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To The Editor:

Somehow or other Mr. Schlesinger has confused me with John T. Flynn. Or perhaps it is simply that, after many years of research in the history of the New Deal, he is primed for a debate with Mr. Flynn and does not intend to let a mere case of mistaken identity interfere with his pleasure. So I suppose I shall have-to repeat here what I said both in my article and in my reply to Mr. Rauh: that I am as desirous as they are of defending the heritage of the New Deal in its essential respects, and that a criticism of Alan Barth's version of the present situation of our civil liberties does not imply an attack on social security or unemployment insurance or the graduated income tax.

Nevertheless, there remains a real dispute over my assertion that “the major segment of American liberalism” in the 30's showed a high tolerance for Stalinist iniquity. This question is a tangled one, not to be answered by counting noses—for even after they were all counted, they would still have to be weighed, and the scales for this have not yet been invented. Much depends on one's memories and lasting impressions of that period; and my own are quite unambiguous, nor are they in any way exceptional or idiosyncratic. For example, shortly after the Stalin-Hitler pact John Haynes Holmes delivered a sermon in which he said:

“If we liberals were right on certain single aspects of the Russian Revolution, we were wrong, disgracefully wrong, on the question as a whole. We were wrong because, in our . . . vision of a new world springing from the womb of this Russian experiment, we permitted ourselves to condone wrongs that we knew must be wrongs. . . . We defended, or at least apologized for, evils in the case of Russia which horrified us wherever else they appeared, ant. by whomsoever else they were done.”

Now, perhaps Mr. Holmes had no authority to speak for the liberalism of the 30's. He certainly knew that there were liberals (Like John Dewey and Sidney Hook) who had been staunchly anti-Communist during the time when he was not. Yet, in delivering this sermon, he was obviously of the opinion that the “major segment” of American liberalism had done the things he excoriated. Maybe he was suffering from an optical illusion. On the other hand, maybe Mr. Schlesinger is.

The distinction Mr. Schlesinger draws between the New York Popular Frontiers and the Washington New Dealers may be a very useful one. (Though his animus against “New York intellectuals” has about it, surprisingly, a familiarly vulgar and philistine air.) It is doubtless true that the New Dealers as a group were more interested in practical reforms than in ideology, and that they did not generally indulge in the uninhibited deceit of the Nation and New Republic with regard to such matters as the Soviet purges or Siberian labor camps. But it is also true that most New Dealers, at one time or another, found the Popular Front ideology extremely congenial, and that very, very few ever found occasion to assail it. (I well recall the difficulty that the anti-Communist factions in the student movement had in getting New Dealers to address their meetings.) Of the names that Mr. Schlesinger mentions, at least four were, to my own limited knowledge, associated with organizations that actively pushed the Popular Front line. (Harold Ickes was even the president of one—and this after the war!) Probably they were simply “taken in,” but it is significant that they were taken in by the Popular Front and not by its liberal critics. I am also intrigued by the names that Mr. Schlesinger did not mention: Where, one wonders, is Henry Wallace? Or Eleanor Roosevelt? Or Aubrey Williams? Or Lauchlin Currie? Or Harry Dexter White? Or Claude Pepper? Or Lawrence Duggan?

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Mr. Schlesinger is anxious to defend the New Deal against the accusation that it was a wicked Communist plot. But I never made any such accusation and would just as soon not be refuted for it. I do believe that the Popular Frontiers were, on the whole, more influential in the Roosevelt administrations than Mr. Schlesinger seems to think; but this, so far as I can see, was more true after 1941, when F.D.R. had already buried the New Deal, and applies mainly to secondary and tertiary governmental levels, not top ones. (Communist sympathizers didn't have to “infiltrate” such departments as the Bureau of Economic Warfare, the OWI, and the OSS—they walked in the front door.) In any case, my point had nothing to do with New Deal policies, but with the state of mind of “the major segment of American liberalism” in the 30's. It's all very well for Mr. Schlesinger to sneer at New York intellectuals. But when, for instance, the “New York [sic] intellectuals” involved in the Communist-dominated League of American Writers included such men as Van Wyck Brooks, Archibald MacLeish (later Assistant Secretary of State), Lewis Mumford, Upton Sinclair, Ernest Hemingway, and Thornton Wilder, one feels that Mr. Schlesinger is being more than a bit presumptuous.

Mr. Schlesinger makes a fuss about my passing reference to the open letter of the 400, which I did not use to “prove” anything (the word and the quotation marks are both his) but presented merely as a convenient illustration. I will concede that, for various reasons, a better illustration could have been chosen, and that this was a poor one, but not primarily because it includes “only one” New Dealer (why limit the term to office-holders? doesn't someone like Max Lerner merit the description?). What is wrong with this list of “400” names which Mr. Schlesinger has examined is that it is probably largely fictitious. Shortly after the May issue of COMMENTARY came out, I was reminded by Richard Rovere of a fact that I had once read in Eugene Lyons' The Red Decade, and had since forgotten: only 165 signatures were published by the Daily Worker—the remaining 235 were just claimed. It is more than likely that they were phantom signatures—one surely can't take the Daily Worker's word on it—and that what is customarily referred to as the document of the 400 was 235 shy of the figure. I am sorry to have helped give currency to the mythical total and, in the process, to have misled Mr. Schlesinger.

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Simply to correct Mr. Westin's misstatements (in his article on page 33 of this issue) as to what I actually said would require a reply almost as long as my original article. To take one example, he writes: “The University of California faculty oath, in Mr. Kristol's eyes, was merely a case of a university establishing a justified policy of not hiring Communists and fellow-travelers.” Now here is what I did say about the California oath: “I was and am opposed to it, as I am opposed to all loyalty oaths added to the standard pledge to uphold our constitutional form of government. They serve no purpose whatsoever. The first to sign are always the Communists, and it is those non-Communists who oppose them as a matter of conscience who are ‘rooted out.’”

To cite all such instances of flagrant misreading would be good polemical fun, but would have little bearing on the problem of civil liberties. So I shall limit myself to a few brief, general observations on Mr. Westin's mode of thinking.

Mr. Westin does not seem to know what civil liberties are—which is inevitably a handicap, if one is all set to defend them. A civil liberty is a freedom conferred by our Constitution and our laws; it is not something dreamed up by Mr. Westin, the Yale Law journal, or anyone else, and bestowed at will. There are many cogent arguments against permitting a witness before a Congressional committee to cross-examine another witness, but it is nevertheless Mr. Westin's privilege to believe it desirable and to urge that current procedures be revised; what he cannot claim is that the prohibition against cross-examination violates a (non-existent) “right” to cross-examination. Both Mr. Westin and I would be happier if Congressional members of investigating committees were more intelligent, better informed, less factional; that they are not, however, is no violation of anyone's civil liberties.

It is not astonishing that, corresponding to this confusion over the idea of civil liberties, there is also confusion over the facts. The Hollywood Ten did not invoke the Fifth Amendment against compulsory self-inctimination, but rested their case on the First Amendment, pleading that freedom of speech included freedom from speech, even before a Congressional committee; the Supreme Court decided against them. (If the Court had decided otherwise, any Congressional investigation would be doomed to futility—even an investigation of the “China Lobby” which, I think I can safely assume, Mr. Westin very much wants.) In every case so far, a witness's plea of possible self-incrimination has been sufficient to render him immune from any legal action for contempt.

Mr. Westin seems to think that the civil liberties of Harold Christoffel, Philip Jessup, John Stewart Service, and Owen Lattimore have been infringed upon. This is nonsense. Harold Christoffel testified before a Congressional committee that he was not a member of the Communist party, and he is now charged with perjury. Is Mr. Westin saying that there is a “right” to lie under oath? Philip Jessup was refused confirmation by the U. S. Senate. Which one of his “rights” was thereby violated? John Stewart Service was discharged as a poor security risk. Does he or anyone else have a “right” to a job in the State Department for which his superiors think him unfit? Owen Lattimore was called upon to testify before the McCarran Committee about the political tendency of his activities in the Institute of Pacific Relations and in his various important government jobs. How did this violate his civil liberties?

Mr. Westin appears to labor under the misimpression that our society once passed an FEPC law for Communists; it has not, nor is it likely to. A Communist has no more “right” to act in movies than he has to be on the professional staff of the American Civil Liberties Union. There is little cause for concern in the one case, and rather more in the other; but in neither is there any issue of a “right to work.”

Perhaps Mr. Westin is of the opinion that the Senate was unwise in not confirming Mr. Jessup, or that the State Department acted unfairly in firing Mr. Service. But he ought surely to know that just because an action is stupid or unjust it does not follow that it is a transgression of civil liberties. There are, unfortunately, too many people who feel petulantly that their “civil liberty” is damaged insofar as the world they live in does not conform exactly to their wishes. They confuse earth and high heaven, and one suspects that they are probably in for some surprises when they reach the latter, too.

Mr. Westin indulges in exactly the same kind of glib disingenuousness that I criticized in my original article. Thus, he refers ironically to “the danger to American society from a Communist's being treated with procedural fairness before the McCarran Committee.” I challenge him to name one Communist who was not treated with “procedural fairness.” He cannot—for the very simple reason that all the Communists who appeared before the Committee refused to testify on grounds of possible self-incrimination. He also defends habeas corpus and due process of law—but from whom? Let him name one Communist whose right to habeas corpus was flouted or who was subjected to legal penalty without due process. He cannot—for there is none.

My own attitude toward the question of the civil rights of Communists is that of Judge Learned Hand, as expressed in his opinion on the Smith Act: the Communist movement is a conspiracy to subvert the institutions, and overthrow the government, of the United States, and there is no “right” to take part in any such conspiracy. To be sure, this conspiracy at the moment, though capable of much mischief, is not a menacing one. That is why I believe, as stated in my original article, that we may extend to Communists, at this time and in certain areas of our society, a toleration and freedom to which they have no moral or legal right.

Irving Kristol

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