Problem of the Century

REVEILLE FOR RADICALS--Saul D. Alinsky--University of Chicago Press ($2.50).

SOVIET POLITICS--Frederick L. Schuman--Knopf ($4).

The dominant problem of the 20th Century is the reconciliation of economic security with political liberty. All other problems are secondary--even The Bomb. At the present time, the divergent attitudes of Russia and the Anglo-U.S. community toward the age's No. 1 problem confront each other in nearly every area of the world, and in almost every thinking mind.

Reveille for Radicals and Soviet Politics are U.S. contributions to this great discussion. Both are in dead earnest. Both gain importance from the magnitude of the subject they deal with. Reveille for Radicals is a plea to reintegrate along the lines of a "People's Organization" the fragments of the U.S. community. In part it is an organizer's handbook for the same purpose. To some it may sound like a new name for an old enterprise-social revolution. To others it may sound like a glad shout of: everybody join the daisy chain!

Professor Frederick L. Schuman's book is probably the ablest apology for Russia ever written by an American. It is like a brilliant brief by a very clever lawyer who is fortified rather than handicapped by knowing that his client did commit the murder, and even where the body is buried.

Radicals, Awake! In 1939 Saul D. Alinsky turned his back on a brilliant criminological career in favor of a life in the Jungle--the slums that lie back of Chicago's stockyards. It was his simple faith that if leaders of the fragmented sections of any U.S. community could be got to sit down together and talk or participate in common action, democracy would be reborn.

Said he: "As I looked into the vast chasm that divides the mass of the people and our middle class attempts at charity, I realized that the only way out is a democratically informed, active, participating people who have confidence in themselves and their fellowmen, a People's Organization, whose program is limited only by the horizon of humanity itself."

Neither Conservatives nor Liberals, he felt, were suitable messengers of the new evangel. ("Time need not be wasted on Conservatives, since time itself will take care of them." "A Liberal is [a person] who puts his foot down firmly on thin air.") Society's crisis called for Radicals. The first part of Reveille for Radicals is a paean to the Tom Paine type of U.S. Radical. But even Radicals must first be awakened: "Deep in the cradle of organized labor America's Radicals restlessly toss in their sleep--but they sleep."

Reveille for Radicals is written with burning honesty. The author has glimpsed a vision which is greater than his ability to put it in practical terms. But this vision, which is no less than the revitalization of democracy, explains why Chicago's Auxiliary Bishop Bernard J. Sheil calls Reveille for Radicals "a life-saving handbook for the salvation of democracy," and why Philosopher Jacques Maritain calls it "epoch-making."

Russia Revisited. The Soviet Union has solved the problem of economic security v. political liberty--by liquidating political liberty. Hence few things are so important to the future of the U.S. as an understanding of the Soviet Union, the functioning of its single party, the character and purposes of its leaders, the meaning and purposes of Marxism, its guiding philosophy, and what the sum of these things mean in the daily life of the Soviet nationalities. Few subjects are so controversial, or more confused by the unqualified adulation of the Russia-lovers and the almost equally unqualified abhorrence of those who see in the Soviet system the complete negation of democracy.

Professor Frederick L. Schuman, Woodrow Wilson professor of government at Williams College, has been looking at Russia steadily for some 20 years, and each time that he looked he liked better what he saw. His purpose in Soviet Politics is to show, with a disarming air of objectivity, how the Soviet Union got that way and what that way really is. He brings to his task the methods of a trained historian, great learning, unflagging industry and a firm belief that, if Russia and the western democracies cannot get together, civilization is doomed.

Soviet Politics is, first, a great historical recapitulation from the twilight of Russian history through the expulsion of the Mongols (twelve years before Columbus discovered the New World) to the end of World War II. From this historical background, and from the meddling stupidities of the western democracies, Author Schuman argues, have resulted those terrorist and tyrannical aspects of Russian Communism that have shocked or baffled many Americans. For it is Schuman's basic premise that Marxism is merely a contemporary and inevitable development of the libertarian and humanitarian ideals of the French and American revolutions.

Unlike most apologists for Russia, Author Schuman is much too intelligent to blink the facts about Russia. He does not hesitate to say that Russia is "the first of the totalitarian states." But "Soviet 'totalitarianism' was not inevitable nor necessarily implicit in the Bolshevism of 1917-18 but was forced upon it, with death as the alternative, by the decisions of Russian democrats and of the Western Democracies."

This premise once granted, it is possible to construct a plausible exoneration of Russian Communism for almost everything that it has ever done. The result is this book, which, in the guise of objective appraisal, is 689 pages of special pleading so adroit that many readers will not realize the nature of the device.

Prof. Schuman's indictment of the western democracies is clever, but it is unlikely that many western democrats will find themselves seriously indicted. They are more likely to find Schuman's reasoning, in this case, of a piece with his justification of the Purge: because "in my considered opinion the portrait of conspiracy spread on the Soviet court record appears . . . to be closer to reality than any alternative explanation." In the presence of equally cogent alternative explanations, that merely raises the question of the value of Schuman's opinion.

More importantly, it raises the question of the value of all justification, however eloquent or authoritative. For justification is not truth. And only through the rigorous search for truth can come a solid basis for U.S. understanding of Russia's success or failure in solving the critical question of the 20th Century.

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