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The
Liberal Dilemma The Pragmatic Tradition in the Age of
McCarthyism
Jonathan
Michaels
Routledge
Advances in American History Series London:
Routledge, 2020 Hardcover. ix+260 p. ISBN 978-0198843214. £120
Reviewed by Ian Scott University of Manchester
The endorsement of
the anti-communist crusade and, for a time at least, wholesale support of
Senator Joseph McCarthy’s pursuit of communists within the United States
government and society has rightly fascinated scholars for the last seventy
years. How and why did such a reactionary sentiment, emerging right after one of
the most significant conflagrations in human history, devour the attention of
so many people from such a wide spectrum of American life? In his new book, The
Liberal Tradition, Jonathan Michaels goes in search of answers to these
questions. Michaels is concerned
with why those on the left, who had trumpeted their support for New Deal
liberalism in the 1930s and ‘40s, were especially susceptible to the accusatory
atmosphere at large. On a general level, his initial conclusions in a fine
introductory chapter are not surprising, nor are they entirely unfamiliar. Post-war
liberals felt sharp pangs of patriotism and loyalty as the cold war took hold. They
displayed that loyalty by hurling accusations of their own at perceived
communists and, as Michaels demonstrates, introducing bills in congress that
were far more stringent than many Republicans were urging at the time. They did
this because conservatism was perceived to hold the reins of moral American
authority and failure to tow the line and accept the implied criticism of
liberalism and its un-American countenances, now threatened to have you thrown
in jail. What Michaels’ study is
really interested in, however, is not the liberal ‘response’ to McCarthy and
anti-communism, but why this assertion of patriotism and attack on suspected
communists became so virulent on the progressive left and what it said, and
says, about liberalism in America. In other words, Michaels is trying to
understand how, in this crucial post-war decade of the late 1940s and early
‘50s, ordinary people reacted to the perceived differences between conservatism
and liberalism. As one might guess, such an investigation of those times
immediately throws up questions for our own era wondering about the breakdown
in consensus then and now and the ways in which any bridge can be made between
the red state MAGA-supporting Republican populace of today and the, perceived,
east-coast, intellectual Democratic Party base. Back in the 1950s, Michaels
goes looking for commentaries on the liberal / conservative disjuncture at the
campuses of some of America’s most prominent universities. And it’s this case
study direction – with four examples in particular –
that provides fascinating testimony of the on-the-ground debates going on at
the time. Even if one might question the interiority of those debates within
academia’s ‘ivory towers’, Michaels’ intentions are never less than laudable.
He doesn’t simply want to revisit the cant spewed by politicians on the
subject, and he isn’t interested either in a general populace passively taking
in the rhetoric and propaganda. His examples might reveal a tangible elite
still in focus here, and one that is only part willing to acknowledge the
responsibilities and actions of those other parts of the population that were feeding
off each other, accelerating and perpetuating the climate of fear, but he still
makes the case for a sophisticated and very public dialogue over the pros and
cons of liberalism and its discontents. Michaels is clear from
the beginning that if anything aligned the past and present, it was in exchanges
where “the participants were not attacking or defending ideas; they were
attacking each other” [5]. Like today, what Michaels is drawn to in
these campus debates – largely attacks on the left originated by the right, and
the left’s defence in the face of such attack – is not the truth of the
situation or claim, but the legitimacy of liberalism itself. The belief of some
that the second half of the 20th century gave way to liberal hegemony is
challenged in all of these exchanges by a constant reiteration of liberalism
under attack, projected by a suspicion of its motivations and intentions that was
to stretch out into the rest of the century. The key for Michaels
is that liberals understood that they were somehow being equated with
communism, but, he crucially states, they appeared not to know why, especially when
they themselves were anti-communist and quite happy to display their
credentials on this issue. What he finds, and today’s Trumpian world would no
doubt endorse heartily, is that pluralism and, in Daniel Bell’s words, the “end
of ideology” has not materialised in America since McCarthyism. Even if there
was a period when such a consensus prevailed, it was long ago superseded by the
need to recapture political agitation and demonstrate difference. Politics,
says Michaels, is for essentialists and is guided by traits on the left and
right that, while they may have differences at the margins, are at heart ontological
assertions of belief and identity. So Michaels moves
from campus exchanges at the University of Connecticut and the presence or
otherwise of communists at Virginia to op-ed pieces emerging out of the
University of New Hampshire, and the changing shape of who and what liberalism stood for. From campus papers to town hall
debates, Michaels’ research and access to a host of fascinating university archives
provides an intriguing picture of a – highly
active – campus life and one that wasn’t bowed down by anti-communism either.
Purely from a historical frame of recollection, any idea that McCarthyism shut
down debate and engendered fear in every university quad just in case the
campus had been infiltrated by the FBI is not borne out in the papers revealed.
Open and articulate debate, though increasingly of an attack-minded and
personal frame, is more the state of play. Perhaps the most
poignant example of the whole book occurs in the chapter on the debates
swirling around the University of Virginia in 1951 as a result of the campus
newspaper picking up on an editorial first printed in the Richmond
Times-Dispatch. The newspaper had reproduced an article from the president
of Yale, Whitney Griswold, in which he had proclaimed the need to reassert the
independence and freedom of universities and not have them used as
battlegrounds for the war on communism at large. The paper’s own commentary on
Griswold’s comments reminded its audience that there were already universities
allegedly tainted by ‘reds’ in their midst and this was to be cautioned against.
A running commentary alongside the piece from Virginia’s own faculty member,
Allen Moger of the History Department, also urged restraint and argued against labelling
everyone or anyone red, pink or any other colour simply because they might have
supported the New Deal. The response from a
professor in the Woodrow Wilson School of Foreign Affairs in particular, Homer
Richey, lit the blue touch paper on a debate that then raged for weeks. Richey,
also an occasional commentator on a conservative radio talk show, labelled not
only staff members but anybody with a grain of liberalism in them ‘fellow
travellers’, and provoked a wave of responses. Richey’s letter, the exchange of
correspondence which followed and quickly became personal, produced threats of
libel and charted a pattern of longer and more controversial behaviour that engulfed
the campus and the paper. Michaels’s
unravelling of the Homer Richey case at Virginia is intriguing, unnerving and
deeply symptomatic of the tensions at the time. The escalating war that Richey
engaged in with staff, students and notably his head of the Wilson School, John
Gange, is a cast-iron example of the way animosities and professional standing
got caught up in the politics of the day. Richey pressed the proverbial nuclear
button on a raft of accusations and conspiracies that, as Michaels
acknowledges, was perhaps less designed to secure him the permanent position he
felt he deserved but had been rejected for, than it was to enact revenge on
individuals and establish him as some sort of martyr for the anticommunist
cause. The sorry tale offers testament of an academic community on edge, of
arguments reworked for almost any situation, and of lies and fabrications standing
in as facts; an object lesson on the hysteria unfolding in the U.S. and a
scenario that is not unfamiliar in our own febrile times. Michaels’ point is
that for all Richey’s outrangeous shift towards baseless accusation as the
tawdry story unfolds, the progressive individualism at the heart of being
‘white’ – as opposed to ‘pink’ or, heaven-forbid, ‘red’ – leaves Richey occupying
the political high ground by defending property and individualism as American
values that refute collectivity at every turn. Liberals, in other words, were
always on the defensive in this era. It is this
defensiveness that gives good reason for Michaels’s final example to be devoted
to mapping out the liberal mind in the 1950s. Here he uses the articles of Paul
Sullivan, a student at the University of New Hampshire who wrote regularly for
the campus paper. Michaels pulls together 28 pieces over a 16-month period up
to mid-1955 that lay out the thinking behind a classic liberal’s position. He
posits a fine and indeed complex attribution of values and beliefs to
Sullivan’s clearly thoughtful and insightful recitations. But it’s also plain
to see, however much that Michaels couches these readings in theoretical terms,
that here is a young man with the same hopes and fears of many starting out in
life. Materialism is but a means to an end as the young often profess; that the
“lived life” is the thing, the youthful desire for ‘experiences’ shines through,
and that changing society are what contributions are made for, and what
satisfaction can be derived from. Michaels rather
neglects this personal profile though and opts for something much more
philosophically political. In conclusion his argument is wrapped in a debate
about nomenclature (what ‘white’ ‘red’ and ‘pink’ might be alluding to as derogatory
allegations) that reverts to political science critiques about freedom and
private property, conservative bulwarks against state-run societies that
liberals are accused of desiring and/or conspiring towards. There is nothing
wrong with Michaels’s theory here, but the history of his protagonists is so
rich that it is easy to forget the human story. Clashes of philosophy become
personal accounts of wrongdoing and lack of moral fibre carelessly tossed at
otherwise dedicated professionals, and suddenly the society at large – or in
this case the academic rigour that a university might apply to its sense of
mission in an era of graceless gainsaying – is lost amidst a howl of
name-calling. In summary Michaels takes
up the cause of the recently departed president, Franklin Roosevelt, whose New
Deal, the author argues, was a beacon for the left that merged the needs of
liberal individualism with the protection of the broader community. The
American population or ‘family’, he argues, is the one that provides for life,
liberty and the pursuit of happiness as Roosevelt argued, but which cannot do
those things without economic guarantees, the least of which is the ability of
the individual to have the means to strive for those values, from whatever
position they may be in society. Without the underwritten guarantee of those
inalienable rights being available to members of a family, it has no basis on
which to protect and look after its own, and that kind of individual society surely
leads to only one place. Michaels, through these
case studies, throws up all manner of intellectual, social, cultural and
personal angles and attributes that are often fascinating, and that take us
from Dewey to Durkheim, Schlesinger to Adam Smith, while offering a window into
a threatened and threatening past. Today, the United States faces much of the
same inertia and intransigence, with possibly far less rhetorical dexterity than
that offered by the people within his pages. He is terrific at explicating the
modes of liberal thought and possibilities for the future that such political
wrangling suggest, but there is also a wealth of history in this research that
might just dwell on the American psyche for a moment longer. In the 1980s, Allan
Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind was a kind of outlier of Michaels’
investigation. Bloom’s book was often criticised for laying into the pluralism
and anti-prejudice of American youth, whose parents were those enduring the
ruptures in Michaels’ book thirty years before. But both works offer something
of a delineation about America more generally too. Atomised, factional, eager
to conform and rebel at the same time, open to new ideas and yet closed to
forces that seemingly threaten the equilibrium of American life, The Liberal
Dilemma at its best tests some of the same contradictions as Bloom, even if
Michaels doesn’t always follow through on conclusions in quite the same way. The author’s closing
sentiments are a case in point. A positive assessment of the liberal American
future, Michaels senses the left has plenty to look forward to if it can
reconcile neo-liberal capitalism with being saviour of the welfare net
protectionism that keeps Americans in hock to the fabled ‘dream’. But how might
that work now, in the age of Trump? How are his notes from the McCarthy period not
simply history repeating itself? If such questions are not as vigorously
tackled as one might hope, that’s not to denigrate the fascinating impulses at
work in this book and the potential for future investigations of liberalism. For
that prospect alone, this examination comes well recommended as an entry point into
the reevaluation of the left and its place in American life, a place the left itself
is desperate to fathom.
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