THE WESTERN SOCIALIST, Jan-Feb 1955
Review of WHERE WE CAME OUT, Viking Press, 1954
Four years ago Richard Crossman edited a work in which six intellectuals, three members, and three sympathizers, of various Communist Parties, elaborated on why they had been attracted to these Communist Parties, and how they had become disillusioned with them.
For some reason or other, Granville Hicks, one of the fair-haired boys in the literary circles of the Communist Party of America in the last half of the 1930’s was not included in this “symposium,” participated in by such well-known writers as Arthur Koestler, Andre Gide, Louis Fischer, Ignazio Silane, Stephen Spender, and Richard Wright.
Thus, it became necessary for Hicks, fifteen years after his voluntary retirement from the Communist Party of America, to consume 250 pages in a work of his own. The author refuses to call Where We Came Out a confession, inasmuch as it has been public information all those years that he had been a member of the Communist Party from 1935 to 1939.
Mr. Hicks not only wants to explain about “Communism” in the United States, and how best to combat it. He also wants to set the record straight for his neighbors in the small town of Roxborough, New York, where he went to reside immediately following his reconversion to liberalism.
To Hicks it is extremely important to get himself right with his fellow Roxboroughites, because it is among these small towners that he sees evidences of a revolution taking’ place “more significant than the revolution I dreamed of when I was a Communist.” The nature of this revolution will be examined later in this review.
A WEARY STORY
The motives which propelled our author into joining the Communist Party, the intentions which kept him going inside of it for four years, and the conditions which led to his resigning from the CP, are indeed weary for the telling. Hick’s meanderings in and out of the Communist Party rut are similar, in plan if not in detail, to those of dozens of other ex-Communist Party intellectuals who have put their “my sin” to print.
In a word, the failure of the United States to join the League of Nations following World War I, the Babbitism of the “Booboisie” of the 1920’s needed only the Grand Collapse of the 1929 depression to turn former pacifists and liberals into flag bearers for the Communist Party. Ironically, these intellectuals actually believed that the CP was working towards the socialization of the means of production (state capitalism), which they thought was socialism. When Hicks employs the term “suckers” to describe himself and those who fell for the Communist Party line of being “socialism in deeds, and not in words,” he is putting it with the characteristic restraint of a “liberal.”
For Hicks, who became known during the 1935-39 period because of his literary editorship of the New Masses and his biography of John Reed, it was the nonaggression pact which Russia signed with Hitler in 1939 which furnished the final blow to his disillusionment about the American Communist Party. From that time on he became convinced that this organization is controlled from Russia, and that the latter is “basically and incurably a totalitarian dictatorship.”
HOW TO FIGHT THEM
If your beliefs no longer permit you to join them, you fight them. This is precisely what author Hicks intends doing, and with this in mind has developed “The Hicks Plan for Fighting Communism.” Opposing such methods as outlawing the Communist Party, and taking a stand against the various Congressional investigating committees which he claims have done more harm than good, he wants to deal with the Communist Party “in the open.” One end of the al fresco method would be to have the FBI handle “Communist espionage and sabotage.” The other end would be to meet Communist propaganda with “truth and reason.” Hicks even suggests formation of a League of Ex-Communists for this latter purpose. In our opinion, such a League would make an interesting family portrait, even if it served no other purpose.
Mr. Hicks’ first step in the direction of “truth and reason” – his repeated identification of the Communist Party of America and the Soviet Union with “Communism” can scarcely be called a successful one. On one hand he has admitted that the intellectuals who were seduced by the Communist Party to fight for socialism were “suckers.” Now it is not a confession, for it has been known for a hundred years or more, that as economic societies socialism and communism are identical, namely they are terms signifying ownership of the means of production and distribution by all of society, and the distribution of goods according to the needs of the members of society.
How, now, can Mr. Hicks convince his readers that by fighting the Communist Party and the Soviet Union they are fighting communism (socialism), unless, through motives of pure revenge, he wishes to make “suckers” of his readers,
TRUTH BY ERROR
According to the author under review, the achievements of capitalist America “make the romantic promises of socialists and communists look silly.” In this country, it says here, the rich are getting poorer, and the poor are getting richer. Hicks trots forth statistics from Frederick Lewis Allen’s The Big Change to prove his point. In 1948, according to these figures, more than 70% of American families had incomes between $2000 and $10,000 a year. We should like to bring it to Mr. Hicks’ attention, in case Allen’s book did not, that in failing to break this 70% receiving under $10,000 yearly down to one third of the spending units which had incomes below $2000 a year, the 40% who had incomes below $2100, and the 60% whose incomes were under $3000 a year, (1948 Survey of Consumer finances, Board of Governors, Federal Reserve System, Western Socialist, October 1948, p. 3. These figures are for 1947, but 1948 did not show any appreciable difference.) he has committed a very serious error of omission. Truth cannot be served in such fashion.
SMALL TOWN ITEMS
In addition to America’s “equitable” distribution of wealth, of which the above statistics are indeed proof positive, in addition to “our” rough-and-ready democracy which “spite of increasing pressures, continues to function,” Mr. Hicks finds a new culture evolving in this country, a new culture indicative of the “revolution” through which we are passing. And where best to see this revolution, asks our author, than in a small town such as Roxborough, New York?
To demonstrate his belief that class lines are being erased in Roxborough, as all over America, Mr. Hicks mentions a New Year’s party in his small town where the guests consisted of an engineer, a photographer, a white collar worker, a salesman, a garage mechanic, an undertaker, and their wives. Perhaps Hicks does not know that all of these people, with the possible exception of the undertaker-we do not know whether he is undertaking for himself or someone else-, belong to the working class. Assembling together only people of one class is hardly the method to illustrate that classes do not exist in America, or are disappearing.
Mr. Hicks tries again. He points out that Americans look much the same when they dress up, and are indistinguishable when they are not dressed up. Thus, if one sees a young lady in jeans, he will not be able to distinguish her between a factory worker, and a young society debutante on the way to the riding academy, save that the former will be wearing a badge-with a number. In this case, a difference with a decided distinction.
Of course, in spite of the excellent conditions in Roxborough, where workers are not exhausted after a day’s work in the factory, where women “if they need or want work” can readily find jobs, there are drawbacks. “Almost everyone is in debt,” and all are concerned with two very serious social problems, that of the possibility of depression, and the possibility of war. But, chin up, Roxboroughites, every American is in the same boat. Either a war or a depression, states Hicks, would end “this particular chapter we as a people are not writing.”
So the “revolution” which the author claims is taking place is only a chimera after all.
ALWAYS THE CREDO
Personally the author has abandoned “all grandiose programs for remaking society,” and now occupies himself with problems in Roxborough, such as fire protection, schools, library, and the like. A former big-city Communist Party member has now become a small town Hicks.
However, Mr. Hicks is an intellectual, for does not the book’s ™y leaf describe him. as literary editor of The New Leader? As an intellectual, he must have a credo. He must still stick his oar into the sea around us, and establish his identity in time and space. This he does by defining himself as a “critical liberal.” By such he means “he is not committed to things as they are or things as they have been,” but “is willing to examine freely proposals for a change.” Nonetheless, in keeping his mind open to such proposals, he rejects all panaceas, all formulas, all shortcuts. There is no one solution, he asserts, to the world’s problems, and if any one comes up with such a solution, he is not interested, even though he has “an open mind.”
In declaring himself, or not declaring himself thusly, Mr. Hicks has indicated very clearly the. course of many “liberals” who were once as dedicated to the Communist Party, and they are now dedicated against it. Having been burned-and burned badly – by the Communist Party, these liberals turn their backs on socialism, because to them socialism represents the same pitfall as the Communist Party, a one-point solution to mankind’s ills. Instead they turn to support of a “progressive capitalism,” which they admit has its faults, but which they say is superior to the system which prevails in Russia.
This is but one of the many tragedies which the Communist Party of America has visited upon the socialist movement. The CP brought into its orbit people with good intentions, but little understanding of the true nature of communism (socialism), and spewed them out as opponents not only of the Communist Party, but of socialism as well. If Mr. Hicks and the other “critical liberals” are truly serious about exercising an “open mind,” they will examine the case for socialism as it is presented, and not as it has been misrepresented by their experiences in the Communist Party of America.
KARL FREDERICK
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