Dough-Faced

In simpler days, the leading left-wing political magazines of the U.S. and Britain often stood together on issues, arms locked against the rest of the world. But all that changed after the end of World War II. Such weeklies as Britain's New Statesman and Nation and the New Republic in the U.S., or the left-wing Nation and the stoutly anti-Communist New Leader, have tangled in bitter squabbles (TIME, April 2, 1951 et seq.). The main issue: What is the proper liberal stand in the fight against Communism?

"Book Burning." Last week the battle on the left flared up afresh over a special 60-page issue of the Nation called How Free Is Free? The issue reported on civil liberties in the U.S., found them desperately menaced from all sides. Harvard Law Professor Zechariah Chafee Jr. found the U.S. turning "spies into heroes"; Matthew (The Robber Barons) Josephson discovered "book-burning" in schools and libraries. Scientists, charged Harvard pinko Professor (of geology) Kirtley F. Mather, have been hard hit because they "are peculiarly vulnerable to suspicion, recrimination and punishment." In education, entertainment, publishing, advertising and other fields, Nation contributors all turned in similar gloomy reports.

But to Richard H. Rovere, onetime Nation editor, much of the special issue of his old magazine was an example of "a spurious brand of anti-McCarthyism." Writing in the New Leader, Rovere said that the Nation's "doughface anti-McCarthyism . . . can be as dangerous as McCarthyism itself because its image of America is as false and, I am inclined to believe, as intellectually and morally disreputable as that of the Yahoos and primitives who have made McCarthy a power in the land."

"Shameful Things." The effect of the Nation's issue, said he, "is to encourage the world to accept Radio Moscow's view, of the U.S., the view of this society as a disintegrating democracy, one in which the hooligan element not only strives for power as it does elsewhere, but has already achieved it.

"We have seen some shameful things in this country in the past four or five years, and no one should want to see them glossed over. But when all the disagreeable facts are assembled and presented as a description of the state of American liberty, then a fraud has been perpetrated . . . What we have here in the Nation is no more than a half-truth, perhaps no more than a tenth part of the truth. From the Nation one gets the impression that individual liberty today must rely for its defense on a heroic and beleaguered little band marshaled by [Nation editors] Freda Kirchwey and Carey McWilliams.

"It is Soviet power which today breeds the anxieties which McCarthyism turns to its advantage . . . [Nation Editor Freda] Kirchwey disapproves of resistance, for she believes that Soviet power is an expression of the 'emerging forces of popular revolt'. . . In the literature of appeasement before World War II, there was at least a note of genuine tragedy. It was never, as I recall it, argued that the wave of the future would wash us clean."

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