Report from Pandemonium
The Charm of Politics.
by R. H. S. Crossman.
Harper. 256 pp. $4.00.
When Satan and his angels were expelled from heaven, they built a palace in space which they named Pandemonium; and there they met in conclave to decide “What do we do now?” Milton has reported the debate in detail: the clash between the bitter-ender who wanted a fight to a finish, the appeaser who urged surrender as the lesser evil, the peace-by-negotiation orator who argued that a show of resistance would produce better terms, and the middle-way advocate of a diversionary blow at Earth, their enemy’s soft under-belly, in order to create a fifth column there. This debate was the beginning of politics, for Pandemonium was the mother of Parliaments, the mirror-image of every legislative assembly. Milton’s reporting set a standard that nobody has bettered. He was able to portray Pandemonium, and to strip the flesh from the bones of its debaters, because he had sat there himself, as adviser to Cromwell. He had learned at firsthand how politicians feel, think, calculate, and behave. He demonstrated that, to write with authority about Pandemonium, you must be both actor and critic.
Mr. Richard Crossman has spent more than twenty years in our contemporary Pandemonium, and The Charm of Politics is the result. It is the product of participation, observation, and fascination. I shall not compare it with Paradise Lost. All the same, it exhibits more than one of the Miltonic attributes. Among them are the sharp eye for humbug, the refusal to be shocked by the seamy side of ambition—and, notably, the underlying awareness that political behavior must be appraised, ultimately, sub specie aeternitatis. Vulgar brawl though it often is, politics is about ends as well as means. Mr. Crossman’s recognition of this fact lifts him far above the level of tattle and chatter.
His book is a gallery of annotated portraits. It contains politicians (among them Roosevelt, Churchill, Truman, Attlee, Eden, Bevin, R. A. Butler, Adenauer) and a mixed lot of other personalities (who include Professors Can and Toynbee, Walter Lippmann, Franz Borkenau, Henry Luce, J. Robert Oppenheimer, and Alger Hiss); plus some sketches on Hitlerism. All of them previously appeared in the London New Statesman except for “Hitler’s Fool,” an inspection of Putzi Hanfstaengl, which is reprinted from COMMENTARY (April 1958). They are shrewd, skillful, with a uniformly high gloss of sophistication. They are also revelatory—not so much for what they tell you about their subjects as for the light they throw on Mr. Cross-man himself. This is why The Charm of Politics deserves scrutiny by students of Pandemonium on both sides of the Atlantic.
For Mr. Crossman is by far the most influential Socialist intellectual in Britain, perhaps in Europe. He exercises an authority over his country’s Labor movement that stretches literally from top to bottom. Unlike every other such intellectual, from the Webbs and the Coles to Laski and Balogh, he speaks to the masses as well as the back rooms. He is Proteus as a one-man band. He sits on the Labor party Executive, where he is one of its chief policy-makers. He is an M.P., and an effective parliamentarian (neither Laski nor Cole ever reached the House of Commons, and Webb was a dismal failure there). He is the mentor of the Fabian egg-heads who read the New Statesman. He is also a regular columnist in the Daily Mirror, the London radical tabloid that is the most potent force in British mass journalism. (This journal is dedicated to a daily demonstration of the truth that there is a whole sex consisting entirely of women. But Mr. Crossman interrupts the process several times a week in order to warn its four and a half million readers about capitalist plots to deprive them of cheese, and also of cake.) Whatever decisions may come out of Britain’s Pandemonium during the next few years, Mr. Crossman will have a great deal to do with them.
What does The Charm of Politics tell you about him? It shows him, first of all, as a man with no bump of reverence. In one essay after another, he discards the myths and legends of the British left. They crash like bottles in a shooting gallery at a fair ground. He has no time for the myth that full employment can be maintained only by nationalization; or for the myth that Ramsay MacDonald’s Labor government of 1931 was torpedoed by a bankers’ ramp. He points a scornful finger at the Marxists who used to demonstrate that Nazism was merely a smoke-screen for monopoly capitalism; and another finger at those muddled members of his own party who, in the face of Hitler, simultaneously rejected pacifism and conscription. It is a refreshing and impressive display of intellectual candor—all the more since it comes from a committed partisan. For Mr. Grossman is not satisfied to abandon those myths that have served their turn at the hustings; he tramples just as lustily on the working myths of today. Let me quote one conspicuous example of this.
Ever since Mr. Attlee, as the Socialist Prime Minister, flew to Washington during the Korean war, the British left has affirmed that this journey stopped MacArthur from using the atom bomb. Mr. Crossman examines Truman’s account of the matter. This, he says, shows that “characteristically, Mr. Attlee seems to have been content to assure himself that the President was in control. Apparently, he never mentioned General MacArthur, and his only reference to the A-bomb was made in an aside when the conference was over, and the communiqué was actually being drafted.”
Mr. Crossman goes on: “If this picture is correct, British Socialists should undertake some re-thinking. We have all made speeches about the British government’s moral influence in Washington, and the restraint it exercised on America’s wild men. In fact, these claims fail to do credit to the courage and will-power of Harry Truman. . . . The Labor government was so nervous of losing American support that it first conceded the American bomber bases in Norfolk without demanding any quid pro quo, and then reversed its publicly declared opposition to German rearmament as soon as Mr. Acheson insisted on it.”
In the climate of British politics, for Mr. Crossman to write such a disclaimer is like Eisenhower rebuking Lincoln, or Senator Kennedy bringing up the Inquisition. Robbing his energumens of their belief in the Attlee flight is the equivalent of telling the Grand Mufti that the Prophet invented the story of the Hegira in order to conceal a night out in Mecca.
This ruthless readiness to reject myth-mongering emerges repeatedly in The Charm of Politics. But it is not the only aspect of Mr. Cross-man to be illuminated. Another side is shown in his examination of Neville Chamberlain. Here he repudiates with impatient scorn the left legend of the Munich Prime Minister as a dull, stupid nonentity. He paints Chamberlain as “a man of first-rate intellectual capacity and mature political judgment” before damning him for “a blindness of which only a first-rate intellect is capable.” This portrait exhibits Mr. Crossman’s willingness to do justice to an opponent, to make assessments at a low temperature.
He hardly ever loses this capacity for dispassionate scrutiny when he is looking at another politician. But with non-politicians it is sometimes a different matter. Take, for example, this onslaught on Mr. Lippmann: “For years Mr. Lippmann has been throwing the pearls of his expertise before the swine of a vast syndicated readership. Quite suddenly, his patience has snapped. In The Public Philosophy, he tells us that the decline of the West—which he dates from the first world war—has been due to the poisonous influence of a mass electorate on foreign policy.” Mr. Crossman repudiates this heresy as angrily as if he were reading the Daily Mirror instead of writing for it: “My conclusion is that . . . whenever a British or American politician has had the courage to trust the people, he has not been disappointed. . . . It is the press lord, the lobbyist, the party boss, and the bureaucrat who are chiefly responsible for weak government and cowardly decisions.” The divine right of Demos, the doctrine that he can do no wrong (even when he votes for Versailles, or in Wisconsin) could not be put more succinctly.
What is the composite picture of the author that emerges from The Charm of Politics? Every reader, of course, will paint it differently. To me, Mr. Crossman seems to display both the strength and the weakness of the intellectual in Pandemonium: the belief in reason, and the disbelief in anything else. He is a political agnostic, the Einstein of negativity. In almost every one of his portraits, the net effect is one of depreciation. Even when he expresses approval, it is in order to express disapproval of someone else. He appears to have neither comprehension nor sympathy for the nature of belief—that cortical convulsion that sets a man apart from the doubters. Confronted by it, he writes as if he were baffled. Thus, he describes without explaining such personalities as Adenauer, Whitaker Chambers, Borkenau, Wingate. The touch of conviction seems to paralyze him. In this nuclear century, which has seen the re-emergence of the zealot from the cellars and the footnotes into which he was thrust by the age of liberalism, Mr. Crossman’s talents, glittering as they are, make him look rather like a cavalryman at Hiroshima.
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