Soul-Searching (Cont'd)

The soul-searching eye of U.S. liberal journalism focused again last week on the Nation (circ. 35,106). Wrote ex-Communist Granville Hicks in the liberal Jewish Commentary: "However paradoxical it appears, the magazine that calls itself 'America's leading liberal weekly since 1865' ... in some sense serves today as an apologist for Soviet Russia."

Hicks, author (The Great Tradition), once an editor of the Communist New Masses, had just got around to analyzing the Nation's 120-page 85th birthday edition of last December, which, he noted, had carried congratulations from President Truman, Secretary of Agriculture Brannan, Mrs. Roosevelt, Trygve Lie and others. In the outsize edition, Hicks found a "general line of ... bias ... in the direction of giving the Soviet Union the benefit of almost every doubt, and the United States the benefit of very little doubt at all." Hicks broadened the indictment of Nation foreign policy made last fortnight by ex-Nation Staffer Clement Greenberg (TIME, April 2) to include the Nation's basic editorial policy under Editor Freda Kirchwey.

"If the pro-Soviet front has any strength in America today," wrote Hicks, "it is because there are still liberals who provide the verbal cloak of 'social betterment' that hides the nakedness of the brutal revolutionary totalitarianism that is the Communist aim . . . Self deception . . . is nothing new in the history of American liberalism, but today, when it serves so well the purposes of those for whom deception is a basic strategy, and when it effects such a profound corruption of thought and culture, it is a luxury we cannot afford.

"The Nation, of course, is not of a single piece: by no means all of its political articles represent the pro-Soviet liberal point of view ... In its basic editorial policies, however, it tends to speak for a small segment of liberalism--small but not insignificant. One looks back with regret to the time when the Nation spoke for all the liberals and was a better magazine than it is today . . . The Nation . . . has preserved what was weakest and blindest in the old liberalism, and has carried over attitudes that once were merely irresponsible but now are dangerous."

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