Book Reviews

The romantics were subsequent ly joined by the Fabian liberals, who sought to use government as a "planning" instrument to re fashion society in accordance with supposed scientific principles. Call ing themselves intellectuals, the romantics and the Fabians (or Progressives, as they were known in America), were actually short on analytical ability. They couldn't understand the emerging capital ism that had unshackled the pro ducer after Napoleon had com pleted the wrecking of the old feudal world. That was how things stood when, at the end of World War I, the Bolsheviks grabbed the levers of power in Russia, quite in defi ance of Marx's theory that the "revolution" would first come in the industrialized countries. The scene was set for the rise of the Fellow-Traveller. The noncompre hending intellectuals (who was it said "thinking is too important to leave to the intellectuals"?) re573 574 THE FREEMAN September acted to the emergence of the So viet State in a variety of ways, but on one thing they were agreed: the "experiment" in the land of the muzhiks was something to be coddled and protected.

In a remarkable book called The Fellow-Travellers: A Postscript to the Enlightenment (Macmillan, $8.95), David Caute follows the fortunes of three or four genera tions of intellectuals who were be mused by the Portent in the East through all the hot and cold war days of the middle twentieth cen tury. The story, as Mr. Caute pre sents it, has the attributes of a great tapestry. The characters come and go, some of them chang ing their minds, some persisting to the end in holding that Statist Communism, though it might not be considered a good organiza tional form for a Western nation that had known habeas corpus and other liberties, is an acceptable order for a backward nation that has yet to achieve its industrial revolution. Biographical Material As a collection of interweaving biographies The Fellow-Travellers is fascinating. If you want to know whatever became of such Germans as Lion Feuchtwanger, Arnold Zweig, Heinrich Mann and Ernst Toller, all of whom trusted the So viets to save their Fatherland from Hitler, you'll find it here, with a liberal garnishment of historical irony. The British Fellow-Travel lers - Harold Laski, George Ber nard Shaw, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, the poets (Auden, Spend er), the detached socialists (Or well was the greatest of them un til he went to Spain and saw what the Stalinists were doing) ...:.- were more interested in Lenin and Sta lin as planners than as anti Fascists. The FeIfow-Travelling French, from Anatole France and Romain Rolland on down through Andre Malraux and Andre Gide to Jean-Paul Sartre, were more ab stract about it all (Anatole France was looking for a new breed of eighteenth century philosophe, Rolland was for universal peace, Malraux wanted adventure, Gide and Sartre had moral and exis tential preoccupations). The Americans-Lincoln Steffens, Anna Louise Strong, John Dos Passos, Corliss Lamont, Malcolm Cowley, Theodore Dreiser, Upton Sinclair, Max Eastman - got into the Fel low-Travelling act mostly for idealistic motives. They didn't fear Hitler as the Germans feared him, nor were they particularly inter ested in turning their own nation over to a Fabian bureaucracy, even though many of them came to accept the New Deal as a domestic substitute for more orthodox so cialism.

1974 THE FELLOW-TRAVELLERS 575 Shock Waves of Change What is deficient about Mr. Caute's vast canvas is its failure to be incisive about the social shocks that brought intellectuals into the Fellow-Travelling orbit or pro pelled them out of it. The shocks began quite early in the game, with the breaking of the Kron stadt sailors' mutiny against Bol shevism. The 1929 depression was the biggest shock of all. Then came the counter-shocks: the Soviet man-made famine of the Thirties, the purges, the Moscow trials, the triumph of ugly dictatorship in the person of Stalin, the signing of the Nazi-Soviet Pact. Many of the American idealists-Max East man, Isaac Don Levine, Edmund Wilson, J. B. Matthews, Dos Pass os, even Louis Fischer-got off the train at one point or another be cause they couldn't stand the sight of torture. Max Eastman once wrote a great essay on the "motive pat terns" that brought people to so cialism in his time. Some were looking for freedom, others were more interested in order. Natu rally the freedom-lover would re act to a purge, or a fostered fa mine (breaking eggs to make an omelette), or the creation of an all-devouring Ogpu, in a different way than a "planner" with a book keeping mind would react.

If Mr. Caute had applied Eastman's motive-pattern test to his characters, he would have come up with more convincing explana tions for the evolution of such "defectors" as Dos Passos or Mal raux. And he would have been able to come to grips with the nature of many a Fellow-Travelling com promise. In Spain, FeUow-Tra vel lers put up with the Stalin terror beca use they considered Franco the greater evil. So it was, all through the West, after Hitler had attacked Russia. Even such a freedom-lover as Winston Church ill could be a Fellow-Traveller on the pragmatic theory that "the enemy of my enemy is my friend." The McCarthy Period Mr. Caute is at his best in deal ing with the Germans, especially the German Jewish intellectuals. They needed Soviet help to get rid of the Nazis. But when it comes to understanding the so-called Mc Carthy Period in America Mr. Caute misses the whole point.

With Hitler out of the way, there was no pragmatic reason to regard the Soviets as friends. It was not mere "witch-hunting" that ac counted for the U.S. concern with the behavior of Fellow-Travellers such as Owen Lattimore. The So viets in the Cold War period, and the Maoists in China, were - and still are, for that matter - push ing for international domination, 576 THE FREEMAN September and the influence of people like Lattimore made it difficult for the U.S. to formulate a foreign policy that would be an adequate check on Communist expansion. McCarthy was not a particularly intelligent student of Communism, and he couldn't do arithmetic. But there was no academic or journal istic "reign of terror" in the U.S. in the early Fifties. As a matter of fact, anti-Communist writers had difficulty getting their books published, and the only professor that lost his job during the so called witch-hunt period was Will moore Kendall of Yale, who made the mistake of exposing himself as a McCarthy sympathizer.

Hollywood, of course, was a dif ferentstory: the proCommunist film writers did have boycott troubles. But Morrie Ryskind could tell David Caute a thing or two about the long period in the Thirties and Forties in which the Fellow-Travellers arrogantly squeezed the anti-Communists out of the studios. What the Fellow Travellers in Hollywood got in the McCarthy period was a bit of be lated poetic justice. Mr. Caute writes beautifully about the general Fellow-Travel ling ambivalence. But, when he deals with the American scene, he is a bit ambivalent himself. , HANDSOME BLUE LEATHERLEX FREEMAN BINDERS $2.50 each ORDER FROM: THE FOUNDATION FOR ECONOMIC EDUCATION IRVINGTON-ON-HUDSON, NEW YORK 10533 the Freeman VOL. 24, NO. 10. OCTOBER 1974 ATheme for the Bicentennial: The Founding Fathers'Fear of Power Allan C. Brownfeld 579 A review of the early warnings about the concentration of political power.