Liberals

Last week the pinko weekly New Republic gave itself a 25th birthday party. To its swank, Lescaze-designed Manhattan skyscraper office it invited representatives of that amorphous, shifting, elusive, body of opinion that is known as U. S. liberalism, displayed for them a 94-page supplement called The Promise of American Life. Present were amiable Robert Morss Lovett, Government-Secretary of the Virgin Islands, a New Republic editor for 18 years; Freda Kirchwey, editor of The Nation, the rival (74-year-old) liberal intellectual journal that looked exactly like the New Republic to outsiders, very different to liberal intellectuals. Present also were contributors, constant readers, free traders, isolationists, progressive educators, single taxers, practicing Marxists, disillusioned Marxists, poets, professors, publishers, all who believe themselves to be liberals, all who thus claim to fit into a category that nobody has satisfactorily defined.

History. When Herbert Croly launched his new liberal "journal of opinion" 25 years ago, definition was easier. At that seething high tide of trustbusting, muckraking, Bull Moose progressivism, the settlement house movement, the suffragette movement, the I.W.W., liberals were also many things, but they were above all hopeful. In an aged brownstone house in Manhattan's Chelsea district, with a theological seminary appropriately across the street, and a House for the Detention of Women next door, Editor Croly ran his magazine to establish a liberal credo, a way of looking at U. S. political and social life, rather than to win a practical political objective. A scholar--his field was U. S. history--and a gentleman, Herbert Croly was also almost a great editor. His unruly staff, over whom he never exercised the full powers of an editor, had one common admiration--Croly. Through the New Republic's respectable but rundown portals passed some of the most incongruous people in the world: Greenwich Village poets, workers from Chicago's Hull House, old-style Caribbean revolutionaries, retired burglars, Messianic booksellers, musicians from Wall Street, bearded atheists, Nicodemus-like lawyers, authors from Idaho, Junior Leaguers and Bryn Mawr graduates--all manner of odd types, irreconcilables, extravagants, visionaries and practical reformers who somehow were attracted by Founder Herbert Croly.

Son of an immigrant Irish newspaperman, Herbert Croly was the first child adopted into New York City's Ethical Culture Society. Proud, shy, intellectual, Croly suffered agonies of embarrassment interviewing any stranger, virtual torment when impassioned liberals appeared. Despite a soft, almost whispered voice, he dominated liberal gatherings, New Republic luncheons, was deferred to not only by force of intellect but of character. No Robespierre, he had good friends among the Bourbons (one of them was a New York Stock Exchange ex-president). His ideas included a thorny explanation of U. S. history which, expounded in his best book, The Promise of American Life, in 1909, has defied simplification ever since. A conscientious but seldom an inspired writer, he painfully ground out his long, unpopular, difficult editorials as a necessary but dreadful duty. But Herbert Croly proteges, from popularizing Liberal Walter Lippmann to scholarly Critic Edmund Wilson, spread Croly's ideas far beyond his reputation.

Definition. What is a liberal? Only political cynics could call liberalism a refuge for people of no opinions. If it were only a refuge, greater mystery would be why something called literalism is an important U. S. political force, why the liberal label is still prized by politicos and pundits. But if U. S. voters could not identify liberalism, they could spot a liberal without trouble. Liberal, in the sense that he is an ex-New Republican, is Columnist Walter Lippmann. Liberal also is Historian Charles Beard. While Liberal Lippmann plumped for repeal of the arms embargo, hammered at the Communist-Fascist threat to democracy, Liberal Beard wanted the embargo kept, lashed out at "giddy minds and foreign quarrels" like an outraged professor lecturing unruly students who have got his goat. Liberal Oswald Garrison Villard said his liberal say in the Nation, in the New York Evening Post, in a new book, Our Military Chaos that repeated his old fear of militarism.

Liberal by common consent is charitable, 80-year-old John Dewey, who reiterated that Education and the mind in the frayed but clean white collar would conquer all. Liberal too is irritable Stuart Chase, who writes hotly about the conservation of U. S. resources, seems to think everybody else wants to go out and erode a lot of soil. Liberal, as everybody knows, is William Allen White, 71, Republican, editor of the Emporia Gazette, backer of Alfred Landon, who last week published The Changing West to reaffirm his liberal views. Equally liberal is Bruce Bliven, 50, editor, who steered the New Republic straight along its New Deal course.

Is Franklin Roosevelt a liberal? Few could agree whether he is or not. But nobody doubted that he prized the liberal label; fortnight ago he defined a radical as a man standing on his head, a conservative as a man standing still, a reactionary as a man going backwards, a liberal as a man who used his legs, hands and head. No liberal could agree with such a crude distinction, but liberals would look pretty foolish denying that they were people who used their legs, hands and head.

Gloom. A captiously critical man reading the New Republic's Promise of American Life might define a liberal as one in a gloomy state of mind. Promise of the U. S. looked dim to some of its 16 contributors, was well-nigh invisible to others, was in imminent danger of destruction (Liberal Lewis Mumford), depended on the will to believe (Poet Archibald MacLeish), was no joyous, blithe, cheery, inextinguishable prospect to any one of them. Reading from sombre Right to dismayed Left, it depended on progressive education to Progressive Educator William H. Kilpatrick, on Labor's political role to Labor Leader Sidney Hillman.

Uneasily Editor Bliven admitted that "For the first time in our history, American optimism. . . has been seriously challenged" --seldom so effectively as by the New Republic. Deepest gloom was expressed by Vincent Sheean, who wrote of social progress as Soviet Russia (often viewed tolerantly in the New Republic] has achieved it: "The human and economic waste has been colossal, more, probably, than any nation has ever known in twenty years of its history; and the enslavement of the proletariat and the peasantry, which no longer have even the right of movement from one part of the same district to another, is without parallel in the records of mankind."

Victory? Last week's 25th anniversary cast much light on liberals' dilemma, made the New Republic's 25th anniversary indicative of U. S. liberalism as a whole. Plain was it that after Herbert Croly's death in 1930 editors had tried to keep his tradition alive. Equally plain was it that the New Republic, like most liberals, had plumped more & more for specific liberal reforms, had hammered less & less at the old Croly vision of liberalism as a basic, unifying, cultural belief.

As a practical political program, modern liberalism is crammed to overflowing with the souvenirs of old minority causes--distrust of big business, inherited from the trustbusters and western populists, and newly polished by Marxists; fear of political corruption, handed down by the muckrakers. And liberals, now as 25 years ago, generally hold to the right of labor to organize, watch for violations of civil liberties. But more & more liberals have found Communists initiating movements, unearthing scandals, doing more & more of the drudgery of reform, while liberals merely passively approved, passively disapproved.

Last week Liberal Charles Beard gloomily pointed the paradox: in practical reforms, liberals had won what they were fighting for in 1914, were now gloomier than ever. The U. S. had, said Dr. Beard: woman suffrage, old age pensions, public development of waterpower sites, a national highway system, an anti-injunction act, the Wagner Labor Relations Act. That liberals are now dismayed, confused, unhopeful, stoic at their strongest, despairing at their weakest, looked like the surest proof of Founder Croly's basic belief: that liberalism had to be a great spiritual force or the practical reforms it won would not be worth the victory.

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