Summer, 1952
THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE speaks of certain unalienable rights given to Man by God—the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Yet nothing is clearer than that these rights are far from unalienable. They can be taken from a man by other men; they can be surrendered by a whole people to the state; if they are to be preserved at all, the state, presumably, must secure them. In the days of the Founding Fathers, these rights had a certain sacred character that flowed from a belief in God; they were hallowed in the individual by the supposed intention of the Creator and were hardly to be distinguished from the sacredness of life itself. God meant man to be free, paradoxically, to obey his conscience; indeed, man’s freedom imposed on him the duty of obeying the inner voice, in defiance, if necessary, of law and common opinion.
Today, in a secular society that no longer believes in God, we retain a lip-belief in the doctrine of inherent rights without knowing what we mean by them or where they are supposed to come from. In practice, we look to the state as the source of rights and the patenter of new rights that have suddenly come to light—the right to teach, the right to a government job, and so on, though it is evident that no one has the right to teach inherent in him as a human being. But when we look to the state as the source of rights, these rights lose their sacred character and become mere privileges which the state can withdraw at any time from individuals or groups that displease it. This is the situation of the Communists in the United States today; their liberty is looked upon by the public as a privilege accorded them by the government that they have misused and that therefore ought to be taken away from them. Liberty, as it is conceived by current opinion, has nothing inherent about it; it is a sort of gift or trust bestowed on the individual by the state pending good behavior. We see this notion applied not only to Communists but to racketeers like Frank Costello and Erickson, who are deprived of their freedom to remain silent before Congressional committees; their Constitutional rights are suspended, as long as they remain uncooperative. Thus a Communist is free to testify to his party-associations; Costello is free to testify to his illegal gambling transactions; but neither is free to be silent. In the same way, other, more parvenu rights fade overnight into privileges—the right to strike, for example, or the right to teach in the public schools turns out to depend on the teacher’s or the trade union’s “good behavior,” i.e., on political criteria. In short, these so-called rights are not, realistically speaking, rights at all but resemble, rather, licenses, like hunting licenses, licenses to carry firearms, or driving licenses, which keep having to be renewed and are subject to all sorts of restrictions and limitations. This is very clear in the case of a passport: nobody, it is claimed, has a right to a passport inherent in him as a citizen, and if this right does not exist, then a passport becomes simply a travel permit which can be canceled for infractions of discipline, exactly like a license to drive.
Once the state is looked upon as the source of rights, rather than their bound protector, freedom becomes conditional on the pleasure of the state. You may say that in practice this has always been true and always will be: the state has always decided how much freedom shall be had and by whom. Yet the difference between a democracy and a tyranny or despotism is that in theory the citizen of a democracy possesses inherent rights, and this theory becomes the working hypothesis, i.e., the practice of a democratic state. However, without a belief in a Creator as the divine provider of rights, the theory tends to shift and to be stood, even, on its head, i.e., to turn into a doctrine of privileges vested in the state and dealt out by it to citizens who can prove their worthiness to enjoy them. That is what is happening today; rights and privileges have become so confused that to talk of rights at all is to invite a demonstration that there are none, for every right can be shown to be contingent and not absolute. If you argue today’s vexed cases in terms of rights, you will lose the argument every time, strangely enough, to advocates of “freedom.” Nobody, they will tell you, has a right to a Hollywood swimming pool, nobody has a right to perform on television or the radio, nobody has a right to a government job, nobody has a right to a passport, nobody has a right to teach in a public school, nobody has a right to conspire against the government. Conversely, a Hollywood screen-producer has a right to fire whom he chooses, radio and television companies have a right to be responsible to their advertisers, and the advertisers have a right to be responsible to the public, and the public has a right to complain of Communist performers on the air; a school board has the right to refuse to allow subversives to teach the children in its care; the government has the right to keep Communists out of its services, to refuse passports to citizens according to its own judgment, to revoke visas of entry, and in general to withhold the rights of citizenship from those who would take them from others. Agreed, but what exactly are these “rights” we are speaking of? Closely examined, they seem to be not rights but powers. What is meant is that nobody has the power to keep the government from denying a passport or to keep an employer from firing a Communist, to prevent a school board from screening the teachers it selects for its children; and, conversely, no schoolteacher or radio-performer has, in himself, the power to retain his job. Powers, once they have been weakened, cease to be thought of as rights, or a right, on the defensive, is an enfeebled power. Take the right of an employer to hire and fire; this right, once universally recognized and seemingly, almost, a “natural” right, now exists chiefly in small business and in households, where no union power is massed to limit it; similarly, the “right to work,” which a few years ago meant the right to a job, now has shifted to mean the right of a worker not to belong to a union and is really the old employer’s right to hire and fire presented in a proletarian disguise. Rights which appear natural and unquestioned take on a highly unnatural look when the power that bred them wanes. I might like to assert the right of a Communist to perform on the radio, but I lack the power to implement it, a power that could only be created by a demand for Communists on the air. Since there is not likely soon to be a demand for Communists, on the air, or in the schools, or in the government service, it becomes rather futile to urge their “right” to be employed in these fields. In default of a real demand, can a synthetic one be improvised, in the interests of pluralism? Is a university president with liberal ideas obligated by his principles to hire a token Communist on his faculty—in fairness to minorities? Should a breakfast-food company be obliged to keep a Communist artiste on its payroll, to show that it does not discriminate? No. Communism is not a commodity that we can force entrepreneurs to stock. When the argument is put in this way, scarcely anyone today would defend the right of a Communist, qua Communist, to a job in entertainment or education. Where the problem really presents itself is not in terms of general propositions but in specific cases. For example, should Paul Robeson be allowed to sing on the radio? Here it is easy for the liberal to answer yes, the more so since there is a real demand for Robeson as a singer. And the question for the university president is not whether he should hire new Communists in order to prove himself a liberal, but whether he should get rid of the ones he already has on his staff. Here again, the answer is not difficult. Most liberal college presidents would object to firing a teacher simply because he was a Communist, though few would be likely to insist, in public, on the college’s “right” to keep him. The usual course is to deny that the teacher concerned is a Communist, thus avoiding the whole question of the “right to teach,” since this right, openly invoked, will be disputed and the college will probably lose its right, i.e., its power, to harbor him.
To my mind, this situation would be greatly clarified if we thought, not just in terms of rights, but of goods, if we endeavored to treat individuals not in terms of what was owing to them by society or the state, but in terms of what an open society owed to its own image. If we thought of liberty not only as a right but as a good, we would be more hesitant to deprive people of it than we are when we think of it as a privilege or license within the bestowal of the state. If liberty is a good, a primary, axiomatic good, then the more that can be had of it, the better, and we should tend, even in situations of danger, to think of maximums rather than minimums. When weighing such questions as that of the right to a passport or of the right to Communists to teach or even of Frank Costello not to testify, we would ask ourselves how much liberty our free society ought to extend, if it is to live up to its name, rather than how much liberty was owing to this or that individual. Advocates of the curtailment of liberties tend to reason in broad scholastic syllogisms; they seldom feel it necessary to show, concretely, how the exercise of a given liberty will endanger the body politic. The Communist conspiracy, in theory, menaces the internal security of the United States; therefore, it is reasoned, every Communist is a dangerous conspirator, potentially, and must be treated as though he were one in fact. The case of Dr. Fuchs, a secret Communist sympathizer, who transmitted atomic information, is used as an argument for jailing open Communists, who would never, in any case, be employed on an atomic energy project. Or it is maintained that though the Communists are not an internal danger now, they would be duty-bound, in wartime, to disrupt the armed services and sabotage defense industries; what is overlooked in this chain of reasoning is that we are at war with Communist forces in Korea, and yet Harry Bridges’ powerful West Coast maritime union, admittedly Communist-dominated, has been unable to halt a single shipment of war materials to the battlefront.
To argue these questions on theoretical grounds is to lose sight of common sense—the common sense which, after all, is the rationale of a democracy; a belief in common sense is the informing spirit of all democratic institutions, from the jury system to universal suffrage. No emergency can justify the national suspension of common sense, yet just that is being urged on us as a necessary measure to cope with Communism. We are told, for instance, that Communists’ minds are not free and that therefore they are not “fit” to be teachers, but no attempt is made to show this on a common-sense level or to indicate, in contrast, for that matter, what minds are free. The same argument could be used against permitting Catholics to teach. I myself would think it a poor idea to have our schools staffed by large numbers of Communists, but nobody is proposing that. The question is whether, in our energetically anti-Communist society, it is worthwhile to construct a whole apparatus of repression to stamp out the few Communist teachers who have managed to survive in our school systems. Those who would say yes would pretend that the infection of a single school child’s mind ought to be avoided, for moral reasons, at the cost of a whole society. But this is the purest scholasticism. In the thirties, when the Communists were a genuine power in the intellectual world, we liberals thought it our duty to expose them in the schools and colleges where they pontificated. I do not think we were wrong, but I think we are wrong today if we fail to acknowledge that the situation has changed and that the student today, far from being in danger of being indoctrinated by Communism, is in danger of being stupefied by the complacent propaganda for democracy that accompanies him to school, follows him through school, goes home with him, speaks to him in the movies and on television, and purrs him to sleep from the radio. The strange thing is that this current indoctrination for democracy has very much the same tone—pious, priggish, groupy—that we objected to in the Stalinism of the popular-front period.
Advocates of “realism” (as opposed to “idealism”) in the treatment of Communists seem bent on ignoring the realities of the current situation. Those who, like Sidney Hook, advocate the refusal of teaching jobs to avowed Communists while insisting that mere fellow-travelers should have the right to teach, are courting the very result they deprecate—the growth of an underground Communism that does not acknowledge its name. Clearly, it would be more sensible to ban fellow-travelers from the schools while allowing avowed Communists, under that label, to have their representative say. In my academic experience, the fellow-traveler is far more insidious to deal with than the Party member, for the fellow-traveler invariably calls himself a “liberal” and points to some small difference he maintains with official Marxism to certify his claim to that title; students are frequently taken in by him, to the point where they become fellow-travelers themselves while imagining that they are liberals or else conceive a lasting repulsion for what they suppose to be liberal attitudes. When a science instructor recently left her job at a woman’s college, the housekeeper found her Party card in her bedroom safe; no one had ever suspected her of Communism because she had never expressed any political views, though there were a number of vocal fellow-travelers on the faculty, which was considered very “pink.” Now a policy that would guard students from this woman’s influence while permitting fellow-travelers to teach has only one merit: that of bureaucratic simplicity. It is easier, from an administrative point of view, to clean out “card-carrying” Communists, whose names are known to the FBI, than to draw a line between a fellow-traveler and a liberal. And it might be easier, then, to fire all liberals, to avoid making mistakes. Easiest of all, finally, would be to use machines to teach—a solution not so remote as it sounds.
There is a great deal of talk today about the “dilemma” confronting the liberal. He must choose, it is said, between his traditional notions of freedom and the survival of the free world. This dilemma is totally spurious—the invention of illiberal people. If there were a strong Communist Party in America, allied to the Soviet Union, the choice for the liberal might be painful, as it might have been had there been a strong Fascist Party allied to the Nazis during the last war. As it is, the liberal’s only problem is to avoid succumbing to the illusion of “having to choose.”
To heighten this illusion, which common sense rejects, the strength of the Communists is claimed to lie not in their numbers but somewhere else, somewhere less evident to the ordinary, uninitiated person. The initiated anti-Communists subscribe to a doctrine that one might call Gresham’s Law as transferred to the field of ideas—the notion that bad ideas drive out good. According to this notion, Communism is an idea that is peculiarly contagious. The Communists may be few in number, but their ideas are felt to have a mysterious potency that other ideas do not possess. Nobody contends, for instance, that Communist teachers constitute a majority or even a considerable minority in our schools. Nor does anybody point to a single primary school child who has been indoctrinated with Communism or suggest how, even in theory, such indoctrination might be accomplished. No; it is enough to show that a primary school teacher belongs or has belonged to a subversive organization; from this, I quote, arises “the danger of infection,” as if Communism were a sort of airborne virus that could be wafted from a teacher to her pupils, without anybody’s seeing it and even though the whole hygiene of school and family and civic life today was such, one would think, as to sterilize the child against such “germs.”
Everyone who has had any experience of teaching knows how difficult it is to indoctrinate a pupil with anything—with the use of algebraic symbols, the rules of punctuation, the dates of American history; yet a Communist teacher, presumably, can “infect” her pupils with Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism by, to quote one writer, “the tone of her voice.” She is able, moreover, to cite another popular image, to “plant the seeds” of Communism, undetected by parents or school superintendents or principals or fellow-teachers; she does it “by suggestion.” The inference is that a single Communist teacher has more persuasion in her little finger than a school system consisting of ninety-nine others has in its whole organized body, more persuasion than all the forces of radio, movies, television, and comic books combined.
Yet no one, as I say, has produced (so far as I know) a single case history of a primary school child in the United States who has been indoctrinated with Communism. “Tragic cases,” however, are often alluded to of somewhat older young people whose lives have been ruined by being exposed to a Communist teacher or professor. There may have been a few such cases in the thirties, tragic or not, yet we do not hear that such well-known figures as Hiss or Chambers or Remington or Elizabeth Bentley “got that way” because of a teacher. The most Elizabeth Bentley can say, in her autobiography, is that at Vassar she was exposed to godless and atheistic influences that softened her up for Communism. But to save the soul of one Elizabeth Bentley, or a dozen, should all non-believing teachers be eliminated from our colleges? The direct “causation” of Communism cannot be established, but surely a large number of Communists, present and ex-, would claim that they became so in reaction against their conservative parents and teachers; the revolutionary as rebel against authority is a familiar psychological cliché. Then should conservative teachers be eliminated?
The truth is that most young people who became Communists in the United States in the thirties and early forties did so either in response to the misery of the depression or in response to the threat of fascism as exemplified by Hitler. The few in this country who become Communists today probably do so in the mistaken hope that Communism offers protection against a third world catastrophe: war. It is not a question, really, of the contagion of ideas but of a relation that is felt to exist between certain ideas and an actual situation, to which the ideas seem applicable. When an anti-Communist argues that Communist ideas are highly contagious and that mere contact with a Communist is therefore dangerous for a school child or student, he is making an implicit confession. He is admitting to the fear that Communist ideas are catching, not just because they are “bad” and tend to drive out “good” ideas, but because they have a more evident correspondence with the realities of social inequity than he suspects his own ideas have. If Communist ideas are contagious or, rather, if we feel uneasily that they are, is not this precisely because they contain a “germ” of truth? We can laugh at Soviet “equality,” Soviet “justice,” Soviet “economic democracy,” but only in the Soviet context; in France, Italy, China, Indonesia, the American South, these words have the power to shame us. We are afraid of export Communism, though not of the Soviet domestic article, because our own export, democracy, is competing under the same labels, and we know that our own capitalist society to a Chinese peasant or a Sicilian peasant or even an American Negro might appear even more unjust and unequal than the Soviet product.
The fear and hatred of Communism expressed in America today is not just a revulsion from the crimes of Stalin, from the deportation camps and forced labor and frame-up trials; it is also a fear and hatred of the original ideals of Communism. In a certain sense, the crimes of Stalin come as welcome news to America: they are taken as proof that socialism does not “work.” Inequality, we would like to believe, is a law of nature, and by “we” I do not mean only wealthy businessmen or blackguards like Senator McCarthy or Southern racists. As the richest nation in the world, we have developed the psychology of rich people: we are afraid of poverty, of “agitators,” of any jarring notes in the national harmony. The behavior of our local Communists outrages our sense of majesty, while abroad, all over the globe, our Congressmen are filling satchels with instances of foreign ingratitude. Like all rich people, we feel we are not appreciated, and we suffer from ideas of reference; if anybody speaks about “privilege” or “exploitation,” we think they must mean us; if we see a film in which the poor are good and the rich are bad, we wonder whether it is not Communist-inspired. We do not like to hear attacks on segregation, on the use of the atomic bomb, on NATO, unless we are sure that the person talking is “on our side.”
It is this guilty fear of criticism, at bottom, this sense of being surrounded by an unappreciative world, that is the source of our demands for loyalty, from teachers, from public performers, from veterans getting subsidized housing, from all those, in short, whom we regard as our pensioners. Certainly, the administration of loyalty oaths, like a mass vaccination against Communism, does not make any practical sense. And if we are particularly sensitive about our schools, it is because we fear that children, with their natural lack of bias, their detached and innocent faculty of observation, will be all too ready to prick up their ears if they hear our society criticized, even implicitly, in the “tone” of a teacher’s voice. Our children, we feel, may listen to her more than they will listen to us, because they have already noticed the injustices of our society and want to know the why of it, instead of being told that “God made it that way.” People with bad consciences always fear the judgment of children.
We did not behave this way toward fascists and fascist sympathizers during the war. We did not make a national effort to root them out of our schools and colleges or demand that they take loyalty oaths; on the whole, we did nothing to disturb them or to prevent the spread of their ideas. This was not because we found their doctrines more tolerable than we find the doctrines of Communism. On the contrary. Their ideas seemed to us so crazy and disgusting that we could not imagine anybody’s being taken in by them, though in fact some people were. But this was, as we used to call it, the “lunatic fringe.” The proof that we do not regard Communists as lunatics is precisely this fear we have that their ideas may be catching, this fear, as I say, of the “germ” of truth. And this germ phobia will be with us as long as we ourselves try to sell the white lie of democracy abroad, to the starving nations who in fact are the “children”—the ignorant and uneducated—whose allegiance we question, rightly, and whose judgment of us we, rightly, dread.
This was a speech delivered to a group of teachers.