Interventionist Liberals

by
Henry Elmer Barnes

Original Copyright 1955

All rights reserved. This book and all parts thereof may not be reproduced in any form without prior permission of the publisher.

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Table of Contents

Front Matter
Tolerance to Totalitarianism
Totalitarian Liberals
Revisionism and Integrity
Who Started the Smearing?
Book Burning
The Educational Inquisition
Destroying the Welfare State
Did We Have to Fight?
Balance-Sheet of Globaloney

Liberalism: From Neutrality and Tolerance to Interventionism and Totalitarianism

During the last months there has been a tremendous roar and an anguished outcry from wounded and scathed liberals against what they regard as the alarmingly reactionary and intolerant trends of the times. The liberal magazines have been loaded with articles protesting against the invasions of academic freedom, the mounting wave of what is denounced as witch hunting, the alleged violations of civil liberties, and the growth of political, economic and social reaction.

In this discussion of the liberal attitude today, it is necessary at the outset to describe and analyze briefly the vast change in the ideas of those who now constitute the overwhelming majority of self-designated liberals, as compared with the attitudes and policies of the traditional American liberals down to the mid-1930's.

The Old Liberals, well represented by such men as Amos Pinchot, Frederic C. Howe, Herbert Croly, Charles Austin Beard, Randolph Bourne, Edward A. Ross, George W. Norris, John T. Flynn, Garet Garrett, Oswald Garrison Villard, Edwin M. Borchard, Robert M. LaFollette, Clarence Darrow, Burton K. Wheeler, Samuel B. Pettingill, John Haynes Holmes, and Lincoln Steffens, supported freedom of speech and expression for their opponents as well as their friends, neutrality and friendly cooperation in world affairs, disarmament, world peace, and wise social legislation, based on careful study of the needs and resources of the time.

This brand of liberalism and liberals has all but disappeared. The writer of this brochure is one of the few survivors. The strictures set forth here are not directed against the true traditional American liberalism, which was, perhaps, the chief glory of American culture. They are pointed toward the bogus and renegade liberals who were willing to betray liberalism in order to hold power and led us into world-meddling and devastating warfare so that they might retain their grip on power.

Those who now parade as our "liberals" are quite a different breed of animal from the liberals of the 1920's, although many of them once espoused the earlier liberal ideas. They shifted from neutrality and peace to interventionism and war mongering in the late 1930's and created the war hysteria and mythology which followed. The intolerance which these produced has never abated, although it later backfired and thus brought on the trends which now alarm and discomfort the interventionists. The latter have been fairly dubbed "totalitarian liberals" because of their unquenchable zest for power, their intolerance of any deviation from their dogmas, and their efforts to suppress dissent, whether oral or written. To the extent of their ability, they have sought to set up an "iron curtain" of conformity to their doctrines in this country. Though its members inveigh heartily against the tactics of the extreme Right and the extreme Left, the totalitarian liberal Center—the "Vital Center" of Professor Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.—has been chiefly responsible, directly and indirectly, for launching intolerance in our generation and for perfecting the techniques employed.

In this shifting of liberals from neutrality and peace to world-meddling and interventionism, it would seem that, the more they were inclined to favor neutrality and peace in the 1920's and early 1930's, the more they overcompensated for this by their ferocity or frenzy after 1936. This can be illustrated by the cases of some of the more prominent intellectual leaders of the "flip-flop" group.

The eminent playwright, Robert E. Sherwood, brought out in 1936 one of the most striking of pacifist dramas. Idiot's Delight, exposing the main forces leading to modern wars. But, within a few years, we find him, with what some regarded as almost idiotic delight, giving ardent personal support to the mendacious machinations of President Roosevelt which were to lead the country into war. Sherwood has even boasted of his role in wording the "Again and again and again" speech which Roosevelt delivered in Boston in October, 1940, one of the most notable examples of the public lie in modern history.

Walter Millis not only debunked the Spanish-American War, but in his Road to War (1935) produced the most readable critique of Wilsonian diplomacy and our entry into the first World War. It was a powerful and effective book. As late as 1937, in his Viewed without Alarm, he regarded the Nazi policies with something more than complacency. He contended that it might well be a blessing to "the rest of the world" if the Nazis could unite Central Europe and create a "going economic and social system" out of it—"however unpleasant for the lesser nations which it swallows." But, when Hitler proceeded to do just this and it led to war, Millis was among the first to demand American intervention to check him. He cooperated enthusiastically with our "Ministry of Truth" during the war, produced the first extended effort to whitewash Roosevelt's ro1e in the Pearl Harbor attack, This Is Pearl! (1947), and has served as the leading "hatchet man" of the New York Herald-Tribune in attacking such revisionist books as that paper has noticed.

Samuel Eliot Morison was one of the most urbane members of the Harvard community in the 1920's, was known for his devotion to commendable and peaceful civic causes, and was much in demand as a counsellor to student groups with pacifist inclinations. But, by the late 1930's, he had become converted into a zealous interventionist who found his friend, President Roosevelt, rather too cautious in moving toward war. As our leading court historian, he started writing the official naval history of the war during the conflict, and has carefully protected our diplomatic record from any suspicion of serious guilt. He was rewarded by being advanced to the rank of Admiral. In reviews and addresses, he vigorously attacked Charles Austin Beard for his attempt to give us a truthful account of Rooseveltian diplomacy, and has issued laudates for war in words that resemble the sentiments of a Marine drill sergeant at Parris Island more than the benign suavity for which Morison was noted in the 1920's. He has become a sort of intellectual John the Baptist preparing the youth of the land for permanent war service.

Paul H. Douglas was one of the outstanding American pacifists of the 1920's and early 1930's. He even joined the Society of Friends because of his passionate devotion to peace, the virtues of which he lost no opportunity to proclaim. But, by 1937, he had become a vehement interventionist, completely intolerant of the pacifism he had earlier espoused. He enlisted and served with distinction in the war, ran for the United States Senate on his war record, and was elected. He became a leader in the extreme interventionist group in the Senate and, at the height of his popularity and influence, was regarded by some as the most likely candidate for our American "Big Brother."

In the 1920's, Edward Mead Earle was a brilliant young Columbia professor with strong pacifist and revisionist inclinations. He was noted as a critic of modern imperialism and wrote a splendid book on the Bagdad Railway (1923). After a long and lamentable illness, he returned to the academic fold at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, where he devoted himself with great fervor and assiduity to military history and to the support of interventionist diplomacy. Among academicians, he probably ranks second only to Admiral Morison in his enthusiasm for the military way of life, and he has been appropriately decorated for his services to both the "Ministry of Peace" and the "Ministry of Truth."

Reinhold Niebuhr, during the 1920's and early 1930's was surely among the half-dozen leading ministerial pacifists and critics of war, and gave unsparingly of his energy and devotion to the cause of peace. But he succumbed to interventionist fervor in the late 1930's and it is probably fair to say that no other prominent American clergyman or theologian made so vigorous an effort to portray our entry into the second World War as a holy crusade. He has continued as perhaps the leading American clerical protagonist of vigorous interventionism and globaloney.

This list could be continued at length. Names of men like Archibald MacLeish immediately come to mind, and Lewis Mumford and Elmer Davis are dealt with later on. But the instances given above will suffice to illustrate the trend of behavior in which we are interested for the moment.

These interventionist and totalitarian liberals while having adhered mainly to the Democratic Party since New Deal Days, although augmented by Republican interventionist liberals like Henry Cabot Lodge and other eastern seaboard proponents of globaloney, are also organized in such groups as the Americans for Democratic Action (ADA), the Liberal Party, and the like, and their leaders gravitate around Freedom House, appropriately established in honor of Wendell Willkie. We may concede them some admirable ideas and aspirations and a few noble intentions. Nevertheless, when it comes to the matter of toleration of dissent from their destructive dogmas, they are not qualified to criticize Senator McCarthy's Committee or the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Their ferocity toward opponents of their views is unlimited. The fact that Harry D. Gideonse was the president of Freedom House for some time underlines this fact. George Orwell would have gloated cynically over the Freedom House label, in the light of the patterns of thought and behavior which its devotees have adopted.

The "flip-flop boys" were not, of course, limited to the liberals. There were a number of Socialists who deserted the proletarian cause of peace to which they were committed by tradition and ideology and joined the war-mongers. But, although their shift was more ludicrous, they were relatively unimportant in any practical sense, as compared with the liberals. The latter controlled the government of the United States, while the Socialists remained in a hopeless minority. Notable instances of Socialists who shifted their position were Upton Sinclair, Sidney Hook, Louis Hacker, Alfred Baker Lewis, and the majority of those Socialists who now operate the New Leader and bellow for action against Russia perhaps even more loudly than members of the Union League Club. They left Norman Thomas in the lurch in his valiant effort to put the Socialist party on record against interventionism.

Upton Sinclair was once probably the most world-famous American Socialist critic of world-meddling militarism and imperialism. But he followed the Roosevelt group in fervently espousing interventionism. He wrote an almost interminable series of novels lauding this policy. His hero, "Lanny Budd," is little more than a "Charley McCarthy" of Rooseveltian and post-Rooseveltian interventionism in its most maudlin form. The large sale of these novels indicates that they have been very profitable. In this manner, a one-time violent critic of the profits made from the war spirit has gained opulence by exploiting this very spirit.

Sidney Hook has been much in the public eye and prints of late, a good example being his article in the New York Times Sunday Magazine of December 14, 1952, on "The Job of the Teacher in Days of Crisis." He appears greatly disturbed about the "snooping" into teachers' affairs lately, being particularly upset about the forces which, in their stumbling way, thought they were saving "the little red schoolhouse" from "the little Red school teacher." Hook has continued his hazardous act on the ideological and semantic tightrope, while seeking to munch his cake and have it, too, in his recent book. Heresy, Yes—Conspiracy, No (1953).

Even more interesting has been the case of Louis Hacker, with which I am personally very familiar, since I played the leading role in rescuing Dr. Hacker from social work and starting him on the road to great eminence in the historical gild and academic heriarchy. Dr. Hacker, in the early 1930's, was a sincere pacifist. At the end of his Short History of the New Deal (1934), he sadly, ominously, and with amazing accuracy, predicted that the New Deal would fail in its domestic program and, to maintain tenure, would turn to an imperialistic war. He retained his pacifism unimpaired certainly as late as the spring of 1939. At that time, I had a visit with him in his office at Hamilton Hall in Columbia College. He was greatly agitated over the growing bellicosity of Heywood Broun, Hendrik Van Loon, and other former fellow pacifists. He earnestly assured me that we must preserve peace at any price.

Between then and 1941 something happened, for Dr. Hacker had by then become a passionate partisan of interventionism. My informants at Columbia tell me that Allan Nevins and Henry Steele Commager took him to the mountain top at Morningside Heights and showed him all the historical kingdoms of this world. Whether this be true or not, he surely inherited many of these kingdoms and that very rapidly. When I saw him in 1939 he was a lowly lecturer in economics and told me that his tenure was extremely precarious. But he soon rose to the rank of professor, was appointed Harmsworth Professor of American History at Oxford University, and is now the Director of General Studies at Columbia. His "flip-flop" paid off handsomely.

While exposing those Socialists who deserted the cause of neutrality and peace, we should be equally emphatic in paying tribute to two outstanding Socialists who refused to abandon their ideals, whatever the pressure exerted on them, namely, Norman Thomas and Scott Nearing.

It is important to examine the reasons for the drastic and ominous transformation in liberalism, roughly between 1920 and 1940, coming to a head after 1936. There were a number of potent influences that stimulated the change, but the item which transcends all others has been the growing power-madness of the liberals since 1933.

The older liberals, for the most part, aside from the few members of the old Progressive Movement, rejected any temptation to assume extensive political power. They preferred to remain on the sidelines as observers and critics rather than public operators.

The New Deal put an end to all this after 1933. The Brain Trust and many of the most important administrative posts were filled with ardent liberals. They soon got a taste of power. Like the lion or tiger who has acquired a liking for human flesh, once the liberals tasted almost unlimited political power for a few years, they could not bring themselves to contemplate any relinquishing of this power, no matter what the extent of the ideological betrayals, reversals, and alternations, or the intellectual and moral plasticity which might be required to retain power. Had it not been for this new power compulsion, the liberals would never have resorted to a vastly bloody and expensive war to hold power after the New Deal began going on the skids in late 1937. The liberals became prepared to change positions, policies, attitudes and programs, as the current political strategy demanded, but never to relinquish power, if any technique, however ruthless and dishonest, might enable them to retain their power.

The New Deal liberals were deeply affected by the power-grabbing methods adopted by Soviet Russia, Fascism, and Nazism, however much they may have hated certain incidental policies of the latter. They also tended to attach much importance to plebiscite-like elections, much after the fashion of the totalitarian regimes in Europe. This trend, which goes far toward explaining the totalitarian traits of our latter-day liberals, was ultimately rationalized for them in an ideological manual. The Managerial Revolution (1941) of James Burnham. The American liberals were to be the new managerial elite whose function it was to administer the world in the days to come. This development is well discussed by George Orwell in his essay, "Second Thoughts on James Burnham," in his Shooting an Elephant and Other Essays(1952).

In his Nineteen Eighty-four (1949), Orwell described more precisely this new liberal managerial elite:

"Bureaucrats, scientists, technicians, trade union organizers, publicity experts, sociologists, teachers, journalists, and professional politicians . . . whose origins lay in the salaried middle class and the upper grades of the working class . . . As compared with their opposite numbers in past ages, they were less avaricious, less tempted by luxury, hungrier for pure power, and, above all, more conscious of what they were doing and more intent on crushing opposition."

These are the totalitarian liberals—Professor Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.'s "Vital Center"—who took over power after 1933. It was interesting that, in its issue of February 19, 1950, the New York Times published a survey of the "government types" then in power which amply confirmed Orwell's characterization. They still permeate the federal government despite the formal party change in January, 1953.

By 1938, when it began to look as though the New Deal would fade out if liberal political strategy continued to be based on domestic policy, the totalitarian liberals had become so power-crazed that they did not hesitate speedily to repudiate their most cherished principles and ideals, as of 1933-1937, namely, freedom of speech and press for all, especially their opponents, neutrality, disarmament and peace, and to adopt with alacrity and ferocity an intolerant armament and war policy which they hoped would enable them to retain public power. Their playing up of the evils of Fascism and Nazism, the glories of the Popular Front, the promises of the "Freedoms" (whether Four or more), the necessity of collective security, and the like were only rationalizations of their frenzied determination to hold power. Lying us into war was permissible on the assumption that the end justifies the means. Even a Pearl Harbor could be planned to save the day. Later on, Professor Thomas A. Bailey, a leading interventionist diplomatic historian, was to come along and approvingly rationalize all this in his The Man in the Street (1948).

The desire to retain power and tenure was also the dominant motive which led us into the Cold War and the Korean War. Some twelve days before he launched the Truman Doctrine and unleashed the Cold War, President Truman had rebuked former Governor George H. Earle of Pennsylvania for his alleged dangerous exaggeration of the Communist menace to the United States. But, at this moment, Truman's political prospects were in the cellar, so far as they could be judged by public opinion polls. Some desperate move was required at once to save Truman from political oblivion and the Democratic party from probable defeat in 1948. As Holmes Alexander has made clear, it was the bitter Republican attack on the Democrat handling of the Far Eastern situation after the war which was primarily responsible for leading Mr. Truman to intervene in Korea.

Next to lust for power and prolonged tenure of office, the main influence in transforming the liberals from the most enthusiastic supporters of neutrality, disarmament and peace into the leaders of the armament and war program, was their capitulation to the myth of collective security. This mischievous and lethal doctrine first appeared in the 'League to Enforce Peace', born during the first World War, chiefly of Republican parentage. It was continued in the principles of the League of Nations and given more definite implementation in the Geneva Protocol of 1924, the Locarno system of 1925, and the Kellogg Pact of 1928. In the 1930's Maxim Litvinov, the Soviet representative at Geneva, cleverly sold the idea that collective security meant only collective action against the totalitarian menace from the Right. Litvinov's intriguing formula was that "peace is indivisible." This was the main impulse to the liberal excitement over the Spanish Civil War, and it diverted all attention from any possible threat of the totalitarianism of the Left.

The most influential interventionist liberal in the United States and the man who did more than any other American to convert American liberals to support of collective security was James Thomson Shotwell of Columbia University, who was able to use the vast resources of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He was ably seconded by men like Quincy Wright of the University of Chicago. Collective security is a noble conception and may be of great practical value when the world is ready for it, a century or so from the present day—about the time when the human race is prepared to accept and operate a compulsory system of world government. At the present time, it is the most dangerous of all the menacing policies which make for globaloney and war. The greatest international lawyer of our time, John Bassett Moore, correctly pointed out that it inevitably transforms every border conflict into a world war. His leading disciple, Edwin M. Borchard, made the equally cogent observation that the application of the principle of collective security today can only mean "perpetual war for perpetual peace," the situation in which we now find ourselves.

Another associated dangerous illusion cherished by the interventionist liberals is the fantastic "We or They" conception, introduced into liberal mythology chiefly by Hamilton Fish Armstrong, a leader in the strongly interventionist Council on Foreign Relations. He set forth the idea in his book We or They (1937). The essence of the notion is that it is impossible for two powerful conflicting ideological and political systems to coexist peacefully in our world. Hence, one has to obliterate the other in order to be safe and bring the blessings of peace to mankind. This blood-curdling fiction was, thus, closely related to the collective-security fantasy. Armstrong was originly motivated chiefly by fear of Fascism, especially of the Nazi variety. But, once the Fuehrer and II Duce had been disposed of, the interventionists were able to drag out from under the bed an even more terrifying "They" in the form of Josef Stalin and the Communist threat.

The "We or They" psychosis was an especially curious one for American liberals to espouse. It was not only a complete repudiation of our traditional policy of neutrality but also a challenge to the whole historical background of American libertarian philosophy. Our liberals had always bitterly condemned Edmund Burke, the Duke of Brunswick, Metternich, and Alexander I and his Holy Alliance for maintaining this "We or They" doctrine and contending that a stable political society could not coexist with governments like those of the United States, France, and Latin American countries which had been established through revolutionary violence. Our independence and early national stability were actually founded upon the complete repudiation of the "We or They" nonsense and upon the unhesitating acceptance of the conception of the coexistence of conflicting political and economic systems. This ideal and policy were embodied in the Monroe Doctrine and served as the basis of official American foreign policy down to April, 1917.

While the craze for political power and support of collective security and the "We or They" piffle were the most potent factors in transforming the liberals following 1933, most of them were also motivated by overcompensated hatred of certain totalitarians, especially the Nazis.

The relative strength of these influences varied with individuals and groups. With persons like Harry Hopkins and Leon Henderson, it was mainly the desire for power. In the case of Lewis Mumford, Hendrik Van Loon, Heywood Broun, and others, and special pressure groups, it was chiefly hatred of totalitarian brutality. With others, such as Harold L. Ickes, Henry A. Wallace, and Paul H. Douglas, these factors of power-madness and hatred were about equally balanced. To their honor, certain of the New Dealers, like Raymond Moley and Rexford G. Tugwell, rejected the bid for continued power if it meant the betrayal of neutrality and liberal principles, and resort to an imperialist war.

Lord Acton once observed that power corrupts and that absolute power corrupts absolutely. This axiom was well illustrated by conditions following Pearl Harbor when President Roosevelt and his liberal colleagues enjoyed absolute power. The totalitarian traits which such power breeds grew apace in the liberal war regime, and the corruption attained unprecedented proportions under the Truman administration.

The capacity for doublethinking, as Orwell calls it, among the totalitarian liberals, which their intellectual plasticity over the last fifteen years has begotten, was well illustrated by their ability at one and the same time to support the foreign policy of Secretary Acheson and to approve the criticism by radicals of the main result of this policy—the spirit of intolerance resulting from the psychological trends which the Cold War and the Korean War have produced.

Even more amazing, as revealing their limitless talent for double-thinking, has been the enthusiasm with which the interventionist liberals hailed and supported President Truman's efforts in behalf of civil rights for minorities and his appointment of a Committee on Civil Rights, while in the same breath they cheered and promoted his cold war policy which set in motion the most extensive drive against civil liberties since the enactment of the Alien and Sedition Laws at the close of the eighteenth century. Perhaps the outstanding example of the double-thinking manifested in simultaneously supporting globaloney with great ferocity and valiantly attacking invasions of civil liberties is presented by the case of Bernard De Voto, the ideological editor of Harpers Magazine.

As a result of the power psychosis and the war that this produced, it has come about that those who dominate what is still called the liberal group in America bear much less resemblance to the liberals of the 1920's than they do to the totalitarians of Europe. Interventionism has suppressed the freedom of speech and press in the United States as Communism, Fascism and Nazism did in Europe.

It would, of course, be unfair to accuse the turncoat interventionist liberals of being entirely responsible for the adoption of an armament program, the entry of the United States into the Second World War, and all the calamitous results which followed this policy and action. We were also pushed into armament and war by the pressure of the strongly Anglophile international banking group and "better people" along the Atlantic seaboard, most of whom then hated Roosevelt and the New Deal. They were backed up by the powerful papers serving these groups, such as the Boston Herald, the New York Sun and Herald Tribune, the Philadelphia Bulletin, the Baltimore Sun, the Washington Star and Post, the Atlanta Constitution, and the like.

Also important in urging intervention and war were powerful pressure groups that had strong emotional reasons for hating the Fascists and Nazis [i.e. Jews]. They were served by the most influential American newspaper, the New York Times, which also cherished the esteem of the "better people" and the seaboard Anglophiles. But the interventionist liberals possessed the dominant political power after 1937 and, without their initiative and support, our government would never have deliberately adopted a policy which prodded the Japanese into attacking Pearl Harbor.

The Totalitarian Liberals Protest the Intolerance They Have Created

The totalitarian liberals have inveighed heavily against McCarthyism and what they regard as witch hunting, especially the activities of the McCarthy Committee, the Jenner Committee, and the House Committee on Un-American Activities. They are deeply stirred lest the freedom of teaching be fatally undermined. They protest against invasions of the Bill of Rights. They view with alarm the increase of censorship and what they denounce as "book burning," by which they really mean any drive on their brand of Left-wing literature, that which upholds globaloney unlimited, perpetual war for perpetual peace, and other aspects of the interventionist program.

They are greatly distressed about the glowing trend toward authoritarianism in the hands of others and the rise of military state capitalism. They deplore the end of the welfare state, whether it be the New Deal or the Fair Deal, and the fact that the money which was formerly spent for public welfare is now being devoted mainly to armament and either cold or hot war. In short, they protest violently against what is fundamentally the advent of Orwell's "Nineteen Eighty-four" regime throughout the world, in general, and the United States in particular. Their epithets are directed in a personal way chiefly against Senators McCarthy, McCarran and Jenner, and Congressman Velde.

In this discussion, the writer does not propose to argue about whether the above trends which alarm and distress our totalitarian and interventionist liberals are good or bad. One argument at a time is quite enough. But, whether these tendencies be commendable or an unmixed evil, it can hardly be disputed that the totalitarian liberals regard them as most deplorable, if not absolutely fatal to the future of our country. We can note a few examples of this liberal protest.

On February 15, 1953, there appeared in the New York Times Sunday Magazine an article by Arthur Hays Sulzberger, the publisher of this most powerful of all interventionist-liberal newspapers. It was entitled "Have We the Courage to Be Free?" and was devoted to deploring the smearing of various international movements and organizations and certain books by native patriots. On February 17, 1953, in an address before leading educational administrators at Atlantic City, Mrs. Agnes E. Meyer, wife of the publisher of the ardently interventionist Washington Post, bitterly attacked what she regarded as the reactionary tendencies of our time, especially as they affect education. The Atlantic for June, 1953, devoted a large amount of its space to various articles bemoaning attacks upon educational freedom. The arch-interventionist columnist, Joseph Alsop, in particular, called for a bold stand against any intimidation of professors at his Alma Mater, Harvard University. In Harpers Magazine for June, 1953, Richard H. Rovere deplored the "enormous growth of conservative sentiment in this country in the past five or six years—alongside, a growth of out and out reaction." In his Phi Beta Kappa Oration, published in Harpers Magazine, August, 1953, under the title of "Are We Worth Saving?" Elmer Davis contended (p. 30) that "McCarthy and the spirit of McCarthyism" are more of a menace to the United States than Stalin, Malenkov, Molotov, Beria and Bulganin.

Albert Einstein has exhorted intellectuals to prepare to go to jail rather than to submit to any inquisition as to their opinions. In numerous articles, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. has attacked many phases of what he alleges to be the reactionary tendencies of the times. A similar attitude has been reflected in editorials and articles in totalitarian liberal newspapers such as the New York Post. The Nation, in a recent promotional broadcast, has declared the country to be veritably at the cross roads:

". . . at the cross-roads between peace and atomic war so destructive as to be almost unimaginable . . . at the cross-roads between freedom and regimentation as McCarthy, Jenner, and Velde lead the attack on the citadels of free thought and speech, the free press, schools, theatre, and, very soon, our churches . . . at the cross roads between further development of our national resources for all the people and the great steal of these resources, starting with the 600 billion dollar off-shore oil grab, continuing with public lands, minerals and power, and aiming at the biggest prize of all—control of the atom for private profit."

Perhaps the most authoritative and impressive collection of liberal protests against alleged witch hunting and intolerance, especially as it applies to educators and educational activities, was contained in the Spring (1953) Bulletin of the American Association of University Professors, containing papers given at the annual meeting in Chicago in March, 1953. The Bulletin is filled with protests, credos and resolutions against "witch hunting" and intolerance, notably that alleged against the Congressional investigations. But there is not the slightest sign that the protestors recognized that they have only been caught in a net of their own weaving. Or, at least, if anybody did recognize this, he did not have the honesty or courage to state his belief.

In an article in the Atlantic for July, 1953, Mayor Joseph S. Clark Jr. of Philadelphia called upon the liberals to unite to preserve the liberal position and program, as though true liberalism still existed. As John Chamberlin has pointed out in Human Events, August 19, 1953, our totalitarian liberals of today are prone to think of themselves as being like the liberals of the 1920's. They regard the Bruce Bliven of 1953 as the same kind of liberal he was in 1923, and would equate the Freda Kirchwey of 1953 with the Freda Kirchwey of 1933. A Michael Straight is held to express the same New Republic liberalism that Herbert Croly used to give out thirty years ago. Actually there is little resemblance, save in the now distorted semantic label of "liberal."

Professor E. Merrill Root goes to the heart of the matter in an article on "Are the 'Liberals' Liberal?" in Human Events, September 23, 1953:

"Mayor Clark asks, 'Can the Liberals Rally?' I ask the deeper question: are there any liberals left to rally? My own belief is that if the 'liberals' of Mayor Clark's definition are going to rally and rule, we had better—in kindness to them and in pity for ourselves—first provide them with seeing-eye dogs."

Whether our totalitarian liberals are correct in their present critical attitude need not be considered at this time. The point which we desire to make here is that, be they right or wrong, the trends which they deplore have been produced almost exclusively, if not entirely, by the totalitarian liberals themselves. Almost without exception, the liberals who are now protesting against the alleged witch hunting and reactionary trends of our day have been interventionists since the mid-1930's. For the most part, "isolationists" and friends of disarmament and neutrality in the early 1930's, they switched and became the leaders in the movement for war-mongering, globaloney, interventionism, and the like. The chickens which were hatched from this evil interventionist movement have now come home to roost and the liberals who so light-heartedly laid the eggs are now clucking with alarm and indignation.

Had we not entered the second World War, the Cold War, and the Korean War, the trends and events which the liberals now protest against with such vehemence would have been unthinkable. They are all the logical and inevitable fruits of the great ostensible crusade for the Four Freedoms and the like—in reality, the great political plot to retain tenure and power. War psychology and interventionism, whether in hot or cold wars, provided the general mental framework for all the reactionary trends and invasions of liberty which have finally driven our totalitarian and interventionist liberals into a veritable frenzy of alarm. It need not be assumed that we would be living in a placid utopia today if we had not entered the second World War, but it can safely be asserted that our intervention therein has been overwhelmingly responsible for the situation which now so deeply stirs the totalitarian liberals.

The brighter interventionist liberals fully realized the price they would have to pay for retaining power through war. In Harpers Magazine, March, 1938, Elmer Davis wrote one of his most profound articles, entitled "We Lose the Next War." Its theme was that American liberal civilization would be the outstanding casualty of our intervention in a second World War. But, by 1942, we found Mr. Davis the head of the Office of War Information, devoting his abilities to upholding the doctrine that American civilization could only be preserved by our intervention and triumph.

Not only did the interventionist and totalitarian liberals create the program and atmosphere in which reaction and witch hunting thrive but they also initiated the specific techniques of witch hunting which they now so violently oppose. These were combined and put into operation by no other than Attorney-General Francis Biddle, who has since written a fervent book, The Fear of Freedom (1951), protesting vigorously against the very trends he set in motion. We have in mind here especially the Mass Sedition Trial of 1944-1945. In this, the chief prosecutor was O. John Rogge, who has lately been ardently defending Communists and fellow-travellers now subjected to precisely the same tactics that Rogge followed in 1944-1945. Their "cruel fate" he now bewails in his book Our Vanishing Civil Liberties (1949). The trial was warmly supported by totalitarian liberals generally, and by their leading journalistic organs, such as the Nation, New Republic, New York Post, the Washington Post, and the like.

Nothing which can even be alleged against the so-called McCarthyism, Jennerism, and McCarranism of today constitutes so great a threat to freedom of speech and action as did the Mass Sedition Trial. The liberals, Communists, and strong pressure groups sought to introduce into American judicial practice mock trials after the fashion of those in Russia during the mid-1930's. They brought into play the theory of "guilt by association," formulated mainly by Harold D. Lasswell, once a severe critic of war propaganda. Now, the totalitarian liberals and radicals bitterly criticize this procedure when it has been turned against them. That the Sedition Trial failed in its specific objective does not free the liberals and radicals from their responsibility for the sinister effort to ape the Kremlin in 1944.

Indeed, the stage was set for intolerance before Pearl Harbor by the arrogant attitude and smearing tactics of the various interventionist organizations such as the Committee to Study the Organization of Peace, the Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies, the Miller or Century Club Group, the Non-partisan Committee to Defeat Hamilton Fish, and the like, so fully, if unconsciously, exposed by Walter Johnson in his book, The Battle Against Isolation (1944), the semi-official history of the interventionist movement before Pearl Harbor. This book, even if unintentionally such, is by far the best historical introduction to the causes, rise, and triumph of present-day smearing and intolerance. It is more relevant to this theme than a whole library of books devoted to the political record and activities of Senators McCarthy, McCarran and Jenner, and Congressman Velde.

Now we find the interventionist liberals squawking violently over what they themselves have brought about. But, so far as I have been able to discover, there has been not a single instance of a leading totalitarian liberal who has confessed his guilt or error or has been willing to reverse his stand with respect to the very issues which have produced the situation that the totalitarian liberals now deplore with such vehemence. It is instructive to note that, however much the totalitarian liberals may protest against witch hunting, when it comes to opposing more stringent legislation of this type in Congress the opposition has to come mainly, not from homogenized liberals like Senators Morse, Douglas, Saltonstall, Humphrey, Fulbright, and the like, but from conservative guardians of the traditional American system, such as Senators George and Hoey.

Indeed, while they have indulged in almost unlimited rhetorical dolorosity and indignation over the increased regimentation of thought and expression, the totalitarian liberals, as a whole, have done virtually nothing which could have any real effect in eliminating the conditions under which they now seem to writhe. To do anything really effective along such lines would be almost impossible for these totalitarian liberals, since the first, and almost the only important, step would have to be a confession that their program of intervention, war and globaloney since 1937 has been a gigantic fraud and a vastly expensive hoax which Soviet Russia has been only too happy to exploit.

Being unable to repudiate the evil they have wrought, the interventionist liberals have had two alternatives: They could tacitly support the continuation of the program, with their alleged opponents in the driver's seat. To do this, they would have to swallow the bitter pill of being pushed away from the trough without enjoying even the compensation of expressing "sour grapes." This has been more than they could bear. Therefore, on the fundamental issue of globaloney, they have had to stick to the line that the street-car is still sound, on the right track, and headed in the right direction, but they would make better motormen and conductors. They have limited their criticism and acts to superficialities—anguish over any wounds of body or mind they incidentally may receive from the crowding, scuffling, clatter and bedlam, as the car moves on inexorably to the general ruination of the nation. Our totalitarian and interventionist liberals can be fairly compared to a conference of public health officials, called to deal with a menacing typhoid fever epidemic, spending their time studying the mortality statistics and debating the relative effectiveness of various antibiotics, while at the same time advocating empting the sewage of the city involved into its water system.

Revisionism and Intellectual Integrity After Two World Wars

All this stands out in remarkable contrast to the attitude of the liberals after the first World War. During that war, most of the liberals, except for a few like Randolph Bourne and Oswald Garrison Villard, were swept into the crusade for "the war to end all wars," as a result of the eloquence of Woodrow Wilson. After the war, however, the liberals, almost to a man, recognized their tragic mistake and became the leaders of Revisionism down to the mid-1930's. As late as 1935, Walter Millis published his Road to War, the most scathing volume ever written criticizing American entry into the first World War. The liberals repudiated the thesis of unique German responsibility for the first World War and the nefarious treaty of Versailles, which was based upon this illusion. They logically denounced the failure to revise the postwar treaties, the absurd and disastrous attempt to collect astronomical reparations from Germany, and all the other outstanding international follies of the 1920's.

The Nation, under the courageous leadership of Oswald Garrison Villard, had opposed our intervention in the war. Hence, its espousal of Revisionism in the 1920's did not require any reversal of editorial attitude. The New Republic, on the contrary, had vigorously supported President Wilson and the war. Nevertheless, as if to atone for their greater sins, the editors of the New Republic advocated Revisionism in the 1920's even more vigorously than did the Nation. The reviews and other contributions which the author of this brochure made to the New Republic as early as 1924 may be regarded as the veritable launching of the popular revisionist movement in this country. Even the New York Times joined the movement through its Current History Magazine, which for many years opened its columns freely to the most forthright revisionist material. The Times reviewed revisionist books fairly, even my Genesis of the World War. Irita Van Doren was able to get a number of vigorous revisionist reviews into the Herald Tribune "Books," until Mrs. Ogden Reid became outraged over my review of John S. Ewart's Roots and Causes of the Wars, 1914-1918 (1925), which Mrs. Reid threw out of the issue, even though it meant stopping the presses and revamping the make-up.

The majority of our more alert historians warmly espoused Revisionism. Henry Steele Commager wrote a literally "rave" review of Professor Tamili's America Goes to War, (1938), the most scholarly and complete indictment of Woodrow Wilson and our entry into war in 1917. William L. Langer brilliantly and learnedly embraced the cause of Revisionism. Sidney B. Fay prepared the classic and generally accepted statement of the revisionist position relative to the first World War. Only an isolated "die-hard" here and there, such as Frank Maloy Anderson and William Stearns Davis, dared to raise a voice in defense of the illusions which prevailed from 1914 to the early 1920's. Whatever the mistakes of the liberals in the war period, they amply atoned for their errors by their subsequent revisionist zeal.

The net result of the Revisionism carried on by the liberals after 1920 was highly beneficial: it temporarily discredited interventionism and foreign meddling; it encouraged disarmament; it added strength to the movement for neutrality; it notably promoted world peace down to the mid-1930's; and it helped to restore public toleration.

Today, there is nothing of the sort. The Nation strove valiantly for armament and war in the late 1930's before the New Republic shifted its attitude, when Bruce Bliven began to call for even "more jitters" than those caused by President Roosevelt's fearsome warning of Hitler's timetable to invade Iowa via Dakar, Rio de Janeiro and the Caribbean. The Nation has never given the slightest evidence of any sense of guilt or accorded any remote hospitality to revisionist truth about the onset and issues of the second World War. If it has noticed revisionist books at all, it has been only for the purpose of smearing them. The only revisionist symptom displayed has been with respect to the Korean War which has to some extent outraged its Leftist tendencies.

The same is true of the New Republic. It has not published a revisionist paragraph or fairly reviewed a revisionist book. Indeed, its editor, Michael Straight, went so far as to charge that Professor Tansill's Back Door to War (1952), the book comparable to Professor Fay's masterpiece on the first World War, was the product of a Catholic plot against the national interest of the United States. [In a promotional blast in October, 1953, the New Republic concentrated its fire on Senator McCarthy, nominating him for "Secretary of Fear," but there was no hint that the foreign policy so hotly supported by the New Republic is what produced "McCarthyism".]

What we have said above about the Nation and the New Republic applies equally to the other interventionist-liberal magazines, such as Harpers, the Atlantic, and the Saturday Review of Literature. While frequently publishing articles repeating the mythology of wartime, they have never opened their columns to a revisionist article or published a fair review of a revisionist book. They have usually ignored Revisionism.

The majority of our liberal newspapers, led by the New York Times and Herald Tribune, became fiercely interventionist in the late 1930's. A few, like the papers in the Scripps-Howard chain and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, held out for neutrality until 1941. But even those which favored neutrality before Pearl Harbor have shown no cordiality to Revisionism since the war. They are as hostile to it as the liberal periodicals. Few of the liberal newspapers will fairly review a revisionist book, and most of them, like the periodicals, prefer completely to disregard Revisionism.

The lack of cordiality towards revisionist truth is also characteristic of the vast majority of our historians and academicians. Admiral Morison and Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., at Harvard, Samuel Flagg Bemis, at Yale, Allan Nevins and Henry Steele Commager, at Columbia, Gordon A. Craig, at Princeton, Quincy Wright and Walter Johnson, at Chicago, and others like them in our leading universities, have conditioned a whole younger generation of American historians to embrace interventionism, globaloney, and anti-Revisionism. Even many of those who were and still are Revisionists, relative to the first World War, became ardent apologists for Mr. Roosevelt and his war policy after 1937. Among former Revisionists who joined the war mob were William L. Langer, the most scholarly revisionist historian after the first World War, Sidney B. Fay, Henry Steele Commager, and Carl Lotus Becker the most ardent supporter of my revisionist writings in the 1920's. The renegade Revisionists continued in their support of the Cold War and the Korean War. On January 29, 1951, about 900 leading "liberal" historians and social scientists signed a manifesto upholding Secretary Acheson's policy of intervention in both Europe and the Far East.

Some of the interventionist historians have gone to the near-paranoid extreme of representing President Roosevelt as almost an "isolationist" down to Pearl Harbor, reluctantly pushed toward war by American public opinion, which was actually at least 80 percent isolationist to the day of Pearl Harbor. Good examples of this attitude are to be seen in the paper read by Professor Dexter Perkins before the American Historical Association in Chicago on December 29, 1950, the review of Langer and Gleason's The Struggle Against Isolation (1952) by Professor Edward M. Earle in the American Historical Review, July, 1953, and the review of Langer and Gleason's The Undeclared War (1953) by Samuel Flagg Bemis in the New York Times Book Magazine, September 6, 1953. Other historians, such as Richard W. Leopold and Selig Adler, have even gone back to attack the integrity of revisionist scholars for their work on the causes of the first World War. Not since it "slipped up" in giving Charles Austin Beard's American Foreign Policy in the Making, 1932-1940 (1946) to Professor Louis Martin Sears to review, has the American Historical Review fairly reviewed a revisionist book. It has entirely ignored some of the best of them, such as W. H. Chamberlin's America's Second Crusade (1950), and F. R. Sanborn's Design for War (1951).

The reluctance of the interventionist liberals to accept revisionist realities is well illustrated by Gerald W. Johnson's review of Admiral Morison's By Land and By Sea (1953) in the New York Herald Tribune Book Review, September 20, 1953:

"The volume includes Morison's famous attack on the isolationist philosophy of Charles A. Beard. This is one polemic that has gathered, rather than lost significance in the five years since it was written. The distortion of history that Morison accused Beard of practicing in a very mild way is now being practiced by lesser men with a recklessness hardly surpassed by either the Nazis or the Communists; so that what Morison said about Beard applies with multiplied force to Beard's successors in 1953."

These successors are, obviously, the distinguished historians and publicists, Frederic R. Sanborn, Charles Callan Tansill, William Henry Chamberlin and George Morgenstern. The best answer to such irresponsible and recalcitrant twaddle is the article by Howard K. Beale on "The Professional Historian: His Theory and His Practice," in the Pacific Historical Review, August, 1953.

The stock argument of the interventionist liberals in regard to their refusal to accept and promote Revisionism since 1941 is that there is no factual basis for it now, as there was after 1918. The outpourings of White House interventionist propaganda after 1937 and of the Office of War Information after 1941 are represented as being gospel truth on the diplomatic history of the United States and the world from 1937 to 1945. The reverse of this attitude is the real truth. Whatever the errors and exaggerations in interventionist propaganda from 1914 to 1918, they were trivial when compared with the mendacity and mythology that accompanied interventionism and war following 1937.

Woodrow Wilson really tried over a considerable period to keep the United States out of war, and was swept into it by developments partly beyond his control. He surely had no ambition to base his fame mainly upon being a war president. Even the night before he delivered his war message to Congress, he shuddered at its consequences, as Frank I. Cobb has told us.

Franklin D. Roosevelt's greatest ambition was to go down in history as a war president and he discussed war with Japan as a method of solving the depression in his very first meetings with his Cabinet in 1933. He began definite war plans by the autumn of 1937. He "lied us into war" as adroitly and speedily as possible. He cooperated heartily with the leaders of the war movement in England and elsewhere. He rejected all Japanese overtures for peace after it was evident that Hitler could not be provoked into declaring war as the result of flagrant American violations of neutrality. He approved the steps that he knew would inevitably lead to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. He was immensely relieved, if not overjoyed, when the attack actually came.

Hence, the historical and moral need for revisionist historical research and writing is far greater in the 1950's than it was in the 1920's and 1930's.

It might be argued by many that any return to the true liberalism and the neutrality of the early 1930's would be calamitous. This would lead us into another theme which we do not propose to discuss at this time. It may, however, be stated without the slightest fear of valid contradiction that there is no hope of returning to the freedom and tolerance which our current crop of alarmed totalitarian liberals now recall with such tearful nostalgia unless we repudiate, root and branch, the militant globaloney and the perpetual-war-for-perpetual-peace program which have produced all the serious defections from the life and policy of the early 1930's which the liberals now lament.

The double-thinking tendency of interventionist liberals to lament the passing of intellectual freedom and at the same time to support with intolerant fervor the continuance of the policies that have destroyed this freedom is illustrated in an eloquent article by Bernard De Voto. He portrays the glories of free thought, reading and writing before 1937 and yearns for their return: "We had that kind of a country only a little while ago, and I'm for getting it back." But few American writers assail more ferociously than does De Voto the neutralism and continentalism which offer the only hope of regaining a free and tolerant civilization.

So long as any liberals applaud and support globaloney and worldwide interventionism against public sin, they are only getting just what they deserve, and richly deserve, to receive.

Whether they are fully conscious of it or not, a main reason for the sense of fury and frustration on the part of the totalitarian liberals today is the fact that their anti-Communist Republican opponents have scooped up the ball where the fumble occurred in the fall of 1952 and are now dashing down the sidelines with the ball in one hand and a megaphone in the other heaping abuse on the fumblers in all directions where their voices can be heard. It is hard enough on the interventionist liberals to have their internationalist program carried on by a group supposed to be congenitally unable to do any such thing. What is even worse is to have to absorb at the same time harsh and voluminous abuse for the manner in which the program was conducted under interventionist-liberal sponsorship. The bitter attacks upon Secretary of State John Foster Dulles by Senator Wayne Morse well reflect this resentment felt by the totalitarian liberals over the situation just described.

The author of this brochure cannot fairly be accused of being one who has only recently awakened to the menace of interventionism to liberty. A few nights after Mr. Roosevelt delivered his famous "dagger in the back" speech at the University of Virginia Institute of Politics in June, 1940, I gave an address before the Institute on the same spot. Here, I predicted that our intervention in the second World War would produce exactly the system of intolerance against which the liberals now protest with such vigor. The essentials of this address were printed in the Virginia Quarterly Review (Autumn, 1940). I had given much the same lecture before the members of the history and social science faculties at the University of Michigan a month before. It caused a great uproar among the interventionist-liberal professors who thereafter persecuted for months their colleagues who had been responsible for inviting me to give the address.

Who Started the Smearing?

The liberals are greatly agitated over what they denounce as the smearing tactics of the alleged "inquisitors" of the present day. They write about "ordeal by slander" as though it had been invented by Senator McCarthy. But let us look at the record.

Who was it that sweepingly introduced the smearing technique into American public life on a national scale? It was no other than that shrewd old New Dealer and liberal tactician, Charles Michelson, following 1929. Was Owen Lattimore the first to suffer from "ordeal by slander?" Hardly. The first man to be subjected to this treatment, far more prolonged and bitter than any endured by Lattimore, was no other than Herbert Hoover, when he was an occupant of the White House. Liberals applauded loudly when Rex Todhunter Stout, in his The Illustrious Dunderheads (1942), smeared in ugly fashion the leading anti-interventionists, usually quoting them out of context, and when John Roy Carlson, in his book Under Cover (1943), smeared on a low and crude plane nearly everybody of importance who opposed our entry into the second World War. If we were to listen to the liberals today, we would imagine that such "infamous behavior" could only be carried on by persons smearing Communists and fellow-travellers.

Senator Margaret Chase Smith has accused Senator McCarthy of having unloosed "the Four Horsemen of Calumny—Fear, Ignorance, Bigotry and Smear." However much one may deplore the use of such instruments or techniques, the totalitarian liberals, of whom Senator Smith is a member, had been operating with them for years before the emergence of Senator McCarthy into the public limelight. They had become the main stock in trade of the totalitarian liberals after 1937, and especially after 1939. All who opposed our entry into the second World War, from however wise and noble motives, were smeared as professional Roosevelt-haters, reactionaries, isolationists, pro-Nazis, and the like.

The interventionists took great joy in lavishly denouncing, quite indiscriminately, the whole anti-war group as degenerate children with a common nefarious paternity. No one went to greater extremes in smearing the anti-interventionists than President Roosevelt, who went so far as to compare patriotic Americans of international distinction, some of them with a longer record of public service than himself, with Benedict Arnold and the Copperheads of the Civil War period.

Senators Burton K. Wheeler, Bennett C. Clark, Gerald P. Nye, Rush Holt, Robert M. La Follette Jr., Rufus C. Holman, and Henrik Shipstead, and Congressman Hamilton Fish, were smeared out of public life because they dared to uphold the traditional American doctrine of neutrality in foreign quarrels against the newer global interventionism. Even Joseph Goebbels would have blushed at the methods used by liberals and radicals in smearing Senator Wheeler during his last campaign for the Senate. And it is relevant to remember that Mr. Wheeler was the special darling of the liberals when he ran for the Vice-Presidency in 1924 on the Farmer-Labor ticket. And he continued to be such until he opposed Mr. Roosevelt's Supreme Court Plan in 1937. Even this "offense" was more readily forgiven by the liberals than his later opposition to our involvement in the second World War.

The most sensational case of smearing done by the interventionist liberals was, of course, that directed against Colonel Charles A. Lindbergh, who was as late as 1937 surely far more of a popular national hero than President Roosevelt. He was reviled beyond any precedent for upholding the traditional American foreign policy and was for a decade literally transformed from a hero into a pariah. Two other leading publicists who were liberal heroes in the early 1930's were accorded similar treatment. They were Lawrence Dennis and John T. Flynn, special favorites of the New Republic and other liberal journals when they were devoted to exposing the foreign bond and investment trust scandals. And, today, when we are witnessing tearful protests against the smearing and discharge of teachers accused of Communist leanings, we should not forget the ruthless persecution of May A. Quinn in 1945 for alleged Fascist sympathies by PM and some other liberal journals.

We may also profitably recall the outrageous smearing of that great member of the old liberal group, Charles Austin Beard, at the time of his death, by Max Lerner, Perry Miller, Peter Levin, and other liberals who had been fulsome admirers of Beard before he rejected the globaloney and war mongering of Roosevelt and his interventionist liberal supporters. The stage had been set for this ingratitude and bad taste by Admiral Samuel Eliot Morison in his review of Beard's President Roosevelt and the Coming of the War, 1941 (1948) in the Atlantic for August, 1948; and by Harry D. Gideonse's arrogant smearing of the same book in the New Leader, June 12, 1948.

The smearing of Beard illustrates one of the lower forms of the techniques used to discredit honest revisionist historians. In case a writer or book cannot be answered effectively in a factual manner or disposed of by merely applying the epithet of "isolationist," it has become usual to charge him with "senility" if he is over fifty years of age. This was the method used in smearing Beard by Max Lerner, Perry Miller and, especially. Admiral Morison. The latter, who frequently cites Leopold von Ranke with admiration, might have been expected to remember that von Ranke began to write his voluminous world history when eighty-five, while Beard was only seventy-four when his final book on Roosevelt foreign policy was published, and his mental powers were not in the slightest impaired by age, as I can attest from close personal association with him in those years.

This allegation of senile incompetence in the case of Beard was repeated with singular audacity and bad taste by an obscure history teacher at Michigan State College, John B. Harrison, in his book, This Age of Global Strife (1952) : "This prominent historian undertook in the last days of his eccentric old age to prove by ponderous documentation that President Roosevelt set out from the beginning of the war in Europe to stealthily and deceitfully maneuver the United States into a war whose outcome was of no real concern to the American people. It is a deplorable collection of half-truths and distortions. Anyone who reads it should read also Samuel E. Morison's brilliant analysis of it in the Atlantic Monthly, August, 1948." In short. Beard's alleged senility is to be proved by reference to a review of his book based on the utterly unproved charge of senility. If a writer of one hundred years of age should produce a book whitewashing the Roosevelt diplomatic record, he would be praised by the anti-revisionist school as an example of great clear-headedness and sustained rationality.

In commenting on Owen Lattimore's Ordeal by Slander (1950), William L. Shirer observed:

"A moving and shocking book. As I read this story of his ordeal I kept thinking: No, this can't be true. Such witch hunting, such persecution, such slandering of a decent, patriotic loyal American simply couldn't happen in a free, democratic America. That it did happen comes as a sickening shock to the reader."

Without going into the merits of the Lattimore case, it may be observed that few journalists have been quicker on the trigger in smearing anti-interventionist writers and public figures than Mr. Shirer. Nobody did more than the publicists and writers of his school of thought and journalistic methods to prepare the formerly "free" democratic America" for an era in which slander could become commonplace and protection therefrom increasingly difficult. The whole corps of interventionist-liberal columnists and editors have been smearing anti-interventionists daily for fifteen years in contrast to the recent and periodic smearing done by the men whom the liberals now castigate as witch hunters. So long as "the shoe was on the other foot," the interventionist liberals just loved to pour on the smears and insinuations.

John T. Flynn, in his brochure, The Smear Terror, the most penetrating study of the smearing device in our time, shows that most of the smearing since 1937 has been initiated and executed by "liberals" and radicals—down to the time when the tables were turned on them and their own fat was brought into the fire. Their present plight seems, however, to have taught them little in the way of humility and contrition. They remain just as intolerant of any who do not swallow their globaloney dogmas as the so-called "inquisitors" are of Communism and fellow-travelling.

Informers and Investigators

The totalitarian liberals pretend to abhor "informers" when the information thus derived is used against them, but they do not hesitate to "inform" against neutralist liberals whose views on world affairs they reject. A short time back, I was edified to discover that a prominent Columbia University Teachers College professor whom, back in my journalistic days, I used to defend against what I regarded as unfounded charges of Communist leanings, was a leading informer against some alleged Left-wing members of the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee. A little later on he was a co-signer of a long letter to the New York Times attacking invasions of academic freedom.

In their current protest against allegedly excessive Congressional investigating today, the totalitarian liberals apparently have forgotten their passion for investigations in early New Deal days, such as the Pecora investigation of banking, the Black investigation of the public utility lobby, the Nye investigation of munition makers, Thurman W. Arnold's assault on the trusts, and the attack on the "big business" which had been encouraged by the NRA. Especially interesting today, in the light of later developments, was the vigorous "combing over" of the Morgan firm by Alger Hiss when he was counsel for the Nye investigation. This was surely comparable to the much publicized and denounced examination of James Wechsler by Senator McCarthy. But there were no liberal protests against investigations at that time. The only cries of anguish came from the "reactionary" Republican press.

Book Burning

Led by Clifton Fadiman and others, the totalitarian liberals of our day have raised a great outcry about what they designate as "book burning." What they have in mind is the removal of some books written by Left-wing authors from the 285 libraries which have been established for the use of American soldiers and civilians abroad and a few possible European readers. Some of these books are of ephemeral value and the total removed is not impressive.

The wisdom of this move to censor the reading of Americans officially abroad and curious Europeans need not be discussed here. Even if we were to accept at its face value the most bitter criticism of the policy, this type of interference with freedom of thought and reading is infinitesimal compared with what the interventionist liberals have been doing in this country for the last fifteen years, and still continue to carry on to the best of their ability. Victor Lasky has dealt searchingly with some aspects of this matter in his article on "Book Burning on the Left," in Human Events, September 2, 1953.

As noted above, only a few books, some of them of dubious value, have been taken away from the very small American occupation forces residing abroad, and a handful of hoped-for foreign readers. The totalitarian liberals, in contrast, have done their best to prevent all books which tell the truth about American foreign policy since 1937 from even being printed here in our own country. They would have succeeded completely had not we possessed three small but courageous publishing houses that dared to defy the "historical blackout." Those books which have appeared have been almost uniformly ignored or smeared by the totalitarian liberals.

The early phases of this attempt to keep the American people in ignorance about the most important subject in our public life today were described by Dr. John H. Sachs in his brochure on "Hatchet Men," (1948) and by Oswald Garrison Villard in his article on "Book Burning— U.S. A. Style," in The Progressive, April 28, 1947. I have told the story in full in my lengthy brochure on "The Struggle Against the Historical Blackout," and in the first chapter of the Symposium on Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace (1953).

In this way, the totalitarian liberals, who are now raising such a rumpus about taking a handful of books away from a few Americans and Europeans in foreign lands, have done all in their power to prevent the tens of millions of American readers here at home from getting any books at all which deal honestly with our foreign policy in the last fifteen years. When they have not been able to prevent the publication of such books they have done what they could to discourage the more than 10,000 American public libraries from buying them, and with much success, as several sampling investigations have demonstrated. This story is told in part by Oliver Carlson in his article on "A Slanted Guide to Library Selections," in The Freeman, January 12, 1952, and by Gomer Barth in another article in The Freeman (May 19, 1952) on "The Libraries Buy Propaganda." In short, while the recent "book burning" has removed only a limited number of books from a few foreign libraries, the liberals have done everything they could to keep all honest books on recent world history from getting into our own libraries here at home.

The men in American public life today who are branded by the liberals as "book burners," seek at the worst only to remove from a few foreign libraries books which have actually been published and have already secured wide circulation at home, due to the notorious system of favoritism in book reviewing and book club selection which has been current here for years. But the interventionist and totalitarian liberals have sought, and generally succeeded, in figuratively "burning" the books which oppose their dogmas in manuscript, before they can even secure publication. Publishers have been so intimidated that they do not dare to bring out anti-interventionist books. Not one large commercial publishing house has issued an anti-interventionist book since the second World War. Such books of this type as have been published, mainly as the result of the courage of these three previously mentioned small, patriotic publishing firms, have, so far as the interventionist liberals could bring it about, been kept out of our public libraries and off the counters of our book stores.

The hostile attitude of totalitarian liberals toward books which have told the truth about our foreign policy was well illustrated by the action of Lewis Mumford, who heatedly resigned from the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1948 when this august organization awarded a Gold Medal to the late Charles Austin Beard for producing the best historical work by an American in the preceding decade.

The case of Lewis Mumford, in the 1920's a typical liberal supporter of neutrality, disarmament and peace, is a good example of the mental confusion of the interventionist liberals. His book, Men Must Act (1939), was a frantic appeal for American intervention against the Nazi menace. After the war, he apparently became fearful of the mental intimidation which might result from a permanent war scare. He wrote a splendid article in Air Affairs, March, 1947, on the eve of the Cold War, in which he cogently predicted that, even if we did not wage a third world war with atomic weapons, the fear of such a war might force upon us a type of life and regimentation which would be little better than barbarism. Yet, he continued to support the globaloney without which a cold war and the resulting cultural regimentation would be quite impossible. Mumford thus outdid the "double thinking" described by Orwell and gave us an imposing example of "triple-think."

An equally good performance was turned in by Quincy Wright in his address of welcome at the Spring Meeting of the American Association of University Professors in Chicago, March, 1953. After condemning isolationism (i.e. neutrality) as one of "the worst aspects of American society," Wright proceeded to a most realistic and able analysis of the ways in which a garrison state menaces liberty, social justice, and all other social decencies. Then he wound up with a plea for globaloney and American world leadership which have been almost solely responsible for such steps as have been taken to transform us into a garrison state.

While we are on the subject of totalitarian liberals and the loss of good books, we may well refer to one matter of which few Americans are at all aware, save for the authors who have suffered personally. Much has justly been made of Hitler's real "book burnings," but the Fuehrer at his worst made no such inroads upon the availability of important books as did Mr. Roosevelt and his liberal associates during the second World War.

A government order was sent out directing the melting of the plates of books which had not been reprinted in the recent past. This was an especially unfair directive, since, on account of the shortage of materials and high costs, many books which would normally have been reprinted were not continued in print during the war. This was even true of substantial textbooks for which the demand was lessened on account of the diversion of most college students into some form of war service. The plates of the large two-volume book I wrote with Professor Howard Becker on Social Thought from Lore to Science (1938) were reluctantly melted by the publisher. The permanent value of the book, generally regarded as the most complete and indispensable work on the subject in any language, was attested by the fact that it was recently reprinted at relatively great expense. Indeed, the plates of virtually every book I had ever written before 1941 were melted, including those of my History of Western Civilization, which was described by no less an authority than Professor Preserved Smith as "unquestionably the masterpiece of the new history." Other authors suffered proportionately.

It is literally true that, of all the books in print in 1940, almost none are now available at the publishers save for the Bible, some dictionaries and encyclopedias, a few classics, and textbooks so popular that they were reprinted in wartime. There was no need whatever for this absurd order. The metal derived from the melting of these plates did not amount to one ten-millionth part of that dumped into the Pacific Ocean or allowed to rust in our deserts after the war.

I endeavored to persuade Frederick Lewis Allen to have an able writer on Harper's staff expose this scandal in an article in Harper's Magazine. He replied, belittling the irreparable scholarly and literary loss, and, however incredible it may seem, he was supported by some of the top men in the publishing department of Harper and Brothers. The desire of the liberals to protect the Roosevelt myth in all its aspects seemed to outweigh loyalty even to the interests of the publishing industry and the reading rights of the American public. Yet, only the other day, I received a pamphlet entitled "The Freedom to Read," urging publishers and librarians to resist book burning and book branding. One of the signers was Cass Canfield, Chairman of the Board of Harper and Brothers, a great publishing house which has surely done all it could to see to it that the public will not have any "freedom to read" revisionist books.

The Educational Inquisition

We have noted that our totalitarian and interventionist liberals are now much agitated over the recent alleged inquisition as applied to educators. What they have in mind, chiefly, is the interrogation and dismissal of professors suspected of Communistic leanings. There have been relatively few of these—estimated to have been about 100 altogether—and not many of them have been scholars or teachers of great distinction.

The wisdom of this alleged inquisition can legitimately be debated. But, even if one took the most critical view of the procedure, the evil therein is both quantitatively and qualitatively trivial compared to the intellectual tyranny exerted by interventionist and totalitarian-liberal professors and academic administrators, especially in the fields of history, international relations, and political science, over the last fifteen years. It is no exaggeration to state that, today, it is extremely difficult for any man or woman to obtain or retain a teaching post in these fields in the great majority of American colleges and universities if he or she holds the opinions that were characteristic of sound liberalism, say, in 1930; that is, if it is known that such opinions are held. To be secure in tenure during the last decade or more, such a person has been compelled to conceal any dissent from the prevailing internationalism and interventionism. To have revealed any deviation therefrom would have been more menacing to tenure and promotion than Communist leanings or fellow-travelling tendencies.

As a result of this situation, hundreds of the most intelligent men in the fields of history, international relations, and political science have been compelled to live under a veritable "reign of terror" since long before Senator McCarthy ever entered public life. This involuntary intellectual servitude of many hundreds or thousands of honest and capable men is a far greater invasion of academic freedom than the firing of a baker's dozen of those suspected of ultra-radical leanings. This fact was pointed out years ago by Professor Edward A. Ross in one of the most searching discussions of freedom ever delivered. President Nicholas Murray Butler of Columbia University virtually ordered his faculty to declare war on Germany after the Germans invaded the Lowlands and France in May, 1940. Those who continued any criticism of interventionism were roughly dealt with. Friends of mine in a number of leading universities have detailed to me the terrific pressure put on them to sign the academic manifesto of January, 1951, supporting the foreign policy of Secretary Acheson. This academic inquisition and the censorship of professors who do not subscribe to the globaloney of the interventionist liberals extend even to text-books. Those which stray notably from the prescribed internationalist path are quickly smeared out of use.

To revert briefly to the matter of the so-called inquisition of educators now being denounced by our totalitarian liberals, it is a patent fact that these interventionist liberals, by doing all in their power to get us into the second World War and by supporting the Cold War and the Korean War, have been responsible, so far as they were able to influence events, for the very inquisition which they now so furiously or plaintively decry. Yet, so far as I have noticed, not one of them has confessed to this fact, repented, and pointed to the only logical remedy: the renunciation of the interventionist policies which have created the very intellectual atmosphere in which witch hunting can thrive. Despite their obviously fatal effects on liberalism and intellectual freedom, the totalitarian liberal educators go on fervently advocating the global interventionism and perpetual war for perpetual peace which have brought upon them all their woes.

This double-thinking tendency was illustrated on a great scale in the papers, credos, and resolutions at the meeting of the American Association of University Professors in Chicago in March, 1953, to which reference has already been made. There were repeated liberal groans about the utter depravity of universities which had knuckled down before the "witch hunts" and "witch hunters." But the interventionism, globaloney, and international fantasies which have produced all the intolerance were praised, while neutralism and international amity, the only avenue of escape from the predicament of the liberals, were denounced with as great intolerance as in wartime. This attitude was especially notable in the address of welcome by Professor Quincy Wright. Amusingly enough, Wright stated that "A professor who has become anybody's Charley McCarthy has no reason for existence." With this sentiment, I would heartily agree. At the same time, I can think of only one other professor in the United States who has been as consistent and faithful a "Charley McCarthy" of globaloney.

The Clergy and Globaloney

The American clergy have recently been enraged, perhaps justly, by the attack of J. B. Matthews on the Protestant clergy in the American Mercury, July 1953, as allegedly "fronting" for the Communists in the United States. While the clergy had a far better record than the professors during the second World War in the way of refraining from passionate war-mongering—there was no such violent fanning of hatreds as that described by Ray H. Abrams in his Preachers Present Arms (1933), the classic account of clerical hate-mongering during the first World War—the clergy do have their share of responsibility for the more recent developments which have led to such things as the Matthews attack. Although they had a reasonably good record for sanity during the war, the majority of the clergy have supported collective security, globaloney, interventionism, the United Nations, and the like, since 1945. And these forces, policies and agencies are precisely what have led to the Cold War, the Korean War, and the resulting growth of ideological hatreds and public intolerance.

Theological liberalism appears to be no safeguard against falling victim to interventionism and anti-Revisionism. The Christian Register, published in Boston, is the chief organ of the liberal American Unitarians. It is interlocked with the Beacon Press which published the vigorous attacks of Paul Blanshard on Catholic political policies. Yet, apparently fearing that no Protestant reviewer could be trusted to smear sufficiently Professor's Tansill's great book on the origins of the second World War, the editor of the Christian Register reprinted the bitter attack on the book by a Catholic reviewer in America, the chief political publication of American [Jesuit] Catholics. The Register has amply attested to the validity of Orwell's concept of "double-think" by simultaneously publishing vehement attacks on the growing intolerance and articles giving equally vigorous support to the globaloney which has brought about this intolerance. The editors do not seem to realize that the Orwellian regime into which the foreign policy they support is inevitably leading us would be far more menacing to Unitarianism than a revival of the Spanish Inquisition in the United States. Even the Christian Century under Paul Hutchinson's editorship has shown no such realism and courage as it did after the first World War when it was edited by Charles Clayton Morrison, who published my comprehensive series of articles in the autumn of 1925 on the responsibility for the first World War.

Classifying Subversive Organizations

The totalitarian liberals have been wailing of late over the listing and classification of subversive organizations, especially since these lists have recently been periodically expanded. In the New York Times, August 28, 1953, it was announced that Attorney-General Herbert Brownell was about to add to the list of subversive organizations the National Lawyers Guild, one of the leading founders of which was that valiant defender of civil liberties, the confidant of President Roosevelt, and a prominent member of President Truman's Committee on Civil Rights, Morris L. Ernst. As a matter of fact, it was precisely the totalitarian liberals who helped to create the favorable atmosphere in which President Truman and Attorney-General Clark believed it both possible and expedient to launch this program when they were pressed by the conservatives. This state of mind was greatly aided by Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., Henry Steele Commager, Harry D. Gideonse, and the like, when they began to attack Leftish organizations and individuals who did not charm them. Examples of such writing were Schlesinger's The Vital Center (1949), and his Public Affairs Pamphlet "What About Communism?" (1950). He was very harsh on Henry Wallace and the Progressives who did not go along with the liberal globaloney in 1948, as Wallace had so fiercely done in 1940 when it was directed against Hitler. All this liberal smearing may have been done for self-protection, but at any rate it encouraged the first Truman moves against so-called subversive organizations.

It is likely that the totalitarian liberals did not at first foresee the extremes to which this would lead. They probably did not realize the extent to which their fellow totalitarian liberals had sponsored various "front" organizations during the honeymoon with Stalin from 1941 to 1945. It is certain that they expected no such blast as A. A. Zoll's "Red-ucators at Harvard," which listed 76 professors with 124 "fronts." There was little excitement until the Hiss and Lattimore cases and that of the Eleven Communist leaders all seemed to burst out at once. Then the feathers began to fly. But, when the totalitarian-liberal tribe sought to shut off the water, they found that the washer in the faucet had rusted and clogged to an extent which they had not anticipated. They have been uttering anguished bleats about the situation ever since. Perhaps the best explanation of the predicament which they let themselves in for is that they had never read and properly reflected upon Orwell's great treatise and learned in advance about the type of mental attitudes that are required to sustain globaloney and perpetual war for perpetual peace.

The resistance to accepting the relevance of the Orwellian analysis for understanding the basic trends of our time, or the sheer inability to discern its significance, was well illustrated in the early autumn of 1953. One of the most striking events in the opening of the Television season was a production of Nineteen Eighty-four which proved a brilliant technical and dramatic triumph. But, so far as I could discover, not one comment in the press or over the radio showed the slightest comprehension of Orwell's fundamental contention that deliberately planned cold war and war scares are the sole cause of the regimentation, intellectual tyranny, tortures, and the like, which the book so poignantly describes. So far as providing any cogent guidance for public policy in our day is concerned, the studio might just as well have been putting on a performance of Pilgrim's Progress. Even social philosophers show the same aversion to realism. In the Humanist, September, 1953, Sidney Hook denied that I had any intellectual or moral right "to invoke Orwell" in explaining and interpreting the current world situation.

Interventionism Destroys the Welfare State

The totalitarian liberals of our time mourn the disappearance of the welfare state, whether of the New Deal or the Fair Deal, and lament the fact that the money which once went into public works is now being spent for armament and war. This lament was eloquently and forcefully expressed by Mrs. Agnes E. Meyer in an address before a Conference of the American Public Welfare Association in Washington on September 24, 1953. She held that: "The swing of reaction is so great that all liberal ideals are actually on the defensive today." The most cogent comment on this is that it was the interventionist liberals who brought on the war system. They often reply that this was necessary in order to prevent the defeat of the Democrats and the New Deal in 1940.

This is, however, an evasive and shallow justification, in the light of liberal ideology and dialectic. Following the latter closely, the course of events should have been, in the event of a Republican victory in 1940: (1) reactionary and deflationary economic policies producing a worse depression than that which followed 1929; (2) the discrediting of the Republicans, the restoration of the Democrats with a greater majority than ever before, and the reinstitution of the welfare state on a scale surpassing anything envisaged by Mr. Roosevelt, while saving the hundreds of billions of dollars spent on the war. Hence, if the totalitarian-liberal dialectic were sound, the liberals would today be basking in a welfare-state paradise or utopia.

It is not argued here that events would actually have followed this pattern of development or that it would have been a blessing if they had. We are merely pointing out that, if the liberals had possessed both faith in their doctrines and statesman-like patience, they would have preferred peace to war as the means of realizing their ideals. But their mortal fear of losing power, even temporarily, overrode both their ideals and their ideology.

The totalitarian liberals now frequently assert that our conservative politicians have carried us "back to Coolidge." The fact is that the backwash of interventionism and war has carried us back to Benjamin Harrison, if not to William Henry Harrison. While there is some social legislation of the 1930's, like the Wagner Act and the Social Security Act, which carries so much political dynamite that it cannot safely be tampered with, if these laws were not on the statute books today, they could not be brought out of a Congressional Committee, to say nothing of being enacted into laws.

Despite the nostalgia about the New Deal and all the boastful talk by the totalitarian liberals lauding the "welfare state" under President Truman, there has not been one outstanding piece of reform legislation put on the federal statute books since Munich, in the autumn of 1938. The liberals, in the early 1930's, stressed the fact that a people cannot have both guns and butter, and were determined that we should have butter. Hence, they could be expected to know that a garrison state cannot be a welfare state or one likely to promote libertarianism. A garrison state has no place for reform measures unless these make a direct contribution to inducing the "proles" to become and remain more receptive to the continuation of a permanent cold-war regime. But their lust for prolonged tenure impelled the interventionist liberals to brush aside their elementary knowledge and most profound convictions of an earlier day.

The totalitarian liberals have not even been honest enough to face up to what their interventionism has done to the earlier liberal economic doctrines and practices. In his book, The Big Change (1952), Frederick Lewis Allen has contended that interventionism and war have brought great economic blessings to this country, one among them being his allegation that we have been enabled thereby to by-pass socialism and live in a utopia of super-efficient managerial liberalism. A similar attitude has been taken by David E. Lilienthal, long the Director of the Tennessee Valley Authority, the main New Deal economic enterprise, in his eulogy of business trends since 1939, Big Business: A New Era (1953). The fact is that we have not bypassed anything except the now defunct liberalism which Mr. Allen heartily espoused before 1936. We have only passed into military managerialism or military state capitalism, a system which Mr. Allen would have been one of the first to attack with great ferocity in the early 1930's. In his important book on The Government's Role in Economic Life (1953), George Steiner emphasizes the fact that the most powerful group which has been pushing the United States into "socialism" is the military crowd and their economic beneficiaries.

The renegade liberals were especially devious and dishonest in not fighting out the New Deal on its domestic merits rather than advocating war to preserve their tenure, with the result that the older liberalism was lost in the shuffle. They did not show the courage of their special and deepest convictions. Prior to 1937, the liberals had been the shock troops—the advance guard—of Revisionism, neutrality, disarmament, and the like. Led by then militant anti-militarists like Maury Maverick, they had pushed through the sensational Nye investigation of munitions-makers, and put the statesmanlike neutrality legislation on our statute books. They had proclaimed war to be the greatest of all evils. After 1937, they came to regard the possible loss of tenure and power as an even greater evil than a costly, bloody, and needless war.

Did We Have To Fight?

It may never be settled as to just who killed cock-robin, but there can be no doubt as to who killed the old tolerant, neutral, peace-loving, progressive liberalism of the first third of the twentieth century. The latter was destroyed as a result of our entry into two world wars, especially the second, needlessly in both cases. A decent liberalism survived the first World War, but the second proved too much for nearly everything worth saving in the liberal tradition. For our entry into it the turncoat and war mongering liberals were overwhelmingly responsible. The majority of the conservative groups were against our entry into the war, as were the Communists from August, 1939, to June 22, 1941.

The stock argument of the interventionist liberals is that we "had to fight" in order to prevent Hitler from over running Britain and the United States. In the light of our present knowledge, this threadbare apology for bellicose liberal folly is not worthy of even passing consideration. General George C. Marshall, in his final report as Chief of Staff in 1945, freely admitted that Hitler did not have an overall plan for conquering Europe, to say nothing of the New World. Indeed, he did not have a plan for well coordinated military collaboration with his Axis partners. The fact is that the liberals were impelled to their war-mongering fury by two main obsessions: (1) bitter hatred of Hitler, partly born of an over-compensatory feeling of guilt, and (2) the conviction that only armament and war could keep Roosevelt and the New Deal managers in power. Hitler was eliminated, but an even more powerful totalitarian dictator succeeded him. At home, the old and true liberalism was destroyed and a growing conservatism is now crowding in on the totalitarian liberals.

These liberals usually seek to counter embarrassing facts by raising the horrifying spectre of an allegedly certain Hitler victory in the second World War, had we not intervened. We now know that there was little, if any, possibility of a Nazi triumph, even if we had remained aloof from the conflict. Moreover, in his America's Second Crusade (1952), William Henry Chamberlin has shown that the world situation since 1945 could not have been worse than it has been, even if Hitler had won the war, while the United States would have been spared all the monetary and cultural losses which our intervention involved. There is every probability that, had we stood aside from the conflict, Germany and Russia would have fought themselves into a fatally weakened stalemate, and the "Free Nations" would not today face any significant or dangerous totalitarian menace, whether of the Right or the Left. That this was the most desirable outcome of the war was pointed out at the time by men as far apart in their political philosophy and party ties as Senators Taft and Truman.

European opinion is much more realistic on this matter. The famous English authority on military and international affairs. General J.F.C. Fuller, states the situation fairly in the following words:

"We Europeans are a truculent congeries of nations who have been fighting each other for upward of 2,000 years, and we dislike outside interference. In 1917 . . . had you not stepped in, we should have been forced to come to terms between ourselves. . . by a negotiated peace that could not have been worse than the one established. Again in the last war. . . you got entangled in the European brawl. . . But for lend-lease the war could not have continued for long. Again there would have been a negotiated peace, which could not have been as bad as the present so-called one." (Ordinance Magazine, Sept.-Oct., 1949, p. 96)

The almost universal argument in support of the global meddling, the Cold War and war scares since 1945 is that they have been vitally needed, indeed indispensable, to assure our defense and security. The fact is that they have enormously increased our dangers and reduced our effective protection against any probable attack. A sound program for our defense was laid down by former-President Herbert Hoover, surely no person to neglect our need for security, in a speech on January 27, 1952, and another at the Republican National Convention on July 8, 1952. If we abandoned our world-meddling and resumed our traditional policy of benign neutrality, we would not only enormously lessen the prospect of any attack on the United States, but could provide really adequate defense of our country for a mere fraction of what is now being spent on armament.

The Isolationist Smear

The totalitarian and interventionist liberals will inevitably attack my indictment as an exhibit of extreme "isolationism," pre-war or otherwise. Actually, "isolationism" is only a meaningless smear term, invented for propaganda purposes by unscrupulous interventionists after 1937. Not one of the important "Old Liberals" was an isolationist in any literal sense whatever. Rather, these men were apostles of international good-will, and advocated the only policy which could make this possible, neutrality and international amity. The author of this brochure was working for a reasonable and amicable internationalism when some of the most vocal of present-day interventionist world-meddlers were in their cradles.

Any sane American wishes for the development of just as much international intercourse and good-feeling as is possible. The past fifteen years of American world-meddling have, however, only produced a heritage of ill-will, hostility, warfare, devastation, and incredible economic waste. Even the idea of world government is acceptable when the world is ready for it, a century or more from the present time. Today, we should treat the world government program in much the same way that we view proposals for interplanetary flights. Indeed, it is quite possible that rocket trips to the moon will have become commonplace by the time any compulsory world government, such as was tried in vain in the Korean War and proved to be an incredibly expensive and devastating farce, is practicable. As Captain Russell Grenfell has justly and aptly observed, the main lesson taught by the Korean War is that the worst possible disaster which can befall any nation today is to be defended against aggression by the United Nations. It is fair to suggest that, not since the Children's Crusade of 1212, has there been a more glaring case of well-intentioned futility and ill-timed crusading than the strenuous effort to promote immediate world government, world citizenship, and the like, which is now sponsored by Stringfellow Barr, Norman Cousins, Owen J. Roberts, and others who share their program and crusading zeal.

It is far more difficult, however, to debunk the farce of immediate world government than it is to discredit the possibility of immediate flights to Mars. If, say, a half-dozen crews of six men each should leave for Mars and were never heard from again—or the wreckage of their airplanes, rockets, and other equipment was found scattered about on the earth—this would discourage all such wild plans. But even a Korean War, with about 150,000 American casualties, an expenditure of forty billion dollars, an utterly devastated Korea, a "quitter's peace," and a stalemate producing conditions about as they were in 1950, so far as the division or unification of the country is concerned, does not seem sufficient to discredit world-meddling and the myth of world government at the mid-century. Our world-meddlers, who sought to outlaw war, have ended up by outlawing neutrality and peace.

It may be freely conceded that the "One World" idea is a noble apocalyptic dream which may be realized in fact in some vague and distant future. But premature attempts to achieve it, perhaps several centuries ahead of any realistic possibility, by means of atomic and hydrogen bombs can only defeat the whole program through exterminating the human race. The methods followed by the "Caesars" of the past, who have thus far been the only leaders capable of constructing "One Worlds," are no longer practicable because of the increasing destructiveness of military equipment. The program of the world-meddlers would seem to imply that the best way to prevent people from killing each other is to kill all of them first, so that there will be nobody left to disturb the peace of the world. At the best, such a world peace would have the orderly atmosphere of a well-kept graveyard. Actually, it would more likely resemble post-war Korea, except that there would be nobody left to negotiate an armistice and no surviving prisoners to plague the post-armistice period. The disasters which lie ahead, if present methods are continued, have been described in the book by F.J.P. Veale, Advance to Barbarism (1953).

The most aggressive leaders of the movement for world-meddling proclaim the necessity and obligation of American world leadership. Events from 1945 to the present have amply proved that this cannot be established and maintained by force and war. It might be achieved by demonstrating conspicuous success in peaceful activities at home—competent government, economic prosperity, and liberty for all. Even a little country like Sweden, as a result of its remarkable domestic achievements, came nearer to world leadership in the 1930's than the United States has attained through vast expense and bloodshed since 1941. The United States will never achieve world leadership in the guise of "the Savior with the Sword." After some eight years of lavish financing of globaloney and world-meddling, far from being enthusiastically accepted as a "world leader," the United States is more universally hated and feared than at any other period of our national existence.

If the totalitarian liberals would confess their errors and guilt in the period following 1937, one might develop a little sympathy for their current screams of anguish. But there is not the slightest symptom of insight or repentance. While squawking loudly about the inevitable results of the policies which they have advocated, when these have backfired against them, the totalitarian liberals still persist in steadfastly supporting the very program which has brought upon them all their troubles.

It would be difficult to decide whether this supreme example of Orwellian "doublethink" is due more to stupidity than to stubborness. Nor has their recent baptism of inquisitorial fire generated any degree of genuine tolerance among the totalitarian liberals. They crave freedom from Rightist pressure, but they are as intolerant as ever of the older neutral and peace-loving liberalism whose decencies they have so flagrantly betrayed. So long as this attitude prevails, there is no evident logic in shedding tears over the current woes of those who, with such dubious propriety, still arrogate to themselves the label of liberals.

The English liberals and former-interventionists seem, at long last, to have awakened from their "dogmatic slumbers," as Immanuel Kant would have described them. In a long editorial on "The Hollow War," published in the issue of August 1, 1953, The New Statesman and Nation sets itself the task of "unseating a false god, which progressives have worshipped ever since President Wilson first outlined the idea of the League of Nations." This false god turns out to be the idea of collective security and the dogma that conflicting ideological systems cannot peacefully coexist in the world—the mischievous "We or They" nonsense.

The Balance-Sheet of Globaloney

Some may feel that I have been too harsh on our totalitarian liberals but, in reality, I have thus far only called attention to a small segment of the disastrous results which their interventionist policy has produced, namely, the increase of reaction and intolerance which the liberals are now so fiercely denouncing. As a matter of fact, virtually all of the public ills from which we are now suffering have been produced or enormously intensified by our intervention in the second World War, the Cold War and the Korean War. For this intervention our totalitarian liberals, aided by the Atlantic seaboard Anglophiles and special pressure groups, have been overwhelmingly responsible. Hence, it is not unfair to attribute to their policies and efforts the outstanding public misfortunes to which we are now subject.

Among the evils created or intensified by global meddling and by our intervention in hot ajnd cold wars are the following: Political disasters can be observed in the jeopardy or termination of true democratic government and in the emergence, in different degrees among the countries of the world, of military managerialism and other totalitarian mechanisms and devices. Our civil liberties have been invaded and flouted to an unprecedented extent. Our Constitution has become a scrap of paper in the hands of war-minded politicians and the military managers.

Interventionism and war have led to varying types of economic totalitarianism, extending all the way from the bureaucratic military state capitalism of the United States to the rigorous Communism of Soviet Russia. The capitalistic system and free enterprise have been dealt a serious, if not fatal, blow in the Old World, and have been seriously undermined here at home. Inflation, rising living costs, currency depreciation, an astronomical public debt, and crushing taxation are among the economic penalties exacted by interventionism in the United States. Our economy is being undermined and our natural resources exhausted.

Our social life has turned increasingly chaotic in the face of the disconcerting uncertainties of the personal, political and international future created by cold and phony wars. A collective anxiety neurosis has been developing and is reflected in general unrest and uneasiness. Pathological results can be observed in the notable increase of crime, racketeering, degeneracy, and mental disease. The decline of political morals after a decade and a half of official mendacity with regard to world affairs and their domestic relationships has undermined public morale. It has led to unparalleled political graft and public corruption which make the Grant and Harding administrations seem, by comparison with the totalitarian-liberal administration of Truman, to be striking examples of sound statecraft and political integrity.

All in all, we seem to be moving toward a system of totalitarianism modelled on the military managerialism forecast by John T. Flynn in his As We Go Marching (1944). Its eventual form is portrayed in all its grim horrors in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. The chief nations of the world have slipped more or less gradually into this way of life, based as it is upon linking political and economic policy to a state of perpetual war, hot, cold, or phony. Soviet Russia has entered this totalitarian pattern more completely than the so-called Free Nations, but even among the latter the trend is moving in seemingly irrevocable fashion toward the Orwellian nightmare.

Such is the heritage which we have received from fifteen years of interventionist and totalitarian liberalism. It would be an illuminating and instructive exercise, which the totalitarian liberals are not likely to encourage, to compare without exaggeration or prejudice the evils and burdens brought into American life since 1937 by the interventionist liberals with the most extreme composite picture of the machinations and subversive acts of the American Communists during the same period, recognizing, of course, that there was a great deal of collaboration between these two groups.

No reasonable person would doubt that, if the Communists had possessed the power, they might have done more damage to the American way of life than the interventionist liberals have actually accomplished. But they did not possess this power and there was little probability that they would have attained it in any predictable period. The threat from American Communism has been mainly a dire possibility; the damage already done by our interventionist liberals is a dolorous and calamitous accomplished fact, to say nothing of what may yet take place as a result of the continuance of their policies. Hence, for example, it seemed rather paradoxical and incongruous that the Senate Committee on Subversive Influence in the Educational Process allowed the extreme interventionist liberal, President Harry D. Gideonse of Brooklyn College, to emerge from the hearings in the guise of a hero, while relatively insignificant alleged Communists and fellow-travellers on the faculty of the College were severely manhandled.

Despite all the multifarious disasters which the interventionist liberals have brought to our country, they are still unabashed and unrepentant and can count on the support of American public opinion. A more devastating indictment of our channels of communication and information during the last fifteen years could not be drawn than what is implicit in this fact. It would require a Voltaire to do full justice to the situation.

It is, perhaps, somewhat idealistic, or even a bit naive, to expect American public opinion to shift greatly on foreign policy, in the light of the blackout of facts relative to this subject for more than a decade. Even the relatively skeptical German people, still suffering from the effects and memory of a devastating war, could be rigidly indoctrinated by Nazi propaganda within five years. For fifteen years, the American people have been indoctrinated with interventionist propaganda by a press, radio and cinema as universally and intolerantly consecrated to globaloney as the German agencies of communication were to the principles of National Socialism after 1933. As an able publicist has recently observed:

"Never was a people slipping into the slavery of a permanent-war statism freer from dissent, disloyalty, or the spirit of revolt than is the American people today."

Nevertheless, despite the seemingly insuperable difficulties involved, it may safely be maintained that, unless we are able to throw off the yoke and menace of globaloney and interventionism, any and all efforts to attain the good life in the United States—civil liberty, intellectual freedom, economic security, social justice, and the like— are doomed to ultimate and complete failure. Until we free ourselves from the octopus of world-meddling, reformist zeal will remain comparable to excitement over engraving invitation cards to a gala party on a sinking ocean liner.