To the Editor:
I am grateful to you for your discernment and courage in publishing Robert E. Fitch’s “The Illusions of the Intelligentsia” in your December 1953 issue, and, of course, to Dr. Fitch for his singular honesty and hardihood.
I wonder, now that it has been said in clear black-on-white by a licensed intellectual in an intellectually respectable organ of opinion, whether the “liberal line” may now be questioned by us ordinary folk; whether it would be possible to confer special dispensation upon such unlicensed, upstart dabblers in opinion as may long to dissent from or question the hard “liberal line” on such presumably closed subjects as the Satanic Evil of the Taft-Hartley law, the menace of “McCarthyism,” or the sacredness of Adlai Stevenson’s speeches?
Should not the penalty for such doubts or even dissents be somewhat less than excommunication? Does one really have a duty to one’s neighbors or social class to believe on blind faith or blinder terror that Senator McCarthy aspires to be another Hitler, despite his obvious gestures to reassure Jewish opinion by appointing Jews to conspicuous positions on his staff? Is one really obligated, in debt to one’s humanity, to blow up McCarthy’s cynicism to mountainous proportions when considering his defense of his $10,000 Lustron royalty, while never questioning the ethics of people on the “good side” who enjoyed tremendously larger sums for special services in fields relating to their official duties, including foreign affairs? Is it the final, unforgivable offense to suggest that the inflation of “McCarthyism” into a national and world issue is due, in some measure, to the planned exploitation by the organized Communists of the hate-potentiality latent in his position as an Irish Catholic in a predominantly non-Catholic country?
Does one dare to keep his mind free of a special, predetermining “line,” or is it necessary to appeal to Dr. Fitch and COMMENTARY to devise a special license, entitling the duly certified bearer to doubt that the “liberal line” is the new Revelation? If such license were procurable, I should very much like to possess one, and to obtain one for my children in school to show to their so stoutly liberal teachers.
During the campaign of 1952 I polled a group of twenty “intellectual” acquaintances at social gatherings and found not one declaring for Eisenhower; in a private postcard poll of assured secrecy, eight votes were recorded for Eisenhower and three as uncertain. Now that COMMENTARY has enabled Dr. Fitch to speak out, may we persuade the secret underground indicated by the eight Eisenhower votes and the three uncertains that it is again reasonably safe to think one’s own thoughts. . . ?
Philip Hochstein
Newark, New Jersey
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