July, 1952
THE TERM “CULTURAL FREEDOM” is on everybody’s tongue today. It is contended that we in America have it and the Russians don’t, that we in America don’t have it, that we are losing it; a committee exists to defend it, yet even within that committee there appears to be disagreement as to what cultural freedom is and hence whether it is imperiled, say by Senator McCarthy or by the activities of Communist schoolteachers or by both or neither.
Twenty years ago, by contrast, a definition of cultural freedom would not have been difficult. It would have had to do with freedom of expression: the right of ideas and works of art to circulate without interference. The campaign for cultural freedom after the First World War was a series of engagements against censorship: there was the battle of Jurgen, of Ulysses, the battle of evolution at the Scopes trial in Tennessee, the battle of the school textbooks in Chicago.
Judge Woolsey’s decision on Ulysses in 1934 was felt to be the turning point. It was a conclusive victory for the conceptions of the Renaissance and the Reformation, for the human nude, for the hymnody of the flesh, for the freedom of inquiry, for science, for the rights of secularism, for a Faustian conception of man. In the public libraries, locked cases were opened and banned volumes came out into the light. Everywhere, on all fronts, the censors fled in confusion. At the customs, modernist sculptures were photographed, in victory parade, entering without duty, as legitimate works of art; museums hung controversial paintings, around which a curious public marveled. With the removal of the fig leaf, not only the human nude was licensed, but distortions and refractions of the human nude came under the same franchise; with the classic, and under its humanist sanction, came the anti-classic, the experimental.
Today, this victory is held by many people, including its own veterans, to be secure in America. The banning of the Italian movie “The Miracle” or the suppression of Memoirs of Hecate County is regarded as an isolated episode, unfortunate but atypical—so atypical, in fact, that it can even be mildly condoned. An occasional breakthrough of Philistinism is felt to be only natural on the part of a defeated enemy. Even when instances multiply, comparisons with the Soviet Union or with the book-burning Nazis reinforce the sense of general national well-being, of a cultural health so buoyant as to require no special attention: “Ain’t no news, boss; it’s jest that your dog died.” Or, in the words of the French popular song based on that old blackface monologue, tout va très bien,* it is felt, on the cultural front, and sporadic fire from the enemy, like Representative Dondero, the man who hates modern art, is listened to with amused annoyance, like the sound of an old musket going off. President Truman may call modern artists “nutty” and have a Philistine taste in music, but, unlike Premier Stalin, he does not exact uniformity from artists as the price of survival.
So much must certainly be granted by any rational person: cultural freedom, in the old-fashioned sense of the freedom of works of art and ideas to circulate, is still more or less intact in the United States. Howard Fast may serve a jail term, but his books are in currency. Fast is even able to take a full-page ad in the New York Times book section to promote the sale of his latest. The Communist leaders may be jailed, but the Communist books and pamphlets which constitute, presumably, the theoretic basis for their actions are still available to the public. The impounding of “Red” literature which was characteristic of the A. Mitchell Palmer raids of 1919–1920 does not characterize our own period. Indeed, many people who favor outlawing the Communist Party favor at the same time the teaching of Communist classics in colleges (by anti-Communist pedagogues), as a sort of preventive medicine. Tout va très bien.
Communist texts may be propounded, but Communists may not teach—it is this singularity of our period that permits some defenders of cultural freedom to take pride in the state of our native liberties. The little abuses that can be pointed out can be regarded in this light as the necessary by-products of a free, pluralistic society, since one of freedom’s prerogatives is the prerogative not to be perfect, to make mistakes (always called “honest” mistakes), to be overzealous and excessive. “To err is human,” etc. And the right to err, bountifully conferred on officialdom, comes to be taken as a sign of a living, healthy social organism.
Finally, in this sequence, freedom to criticize is held to compensate for the freedom to err—this is the American system. If one points out, for example, the many absurdities and cruelties of the McCarran Act, the arbitrary refusal of visas without any kind of due process, the separation of families for some “crime” committed by one member in the long-ago past, one is assured, gently, that one has the freedom to criticize, as though this freedom, in itself, as it attaches to a single individual, counterbalanced the unjust law on the books. This sacred right of criticism is always invoked whenever abuses are mentioned, just as the free circulation of ideas and works of art is offered as evidence of a basic cultural freedom. Whenever we hear of some injustice, we remind ourselves that the Daily Worker and the Compass may be found on newsstands, that Owen Lattimore’s Ordeal by Slander was a best-seller.
The ideas circulate and the individual is imprisoned—this, I fear, is the paradox toward which our society is floating, almost against its will. I have heard it said in all innocent plausibility that the Committee for Cultural Freedom ought not to criticize Senator McCarthy because McCarthyism is not a cultural phenomenon but an “event” in the sphere of politics, quite independent of culture, i.e., of books and statuary. The ideas circulate but the individual is impounded; this is true of present-day America, even in the realm of sexual morals, where there is great license of expression combined with limitations on action. Homosexual literature circulates and enjoys wide popularity, but homosexuality is a crime, for which one can be arrested. In politics, one finds the same contradiction—in the case of Howard Fast, in the case of the Communist leaders, in the case of the Hollywood screenwriters. The ideas circulate; the individual holding them may be jailed.
This is something very new and quite the contrary of what happened in the 1920s, when a book was prosecuted in court while the author remained relatively undisturbed. Even in the case of Mr. Lattimore, one observes something of the same thing. It is his biography, his personal conversations and meetings, whom he lunched with, what he wrote in a private letter, that are the principal targets of Congressional investigation; his right to express his ideas is conceded. The whole tendency of his Congressional investigators is to brush aside his books and articles and get down to “brass tacks.”
This is classical liberalism’s uneasy response to the challenge offered it by Communism. The Communist stands in a novel relation to ideas. He does not express ideas in the old, individualistic way, as effusions of his personality. Rather, he is an implementation of ideas; an idea, so to speak, disappears into him and is subsumed. He becomes an idea in action, an applied idea, which society now moves to suppress as it once moved to suppress an offensive picture or a doctrine embodied in a book. It is the Communist now who is under the counter, while the book is on the display table. The Communist’s concealment of his ideas and motives makes him very difficult for classical liberalism to defend. Yet when he is reproached with this concealment, he insists that capitalist society will penalize him if he expresses his convictions openly. This is true enough; yet it leads into mazes of ambiguity, since society’s proscription of him and its perplexity before him rest, to a large extent, on the conspiratorial character of his work. He presents himself as a danger precisely because of the lying façade he shows society; yet was it society, originally, which invited him into the role of a conspirator?
In any case, here and now, there is a natural desire on the part of the ordinary straightforward citizen to expose him, to make him acknowledge what he is; this was felt by many people about the Hiss case. It was not that one wanted Hiss to be punished for passing the papers but simply to declare what he was, to tell the truth. Yet the professional Communist, and by dutiful imitation the fellow-traveler, will never divulge his ideas. He would rather go to jail than proclaim them, as in the past a liberal or social revolutionary would rather go to jail than not proclaim them. One feels a kind of fury with Lattimore for the fact that he will not proclaim what seems sufficiently obvious from his writings, that he was some species of fellow-traveler. This is not an indictable crime, but the man will not acknowledge it. Hence an understandable desire to wring the facts from him, by means of his biography, by means of letters and conversations and luncheons; one can even understand a temptation to frame him, though one should not of course yield to it. What one is after (I am speaking as a liberal) is not the ruin of Lattimore but the reconstitution of the old clear-cut unambiguous relation between a man and his beliefs.
This is perhaps a lost hope, a form of romanticism. Certainly, in some of its manifestations, it borders on the demand for “confessions” that rules in totalitarian societies. In the activities of such Red-hunting publications as Counterattack and Red Channels, there is something very similar to the psychological pressure exerted by the MVD on its victims: the erring radio performer or night-club artist, blacklisted, is permitted to perform again if he confesses to having been the dupe or tool of the Communists, denounces his fellow-sinners, and makes his peace with society.
But even here there is a distinction. In the Soviet Union, a man is ordered to confess to crimes that were never committed by him or anyone else—sabotage, poisoning of wells, plots with the German General Staff, attempts on the life of Stalin, and so on, and to involve others, equally innocent, in his imaginary outrages. With Red Channels and Counterattack, on the contrary, the accused is expected to accept as a crime something of his own doing (membership in an organization) which is not a crime but which he must now see as one if he is to be restored to good standing. In short, he is to take his definition of what is criminal from these ex-FBI agents who have appointed themselves guardians of his conscience.
This idea is, of course, monstrous, yet it is not without its parallels in the intellectually more reputable world, where a man is expected to confess to having made a “grave” mistake about China before he can be received back into the fold. On the other hand, it is still reasonable to expect that a man will acknowledge kinship with his own ideas and deeds, even those that are now unpopular. Despite the changed political climate and all the rest of it, we are not really oversimplifying, as some people charge, if we ask Hiss to admit that he passed the papers—assuming, of course, that he did. As liberals, we must not demand that he concur retroactively in our view of this action, but we feel we have a certain claim to be told the bare, factual truth about it. To think otherwise, surely, would be to conceive of lying as a right.
And yet, as we see, police methods are failing to elicit the desired result. Alger Hiss is in the penitentiary, but he continues to tantalize us. We wanted the truth and all we got was his body, a mere husk in convict clothing. Many people remain unconscious of this distinction, except as they experience a sense of vague frustration toward such persons as Hiss, Remington, and Lattimore; a sense of the unconsummated hangs over all these trials. Hence, there remains in this country an enormous anxiety on the subject of Communism, which is admittedly not a menace in any practical internal sense. This anxiety is a response not only to an external military danger but to this experience of bafflement in dealing with the underground man, the fair-faced conspirator—Hamlet’s emotion toward Claudius, who could smile and smile and be a villain still. Like Hamlet, faced with this depthless possibility, we turn to making mousetraps to catch the conscience of the king, the usurper of the liberal succession.
Every amateur endeavors to become a specialist in the detection of Communism. The ideas expressed by an individual become suspect, not in themselves but as clues to a hidden involvement. Certain constellations of ideas are automatically suspicious: a person who favors racial equality, say, plus progressive education, plus peace, minus Senator McCarthy and the McCarran Act, minus teachers’ oaths, is regarded as a poor security risk, not only by the government, not only by his acquaintances and employers, but even by himself. He must try either to suppress some of these clues or to produce a counter-clue. A denunciation of Stalinism used to be thought sufficient, but nowadays in some quarters it is not enough. Something more positive is asked for: approval of Chiang or of the “work” of the McCarran Committee; otherwise you may be labeled as “objectively” pro-Communist, whatever your subjective beliefs. Such guarantees of “objective” solidarity are demanded not only by the extreme right but by the so-called left. In order to perform or work for the Columbia Broadcasting System you have to sign a loyalty oath which is presented with your contract, while in the circle of Carey McWilliams and the Nation you are required to believe in Lattimore’s total injured innocence if you are to escape being detected as a McCarthyite. In other circles, approval of progressive education or a belief in cultural anthropology or in the Sullivan school of psychiatry or in the abstract school of American painting is mandatory if you do not wish to admit that you are a reactionary. In some places, on the opposite side of the fence, the idea that Louis Budenz is a saint is an article of faith.
These are private forms of the loyalty oath prescribed in the cultural sphere: you have to be “cleared” culturally to work with various groups. If you are a doctor practicing in a Catholic hospital in Poughkeepsie, you must furnish guarantees that you are not associated with a birth-control organization; this is, succinctly, a demand for loyalty. You will have difficulty entering the country if at any time you belonged to a subversive organization, never mind what your opinions are now. If you wish a passport to travel abroad, your trip must be deemed “in the best interests of the United States.” Hence, if a citizen cannot show a total and positive belongingness, he may be subject, without trial, to what amounts to house arrest within the territory of the United States. This happened to Corliss Lamont and Paul Robeson and may happen to anyone. When Secretary Wallace, an official of the government, was making speeches in England that Secretary Forrestal did not like, Forrestal recommended that his passport be withdrawn. Those who criticize such procedures are told that no citizen has a Constitutional right to a passport, just as no doctor has a Constitutional right to practice in a Poughkeepsie hospital. Undoubtedly; but it is not an issue of rights but of what is desirable in an open society.
The evil done by the passport policy and by exclusions and detentions under the McCarran Act is not only specific but pervasive. Apologists for the American Way of Life find themselves condoning injustices, defensively, lest they seem to be giving aid to Communism, while various groups are encouraged by government precedent to exact total conformity on their own.
I recently talked to a man, an anti-Communist demi-intellectual, who had been nine months getting cleared by the government because through some bureaucratic error he had been listed as a former Communist Party member. This person, far from deploring what had happened to him, positively welcomed it. “I am glad to suffer,” he said piously, “if our society can be safe.” He did not dare resent even in his soul this concrete injustice lest he fall into the mortal sin of being “objectively” pro-Communist. Such a person, when pressed, will admit that there is no internal Communist menace now, but will express great fears of the “softness” of the American mentality, which lies open to decay, like a carious sweet tooth. In the course of our conversation, he expressed the thought that The New Yorker ought to be investigated by Congress, not because it was subversive but because it was “soft.”
The idea of a society, stern, resolute, dedicated, hard, has made tremendous headway with certain intellectuals and demi-intellectuals, particularly of the ex-fellow-traveler and ex-party-member type. They see the mass of ordinary people, who fortunately at this moment do not share these fears and obsessions and retain a sense of proportion, as so much damp plasticine to be molded into a harder form through constant indoctrination. These so-called “experts” have carried with them into the democratic camp the emergency mentality of totalitarianism, like a germ in its dormant phase that has incubated in the fetid atmosphere of the world crisis. For these people, cultural freedom, in the sense of the genuine freedom of individuals, must be deferred until some future date when everybody will be in total agreement; on that date, it can be afforded. It is such people, sad to say, in a new trahison des clercs, who threaten cultural freedom from within as they make common cause with the enemy from without—with Senator McCarthy, Senator McCarran, Counterattack, Red Channels, and all those who demand a clean bill of health, a sterile biography. They make this alliance, sometimes with repugnance, sometimes with an air of sorrow, but sternly, as good citizens, pointing always, in justification, to the cases of Hiss and Judith Coplon and Remington and the Rosenbergs, who have made the alliance “necessary.”
Yet it is just such real conspirators who generally present aseptic biographies and who elude all our attempts to elicit the truth from them by confrontation and material evidence. If we execute the Rosenbergs, we still will not have their confessions. We can punish them for their overt actions, but they will retain the secret of their thoughts and motives, remaining to the last a quiet ordinary Bronx couple, keeping themselves to themselves. What we will do, however, if we persist in our demands for loyalty, a positive citizenship, testimonials, confessions of error, in the investigative methods of McCarthy and McCarran, will be to create new underground men behind the façade of conformity, new lies, new evasions, new human beings who float like glittering icebergs on the surface of society, with the perilous eight-ninths submerged. We will live in a society of surfaces, where papers and books circulate freely, like so many phantom abstractions, while their human authors and readers have been suppressed or excluded from the country.
This article is based on a speech given by the author at the American Committee for Cultural Freedom conference in March, 1952.
* The song was popular around 1940. After an absence, Mme. la Marquise calls up her château to get the news from the butler. Everything’s fine, she’s told; it’s just that her gray mare is dead. Full of concern, she asks how it happened, and one servant after another takes the phone to tell her that everything is fine, except for a few little nothings connected with the mare’s death.
It turns out that the mare died when the stable caught fire from the burning château; the château caught fire when a candlestick was knocked over during the search for the bullet that killed M. le Marquis, who had shot himself on receiving the news that he was ruined financially. However, aside from these little events leading to the death of the gray mare, everything is fine, fine, fine.