American Liberalism

James J. Martin's massive two-volume study of American liberalism and the coming of the Second World War is a work that continues to grow in interest and importance. History has in a sense caught up with a book which was completed almost a decade ago. Martin then showed how the liberal intellectuals of the 1930's had abandoned their post-World War I revisionism and pacifism to urge American entrance into World War II. Now, as American liberal opinion, disillusioned over Vietnam and the Cold War, has again shifted its position, reverting to its traditional emphasis on peace, it is appropriate to review the merits of the liberals' interpretation of world politics.

A foolish consistency is, of course, as Emerson long ago pointed out, no criterion of superior wisdom, but the amazing somersault of liberal thinking in regard to war and American foreign policy in the 1930's and 1960's demands explanation and analysis. Liberals, after all, have been accustomed to pride themselves on their intelligence and faith in reason. Their spokesmen in both the thirties and the sixties included many of the country's outstanding intellectuals, college professors and popular journalists. If such men and women refuse to stand fast and prefer to bend with the times or to follow the election returns, how much claim do they have to the respect of their readers or listeners?

It is significant, I think, that within the liberal ranks during the 1930's the individuals with strong pacifist or libertarian convictions, who also possessed some historical training, revealed more self-restraint and perspective than those whose concerns were mainly political or popular. In a time of crisis, longstanding beliefs and convictions do seem to provide an intellectual foundation or faith. But for many modern liberals the relativist pragmatism which they espouse has played them false, reducing their philosophy to the lowest common denominator of opportunism and convenience. Thus in the thirties even the leftist liberals' Marxist principles were distorted and made to conform to the shifting Communist party line.

One of the merits of the often-neglected liberalism of the nineteenth century was its critical, questioning, anti-orthodox and anti-authoritarian spirit. Now, thanks to the revived libertarian views of the younger generation of radicals drawn from both the New Left and the New Right, something of the individualist liberalism of the past has returned. Martin's book, though severely historical and detailed, has much to say to this audience, as well as to general readers disenchanted by the official clichés of the Cold War.

The source material for Martin's study is the liberal press of the 1930's, mainly the two premier journals of opinion, the Nation and the New Republic. Liberals, he defines as those self-designated persons who were also widely accepted as liberals by their contemporaries. Within this framework Martin covers virtually all Nation and New Republic articles and editorials dealing with American foreign policy. He also refers to other magazines, particularly Common Sense, and notes books dealing with foreign policy which were widely reviewed in the liberal journals. Thus, as even his pro-establishment critics have admitted, Martin gives adequate sampling of liberal thinking on world affairs. This liberal thinking, already disillusioned by World War I and the conservative domestic politics of the twenties, reacted strongly to the economic depression in the thirties. Still anti-war, but also increasingly anti-fascist, liberals moved farther to the left. At the same time, the crisis in capitalism deepened their admiration of the Soviet experiment. In the Presidential election of 1932, though some liberals accordingly supported the Communist ticket, Norman Thomas, the Socialist candidate, remained the overwhelming liberal favorite. Meanwhile, though there was growing support for the idea of social and economic planning, there was much less liberal enthusiasm, at least among intellectuals, for the domestic program of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal. Just as it took World War II to accomplish economic recovery in the United States, so it was only an aggressive American foreign policy which rallied the liberals to F.D.R.'s support.

For many liberals the road to war in the thirties was indeed a tortuous route, filled with perpelexing twists and turns. The shortcomings of the Treaty of Versailles and the League of Nations and the failure to achieve world disarmament were at first blamed for the collapse of the Weimar Republic and Hitler's sudden rise to power. Liberals, moreover, remained cool to the idea of a Japanese-American war over Manchuria even as they criticized the Roosevelt administration for its growing nationalism and selfish indifference to the fate of the London Economic Conference. Although it was clear that the entire world was moving toward economic nationalism with its variant forms of state capitalism or state socialism, American liberals remained reluctant to yield their dreams of internationalism and collective security as guarantors of peace. Because Russian foreign policy seemed compatible with this vision, liberals happily embraced the Popular Front against fascism which the Soviets contributed to international politics between 1935 and 1939. In its first two years the Popular Front was able to unite a pro-Soviet and an anti-war stance. Reinforcing its view was the Nye Munitions Investigation which linked America's entrance into World War I with the need of capitalism to maximize profits.

Despite recurring troubles in Asia and in Europe, the pacifism and historical revisionism of the liberal left held its own until the mid-thirties. Martin calls the Italians' invasion of Ethiopia in 1935 "the first liberal bugle call," but more significant was the Spanish Civil War. Though general American feeling was divided between the fascist-supported rebels and the Loyalist leftist-republican government, liberals were almost unanimously behind the latter. They also accepted without question the Communists' interpretation of the Spanish conflict as a holy war. Their sympathies with the Loyalist cause aroused to a fever pitch, erstwhile pacifists enlised in the international brigades which fought in Spain. Even Norman Thomas approved a contingent of American Socialist volunteers, and influential American writers led by Ernest Hemingway and Archibald MacLeish now abandoned their previous pacifist convictions. The liberal and leftist arguments urging American aid for the Spanish Loyalists—whatever their intrinsic merits—betokened the collapse of the American peace movement. Liberals in ever-greater numbers now evinced a willingness to fight fascism and accept the philosophy that the end justifies the means.

Despite F.D.R.'s pious avowals of peace in the 1936 Presidential campaign, it was becoming more obvious that, if United States pretensions abroad were raised to the emotional level of Woodrow Wilson's World War I diplomacy, American liberals would be ready once again to fight to make the world safe for peace and democracy. As early as February 1935, Charles Beard predicted that Roosevelt would attempt to resolve the domestic difficulties of the New Deal by increasing American entanglements abroad, with another world war as the most likely outcome. Certainly devils abounded in Europe and Asia, and the mounting liberal assault on Nazi Germany, with its reduction of the complexities of the German question to the personality of Hitler, led the way in shaping American opinion. Curiously, as Martin points out, sophisticated American scholars who treated the self-serving statements of American politicians with the utmost skepticism refused to consider that much of what Hitler said also might be for home consumption. Nor did Americans study the reaction of other European countries to the so-called German menace, or couple Hitler's treatment of the Jews with Polish anti-semitism and the Soviet Union's liquidation of its political dissenters.

There was still time in the mid-thirties, as revisionist historians have since pointed out, to achieve a sensible revision of the Treaty of Versailles and thus to minimize the radical appeal of Hitler's diplomacy. Instead Europe marched to Armageddon via Munich, Czechoslovakia and Poland. The latter nation's intransigence over the questions of Danzig and the Polish Corridor, magnified into a casus belli by British and French promises of support, gave Hitler his excuse. Liberal complicity in the denouement, Martin makes clear, was derived from its amazing capacity for self-deception in regard to international affairs. Inclined at first to minimize Hitler's significance, and then to exaggerate his threat to the United States, American liberal interpretation of world politics followed faithfully the Soviet Union's Communist party line until the astonishing news of the Russo-German nonaggression pact of August 23, 1939, convulsed the Western world.

Stalin's agreement with Hitler destroyed the Popular Front against fascism and split the liberal left in the United States. Only the most dedicated fellow travelers could continue now to adhere to the Communist party line. More significant was the ease with which most of the old liberal left presently joined conservatives and internationalists in a new united front against totalitarianism. Logically the Stalin-Hitler pact might have persuaded these American liberals to reject Europe and return to their post-World War I beliefs in peace and isolation. But the fear of guilt by association with the Communists, who now urged an American neutrality in Europe, plus strong anti-fascist feelings, transformed American liberals into militant propagandists for F.D.R.'s increasingly aggressive foreign policy. The Nation, despite objections from its old editor Oswald Garrison Villard, had long been an avid supporter of collective security. But the New Republic, despite the protests and defections of pro-war contributors like Lewis Mumford, continued until the summer of 1940 to share some of the isolationist reservations of its editor Bruce Bliven and columnist John T. Flynn. More strongly isolationist, Common Sense held out against war until Pearl Harbor. Decisive for most liberals, however, was the fall of France in May 1940. Villard wrote his last column for the Nation in June, and Flynn was forced to leave the increasingly militant New Republic a few months later.

To the eve of Pearl Harbor public opinion polls in the United States showed an overwhelming majority against war. But American liberals had long since begun to don their uniforms. Having done all they could since the mid-thirties to shed their traditional pacifism, liberals now offered only the feeblest objections as Congress and the Supreme Court undermined the legal foundations for individual freedom. In the summer of 1940, Congress passed the Alien Registration or Smith Act, making the advocacy of revolution a serious crime, while the Supreme Court, in an opinion read by the war-minded Justice Felix Frankfurter, condemned the Jehovah's Witnesses for refusing on religious grounds to salute the United States flag. The final lines on the liberal epitaph were written when neither Nation or New Republic opposed the Burke-Wadsworth Selective Service bill nor defended the conscientious objectors who resisted conscription.

To those of my generation who lived through the 1930's, as well as to the younger generation which has rebelled against the Cold War liberals of our own time, rereading Martin's book is a sobering experience. No one else has documented so fully the liberals' complete turnabout from peace to war with all its unfortunate results in world politics since World War II. There were, of course, staunch individualists including the major revisionist historians, excepting only Walter Millis, who followed Charles Beard in opposing American entrance into the war. And later, after World War II, many, including Millis, Mumford and MacLeish, returned to their old post-World War I anti-militarism. But in the 1930's the prestigious journals of opinion gave the more war-minded publicists and intellectuals an effective medium for engaging liberal support. Without such liberal backing it is doubtful whether Roosevelt could have carried the country into war in 1941. And deprived now of that backing, the United States is being compelled to liquidate its war in Vietnam. Whether still another generation of American liberals will be able to resist the bugle call of some future holy war or popular crusade for universal salvation only time can tell. Meanwhile Martin's book sheds light on the question.

Reviewed by ARTHUR A. EKIRCH, Jr. / History (1,337 pages, indexed, 2 vol. boxed) / BFL Price $22.50