Book Reviews

The parallelism between the two decades is apt. In the thirties we had terrible domestic troubles and the growth of an isolationist spirit. But the rise of European Fascism and the ferociously mili tant expansion of Japan broke in upon our home-grown concerns. We were induced, partly by fear and partly by feckless diplomacy that set the stage for Pearl Harbor, to substitute Dr. Win-the War (Franklin Delano Roosevelt's characterization) for Dr. New Deal. During the whole period, as Gene Lyons points out, our cul tural life was subjected to the Machiavellian penetrations of a foreign power that used a bewild ering variety of "Innocents Clubs" and "transmission belts" and other "fronts" to lead artists, journal ists, scientists, teachers, labor leaders, and important political figures around by the nose. We ended up in a war for "democ racy" that enabled the malevolent Josef Stalin to move further to the West in Europe than the Turk had ever been. We frustrated the Japanese attempt to dominate the Asian mainland only to see China fall to Mao Tse-tung, who believes that all power comes from the bar rel of a gun and is bent on putting that gun in the hands of Red guer379 380 THE FREEMAN June rillas everywhere from Tierra del Fuego to Timbuktu.

The New Isolationism In the sixties our domestic troubles were of a different order, but their impact on our spirit was even more appalling than the effect of the street corner apple-selling and the CIa strikes of the thirties. The new isolationism grew as our difficulties in maintaining the 1945 division of the world became more onerous. We haven't had to face a big confrontation with the Mos cow or Peking totalitarians, but that will come (with either a Munich or a war) if we lose faith and credibility in Vietnam and the eastern Mediterranean. Meanwhile our cultural life is subjected to the Machiavellian penetration of polycentric radicals who owe spir itual allegiance to Brezhnev, to Chairman Mao, or to Fidel Castro and the shade of Che Guevara. The modern "Innocents Clubs" are manipulated by a variety of off shore interests, which makes for a confusion but does not lessen the danger. Both the confusion and the danger are compounded by the insidious growth of the drug cul ture, which spreads an apathy that hurts the possibility of a return to sanity.

Oddly enough, one reads Gene Lyons's study of the thirties with a good bit of nostalgia for a period that combined, in Max Eastman's description, "the charms of the South Sea Bubble and the insane pathos of the Children's Crusade." As Mr. Lyons says in his author's preface to the new edition, "liter ally millions of Americans, some knowingly and most innocently, allowed themselves to be manipu lated by a small group under tight control from Kremlin headquar ters." But the Muscovite Comrades could not have pulled the wool over the eyes of thousands of liberals from Eleanor Roosevelt on down if the Idealisms of the thirties hadn't been compelling. After all, Hitler was a monster. From a safe distance at a Manhattan cocktail party held to raise funds for Loyalist Spain one could feel that in offering money to support the Abraham Lincoln Brigade one was doing the work of the Lord. It was only after the courageous John Dos Passos had come back from Spain with the report that the Stalinists had usurped control of the Republican armies that one could see how the American lib erals had been gulled. In reading or rereading Lyons it is the sur face innocence of the thirties that induces the nostalgia. Bliss was it in that dawn to have been inno cent. It took time for most of us to discover what was going on in the depths.

1971 THE RED DECADE 381 The Unmentionable Famine Three Million Starve My own disillusionment with the Soviet utopia came in the middle thirties when Walter Duranty, the cynical Moscow correspondent of The New York Times, remarked casually to Simeon Strunsky and myself in the Times eleva tor one day that three million Russian peasants had died in a man-made famine in the Ukraine in 1932-33. The magnitude of Mr. Duranty's figures was appalling, but even more appalling to me, as an ideal istic young journalist, was the fact that Duranty had never breathed a word about the famine in print. (After all, he had his return visa to Russia to consider, and what did the truth matter as against that.) Mr. Lyons lets the worst about all of us in the thirties be set down for posterity by printing the lists of those who signed the petitions and open letters that characterized the age. He is always generous, however, in telling when a Clifton Fadiman, or an Edmund Wilson, or a John Dewey, came to his senses and got off the Musco vite train. He dates my own con version to common sense accu rately, even though he wasn't aware of the reason for it.