The_New_American_Right

973*91 B43n

Bell

The new American right

56-06966

973.91 B43n 56-06966

Bell $4.00

The new American right

i AS CITY.. MQ.. PUBLIC LIBRARY

Q DDD1

DATE DUb

THE NEW

AMERICAN

RIGHT

THE NEW

AMERICAN

RIGHT

Edited by

Daniel Bell

CRITERION BOOKS NEW YORK

Copyright 1955 by Criterion Books, Inc.
Library of Congress catalog card number: 55-11024

MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

To SAMUEL M. LEVITAS - executive
editor and guiding spirit of The New
Leader, who for the past twenty-five years
has steered that worthy publication to
the right of the left, and to the left of the
right, seeking always the road of freedom
and intellectual decency-this book is per
sonally dedicated.

D.B.

Acknowledgments

SEVEBAL OF the essays, as noted in

the first chapter, appeared earlier in different places. "The
Pseudo-Conservative Revolt/ by Richard Hofstadter, was
based on a lecture delivered at Barnard College in spring
1954 in its series on "The Search for New Standards in
Modern America/ and printed in The American Scholar,
Winter 1954-55. We are indebted to Dr. Basil Rauch,
chairman of the program in American Civilization at
Barnard, for releasing the essay prior to the publication
of the Barnard series in book form. "The Intellectuals
and the Discontented Classes/ by David Riesman and
Nathan Glazer, appeared in Partisan Review, Winter
1955. "The Revolt Against the Elite/ by Peter Viereck,"
was given originally before the American Historical Asso
ciation in December 1954; sections of it have appeared
in The Reporter, December 30, 1954, and The New
Leader, January 24, January 31, 1955. "Social Strains in
America," by Talcott Parsons, appeared in the Yale Re
view, Winter 1955. "The Polls on Communism and Con
formity," by Nathan Glazer and Seymour Martin Lipset,
was prepared for this volume but includes sections of a

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

review-article by Mr. Glazer in Commentary, August,
1955. "The Sources of the Radical Right/ " by Seymour
Martin Lipset was prepared originally as a study by the
Bureau of Applied Social Research for the Fund for the
Republic, and it was published, in a somewhat different
form from that which appears in this volume, in the
British Journal of Sociology, June 1955.

The editor and publisher gratefully acknowledge the
kindness of the authors and editors of periodicals in
granting permission to reprint these essays.

My thanks to Nathan Glazer and Seymour Martin
Lipset for the many discussions, out of which grew the
suggestion for this volume, to William Phillips for en
couraging the idea of publication and to Miss Kathleen
Jett who typed considerable portions of the manuscript.

D. B.

The Contributors

DANIEL BELL is a former managing editor of The New
Leader and instructor in social science at the
University of Chicago. He is at present a lecturer
in sociology at Columbia University and labor
editor of Fortune magazine. His essays on work,
the sociology of leadership, and the intellectuals
have appeared in several books. A monograph on
the history of American Marxist parties, which ap
peared in the compendium Socialism and Amer
ican Ltfe (Princeton, 1952), is being revised and
expanded for publication by Doubleday-Anchor
books. Mr. Bell, with the assistance of William
Goldsmith, is at work on a volume on Communism
and the American Labor Movement, under a grant
from the Fund for the Republic.

RICHABD HOFSTADTER, professor of history at Columbia
University, and one of the leading young his
torians in the United States, is the author of Social
Darwinism in American Thought and The Amer
ican Political Tradition. Both will appear in reprint,

CONTRIBUTORS

the former by Beacon, the latter by Knopf-Vintage
books. A recent work, The Age of Reform, an
analysis of the populist and progressive move
ments, given as the Walgreen lectures at the
University of Chicago, was published by Knopf.
A volume by Professor Hofstadter and Walter
Metzger on the history of academic freedom in
America will be published by the Columbia Uni
versity Press.

DAVID RIESMAN is best known for his book The Lonely
Crowd, which, within five years of its publication,
has been accepted as a contemporary classic. A
former lawyer, Mr. Riesman is professor of social
science at the University of Chicago and sometime
visiting professor at Harvard, Yale and Johns
Hopkins. He is the author, among other works,
of Faces in the Crowd, a companion volume of
case studies to The Lonely Crowd; a biography,
Thorstein Veblen, and Individualism Reconsid
ered, a collection of essays.

NATHAN GLAZER, linguist and sociologist, was a collabo
rator of David Riesman on The Lonely Crowd
and Faces in the Crowd. An associate editor of
Commentary magazine for nine years, Mr. Glazer
conducted its monthly department, "The Study
of Man," and contributed more than a dozen
highly regarded essays on ethnic groups, prejudice
and social theory. Mr. Glazer, now an editor of
Anchor Books, gave the Walgreen lectures at the
University of Chicago in the spring of 1955 on
Judaism in America. These will be published by
the University of Chicago Press next year.

PETER VDERECK, historian and Pulitzer prize winning poet.

CONTRIBUTORS XI

is a stormy petrel of the "new conservatism" in
America. Professor of modern history at Mount
Holyoke College, he is the author of Metapolitics:
From the Romantics to Hitler, Conservatism Re
visited and the Shame and Glory of the Intellec
tuals, as well as several books of poetry, Mr.
Viereck, who lectured in Italy in 1955, is complet
ing a new book of essays, in which The Unad
justed Man will appear, to be published by Beacon
Press.

TALCOTT PARSONS, professor of sociology and chairman of
the department at Harvard University, is one of
the leaders of the dominant structure-function
school in American sociology. His first book, The
Structure of Social Action, was a synthesis of the
work of Durkheim, Pareto and Weber. Together
with several collaborators he has been seeking to
create a general theory of social behavior. These
attempts have resulted in a number of major works
including The Social System, Towards a General
Theory of Action (with Edward Shils), and Work
ing Papers in the Theory of Action (with Robert
F. Bales). His most recent book, with Robert F.
Bales, is Socialization and the Family.

SEYMOUR MARTIN LEPSET, associate professor of sociology
at Columbia University, is the author of Agrarian
Socialism, a study of the Cooperative Common
wealth Federation in Canada; an editor, with
Reinhard Bendix, of a reader in Class, Status and
Power; and a co-author of a monograph on "The
Psychology of Voting," which is included in the
Handbook of Social Psychology, edited by Gard
ner Lindzey. His most recent book, Union Democ
racy, a study of the political process in the typo-

CONTRIBUTORS

graphical union, will be published by the Free
Press in 1956, Together with his Columbia col
leagues Richard Hofstadter, Herbert Hyman and
William Kornhauser (now at Berkeley), Professor
Lipset is completing an inventory of writings in
political sociology, under a Ford behavioral studies

Contents

1 Interpretations of American Politics 3

DANIEL BELL

2 The Pseudo-Conservative Revolt 33

RlCHABD HOFSTADTER

3 The Intellectuals and the Discontented Classes 56

DAVID RDESMAN AND NATHAN GLAZER

4 The Revolt Against the Elite 91

PETER VIERECK

5 Social Strains in America 117

TALCOTT PARSONS

6^ The Polls on Communism and Conformity 141

NATHAN GLAZER AND
SEYMOUR MARTIN LIPSET

7 The Sources of the "Radical Right" 166

SEYMOUR MARTIN LIPSET

Index 235

THE NEW

AMERICAN

RIGHT

Interpretations of
American Politics

DANIEL BELL

Tms BOOK presents a series of novel
essays on some recent political history, notably an exami
nation of the "new American right" which had concen
trated for a time around the leadership of Senator
McCarthy, and which continues today in large, if inchoate,
form. This is not, however, a book about Senator Mc
Carthy, although two of the essays, by Talcott Parsons
and S. M. Lipset, offer some fresh insights into the flash-
fire spread of McCarthyism. McCarthyism, or McCarthy-
wasm, as one wit put it, may be a passing phenomenon.
This book is concerned not with these transiencies, but
with the deeper-running social currents of a turbulent
mid-century America.

4 The New American Right

This is a turbulence born not of depression, but of
prosperity. Contrary to the somewhat simple notion that
prosperity dissolves all social problems, we see that pros
perity brings in its wake new social groups, new social
strains and new social anxieties. Conventional political
analysis, drawn largely from eighteenth and nineteenth
century American experience, cannot fathom these new
social anxieties nor explain their political consequences.

This book, by establishing a new framework, attempts
to provide an understanding of these new social problems.
This framework is derived from an analysis of the exhaus
tion of liberal and left-wing political ideology, and by an
examination of the new, prosperity-created "status-
groups" which, in their drive for recognition and respect
ability, have sought to impose older conformities on the
American body politic. This framework, drawn from some
of the more recent thought in sociology and social
psychology, represents a new and original contribution
which, we feel, extends the range of conventional political
analysis. To an extent, this is a "thesis book." It does not
present a "total" view of politics nor does it supplant the
older categories of political analysis, but it does add a
new and necessary dimension to the analysis of American
society today. Equally important, and of more immediate
relevance perhaps, the application of these concepts may
allow us not only to understand some puzzling aspects of
the last decade, but also to illuminate the sub-rosa polit
ical forces of 1956 and beyond.

Politics in the United States has been looked at, roughly
from three standpoints: the role of the electoral struc
ture, of democratic tradition, and of interest groups
sectional or class. & F

Perhaps the most decisive fact about politics in the
United States is the two-party system. Each party is like
some huge bazaar, with hundreds of hucksters clamoring

INTERPRETATIONS OF AMERICAN POLITICS 5

for attention. But while life within the bazaars flows freely
and licenses are easy to obtain, all trading has to be con
ducted within the tents; the ones who hawk their wares
outside are doomed to few sales. This fact gains meaning
when we consider one of the striking facts about American
life: America has thrown up countless social movements,
but few political parties; in contradiction to European
political life, few of the social movements have been able
to transform themselves into political parties. Here is one
source of flux yet stability in American life.

"It is natural for the ordinary American," wrote Gunnar
Myrdal, "when he sees something that is wrong to feel
not only that there should be a law against it, but also that
an organization should be formed to combat it," and,
we might add, to change it. American reform groups have
ranged from Esperantists to vegetarians, from silver money
advocates to conservationists, from trust-busters to social
ists of fifty-seven varieties. These groups, intense and
ideologically single-minded, have formed numerous third
parties the Greenback Party, Anti-Monopoly Party, Equal
Rights Party, Prohibition Party, Socialist Labor Party,
Union Labor Party, Farmer-Labor Party, Socialist Party.
Yet none succeeded.

The wheat fanners of the north central plains have a
homogeneity of cultural outlook and a common set of
economic problems which national boundary lines cannot
bisect. Yet in Canada, the wheat farmers formed a Social
Credit Party in Alberta and a Cooperative Common
wealth Federation in Saskatchewan, while their brothers
in North Dakota could only, at best, form a Non-Partisan
League within the Republican Party in order to press
their interests. 1

These factors of rigid electoral structure have set
definite limits on the role of protest movements, left and
right, in American life. ("Let me make the deals, and I
care not who makes the ideals," an American politician

g The New American Right

has said.) They account in significant measure for the
failure of the Lemke-Coughlin movement in 1936, and
the Wallace-Progressive Party in 1948. They account for
the new basic alliance between the unions and the Demo
cratic Party. Whatever lingering hopes some trade union
ists may have held for a labor party in the United States
were dispelled by Walter Reuther at the C.LO. conven
tion in November 1954 when, in answering transport
leaders such as Mike Quill, he pointed out that a third
party was impossible within the nature of the United
States electoral system. This is a lesson that every social
movement has learned. And any social movement which
hopes to effect or resist social change in the United States
is forced now to operate within one or the other of the
two parties. This factor alone will place an enormous
strain on these parties in the next ten years.

The democratic tradition, the second of the interpretive
categories, has played an important role in shaping
American political forms. The distinctive aspect of the
political tradition in the United States is that politics is
the arena of the hoi polloi. Here the "common man" be
comes the source of ultimate appeal if not authority. This
was not so at the beginning. The "founding f athers," with
the Roman republic, let alone the state of affairs under
the Articles of Confederation, in mind, feared the "demo
cratic excesses" which the poor and propertyless classes
could wreak against those with property. Whatever the
subsequent inadequacies of the economic interpretation
of history in a complex society, it is clear that in 1787
self-consciousness of property, and a desire to limit the
electoral role of the people, were uppermost in the minds
of the "four groups of personalty interests which had been
adversely affected under the Articles of Confederation:
money, public securities, manufactures, and trade and
shipping." 2 This was reflected in the precautions written
into the Constitution: a non-popular Senate, selected by

INTEBPKETATIONS OF AMERICAN POLITICS 7

the States; an appointive judiciary holding office for life,
and a President elected through the indirect and cumber
some means of an electoral college.

But these barriers soon broke down. The victory of the
Jeffersonians was the first step in the establishment of a
"populist" character for the American democracy. The
Federalists, seeing the success of the Jeffersonian methods,
realized the necessity of imitating those "popular, con
vivial and charitable techniques." As early as 1802,
Hamilton, in a letter to Bayard, outlined a plan for a
"Christian Constitutional Society," which would appeal
to the masses "through a development of a cult of Wash
ington and benevolent activities." 3 A Washington Bene
volent Society was formed in 1808, but it was too late, the
Federalists had already lost. Thirty years later their
spiritual descendants, the Whigs, beat the Democrats at
their own game. Casting aside Henry Clay, whose "Hamil-
tonian" views were too well-established, the Whigs nomi
nated General William Henry Harrison, the hero of the
battle of Tippecanoe, against Andrew Jackson s successor,
Martin Van Buren.

"If General Harrison is taken up as a candidate," said
Nicholas Biddle, the former head of the National Bank, in
some direction to party managers (which might not have
echoed so strangely in 1952), "it will be on account of the
past. . . . Let him say not one single word about his prin
ciples, or his creed let him say nothing promise nothing.
Let no Committee, no convention no town meeting ever
extract from him a single word about what he thinks or
will do hereafter. Let the use of pen and ink be wholly
forbidden." 4

The "cider election" of 1840 was a turning-point in
American political life. Harrison traveled from place to
place in a large wagon with a log cabin on top, and a
barrel of hard cider on tap for the crowds. Daniel Web
ster, with the fustian of the demagogue, expressed deep

8 The New American Right

regret that he had not been born in a log cabin, although
his elder siblings had begun their lives in a humble abode.
Whig orators berated Van Buren for living in a lordly
manner, accusing him of putting cologne on his whiskers,
eating from gold plate, and of being "laced up in corsets
such as women in town wear and if possible tighter than
the best of them/

The lesson was clear. Politics as a skill in manipulating
masses became the established feature of political life,
and the politician, sometimes a front-man for the moneyed
interests, but sometimes the manipulator in his own right,
came to the fore. Increasingly, the upper classes withdrew
from direct participation in politics. The lawyer, the
journalist, the drifter, finding politics an open ladder of
social mobility, came bounding up from the lower middle
classes. The tradition of equality had been established.
The politician had to speak to "the people" and in demo
cratic terms.

^ If the politician spoke to the people, he acted for
Interests." The awareness of the interest-group basis of
politics, the third of the categories, goes far back to the
early days of the republic. Madison, in the oft-quoted
Number Ten of the Federalist Papers, had written, "the
most common and durable source of factions has been
the various and unequal distribution of property. Those
who hold and those who are without property have ever
fonned distinct interests in society." James Harrington s
maxim that "power always follows property," "I believe
to be as infallible a maxim in politics, as that action and
reaction are equal in mechanics," said John Adams the
outstanding conservative of the time. 5 The threat to prop
s 7 T^l^ <V^ SmaU farmer and ** b**te*
toed the basis of the first disquiet in American politics

The Shaysites in Massachusetts and other insurgents
Gajeral Henxy Kn OX complained to George Washington
"believe that the property of the United States has been

INTERPRETATIONS OF AMERICAN POLITICS 9

protected from the confiscations of Britain by the joint
exertions of all." Madison, looking to the future, antici
pated that "a great majority of the people will not only be
without land, but any other sort of property." When this
has occurred, he predicted, the propertyless masses will
"either combine under the influence of their common
situation; in which case the rights of property and the
public liberty will not be secure in their hands; or what is
more probable," he continued, with the lessons of the
Roman demagogues in mind, "they will become tools of
opulence and ambition, in which case, there will be equal
danger on the other side." 6

The early factional struggles in American political life,
rustic in form because of the agrarian weight of the popu
lation, soon became sectional. This was inevitable since
the different regions developed different interests: the
rice, tobacco and cotton of the South; the fishing, lumber,
commerce of New England. National parties came into
being when the Federalists succeeded at first in combin
ing the large planters of the upper and lower South with
the commercial interests of the North Atlantic region, and
when Jefferson challenged this combination by uniting
the grain growers and other small farmers both North
and South into a rival party. Since then, the national
parties have been strange alliances of heterogeneous sec
tional groups: Midwest fanners with the populist, Demo
cratic and Republican parties; the urban immigrant North
with the backward, nativist South. Ethnic and functional
groups have, often by historic accident, flowed into one
of the two parties: the Negroes, because of the Civil War,
for sixty years or so voted Republican; the Irish, because
of their original relation to Tammany Hall, became Demo
crats; the Germans, settling in the Midwest, became
Republican; the urban Italians, in reaction to their exclu
sion by the Irish, became Republican.

Within the sectionalism of American political life, arose

10 The New American Right

the narrower, more flexible tactic of the pressure group
standing outside the particular party, committed to
neither, giving support or winning support on the basis of
allegiance to the single issue alone. One of the first
skillful innovators of this tactic was George Henry Evans,
a confrere of Robert Owen and a leading figure for a
time in the reform politics of the 1830s and 40s. Evans
had been one of the leaders of the Workingmen s Party
in 1829, a New York party that began with moderate
success but which faded when ideological differences
inflamed a latent factionalism, and when the Democrats
"stole their thunder" by adopting some of their imme
diate demands. Evans who believed that free land would
solve tiie ckss tensions and plight of the propertyless
workers, organized an Agrarian League in the 1840s. His
experience had taught him that a minority party could not
win by its own votes and that politicians, interested pri
marily in "deals not ideals/ would endorse any measure
advocated by a group that could hold the balance of
power. Evans "therefore asked all candidates to support
his sliding measures/ In exchange for such a pledge,
the candidate would receive the votes of the working-
men/ 7 While the Agrarian League itself met with mid
dling success, its tactics paid off in the later passage of
the Homestead acts.

In 1933, with the arrival of the New Deal, the feeling
arose that a new era was emerging. In a widely-quoted
book, Professor Arthur N. Holcombe of Harvard wrote:
"The old party politics is visibly passing away. The charac
ter of the new party politics will be determined chiefly

by the interests and attitudes of the urban population

There will be less sectional politics and more class poli
tics,"* The emergence of "functional" groups, particularly
labor, and the growing assertion of ethnic groups, seemed
to underscore the shift The fact that Franklin Roosevelt
was able to weave together these groups, some of whom

DSTTERPRETATIONS OF AMERICAN POLITICS 11

like the farmers had been allied with the G.O.P., seemed
to indicate that some historic realignments were taking
place. Some have. The trade union movement, politically
articulate for the first time, is outspokenly Democratic;
but the working-class vote has usuafly been Democratic.
Ethnic groups which have played a role in politics have,
by and large, retained their loyalty to the Democratic
Party; but there are many indications that, as a result of
rising prosperity and higher social status, significant
chunks of these nationality and minority groups are be
ginning to shift their allegiance. 9 The farmers, despite the
enormous supports voted by the New Deal, have returned
to the Republican fold.

While sectional politics have somewhat diminished,
class politics have not jelled. Elements of both are re
flected in the rise of pressure groups and the lobbies.
The most spectacular use of the seesaw pressure group
tactic was the Anti-Saloon League, which, starting in
1893, was able in two and a half decades to push through
a Constitutional amendment prohibiting the manufacture
and sale of liquor in the United States. Since then, the
pressure group device has been adopted by thousands of
organizations, whether it be for tariff reform, opposition
to Federal medical programs, or political aid to the state
of Israel. In 1949, the Department of Commerce estimated
that there were 4,000 national trade, professional, civic
and other associations. Including local and branch chap
ters there were probably 16,000 businessmen s organiza
tions, 70,000 local labor unions, 100,000 women s clubs
and 15,000 civic groups carrying on some political educa
tion. The enormous multiplication of such groups obvi
ously cancels out many of the threats made to candidates
defying one or the other interests. 10 But it makes possible,
too, a dextrous art of logrolling, which itself makes it
possible for small interests to exert great political leverage.
Thus, when peanuts were eliminated from a farm subsidy

12 The New American Right

program in 1955, over one hundred Southern congressmen
held up a crop support bill until the subsidy was restored.
(Although Georgia peanuts account for less than one
half of one percent of farm income, subsidizing this crop
has cost the U.S. 100 million dollars in the past decade. )
The multiplication of interests and the fractioning of
groups make it difficult to locate the sources of power in
the United States. 11 This political fractioning, occurring
simultaneously with the break-up of old property forms
and the rise of new managerial groups to power within
business enterprises, spells the break-up, too, of older
ruling classes in the United States. A ruling class may be
defined as a power-holding group that has both an estab
lished community of interest and continuity of interest.
One can be a member of the "upper class" (i.e. have
greater privilege and wealth and be able to transmit that
wealth) without being a member of the ruling group.
The modern ruling group is a coalition whose modes of
continuity, other than the political route as such, are still
ill-defined. 12 More than ever, government in the United
States has become in John Chamberlain s early phrase,
"the broker state." To say this is a broker state, however,
does not mean that all interests have equal power. This
is a business society. But within the general acceptance
of corporate capitalism, modified by union power and
checked by government control, the deals and interest-
group trading proceed.

Granting the usefulness of these frames of political
analysis-the role of electoral structure in limiting social
movements and social clashes; the tradition of popular
appeal; and the force of interest-groups in shaping and
modifying legislative policy-in understanding "tradi
tional political problems, they leave us somewhat ill-
eqmpped to understand the issues which have dominated
political dispute in the last decade. These categories do

INTERPRETATIONS OF AMERICAN POLITICS 13

not help us understand the Communist issue, the forces
behind the new nationalism of say Bricker and Knowland,
and the momentary range of support and the intense
emotional heat generated by Senator McCarthy.

For Europeans, particularly, the Communist issue must
be a puzzle. After all, there are no mass Communist
parties in the U.S. such as one finds in France and Italy;
the Communist Party in the U.S. never, at any single
moment, had more than 100,000 members. In the last
five years, when the Communist issue appeared on the
national scene, the Communists had already lost consid
erable political influence and were on the decline the
Communists had been expelled from C.I.O.; 13 the Progres
sive Party, repudiated by Henry Wallace, had fizzled;
the Communists were losing strength in the intellectual
community.

It is true that liberals have tended to play down the
issue. 14 And some rational basis for its existence was
present, There was the surprise of the aggression in
Korea and the emotional reaction against the Chinese and
Russian Communists which carried over to domestic
Communists. The disclosures, particularly by Whittaker
Chambers, of the infiltration of Communists into high
posts in government and the existence of espionage rings,
produced a tremendous shock in a nation which hitherto
had been unaware of such machinations. People began
realizing, too, that numbers alone were no criteria of
Communist strength; in fact, thinking of Communist
influence on the basis of statistical calculation itself be
trayed an ignorance of Communist methods; in the United
States the Communists by operating among intellectual
groups and opinion leaders have had an influence far out
of proportion to their actual numbers. And, finally, the
revelations in the Canadian spy investigations, in the
Allan Nunn May trial in Britain and in the Rosenberg
case that the Soviets had stolen United States atom secrets,

14 The New American Right

themselves added fuel to the emotional heat against the
Communists,

When all of this is said, it still fails to account for the
extensive damage to the democratic fabric that McCarthy
and others were able to cause on the Communist issue
and for the reckless methods disproportionate to the
problem: the loyalty oaths on the campus, the compulsive
Americanism which saw threats to the country in the
wording of a Girl Scout handbook, the violent clubbing
of the Voice of America (which under the ideological
leadership of such anti-Communists as Foy Kohler and
Bertram Wolfe had conducted intelligent propaganda in
Europe), the wild headlines and the senseless damaging
of the Signal Corps radar research program at Fort Mon-
mouth in short the suspicion and the miasma of fear that
played so large a role in American politics. Nor does it
explain the unchallenged position held so long by Senator
McCarthy.

McCarthy himself must be a puzzle to conventional
political analysis. Calling him a demagogue explains little;
the relevant questions are, to whom was he a demagogue^
and about what. McCarthy s targets were indeed strange!
Huey Long, the last major demagogue, had vaguely at
tacked the rich and sought to "share the wealth." Mc
Carthy s targets were intellectuals, Harvard, Anglophiles,
internationalists, the Army.

His targets and his language do, indeed, provide impor
tant clues to the "radical right?* that supported him, and
the reasons for that support. These groups constituted a
strange melange: a thin stratum of soured patricians like
Archibald Roosevelt, the last surviving son of Teddy
Roosevelt, whose emotional stake lay in a vanishing imaee
of a muscular America defying a decadent Europe; the
new rich -the automobile dealers, real estate manipula
te^ od wildcatters-who needed the psychological a
ance that they, like their forebears, had earned their

INTERPRETATIONS OF AMERICAN POLITICS 15

wealth, rather than accumulated it through government
aid, and who feared that "taxes" would rob them of that
wealth; the rising middle class strata of the ethnic groups,
the Irish and the Germans, who sought to prove their
Americanism, the Germans particularly because of the
implied taint of disloyalty during World War II; and
finally, unique in American cultural history, a small group
of intellectuals, many of them cankered ex-Communists,
who, pivoting on McCarthy, opened up an attack on
liberalism in general.

This strange coalition, bearing the "sword of the Lord
and Gideon," cannot be explained in conventional political
terms. These essays do provide some frame, particularly
one to explain the "new rich" and the "rising ethnic"
groups. One key concept is the idea of "status politics"
advanced by Richard Hofstadter. His central idea is that
groups that are upwardly mobile (i.e. that are advancing
in wealth and social position), are often as anxious and
as politically febrile as groups that have become declass6.
Many observers have noted that groups which have lost
their social position seek more violently than ever to
impose on all groups the older values of a society which
they once bore. Hofstadter demonstrates that groups on
the rise may insist on a similar conformity in order to
establish themselves. This rise takes place in periods of
prosperity, when class or economic interest group con
flicts have lost much of their force. 15 The new, patriotic
issues proposed by the status groups are amorphous and
ideological. This theme is elaborated in the essay by
Riesman and Glazer, with particular reference to the new
rich. But these groups are able to assert themselves, the
two sociologists point out, largely because of the exhaus
tion of liberal ideology a collapse not from defeat but
from "victory." The essay by Peter Viereck traces some
of the historical roots of the peculiar rhetoric of the right,
showing the sources of the anti-intellectualism and Anglo-

i6 The New American Right

phobia in the egalitarian populism of the last century.
Professor Parsons, discussing the nature of social change
in the United States, demonstrates how the resultant
social strains foster the emergence of the new right.
Glazer and Lipset, analyzing the recent study by Professor
Stouffer on "Communism, Conformity and Civil Liberties,"
deal with limitations of "survey methods in elucidating
social attitudes. The long concluding essay by Professor
Lipset provides a detailed analysis of the social groups
identified with the new right and assesses their strength.

These essays were not written for this volume. All but
the reviews of the Stouffer book appeared about the same
time, and quite independently. And yet they showed a
remarkable convergence in point of view. This conver
gence itself indicates that some of the recent concepts of
sociology and social psychology the role of status groups
as a major entity in American life and status resentments
as a real force in politics were being applied fruitfully to
political analysis.

Whether the groups analyzed in this volume form a
political force depends upon many factors. Certainly
McCarthy himself is, at the moment, at the nadir. By the
logic of his own political position, and by the nature of
his personality, he had to go to an extreme. And he ended,
finally, by challenging Eisenhower. It was McCarthy s
great gamble. And he lost, for the challenge to a Repub
lican President by a Republican minority could only have
split the party. Faced with this threat, the party rallied
behind Eisenhower, and McCarthy himself was isokted.
In this respect, the events prove the soundness of the
thesis of Walter Lippmann and the Alsops in 1952 that
only a Republican President could provide the necessary
continuity of foreign and domestic policy initiated and
maintained by the Fair Deal. A Democratic President
would only have polarized the parties, and given the
extreme Republican wing the license to lead the attack;

36 The New American Right

pseudo-conservative impulse can be found in practically
all classes in society, although its power probably rests
largely upon its appeal to the less educated members of
the middle classes. The ideology of pseudo-conservatism
can be characterized but not defined, because the pseudo-
conservative tends to be more than ordinarily incoherent
about politics. The lady who, when General Eisenhower s
victory over Senator Taft had finally become official,
stalked out of the Hilton Hotel declaiming, "This means
eight more years of socialism" was probably a fairly good
representative of the pseudo-conservative mentality. So
also were the gentlemen who, at the Freedom Congress
held at Omaha over a year ago by some "patriotic" organi
zations, objected to Earl Warren s appointment to the
Supreme Court with the assertion: "Middle-of-the-road
thinking can and will destroy us"; the general who spoke
to the same group, demanding "an Air Force capable of
wiping out die Russian Air Force and industry in one
sweep," but also "a material reduction in military expen
ditures"; 2 the people who a few years ago believed simul
taneously that we had no business to be fighting com
munism in Korea, but that the war should immediately
be extended to an Asia-wide crusade against communism;
and the most ardent supporters of the Bricker Amend
ment. Many of the most zealous followers of Senator
McCarthy are also pseudo-conservatives, although there
are presumably a great many others who are not.

The restlessness, suspicion and fear manifested in vari
ous phases of the pseudo-conservative revolt give evidence
of the real suffering which the pseudo-conservative ex
periences in his capacity as a citizen. He believes himself
to be living in a world in which he is spied upon, plotted
against, betrayed, and very likely destined for total ruin.
He feels that his liberties have been arbitrarily and out
rageously invaded. He is opposed to almost everything
that has happened in American politics for the past twenty

1$ The New American Right

of public morals has been a continuing feature of our

history.

The sources of this moralism are varied. This has been
a middle-class culture, and there may be considerable
truth to the generalization of Svend Ranulf that moral
indignation is a peculiar fact of middle-class psychology
and represents a disguised form of repressed envy. 16 One
does not find moral indignation a feature of the temper
of aristocratic cultures. Moralism and moral indignation
are characteristic of religions that have largely abandoned
other-worldly preoccupations and have concentrated on
this-worldly concerns. Religions, like Catholicism, which
are focused on heaven are often quite tolerant of man s
foibles, weaknesses, and cruelties on earth; theft, after all,
is only a venial sin, while pride bears the stain of venality.
This is a country, and Protestantism a religion, in which
piety has given way to moralism, and theology to ethics.
Becoming respectable represents "moral" advancement,
and regulating conduct, i.e. being "moral" about it, is a
great concern of the Protestant churches in America.

This moralism, itself not unique to America, is linked
to an evangelicalism that was largely unique. There has
long been a legend, fostered for the most part by literary
people, and compounded by sociologists, that America s
has been a "puritan" culture. For the sociologists this has
arisen out of a mistaken identification of the Protestant
ethic with puritan code. The literary critics have been
seduced by the myth of New England, and the literary
revolt initiated by Van Wyck Brooks which sought to
break the hold of puritanism in literature. While puritan-
ism, and the "New England mind," have indeed played
a krge intellectual role in American Me, in the habits and
mores of the masses of people, the peculiar evangelicalism
of Methodism and Baptism, with its high emotionalism,
its fervor, enthusiasm and excitement, its revivalism, its
excesses of sinning and of high-voltage confessing, has

INTERPRETATIONS OF AMERICAN POLITICS 10

played a much more important role in coloring the moral
temper of America. Baptism and Methodism have been
the American religious creed because they were the rustic
and frontier religions. In his page on "Why Americans
Manifest a Sort of Fanatical Spiritualism," de Tocqueville
observes: "In all states of the Union, but especially in the
half -peopled country of the Far West, itinerant preachers
may be met with who hawk about the word of God from
place to place. Whole families, old men, women and
children, cross rough passes and untrodden wilds, coming
from a great distance, to join a camp-meeting, where, in
listening to these discourses, they totally forget for several
days and nights the cares of business and even the most
urgent wants of the body/ 17

The Baptist and Methodist churches grew while the
more "respectable" Protestant bodies remained static, pre
cisely because their preachers went on with the advancing
frontier and reflected its spirit. "In the camp meeting and
in the political gathering logical discourse was of no avail,
while the language of excitement called forth an enthu
siastic response," observed H. Richard Niebuhr. 18

This revivalist spirit was egalitarian and anti-intellec
tual. It shook off die vestments and the formal liturgies
and preached instead the gospel and roaring hymn. This
evangelicalism was reflected in the moralism of a William
Jennings Bryan, a religious as well as an economic cham
pion of the West, and in the urban revivalism of a Dwight
Moody and the Y.M.C.A. movement that grew out of his
gospel fervor. 19 In their espousal of social reform, the
evangelical churches reflected the peculiar influence of
moralism. They were the supreme champions of prohibi
tion legislation and Sabbath observance. Reform, in their
terms, meant, not as in the New Deal, a belief in welfare
legislation, but the redemption of those who had fallen
prey to sin and sin meant rink, loose women and
gambling.

30 The New American Right

This moralism, so characteristic of American temper,
had a peculiar schizoid character: it would be imposed
with vehemence in areas of culture and conduct-in the
censorship of books, the attacks on "immoral art/ etc.,
and in the realm of private habits; yet it was heard only
sporadically regarding the depredations of business or
the corruption of politics. And yet, this has had its posi
tive side. To the extent that moral indignation apart from
its rhetorical use in political campaigns-played so small
a role in the actual political arena, the United States has
been able to escape the intense ideological fanaticism
the conflicts of clericalism and class-which has been so
characteristic of Europe.

The singular fact about the Communist problem is that
an ideological issue was raised in American political life,
with a compulsive moral fervor only possible because of
the equation of Communism with sin, A peculiar change,
in fact, seems to be coming over American life. While we
are becoming more relaxed in the area of traditional
morals (viz., the Supreme Court ruling against censorship
in the case of the movie, The Miracle), we are becoming
moralistic and extreme in politics. The fact that Senator
McCarthy could seek to pin a Communist label on the
Democratic Party, and tie it with a tag of "treason" and
be abetted for a time by Attorney General Brownell and
the Republican Party is a reflection of a new political
temper in America.

The tendency to convert politics into "moral" issues is
reinforced by a second fact, the activities of the McCarthy-
ite intellectuals-James Burnham, William Schlamm, Max
Eastman, and their minor epigoni. The rise of intellectual
apologists for a reactionary right is, too, a new phase in
American life. The quixotic fact is that many of these
men, ex-Communists, repudiated at first not the Utopian
vision of Communism, but its methods. In the thirties, the
crucial intellectual fight was to emphasize, against the

INTERPRETATIONS OF AMERICAN POLITICS 21

liberal piddlers who sought to excuse the harshness of
Stalinism by reference to the historic backwardness of
Russia, or the grandeur of the Soviet dream, that in social
action there is an inextricable relation between "ends and
means/* and that consistently amoral means could only
warp and hideously distort an end. Yet these men have
forgotten this basic point in their defense of McCarthy.
Schlamm, the author of a fine book about Stalinism, Die
Diktatur der Luge (The Dictatorship of the Lie) applauds
McCarthy as a man who is seriously interested in ideas.
John T. Flynn, the old muckraker, denies McCarthy has
ever made use of the lie. Max Eastman, slightly critical
at times, worries most not about McCarthy but that the
liberals by attacking McCarthy might be playing "the
Communist game"; as if all politics were only two-sided,
in this case McCarthy or the Communists.

How explain this reversal? Motivations are difficult to
plumb. Some of these men, as George Orwell once pointed
out in a devastating analysis of James Burnham, 20 slavishly
worship power images. The Freeman, the old-maidish
house organ of the intellectual right, coyly applauded
McCarthy as a tough hombre.

Yet one significant fact emerges from this bile: the
hatred of the ex-Communist is not so much of the Com
munist, but of the "liberals," and the root of the problem
goes back to the political situation of the Thirties. In
recent years there has been a growing myth that in the
1930s the Communist dominated the cultural life of
America, its publishing houses, Broadway, Hollywood,
and the colleges. The myth is a seductive one which grows
more plausible with the revelation of different "name"
personages who the public now discover were once open
or covert fellow-travelers. Yet, as Granville Hicks points
out, only one anti-Communist book is ever cited as having
been suppressed in those years, while anti-Communist
authors such, as Eugene Lyons, Max Eastman, Freda

22 The New American Right

Utiey, Jan Valtin all published anti-Soviet books. 21 The
Communists, in fact, felt that the shoe at times was on
the other foot. "In the autumn of 1934," says Hicks, "I
wrote an article for the New Masses in which I argued
that the New York Times book review assigned almost
all books on Russia to anti-Communists/ The Nation
book section under Margaret Marshall in those years was
anti-Communist. The Communist cells in universities were
small; at Harvard in 1938, at the height of the popular
front, there were fourteen faculty Communists in all.
While the Communists were able to enlist a sizable
number of well-known names for their fronts, the Com
mittee for Cultural Freedom, in issuing a statement in
1939 bracketing the Soviet and Nazi states as equally
immoral, displayed a more distinguished roster of intel
lectuals than any statement issued by a Communist front
How explain these contrasting images of the Red
Decade the anti-Communists who regarded the Com
munists as dominating the cultural life and the Com
munists who complained that they had little influence?
The evidence, I would say, lies on Hicks side. 22 The
Communists did not dominate the cultural field, though
they wielded an influence far out of proportion to their
numbers. What is true, and here I feel Hicks missed the
subtle edge of the problem, is that the official institutions
of the cultural communitybecause of the Spanish Civil
War, the shock of Fascism, and the aura of New Deal
reform did look at the Communist with some sympathy;
they regarded him as ultimately, philosophically wrong,
but still as a respectable member of the community. But
the vocal anti-Communists (many of them Trotskyites at
the time), with their quarrelsome ways, their esoteric
knowledge of Bolshevik history (most of the intellectuals
were completely ignorant of the names of the Bolsheviks
in the dock at the Moscow trials, Zinoviev, Kamenev,
Bukharin, Piatakov, Sokolnikov, Rakovsky) seemed ex-

INTERPKETATIONS OF AMERICAN POLITICS #3

treme and bizarre and were regarded with suspicion.
The anti-Stalinists, by raising "extraneous" issues of a
"sectarian" nature, were "sabotaging" the fight against
Fascism. Hence, in the thirties, one found the Communist
possessing a place in the intellectual world, while the
anti-Communists were isolated and thwarted.

Here, in a sense, is the source of the present-day resent
ment against "the liberals." If one looks for formal or
ideological definition "the liberal" is difficult to pin down.
To a McCarthyite, "the liberals" dominate the intellectual
and publishing community and define the canons of
respectability and acceptance. And once again the knot
of ex-Communists, now, as in the thirties, finds itself
outside the pale. At stake is an attitude toward the Com
munists. The Freeman intellectuals want the Communists
shriven or driven out of all areas of public or community
life. The "liberal" says the effort is not worth the price,
since there are few Communists, and the drive against
them only encourages reactionaries to exact a conformity
of opinion. By refusing to sanction these measures, the
liberals find themselves under attack as "soft."

In these strange times, new polar terms have been
introduced into political discourse, but surely none so
strange as the division into "hard" and "soft." Certainly
in attitudes towards the rights of Communists, there are
many gradations of opinion among genuine anti-Com
munists, as the debates in the Committee for Cultural
Freedom have demonstrated. But for the Freeman intel
lectuals, there are only two attributes hard or soft. Even
the New Yorfc Post, whose editor, James A. Wechsler has
fought Communists for years, and the Americans for
Democratic Action, whose initiating spirit was Reinhold
Niebuhr, and whose co-chairman, Arthur Schlesinger,
Jr., was one of the early intellectual antagonists of the
Communists, before McCarthy ever spoke up on the sub
ject, have been denounced as "soft."

24 The New American Right

What does the term mean? Presumably one is "soft" if
one insists that the danger from domestic Communists is
small. But the "hard" anti-Communists insist that no dis
tinction can be made between international and domestic
Communism. This may be true regarding intent and
methods, but is it equally so regarding their power; is the
strength of domestic Communists as great as that of
international Communism? It is said, that many liberals
refused to recognize that Communists constituted a
security problem or that planned infiltration existed. This
is rather a blanket charge, but even if largely true, the
"hard" anti-Communists refuse to recognize the dimension
of time. The question is: what is the degree of the present-
day Communist infiltration? Pressed at this point some
"hard" anti-Communists admit that the number of actual
Communists may be small, but that the real problem
arises because the liberals, especially in the large Eastern
universities, are predominantly "anti-anti Communists."
But what is the content of this "anti-anti Communism?"
That it won t admit that the Communists constitute a
present danger. And so we are back where we started.

The polarization of images reflects itself in a strange
set, too, of contrasting conceptions about power position.
The liberals, particularly in the universities, have felt
themselves subject to attack by powerful groups; the pro-
McCarthy intellectuals see themselves as a persecuted
group, discriminated against in the major opinion forming
centers in the land. A personal incident is relevant here
A few years ago I encountered Robert Morris, the coun
sel then for the Jenner Committee on internal subversion
He complained of the "terrible press" his committee was
receiving. What press, he was asked; after all, the great
Hearst and Scripps-Howard and Gannett chains, as well
as an overwhelming number of newspaper dailies, had
^thusia^tically supported and reported tfie work of the
Committee. I wasn t thinking of them, he replied. I

was

INTERPRETATIONS OF AMERICAN POLITICS 25

thinking of the New York Times, the Washington Post, the
St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

The paradoxical fact is that on traditional economic
issues, these "liberal" papers are conservative. 23 All three
supported Eisenhower. Yet, traditional conservative issues
no longer count in dividing "liberals" from "anti-Com
munists." The only issue is whether one is "hard" or
"soft/ And so, an amorphous, ideological issue, rather
than an interest-group issue, has become a major dividing
line in the political community.

The "ideologizing" of politics gains reinforcement from
a third, somewhat independent tendency in American life,
the emergence of what may be called the "symbolic
groups." These are the inchoate, often ill-coordinated
entities, known generally, in capital letters, as "Labor,"
"Business," the "Farmers," et al. The assumption is made
that these entities have a coherent philosophy and a de
fined purpose and represent actual forces. But is this true
in a society so multi-fractioned and interest-divided?

The utilitarians, the first to give politics a calculus, and
thus begin an experimental social science, made a distinc
tion between a social decision (the common purpose)
and the sum total of individual self-interest decisions.
Adam Smith assumed a natural harmony, if not identity,
between the two. But Jeremy Bentham knew that such
identity was artificial, although he felt that they could
be reconciled by an intelligent legislator through "a
well-regulated application of punishments." 24 The dis
tinction between the self-interest and social decisions
might be reworked in modern idiom as one between
"market" and "ideological" decisions. The first represents
a series of choices based on the rational self-interest of
the individual or organization, with the aim of maximizing
profit or the survival or enhancement of the organization.
The second represents decisions, based on some purpose
clothed in moral terms, in which the goal is deemed so

26 The New American Right

important as to override when necessary the individual
self-interest. 25

In modern society, the clash between ideological and
market decisions is often as intense within groups, as
between groups. The "labor movement," for example, has
strongly favored lower tariffs and broader international
trade; yet the seamen s union has urged that U.S. govern
ment aid be shipped in American, not foreign bottoms,
while the textile unions have fought for quotas on foreign
imports. Politically minded unionists, like Mike Quill in
New York, have had to choose between a wage increase
for their members against a rise in transit fares for the
public at large. Interest rivalries are often more direct.
The teamsters unions have lobbied against the railroad
unions and the coal miners against the oil workers. In
every broad group these interest conflicts have taken
place, within industry, farm, and every other functional
group in the society.

The tendency to convert interest groups into "symbolic
groups" derives from varied sources. Much of it comes
from "vulgar" Marxist thinking, with its image of a self-
conscious, coordinated Business class (as in Jack London s
image of "the oligarchs" in his The Iron Heel, and the
stereotypes of "Wall Street"). Some of this was taken over
by the New Dealers with their image of "America s Sixty
Families." But the biggest impetus has come from the
changing nature of political decision-making and the
mode of opinion formation in modern society. The fact
that decision-making has been centralized into the nar
row cockpit of Washington, rather than the impersonal
market, leads groups like the National Association of
Manufacturers, the Farm Bureau, the A.F of L et al
to speak for "Business," for the ^Farmers," for "L&or"
At the same time, with the increased sensitivity to "public
opinion, heightened by the introduction of the mass
polling technique, the "citizen" (not the specific-interest

INTEBPRETAT10NS OF AMERICAN POLITICS 27

individual) is asked what "Business" or "Labor" or the
"Farmer" should do. In effect, these groups are often
forced to assume an identity and greater coherence be
yond their normal intra-mural interest conflicts. A result
again is that political debate moves from specific interest
clashes, in which issues can be identified and possibly
compromised, to ideologically-tinged conflicts which
polarize the groups and divide the society.

The essays in this book are primarily analytical. Yet
they also point implicitly to a dangerous situation. The
tendency to convert issues into ideologies, to invest them
with moral color and high emotional charge, invites con
flicts which can only damage a society. "A nation, divided
irreconcilably on principle/ each party believing itself
pure white and the other pitch black, cannot govern
itself," wrote a younger Walter Lippmann.

The saving glory of the United States is that politics
has always been a pragmatic give-and-take rather than a
series of wars-to-the-death. One ultimately comes to ad
mire the "practical politics" of a Theodore Roosevelt and
his scorn for the intransigents, like Godkin and Villard,
who, refusing to yield to expediency, could never put
through their reforms. Politics, as Edmund Wilson has
described T.R/s attitude, "is a matter of adapting oneself
to all sorts of people and situations, a game in which one
may score but only by accepting the rules and recognizing
one s opponents, rather than a moral crusade in which
one s stainless standard must mow the enemy down/ 26

Democratic politics is bargaining and consensus be
cause the historic contribution of liberalism was to sepa
rate law from morality. The thought that the two should
be separate often comes as a shock. Yet, in the older
Catholic societies, ruled by the doctrine of "two swords,"
the state was the secular arm of the Church, and enforced
in civil life the moral decrees of the Church. This was

s8 The New American Right

possible, in political theory, if not in practice, because
the society was homogeneous and everyone accepted
the same religious values. But the religious wars that fol
lowed the Reformation proved that a plural society could
only survive if it respected the principles of toleration.
No group, be it Catholic or Protestant, could use the
state to impose its moral conceptions on all the people.
As the party of the Politiques put it, the "civil society
must not perish for conscience s sake/ 27

These theoretical foundations of modern liberal society
were completed by Kant, who, separating legality and
morality, defined die former as the "rules of die game"
so to speak; law dealt with procedural, not substantive
issues. The latter were private matters of conscience with
which the state could not interfere.

This distinction has been at the root of the American
democracy. For Madison, factions (or interests) were
inevitable and the function of the republic was to protect
the causes of faction, i.e., liberty and "the diversity in
the faculties of men." As an interpreter of Madison writes,
"free men, diverse man, fallible, heterogeneous, hetero
dox, opinionated, quarrelsome man was the raw material
of faction." 2 * Since faction was inevitable, one could only
deal with its effects, and not smother its causes. One
curbed these effects by a federal form of government, by
separation of powers, et al But for Madison two answers
were central: first, an extensive republic, since a larger
geographical area, and therefore a larger number of
interests, would lessen the insecurity of private rights"
and second, the guarantee of representative government

Representative government, as John Stuart MiU has so
cogently pointed out, means representation of all interests
since the interest of the excluded is always in danger of
being overlooked." And being overlooked, as CaLun
pointed out, constitutes a threat to civil order. But renre
sentative government is important for the deeper reason

INTEBPKETATIONS OF AMERICAN POLITICS 2Q

that by including all representative interests one can keep
up "the antagonism of influences which is the only real
security for continued progress/ 29 It is the only way of
providing the "concurrent majorities" which, as Calhoun
knew so well, were the solid basis for providing a check
on the tyrannical "popular" majority. Only through repre
sentative government can one achieve consensus and
conciliation.

This is not to say that the Communist "interest" is a
legitimate one, or that the Communist issue is irrelevant.
As a conspiracy, rather than as a legitimate dissenting
group, the Communist movement is a threat to any demo
cratic society. And, within the definition of "clear and
present danger," a democratic society may have to act
against that conspiracy. But these are questions to be
handled by law, The tendency to use the Communist issue
as a political club against other parties or groups (i.e. to
provide an ideological guilt by association), or the ten
dency to convert questions of law into issues of morality
(and thus shift the source of sanctions from courts and
legitimate authority to private individuals), imposes a
great strain on democratic society.

In almost 170 years since its founding American democ
racy has been rent only once by civil war. We have
learned since then, not without strain, to include the
"excluded interests," the populist farmers and the orga
nized workers. These economic interest groups take a
legitimate place in the society and the ideological con
flicts that once threatened to disrupt the society, particu
larly in the New Deal period, have been mitigated. The
new divisions created by the status anxieties of new
middle class groups pose a new threat, The rancor of
McCarthyism was one of its ugly excesses. Yet, the
United States, so huge and complex that no single political
boss or any single political grouping has ever been able
to dominate it, may in time diminish these divisions. This

30 The New American Right

is an open society, and these status anxieties are part of
the price we pay for that openness.

1 For an elaboration of the role of political contexts affecting attitudes,
see the remarks following by Glazer and Lipset, on page 141; also, S, M.
Lipset, Agrarian Socialism (University of California Press), pp. 224
passim.

2 Charles A. Beard, An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution
(New York, 1935 edition), page 324.

3 See Dixon Ryan Fox, The Decline of the Aristocracy in the Politics
of New York.

4 Cited in Charles A. Beard, The Rise of American Civilization ( 1940
edition), Vol. 1, page 574.

6 Cited in "American Individualism: Fact and Fiction," by A. T.
Mason. American Political Science Review, March, 1952. Professor
Mason s paper is the most concise account I know of the struggle be
tween private economic power and popular political control in the
United States.

6 A. T. Mason, ibid., page 5.

7 John R. Commons and associates, History of Labour in the United
States, Vol. 1, page 531.

8 A. N. Holcombe, The New Party Politics (New York, 1933) page 11

9 See Samuel LubeU, The Future of American Politics (New York
1952); Louis Harris, I* There a Republican Majority? (New York, 1955).

10 For an extended discussion of the role of interest groups in Ameri
can politics, see David Truman, The Governmental Process (New York,
1951 j .

24&J59) ^^ BieSman> The Lmel y Crowd (Anchor edition, pp.

12 The amorphousness of power in contemporary United States and its
relationship to the break-up of "family capitalism," in the United States

S J^ OP f ,v y n 6 "?** ^ V a P er on " The Ambiguities of the Mass
T^ w th % C ,omplerities f American Life," presented at a confer
ence in Milan Italy, m September, 1955 on "The Future of Freedom."

proceedinss f

llf 7 contr lle * * ** ^wer than five percent of

a peak contrd of

A " ~"~ ^"wjj. Aii^iiuuci o jjj. jj 4.U J.y^^t

sST?^- * astts-cras

aetore the Civil War and immigration, discrimination in America

INTEBPRETATIONS OF AMERICAN POLITICS 31

was almost solely on religious grounds. In the decades that followed, the
rising social classes began to create status demarcations. For an excellent
account of the turning-point in social discrimination in America, i.e., its
emergence in an egalitarian society, see the essay by Oscar Handlin,
"The Acquisition of Political and Social Rights by tie Jews in the United
States*" in the American Jewish Yearbook, 1955.

In the expansion and prosperity of the 1870 s and 1880 s, Professor
Handlin points out, "many a man having earned a fortune, even a
modest one, thereafter found himself laboring under the burden of com
plex anxieties. He knew that success was by its nature evanescent. For
tunes were made only to be lost; what was earned in one generation
would disappear in the next. Such a man, therefore, wished not only to
retain that which he had gained; he was also eager for the social
recognition that would permit him to enjoy his possessions; and he
sought to extend these on in time through his family. . . . The last
decades of the nineteenth century therefore witnessed a succession of
attempts to set up areas of exclusiveness that would mark ojE the favored
groups and protect them against excessive contact with outsiders. In
imitation of the English model, there was an effort to create a *high
society* with its own protocol and conventions, with suitable residences
in suitable districts, with distinctive clubs and media of entertainment,
all of which would mark off and preserve the wealth of the fortunate
families."

For an account of a parallel development in England, see the essay
by Miriam Beard hi the volume by Graeber and Britt, Jews in a Gentile
World. For the sources of discrimination in American traditions and
populism, see Daniel Bell, "The Grassroots of Jew Hatred in America,"
The Jewish Frontier, June 1944.

16 Svend Ranulf, Moral Indignation and Middle Class Psychology,
Copenhagen, 1938.

17 De Tocqueville, Democracy in America. New York, 1945, volume
II, page 134.

18 H. Richard Niebuhr, Social Sources of Denominationdism, New
York, 1929, page 141.

19 See W. W. Sweet, Revivalism in America, New York, 1944.

20 Shooting an Elephant and Other Essays, New York, 1950.

21 Granville Hicks, Where We Came Out, New York, 1954.

22 1 have attempted to assemble some of that evidence in my essay on
the history of American Marxist parties in the volume Socialism and
American Life, edited by Egbert and Persons, Princeton, 1952.

23 The sense of being a hunted, isolated minority is reflected quite
vividly in an editorial note in The FreemanJune, 1955: "Since the
advent of the New Deal (An Americanized version of Fabian socialism)
the mass circulation media in this country have virtually closed their
columns to opposition articles. For this they can hardly be blamed; their
business is to sell paper at so much a pound and advertising space at so
much a line. They must give the masses what they believe the masses
want, if they are to maintain their mass circulation business; and there
is no doubt that the promises of socialism reiterated by the propaganda
machine of the government, have made it popular and dulled the public
mind to the verities of freedom."

24 Jeremy Bentham, Principles of Morals and Legislation, Oxford edi-

o The New American Right

tion, page 3; see also, Elie Halevy, Growth of Philosophical Radicalism,
New York, 1928; pp. 14-18.

25 The distinction, thus, is more than one between opinion and be
havior. Quite often an ideological decision will have greater weight for
a group than immediate self-interest (defined in rational market terms),
and the group will act on the basis of ideology. The task of a realistic
social psychology is to identify under what circumstances the ideological
or market conditions will prevail.

as Edmund Wilson, in Eight Essays, New York, 1954 (Anchor Books),
page 213.

27 See Harold J. Laski, The Rise of Liberalism, New York, 1938, pp.
43-51. Also, Franz Neumann, Behemoth, New York, pp. 442-447.

28 See Neal Riemer, "J ames Madison s Theory of the Self -Destructive
Features of Republican Government," Ethics.

29 See John Stuart Mill, Representative Government ( Everyman edi
tion, 1936), pp. 209, 201.

The Pseudo-Conservative Revolt

RICHARD HOFSTADTER

TWENTY YEARS ago the dynamic
force in American political life came from the side of
liberal dissent, from the impulse to reform the inequities
of our economic, and social system and to change our
ways of doing things, to the end that the sufferings of the
Great Depression would never be repeated. Today the
dynamic force in our political life no longer comes from
the liberals who made the New Deal possible. By 1952
the liberals had had at least the trappings of power for
twenty years. They could look back to a brief, exciting
period in the mid-thirties when they had held power
itself and had been able to transform the economic and
administrative life of the nation. After twenty years the

33

34 The New American Right

New Deal liberals have quite unconsciously taken on the
psychology of those who have entered into possession.
Moreover, a large part of the New Deal public, the
jobless, distracted and bewildered men of 1933, have in
the course of the years found substantial places in society
for themselves, have become home-owners, suburbanites
and solid citizens. Many of them still keep the emotional
commitments to the liberal dissent with which they grew
up politically, but their social position is one of solid
comfort. Among them the dominant tone has become one
of satisfaction, even of a kind of conservatism. Insofar as
Adlai Stevenson won their enthusiasm in 1952, it was not
in spite of, but in part because of the air of poised and
reliable conservatism that he brought to the Democratic
convention. By comparison, Harry Truman s impassioned
rhetoric, with its occasional thrusts at "Wall Street,"
seemed passe and rather embarrassing. The change did
not escape Stevenson himself. "The strange alchemy of
time," he said in a speech at Columbus, "has somehow
converted the Democrats into the truly conservative party
of this country the party dedicated to conserving all that
is best, and building solidly and safely on these founda
tions." The most that the old liberals can now envisage is
not to carry on with some ambitious new program, but
simply to defend as much as possible of the old achieve
ments and to try to keep traditional liberties of expression
that are threatened.

There is, however, a dynamic of dissent in America
today. Representing no more than a modest fraction of
the electorate, it is not so powerful as the liberal dissent
of the New Deal era, but it is powerful enough to set the
tone of our political life and to establish throughout the
country a kind of punitive reaction. The new dissent is
certainly not radical-there are hardly any radicals of any
sort left-nor is it precisely conservative. Unlike most of
the liberal dissent of the past, the new dissent not only

THE PSEUDO-CONSERVATIVE REVOLT 35

has no respect for non-conformism, but is based upon a
relentless demand for conformity, It can most accurately
be called pseudo-conservative I borrow the term from
the study of The Authoritarian Personality published five
years ago by Theodore W. Adorno and his associates
because its exponents, although they believe themselves
to be conservatives and usually employ the rhetoric of
conservatism, show signs of a serious and restless dissatis
faction with American life, traditions and institutions.
They have little in common with the temperate and com
promising spirit of true conservatism in the classical sense
of the word, and they are far from pleased with the domi
nant practical conservatism of the moment as it is repre
sented by the Eisenhower Administration. Their political
reactions express rather a profound if largely unconscious
hatred of our society and its ways a hatred which one
would hesitate to impute to them if one did not have sug
gestive clinical evidence.

From clinical interviews and thematic apperception
tests, Adorno and his co-workers found that their pseudo-
conservative subjects, although given to a form of politi
cal expression that combines a curious mixture of largely
conservative with occasional radical notions, succeed in
concealing from themselves impulsive tendencies that, if
released in action, would be very far from conservative.
The pseudo-conservative, Adorno writes, shows "conven
tionality and authoritarian submissiveness" in his con
scious thinking and "violence, anarchic impulses, and
chaotic destructiveness in the unconscious sphere. . . .
The pseudo conservative is a man who, in the name of
upholding traditional American values and institutions
and defending them against more or less fictitious dan
gers, consciously or unconsciously aims at their aboli
tion," 1

Who is the pseudo-conservative, and what does he
want? It is impossible to identify him by class, for the

36 The New American Right

pseudo-conservative impulse can be found in practically
all classes in society, although its power probably rests
largely upon its appeal to the less educated members of
the middle classes. The ideology of pseudo-conservatism
can be characterized but not defined, because the pseudo-
conservative tends to be more than ordinarily incoherent
about politics. The lady who, when General Eisenhower s
victory over Senator Taft had finally become official,
stalked out of the Hilton Hotel declaiming, "This means
eight more years of socialism" was probably a fairly good
representative of the pseudo-conservative mentality. So
also were the gentlemen who, at the Freedom Congress
held at Omaha over a year ago by some "patriotic" organi
zations, objected to Earl Warren s appointment to the
Supreme Court with the assertion: "Middle-of-the-road
thinking can and will destroy us"; the general who spoke
to the same group, demanding "an Air Force capable of
wiping^ out the Russian Air Force and industry in one
sweep," but also "a material reduction in military expen
ditures" 2 the people who a few years ago believed simul
taneously that we had no business to be fighting com
munism in Korea, but that the war should immediately
be extended to an Asia-wide crusade against communism-
and the most ardent supporters of the Bricker Amend
ment Many of the most zealous Mowers of Senator
McCarthy are also pseudo-conservatives, although there
arepresumably a great many others who are not.

The restlessness, suspicion and fear manifested in vari
ous phases of the pseudo-conservative revolt give evidence
of the real suffering which the pseudo-conservative ex-
penences in his capacity as a citizen. He believes himself

fa^stTeir I * Whidl ^ iS Spled Up n P Iotted

^^^s?^3S^?

fj^*!. T_ , uppoj>ea to almost evervthincr

that has happened in American politics for the past twenty

THE PSEXJBO-CONSEKVATIVE BEVOLT 37

years. He hates the very thought of Franklin D. Roosevelt.
He is disturbed deeply by American participation in the
United Nations, which he can see only as a sinister
organization. He sees his own country as being so weak
that it is constantly about to fall victim to subversion;
and yet he feels that it is so all-powerful that any failure
it may experience in getting its way in the world for
instance, in the Orient cannot possibly be due to its
limitations but must be attributed to its having been
betrayed. 3 He is the most bitter of all our citizens about
our involvement in the wars of the past, but seems the
least concerned about avoiding the next one. While he
naturally does not like Soviet communism, what dis
tinguishes him from the rest of us who also dislike it is
that he shows little interest in, is often indeed bitterly
hostile to such realistic measures as might actually
strengthen the United States vis-a-vis Russia. He would
much rather concern himself with the domestic scene,
where communism is weak, than with those areas of the
world where it is really strong and threatening. He wants
to have nothing to do with the democratic nations of
Western Europe, which seem to draw more of his ire
than the Soviet Communists, and he is opposed to all
"give-away programs" designed to aid and strengthen
these nations. Indeed, he is likely to be antagonistic to
most of the operations of our federal government except
Congressional investigations, and to almost all of its ex
penditures. Not always, however, does he go so far as the
speaker at the Freedom Congress who attributed the
greater part of our national difficulties to "this nasty,
stinking 16th [income tax] Amendment."

A great deal of pseudo-conservative thinking takes the
form of trying to devise means of absolute protection
against that betrayal by our own officialdom which the
pseudo-conservative feels is always imminent. The Bricker
Amendment, indeed, might be taken as one of the primary

g8 The New American Right

symptoms of pseudo-conservatism. Every dissenting move
ment brings its demand for Constitutional changes; and
the pseudo-conservative revolt, far from being an excep
tion to this principle, seems to specialize in Constitutional
revision, at least as a speculative enterprise. The wide
spread latent hostility toward American institutions takes
the form, among other things, of a flood of proposals to
write drastic changes into the body of our fundamental
law. Last summer, in a characteristically astute piece,
Richard Rovere pointed out that Constitution-amending
had become almost a major diversion in the Eighty-third
Congress. 4 About a hundred amendments were introduced
and referred to committee. Several of these called for the
repeal of the income tax. Several embodied formulas of
various kinds to limit non-military expenditures to some
fixed portion of the national income. One proposed to bar
all federal expenditures on "the general welfare"; another,
to prohibit American troops from serving in any foreign
country except on the soil of the potential enemy; another,
to redefine treason to embrace not only persons trying to
overthrow the government but also those trying to
"weaken" it, even by peaceful means. The last proposal
might bring the pseudo-conservative rebels themselves
under the ban of treason: for the sum total of these
amendments might easily serve to bring the whole struc
ture of American society crashing to the ground.

As Mr. Rovere points out, it is not unusual for a large
number of Constitutional amendments to be lying about
somewhere in the Congressional hoppers. What is unusual
is the readiness the Senate has shown to give them
respectful consideration, and the peculiar populistic argu
ments some of its leading members have used to justify
referring them to the state legislatures. While the ordinary
Congress hardly ever has occasion to consider more than
erne amendment the Eighty-third Congress saw six Con
stitutional amendments brought to the floor of the Senate

THE PSEUDO-CONSERVATIVE REVOLT 39

all summoning simple majorities, and four winning the
two-thirds majority necessary before they can be sent to
the House and ultimately to the state legislatures. It must
be added that, with the possible exception of the Bricker
Amendment itself, none of the six amendments so honored
can be classed with the most extreme proposals. But the
pliability of the senators, the eagerness of some of them
to pass the buck and defer to "the people of the country,"
suggests how strong they feel the pressure to be for some
kind of change that will give expression to that vague
desire to repudiate the past that underlies the pseudo-
conservative revolt.

One of the most urgent questions we can ask about
the United States in our time is the question of where all
this sentiment arose. The readiest answer is that the new
pseudo-conservatism is simply the old ultra-conservatism
and the old isolationism heightened by the extraordinary
pressures of the contemporary world. This answer, true
though it may be, gives a deceptive sense of familiarity
without much deepening our understanding, for the par
ticular patterns of American isolationism and extreme
right-wing thinking have themselves not been very satis
factorily explored. It will not do, to take but one example,
to say that some people want the income tax amendment
repealed because taxes have become very heavy in the
past twenty years: for this will not explain why, of three
people in die same tax bracket, one will grin and bear it
and continue to support social welfare legislation as well
as an adequate defense, while another responds by sup
porting in a matter-of-fact way the practical conservative
leadership of the moment, and the third finds his feelings
satisfied only by the angry conspiratorial accusations and
extreme demands of the pseudo-conservative.

No doubt the circumstances determining the political
style of any individual are complex. Although I am con
cerned here to discuss some of the neglected social-

40 The New American Right

psychological elements in pseudo-conservatism, I do not
wish to appear to deny the presence of important econo
mic and political causes. I am aware, for instance, that
wealthy reactionaries try to use pseudo-conservative or
ganizers, spokesmen and groups to propagate their notions
of public policy, and that some organizers of pseudo-
conservative and "patriotic" groups often find in this work
a means of making a living thus turning a tendency
toward paranoia into a vocational asset, probably one of
the most perverse forms of occupational therapy known
to man. A number of other circumstances the drastic
inflation and heavy taxes of our time, the dissolution of
American urban life, considerations of partisan political
expediency also play a part. But none of these things
seem to explain the broad appeal of pseudo-conservatism,
its emotional intensity, its dense and massive irrationality,
or some of the peculiar ideas it generates. Nor will they
explain why those who profit by the organized movements
find such a ready following among a large number of
people, and why the rank-and-file janizaries of pseudo-
conservatism are so eager to hurl accusations, write letters
to congressmen and editors, and expend so much emo
tional energy and crusading idealism upon causes that
plainly bring them no material reward.

Elmer Davis, seeking to account for such sentiment in
his recent book, But We Were Bom Free, ventures a
psychological hypothesis. He concludes, if I understand
him correctly, that the genuine difficulties of our situation
in the face of the power of international communism have
inspired a widespread feeling of fear and frustration, and
that those who cannot face these problems in a more
rational way "take it out on their less influential neigh
bors, in the mood of a man who, being afraid to stand
up to his wife in a domestic argument, relieves his feelings
by kicking ; the cat/- This suggestion has the merit of
both simplicity and plausibility, and it may begin to
account for a portion of the pseudo-conservative public

THE PSEUDO-CONSERVATIVE REVOLT 41

But while we may dismiss our curiosity about the man
who kicks the cat by remarking that some idiosyncrasy in
his personal development has brought him to this pass,
we can hardly help but wonder whether there are not,
in the backgrounds of the hundreds of thousands of
persons who are moved by the pseudo-conservative im
pulse, some commonly shared circumstances that will help
to account for their all kicking the cat in unison.

All of us have reason to fear the power of international
communism, and all our lives are profoundly affected by
it. Why do some Americans try to face this threat for
what it is, a problem that exists in a world-wide theater
of action, while others try to reduce it largely to a matter
of domestic conformity? Why do some of us prefer to look
for allies in the democratic world, while others seem to
prefer authoritarian allies or none at all? Why do the
pseudo-conservatives express such a persistent fear and
suspicion of their own government, whether its leadership
rests in the hands of Roosevelt, Truman or Eisenhower?
Why is the pseudo-conservative impelled to go beyond
the more or less routine partisan argument that we have
been the victims of considerable misgovernment during
the past twenty years to the disquieting accusation that
we have actually been the victims of persistent con
spiracy and betrayal "twenty years of treason"? Is it not
true, moreover, that political types very similar to the
pseudo-conservative have had a long history in the
United States, and that this history goes back to a time
when the Soviet power did not loom nearly so large on
our mental horizons? Was the Ku Klux Klan, for instance,
which was responsibly estimated to have had a member
ship of from 4,000,000 to 4,500,000 persons at its peak
in the 1920 s, a phenomenon totally dissimilar to the
pseudo-conservative revolt?

What I wish to suggest and I do so in the spirit of one
setting forth nothing more than a speculative hypothesis
is that pseudo-conservatism is in good part a product of

42. The New American Right

the rootlessness and heterogeneity of American life, and
above all, of its peculiar scramble for status and its
peculiar search for secure identity. Normally there is a
world of difference between one s sense of national iden
tity or cultural belonging and one s social status. How
ever, in American historical development, these two
things, so easily distinguishable in analysis, have been
jumbled together in reality, and it is precisely this that
has given such a special poignancy and urgency to our
status-strivings. In this country a person s status that is,
his relative place in the prestige hierarchy of his com
munityand his rudimentary sense of belonging to the
community-that is, what we call his "Americanism"
have been intimately joined. Because, as a people ex
tremely democratic in our social institutions, we have had
no clear, consistent and recognizable system of status,
our personal status problems have an unusual intensity.
Because we no longer have the relative ethnic homo
geneity we had up to about eighty years ago, our sense
of belonging has long had about it a high degree of
uncertainty. We boast of "the melting pot," but we are
not quite sure what it is that will remain when we have
been melted down.

We have always been proud of the high degree of oc
cupational mobility in our country-of the greater readi
ness, as compared with other countries, with which a
person starting in a very humble place in our social
structure could rise to a position of moderate wealth and
status, and with which a person starting with a middling
position could rise to great eminence. We have looked
upon this as laudable in principle, for it is democratic
and as pragmatically desirable, for it has served many a
man as a stimulus to effort and has, no doubt, a great
deal to do with the energetic and effectual tone of our
economic life. The American pattern of occupational
mobility, while often much exaggerated, as in the Horatio

THE PSEUDO-CONSERVATIVE REVOLT 43

Alger stories and a great deal of the rest of our mythology,
may properly be credited with many of the virtues and
beneficial effects that are usually attributed to it. But this
occupational and social mobility, compounded by our
extraordinary mobility from place to place, has also had
its less frequently recognized drawbacks. Not the least of
them is that this has become a country in which so many
people do not know who they are or what they are or
what they belong to or what belongs to them. It is a
country of people whose status expectations are random
and uncertain, and yet whose status aspirations have been
whipped up to a high pitch by our democratic ethos and
our rags-to-riches mythology. 6

In a country where physical needs have been, by the
scale of the world s living standards, on the whole well
met, the luxury of questing after status has assumed an
unusually prominent place in our civic consciousness.
Political life is not simply an arena in which the con
flicting interests of various social groups in concrete
material gains are fought out; it is also an arena into
which status aspirations and frustrations are, as the psy
chologists would say, projected. It is at this point that
the issues of politics, or the pretended issues of politics,
become interwoven with and dependent upon the per
sonal problems of individuals. We have, at all times, two
kinds of processes going on in inextricable connection
with each other: interest politics, the clash of material
aims and needs among various groups and blocs; and
status politics, the clash of various projective rationaliza
tions arising from status aspirations and other personal
motives. In times of depression and economic discontent
and by and large in times of acute national emergency
politics is more clearly a matter of interests, although
of course status considerations are still present. In times
of prosperity and general well-being on the material
plane, status considerations among the masses can become

44 The New American Right

much more influential in our politics. The two periods in
our recent history in which status politics has been par
ticularly prominent, the present era and the 1920 s, have
both been periods of prosperity,

During depressions, the dominant motif in dissent takes
expression in proposals for reform or in panaceas. Dissent
then tends to be highly programmatic that is, it gets
itself embodied in many kinds of concrete legislative pro
posals. It is also future-oriented and forward-looking, in
the sense that it looks to a time when the adoption of
this or that program will materially alleviate or eliminate
certain discontents. In prosperity, however, when status
politics becomes relatively more important, there is a ten
dency to embody discontent not so much in legislative
proposals as in grousing. For the basic aspirations that
underlie status discontent are only partially conscious;
and, even so far as they are conscious, it is difficult to give
them a programmatic expression. It is more difficult for
the old lady who belongs to the D.A.R. and who sees her
ancestral home swamped by new working-class dwellings
to express her animus in concrete proposals of any degree
of reality than it is, say, for the jobless worker during a
slump to rally to a relief program. Therefore, it is the
tendency of status politics to be expressed more in vin-
dictiveness, in sour memories, in the search for scape
goats, than in realistic proposals for positive action. 7

Paradoxically the intense status concerns of present-day
politics are shared by two types of persons who arrive
at them, in a sense, from opposite directions. The first are
found among some types of old-family, Anglo-Saxon
Protestants, and the second are found among many types
of immigrant families, most notably among the Germans
and Irish, who are very frequently Catholic. The Anglo-
Saxons are most disposed toward pseudo-conservatism
when they are losing caste, the immigrants when they are
gaining. 8

THE PSEUDO-CONSERVATIVE REVOLT 45

Consider first the old-family Americans. These people,
whose stocks were once far more unequivocally dominant
in America than they are today, feel that their ancestors
made and settled and fought for this country. They have
a certain inherited sense of proprietorship in it. Since
America has always accorded a certain special deference
to old families so many of our families are new these
people have considerable claims to status hy descent,
which they celebrate by membership in such organiza
tions as the D.A.R. and the S.A.R. But large numbers of
them are actually losing their other claims to status. For
there are among them a considerable number of the
shabby genteel, of those who for one reason or another
have lost their old objective positions in the life of busi
ness and politics and the professions, and who therefore
cling with exceptional desperation to such remnants of
their prestige as they can muster from their ancestors.
These people, although very often quite well-to-do, feel
that they have been pushed out of their rightful place in
American life, even out of their neighborhoods. Most of
them have been traditional Republicans by family inher
itance, and they have felt themselves edged aside by the
immigrants, the trade unions, and the urban machines in
the past thirty years. When the immigrants were weak,
these native elements used to indulge themselves in
ethnic and religious snobberies at their expense. 9 Now the
immigrant groups have developed ample means, political
and economic, of self-defense, and the second and third
generations have become considerably more capable of
looking out for themselves, Some of the old-family Ameri
cans have turned to find new objects for their resentment
among liberals, left-wingers, intellectuals and the like
for in true pseudo-conservative fashion they relish weak
victims and shrink from asserting themselves against the
strong.

New-family Americans have had their own peculiar

46 The New American Right

status problem. From 1881 to 1900 over 8,800,000 immi
grants came here, during the next twenty years another
14,500,000. These immigrants, together with their descen
dants, constitute such a large portion of the population
that Margaret Mead, in a stimulating analysis of our
national character, has persuasively urged that the char
acteristic American outlook is now a third-generation
point of view. 10 In their search for new lives and new
nationality, these immigrants have suffered much, and
they have been rebuffed and made to feel inferior by the
"native stock," commonly being excluded from the better
occupations and even from what has bitterly been called
"first-class citizenship." Insecurity over social status has
thus been naked with insecurity over one s very identity
and sense of belonging. Achieving a better type of job or
a better social status and becoming "more American" have
become practically synonymous, and the passions that
ordinarily attach to social position have been vastly
heightened by being associated with the need to belong.
The problems raised by the tasks of keeping the family
together, disciplining children for the American race for
success, trying to conform to unfamiliar standards, pro
tecting economic and social status won at the cost of
much sacrifice, holding the respect of children who grow
American more rapidly than their parents, have thrown
heavy burdens on the internal relationships of many new
American families. Both new and old American families
have been troubled by the changes of the past thirty
years-the new because of their striving for middle-class
respectability and American identity, the old because of
their efforts to maintain an inherited social position and
to realize under increasingly unfavorable social conditions
imperatives of character and personal conduct deriving
from nineteenth-century, Yankee-Protestant-rural back
grounds The relations between generations, being cast
in no stable mold, have been disordered, and the status

THE PSEUDO-CONSERVATIVE REVOLT 47

anxieties of parents have been inflicted upon children. 11
Often parents entertain status aspirations that they are
unable to gratify, or that they can gratify only at excep
tional psychic cost. Their children are expected to relieve
their frustrations and redeem their lives. They become
objects to be manipulated to that end. An extraordinarily
high level of achievement is expected of them, and along
with it a tremendous effort to conform and be respectable.
From the standpoint of the children these expectations
often appear in the form of an exorbitantly demanding
authority that one dare not question or defy. Resistance
and hostility, finding no moderate outlet in give-and-take,
have to be suppressed, and reappear in the form of an
internal destructive rage. An enormous hostility to au
thority, which cannot be admitted to consciousness, calls
forth a massive overcompensation which is manifest in
the form of extravagant submissiveness to strong power.
Among those found by Adorno and his colleagues to have
strong ethnic prejudices and pseudo-conservative tenden
cies, there is a high proportion of persons who have been
unable to develop the capacity to criticize justly and in
moderation the failings of parents and who are pro
foundly intolerant of the ambiguities of thought and
feeling that one is so likely to find in real-life situations.
For pseudo-conservatism is among other things a disorder
in relation to authority, characterized by an inability to
find other modes for human relationship than those of
more or less complete domination or submission. The
pseudo-conservative always imagines himself to be domi
nated and imposed upon because he feels that he is not
dominant, and knows of no other way of interpreting his
position. He imagines that his own government and his
own leadership are engaged in a more or less continuous
conspiracy against him because he has come to think of
authority only as something that aims to manipulate and
deprive him. It is for this reason, among others, that he

48 The New American Right

enjoys seeing outstanding generals, distinguished secre
taries of state, and prominent scholars browbeaten and
humiliated.

Status problems take on a special importance in Ameri
can life because a very large part of the population suffers
from one of the most troublesome of all status questions:
unable to enjoy the simple luxury of assuming their own
nationality as a natural event, they are tormented by a
nagging doubt as to whether they are really and truly and
fully American. Since their forebears voluntarily left one
country and embraced another, they cannot, as people do
elsewhere, think of nationality as something that comes
with birth; for them it is a matter of choice, and an object
of striving. This is one reason why problems of "loyalty"
arouse such an emotional response in many Americans
and why it is so hard in the American climate of opinion
to make any clear distinction between the problem of
national security and the question of personal loyalty. Of
course there is no real reason to doubt the loyalty to
America of the immigrants and their descendants, or
their willingness to serve the country as fully as if their
ancestors had lived here for three centuries. None the
less, they have been thrown on the defensive by those
who have in the past cast doubts upon the fullness of
their Americanism. Possibly they are also, consciously or
unconsciously, troubled by the thought that since their
forebears have already abandoned one country one alle
giance, their own national allegiance might be considered
ficlde. For this I believe there is some evidence in our
national practices. What other country finds it so neces-
saiy to create institutional rituals for the sole purpose of
guaranteeing to its people the genuineness of their na-
FrenClmian or the

or e

Itahan find it necessary to speak of himself as "one hun
dred per cent English, French or Italian? Do they find
it necessary to have their equivalents of "I Am an Ameri-

THE PSEUDO-CONSERVATIVE REVOLT 49

can Day"? When they disagree with one another over
national policies, do they find it necessary to call one
another un-English, un-French or un-Italian? No doubt
they too are troubled by subversive activities and espi
onage, but are their countenneasures taken under the
name of committees on un-English, un-French or un-
Italian activities?

The primary value of patriotic societies and anti-sub
versive ideologies to their exponents can be found here.
They provide additional and continued reassurance both
to those who are of old American ancestry and have other
status grievances and to those who are of recent American
ancestry and therefore feel in need of reassurance about
their nationality. Veterans organizations offer the same
satisfaction what better evidence can there be of the
genuineness of nationality and of earned citizenship than
military service under the flag of one s country? Of course
such organizations, once they exist, are liable to exploita
tion by vested interests that can use them as pressure
groups on behalf of particular measures and interests.
(Veterans groups, since they lobby for the concrete
interests of veterans, have a double role in this respect )
But the cement that Tiolds them together is the status
motivation and the desire for an identity.

Sociological studies have shown that there is a close
relation between social mobility and ethnic prejudice.
Persons moving downward, and even upward under many
circumstances, in the social scale tend to show greater
prejudice against such ethnic minorities as the Jews and
Negroes than commonly prevails in the social strata they
have left or are entering. 12 While the existing studies in
this field have been focused upon prejudice rather than
the kind of hyper-patriotism and hyper-conformism that
I am most concerned with, I believe that the typical
prejudiced person and the typical pseudo-conservative
dissenter are usually the same person, that the mecha-

5o The New American Right

nisms at work in both complexes are quite the same, 13
and that it is merely the expediencies and the strategy of
the situation today that cause groups that once stressed
racial discrimination to find other scapegoats. Both the
displaced old-American type and the new ethnic ele
ments that are so desperately eager for reassurance of
their fundamental Americanism can conveniently con
verge upon liberals, critics, and nonconformists of various
sorts, as well as Communists and suspected Communists.
To proclaim themselves vigilant in the pursuit of those
who are even so much as accused of "disloyalty" to the
United States is a way not only of reasserting but of
advertising their own loyalty and one of the chief char
acteristics of American super-patriotism is its constant
inner urge toward self-advertisement. One notable quality
in this new wave of conformism is that its advocates are
much happier to have as their objects of hatred the
Anglo-Saxon, Eastern, Ivy League intellectual gentlemen
than they are with such bedraggled souls as, say, the
Rosenbergs. The reason, I believe, is that in the minds
of the status-driven it is no special virtue to be more
American than the Rosenbergs, but it is really something
to be more American than Dean Acheson or John Foster
Dulles-or Franklin Delano Roosevelt. 14 The status aspira
tions of some of the ethnic groups are actually higher
than they were twenty years ago-which suggests one
reason (there are others) why, in the ideology of the
authoritarian right-wing, anti-Semitism and such blatant
fonns of prejudice have recently been soft-pedaled. Anti-
Semitism, it has been said, is the poor man s snobbery.
We Americans are always trying to raise the standard of
living, and the same principle now seems to apply to
standards of hating. So during the past fifteen years or
so the authoritarians have moved on from anti-Negroism
and anti-Semitism to anti-Achesonianism, anti-intellectu-
ahsm, anti-nonconf ormism, and other variants of the same

THE PSEUDO-CONSERVATIVE REVOLT 51

idea, much in the same way as the average American, if
he can manage it, will move on from a Ford to a Buick.

Such status-strivings may help us to understand some
of the otherwise unintelligible figments of the pseudo-
conservative ideology the incredibly bitter feeling against
the United Nations, for instance. Is it not understandable
that such a feeling might be, paradoxically, shared at one
and the same time by an old Yankee-Protestant American,
who feels that his social position is not what it ought to
be and that these foreigners are crowding in on his coun
try and diluting its sovereignty just as "foreigners" have
crowded into his neighborhood, and by a second- or third-
generation immigrant who has been trying so hard to
de-Europeanize himself, to get Europe out of his personal
heritage, and who finds his own government mocking him
by its complicity in these Old- World schemes?

Similarly, is it not status aspiration that in good part
spurs the pseudo-conservative on toward his demand for
conformity in a wide variety of spheres of life? Conform
ity is a way of guaranteeing and manifesting respect
ability among those who are not sure that they are
respectable enough. The nonconformity of others appears
to such persons as a frivolous challenge to the whole order
of things they are trying so hard to become part of. Natu
rally it is resented, and the demand for conformity in
public becomes at once an expression of such resentment
and a means of displaying one s own soundness. This habit
has a tendency to spread from politics into intellectual
and social spheres, where it can be made to challenge
almost anyone whose pattern of life is different and who
is imagined to enjoy a superior social position notably,
as one agitator put it, the "parlors of the sophisticated,
the intellectuals, the so-called academic minds."

Why has this tide of pseudo-conservative dissent risen
to such heights in our time? To a considerable degree,
we must remember, it is a response, however unrealistic,

g2 The New American Right

to realities. We do live in a disordered world, threatened
by a great power and a powerful ideology. It is a world
of enormous potential violence, that has already shown
us the ugliest capacities of the human spirit. In our own
country there has indeed been espionage, and laxity over
security has in fact allowed some spies to reach high
places. There is just enough reality at most points along
the line to give a touch of credibility to the melodramatics
of the pseudo-conservative imagination.

However, a number of developments in our recent his
tory make this pseudo-conservative uprising more intelli
gible. For two hundred years and more, various conditions
of American development the process of continental set
tlement, the continuous establishment in new areas of new
status patterns, the arrival of continuous waves of new
immigrants, each pushing the preceding waves upward in
the ethnic hierarchy made it possible to satisfy a remark
ably large part of the extravagant status aspirations that
were aroused. There was a sort of automatic built-in
status-elevator in the American social edifice. Today that
elevator no longer operates automatically, or at least no
longer operates in the same way.

Secondly, the growth of the mass media of communica
tion and their use in politics have brought politics closer
to the people than ever before and have made politics a
form of entertainment in which the spectators feel them
selves involved. Thus it has become, more than ever
before, an arena into which private emotions and personal
problems can be readily projected. Mass communications
have aroused the mass man.

Thirdly, the long tenure in power of the liberal elements
to which the pseudo-conservatives are most opposed and
the wide variety of changes that have been introduced
into our social, economic and administrative life have
intensified the sense of powerlessness and victimization
among the opponents of these changes and have widened
the area of social issues over which they feel discontent

THE PSEUDO-CONSERVATIVE REVOLT 53

There has been, among other things, the emergence of a
wholly new struggle: the conflict between businessmen
of certain types and the New Deal bureaucracy, which has
spilled over into a resentment of intellectuals and experts,

Finally, unlike our previous postwar periods, ours has
been a period of continued crisis, from which the future
promises no relief. In no foreign war of our history did
we fight so long or make such sacrifices as in World War
II. When it was over, instead of being able to resume our
peacetime preoccupations, we were very promptly con
fronted with another war. It is hard for a certain type
of American, who does not think much about the world
outside and does not want to have to do so, to understand
why we must become involved in such an unremitting
struggle. It will be the fate of those in power for a long
time to come to have to conduct the delicate diplomacy
of the cold peace without the sympathy or understanding
of a large part of their own people. From bitter experi
ence, Eisenhower and Dulles are learning today what
Truman and Acheson learned yesterday.

These considerations suggest that the pseudo-conserva
tive political style, while it may already have passed the
peak of its influence, is one of the long waves of twentieth-
century American history and not a momentary mood. I
do not share the widespread foreboding among liberals
that this form of dissent will grow until it overwhelms our
liberties altogether and plunges us into a totalitarian
nightmare. Indeed, the idea that it is purely and simply
fascist or totalitarian, as we have known these things in
recent European history, is to my mind a false conception,
based upon the failure to read American developments in
terms of our peculiar American constellation of political
realities. (It reminds me of the people who, because they
found several close parallels between the NRA and Mus
solini s corporate state, were once deeply troubled at the
thought that the NRA was the beginning of American
fascism.) However, in a populistic culture like ours, which

54 The New American Right

seems to lack a responsible elite with political and moral
autonomy, and in which it is possible to exploit the wildest
currents of public sentiment for private purposes, it is at
least conceivable that a highly organized, vocal, active
and well-financed minority could create a political climate
in which the rational pursuit of our well-being and safety
would become impossible.

1 Theodore W. Adorno et al., The Authoritarian Personality (New
York, 1950), pp. 675-76, While I have drawn heavily upon this enlight
ening study, I have some reservations about its methods and conclusions.
For a critical review, see Richard Christie and Marie Jahoda, eds.,
Studies in the Scope and Method of "The Authoritarian Personality"
(Glencoe, Illinois, 1954), particularly the penetrating comments by
Edward Shils.

2 On the Omaha Freedom Congress see Leonard Boasberg, "Radical
Reactionaries," The Progressive, December, 1953.

3 See the comments of D. W. Brogan in "The Illusion o American
Omnipotence/ Harpers, December, 1952.

4 Richard Rovere, "Letter from Washington," New Yorker, June 19,
1954, pp. 67-72.

5 Elmer Davis, But We Were Born Free (New York, 1954), pp. 35-36;
cf. pp. 21-22 and passim.

6 Cf. in this respect the observation of Tocqueville: "It cannot be
denied that democratic institutions strongly tend to promote the feeling
of envy in the human heart; not so much because they afford to every
one the means of rising to the same level with others as because these
means perpetually disappoint the persons who employ them. Democratic
institutions awaken and foster a passion for equality which they can
never entirely satisfy." Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed.
by Phillips Bradley (New York, 1945), Vol. I, p. 201.

7 Cf, Samuel LubelTs characterization of isolationism as a vengeful
memory. The Future of American Politics (New York, 1952), Chapter
VII. See also the comments of Leo Lowenthal and Norbert Guterman on
the right-wing agitator: "The agitator seems to steer clear of the area of
material needs on which liberal and democratic movements concentrate;
his main concern is a sphere of frustration that is usually ignored in
traditional politics. The programs that concentrate on material needs
seem to overlook that area of moral uncertainties and emotional frustra
tions that are the immediate manifestations of malaise. It may therefore
be conjectured that his Mowers find the agitator s statements attractive
not .because he occasionally promises to maintain the American standards
or kvmg or to provide a job for everyone, but because he intimates that
he will give them the emotional satisfactions that are denied them in the
contemporary social and economic set-up. He offers attitudes, not
bread. Prophets of Deceit (New York, 1949), pp. 91-92

Every ethnic group has its own peculiar status history, and I am well
aware that my remarks in the text slur over many important

THE PSEUDO-CONSERVATIVE REVOLT 55

The status history of the older immigrant groups like the Germans and
the Irish is quite different from that of ethnic elements like the Italians,
Poles and Czechs, who have more recently arrived at the point at which
they are bidding for wide acceptance in the professional and white-collar
classes, or at least for the middle-class standards of housing and con
sumption enjoyed by these classes. The case of the Irish is of special
interest, because the Irish, with their long-standing prominence in mu
nicipal politics, qualified as it has been by their relative non-acceptance
in many other spheres, have an unusually ambiguous status. In many-
ways they have gained, while in others, particularly insofar as their
municipal power has recently been challenged by other groups, especially
the Italians, they have lost some status and power. The election of 1928,
with its religious bigotry and social snobbery, inflicted upon them a
status trauma from which they have never fully recovered, for it was
a symbol of the Protestant majority s rejection of their ablest leadership
on grounds quite irrelevant to merit. This feeling was kept alive by the
breach between Al Smith and FDR, followed by the rejection of Jim
Farley from the New Deal succession. A study of the Germans would
perhaps emphasize the effects of uneasiness over national loyalties arising
from the Hitler era and World War II, but extending back even to World
War I.

9 One of the noteworthy features of the current situation is that funda
mentalist Protestants and fundamentalist Catholics have so commonly
subordinated their old feuds (and for the first time in our history) to
unite in opposition to what they usually describe as "godless" elements.

10 Margaret Mead, And Keep Jour Powder Dry (New York, 1942),
Chapter III.

11 See Else Frenkel-Brunswik s "Parents and Childhood as seen through
the Interviews/ The Authoritarian Personality, Chapter X. The author
remarks (pp. 387-88) concerning subjects who were relatively free from
ethnic prejudice that in their families less obedience is expected of the
children. Parents are less status-ridden and thus show less anxiety with
respect to conformity and are less intolerant toward manifestations of
socially unaccepted behavior. . . . Comparatively less pronounced status-
concern often goes hand in hand with greater richness and liberation of
emotional life. There is, on the whole, more affection, or more uncondi
tional affection, in the families of unprejudiced subjects. There is less
surrender to conventional rules. . , ."

12 Cf. Joseph Greenblum and Leonard I. Pearlin, "Vertical Mobility
and Prejudice" in Reinhard Bendix and Seymour M. Lipset, eds., Class,
Status and Power (Glencoe, Illinois, 1953), pp. 480-91; Bruno Bettel-
heim and Morris Janowitz, "Ethnic Tolerance: A Function of Personal
and Social Control/* American Journal of Sociology, Vol. IV (1949),
pp. 137-45.

13 The similarity is also posited by Adomo, op. cit. 3 pp. 152 ff., and
by others (see the studies cited by him, p. 152).

14 1 refer to such men to make the point that this animosity extends to
those who are guilty of no wrongdoing. Of course a person like Alger
Hiss, who has been guilty, suits much better. Hiss is the hostage the
pseudo-conservatives hold from the New Deal generation. He is a
heaven-sent gift. If he did not exist, the pseudo-conservatives would not
have been able to invent him.

The Intellectuals
and the Discontented Classes

DAVID RIESMAN AND
NATHAN GLAZER

IN THE nineteen-thirties Maury
Maverick, who died in 1954, was a quite exceptional but
far from untypical representative of the Texas political
outlook: free-swinging, red-tape cutting, "a man s a man
for a* that." Born to a famous Texas name which had
entered the common speech, he enjoyed living up to it
by defending the downtrodden: the Spanish- Americans of
San Antonio; the small businessmen; and, most coura
geously, the Communists and their right to be heard in
the municipal auditorium. In the Maverick era Texas was
reputed to be the most interventionist state in the Union,
providing some of the firmest support to Roosevelt s
foreign policy. Its influential Congressional delegation,
which included Sam Rayburn as well as Senator Tom

56

THE INTELLECTUALS AND THE DISCONTENTED CLASSES 57

Connally and a less cautious Lyndon Johnson, were Roose
velt s stalwarts as often in domestic as in foreign policy.
But not many years later Maverick had turned into a
political untouchable, and Texas competed with the North
Central isolationist belt in violent opposition to the old
Roosevelt policies no less than to the policies of Truman,
his successor and legitimate heir.

Texas demonstrates in extreme form the great shift in
the character of American politics and political thinking
since the Second World War. We can date the change
more precisely than that. In the election of 1948, Harry
Truman, more unequivocally and guilelessly committed to
many New Deal policies and attitudes than F.D.R., won
an election against a candidate far more liberal and
capable, if less appealingly homespun, than Eisenhower,
Even as late as the beginning of 1950, the special political
tone of the Roosevelt era continued to influence public
life. We need only recall the mood of the Democratic
Senators investigating McCarthy s charges of Communist
infiltration into the State Department early that year. The
transcript shows them at ease, laughing away McCarthy s
charges, taking it for granted that the country was with
them, and that McCarthy was another Martin Dies. Four
years later, another group of Democratic Senators sat in
judgment on McCarthy. They were tense and anxious,
seeking the protective cover of J. Edgar Hoover, trying to
seem just as good Communist-hunters indeed, better
Republicans than any of their colleagues. In the last
years of Truman s term, while many demagogic anti-
Communist steps were taken by a reluctant administration
as well as many effective ones under Acheson s be
deviled auspices the general climate of Washington still
remained comparatively easygoing. Congress was a par
tially manageable menace and General Vaughan still
could get along without knowing the difference between
Harry Dexter White and Adolf Berle.

^g The New American Right

Many explanations have been offered for what appears
to be a decisive shift in the American mentality. Fear of
the Soviet Union is alleged by some to be the cause;
others blame McCarthy, his allies, and his victims; others
look for cynical explanations, while still others think that
Americans have abandoned liberal traditions for good and
all. In this essay we attempt to estimate the real extent
of the shift, to delineate some factors, previously ne
glected, which may be relevant, and to offer some very
tentative interpretations pointing toward the revival of a
liberal political imagination.

Detectable and decisive shifts of political mood can
occur, of course, without affecting the majority. And this
seems to be what has happened in this country. The less
educated part of the population takes a long time learning
to form an opinion about any international matter and
even more time to change it. It is not easily accessible to
new information and is not trained to alter its opinions
under exposure to the public interpretation of events. 1
Thus, the World War II alliance with the Soviet Union
did little to change the suspicion and distrust with which
(apart from sheer apathy) the poor and less educated in
this country have always regarded Russia indeed, all
foreign countries; these people were "protected" by their
fatalism, generalized suspiciousness, and apathy from
the wartime messages of the movies, the OWI, and like
agencies. Consequently, the worsening of relations with
the Soviet Union found the "backward" strata already
holding the appropriate attitudes toward Russia-no
change was demanded of them, and little change oc
curred.

The less educated of whom we speak are of course

THE INTELLECTUALS AND THE DISCO3STTENTED CLASSES 59

literate; they have radios and TV and buy newspapers;
and to an Asiatic they must appear to move with fabulous
speed. Certainly, in non-political matters (where the
"voter" has at hand the ready mechanism of a retail store)
fashions spread with ever faster waves, and the "back
ward" buy "modern" in furniture long before they will
buy it in elections. Yet it is the educated, the readers of
editorial pages, who have customarily been responsible
for the major changes in American political position. For
example, the shift of this group from neutrality to inter
vention in 1940 and 1941 allowed the Lend Lease Act to
slip through. It also supplied the cadre under Averell
Harriman which then energetically did the actual lend-
ing."

The odd situation today, however, is that such a change
does not suffice to explain what happened between 1950
and 1952. Many of the intelligent (i.e., college-educated)
and articulate minority still in the main are not unsym
pathetic to Roosevelt s and Truman s foreign policies.
They believe that the alliances with Britain and France
must be maintained; they do not regard Communist
infiltration as a serious problem; they do regard the threat
to civil liberties by Communist hunters as a serious prob
lem. If they do not always say so, this is partly for protec
tive coloration, partly because, as we shall see, they have
been put on the defensive not only strategically but also
within themselves, (There are of course others of the
college-educated who have always hated Truman and
Roosevelt, largely for domestic "that man" reasons; they
are not averse to using foreign policy as a heaven-sent
means of vindication.)

As we have seen, the shift has not been among the
inarticulate they have always held their present atti
tudes. The decisive factors, we suggest, have been two
fold, and interconnected. On the one hand, the opinion
leaders among the educated strata the intellectuals and

5o The New American Right

those who take cues from them have been silenced,
rather more by their own feelings of inadequacy and
failure than by direct intimidation. On the other hand,
many who were once among the inarticulate masses are
no longer silent: an unacknowledged social revolution has
transformed their situation. Rejecting the liberal intellec
tuals as guides, they have echoed and reinforced the
stridency of right-wing demi-inteUectuals themselves
often arising from those we shall, until we can find a
less clumsy name, call the ex-masses.

During the New Deal days a group of intellectuals led
and played lawyer for classes of discontented people who
had tasted prosperity and lost it, and for a mass of under
privileged people who had been promised prosperity and
seen enough mobility around them to believe in it. Today,
both sources of discontent have virtually disappeared as a
result of fifteen years of prosperity. 2 This same prosperity,
and its attendant inflation, has hit many elderly and
retired people who cannot adjust financially, politically,
or psychologically to the altered value of a dollar people,
who, though they have the money, cannot bring them
selves to repair their homes because they have not been
brought up to "do it yourself nor to pay three dollars
an hour to someone else for doing it. Among the youth,
too, are many people who are at once the beneficiaries
and the victims of prosperity, people made ill-at-ease by
an affluence not preceded by imagining its reality, nor
preceded by a change to a character-structure more at
tuned to amenity than to hardship. The raw-rich Texas
millionaire appears often to be obsessed by fears that
"they" will take his money away-almost as if he were
fascinated by a fatality which would bring him, as it
were, back to earth.

THE INTELLECTUALS AND THE DISCONTENTED CLASSES 6l

These people, whether suddenly affluent or simply
better off, form a new middle class, called out of the city
tenements and the marginal small towns by the uneven
hand of national prosperity; many have moved to the
fringes of urban centers, large and small. This has been
described in Fortune as a new middle-class market, which
will play a great role in keeping the economy prosperous.
But in politics, these former masses do not have so benign
an influencewe shall call them the discontented classes.

Their discontent is only partially rooted in relative
economic deprivation. Many of them, it is true, forgetting
their condition of fifteen years ago, see only that the
salaries and income they would once have thought prince
ly do not add up to much. Politically, such people, think
ing in terms of a relatively fixed income (in this case, of
course, not from capital, save occasional rentals, but from
salaries and wages) against a standard of variable ex
penses, are generally conservative. And their conservatism
is of a pinched and narrow sort, less interested in the
preservation of ancient principles than in the current
reduction of government expenditures and taxes. It is the
conservatism we usually associate with provincial France
rather than with the small-town venture capitalist of the
older Yankee sort. This conservatism helps create the
particular posture of the discontented classes vis-^-vis
America s foreign role: they are mad at the rest of the
world for bothering them, hate to waste money in spank
ings and cannot stand wasting money in rewards.

But more significant, and more difficult to understand
and grapple with, is a discontent which arises from the
mental discomforts that come with belonging to a class
rather than a mass discomforts founded less on economic
than on intellectual uncertainty. If one belongs to the
middle class one is supposed to have an opinion, to cope
with the world as well as with one s job and immediate
surroundings. But these new members have entered a
realm where the interpretations of the world put forth

62 The New American Right

by intellectuals in recent decades, and widely held among
the educated, are unsatisfying, even threatening. Having
precariously won respectability in paycheck and consump
tion style, they find this achievement menaced by a politi
cal and more broadly cultural outlook tending to lower
barriers of any sort between this nation and other nations,
between groups in this nation ( as in the constant appeals
to inter-ethnic amity), between housing projects reserved
for Negroes and suburbs reserved for whites; many fami
lies also cannot stand the pressure to lower barriers be
tween men and women, or between parents and children.

When this barrier-destroying outlook of the intellectuals
promised economic advance as well as racial equality,
many of the impoverished could accept the former and
ignore the latter. Now, having achieved a modicum of
prosperity, the political philosophy of the intellectuals,
which always requires government spending, taxes, and
inflation, is a threat and the racial equality, which could
be viewed with indifference in the city tenement or
homogeneous small town, is a formidable reality in the
new suburbs. When the intellectuals were developing the
ideology justifying cutting in the masses on the bounties
of American productivity, they were less apt to be called
do-gooders and bleeding hearts the grown-up version of
that unendurable taunt of being a sissy than now when
the greater part of the masses needing help are outside
the nation s boundaries. 3

Very often, moreover, the individuals making up the
discontented classes have come, not to the large civilizing
cities, but to the new or expanding industrial frontiers
to Wichita and Rock Island, to Jacksonville or the Gulf
Coast, to Houston or San Diego, to Tacoma or Tona-
wanda. Even those who become very rich no longer head
automatically for New York and Newport. Whereas the
Baptist Rockefeller, coming from Cleveland where he was
educated, allowed Easterners to help civilize him by

THE INTELLECTUALS AND THE DISCONTENTED CLASSES 63

giving away his money, as Carnegie and Frick also did,
these new rich lack such centralized opportunities for
gratuitous benevolence, being constrained by the income
tax and the institutionalization of philanthropy. And their
wives (whatever their secret and suppressed yearnings)
no longer seem to want the approval of Eastern women of
culture and fashion; they choose to remain within their
provincial orbits, rather than to become immigrants to an
alien cosmopolitan center. Indeed, the airplane has made
it possible for the men and Vogue and Neiman-Marcus
for the women to share in the advantages of New York
without the miseries, expenses, and contaminations of
living there. Howard Hughes, for example, can do busi
ness operating from a plane, yacht, or hotel room.

All this, however, puts some complex processes too
simply. New big money in America has always tended to
unsettle its possessors and the society at large. For one
thing, the absence of an aristocracy means that there is
no single, time-approved course of buying land, being
deferential to the values of those already on the land, and
earning a title by good behavior. Though Rockefeller tried
philanthropy, he was still hated, still needed the services
of Ivy Lee. Yet he lived at a time when the aristocratic
model, in Europe if not here, provided certain guide-posts.
Today, the enormously wealthy new men of Texas have
not even the promise of an assured well-traveled road, at
the end of which stand duchesses, Newport, and gate
keepers like Ward McAllister. Instead, such men may
prefer to buy a television program for McCarthy, or to
acquire the publishing firm of Henry Holt, or, on behalf
of an anti-Wall Street business demagogue, the very rail
road which once helped cement New York "Society,"

Moreover, the partial and uneven spread of cosmo
politan values to the lower strata and to the hinterland
has as one consequence the fact that rich men can no
longer simply spend their way to salvation. Conspicuous

g 4 The New American Right

underconsumption has replaced conspicuous consumption
as the visible sign of status, with the result that men who
have made enough money to indulge the gaudy dreams of
their underprivileged youth learn all too fast that they
must not be flamboyant. This is a trick that the older
centers of culture have played on the newer centers of
wealth. The latter can try to catch up; Baylor and Hous
ton Universities, and the Dallas Symphony, have not done
too badly. Or they can enter the still gaudy forum of
politics to get back at those they suspect of ridiculing
their efforts. Perhaps there was something of this in
Hearst, as there is in some of the newer magnates of the
media. Senator McCarthy, with his gruff charm and his
Populist roots, seems made to order for such men; and
he has attracted some of the political plungers among the
new underprivileged rich, 4 a task made easier by the
fact that they have too few intellectuals and idea men to
divide and distract them.

Furthermore, a great many Americans, newly risen
from poverty or the catastrophe of the Depression, are
much more fearful of losing their wealth than are scions
of more established families already accustomed to paying
taxes, to giving to charity, and to the practice of noblesse
oblige. We know many men who made their money in
war orders, or through buying government-financed
pknts, or through price supports, who hate the federal
government with the ferocity of beneficiaries and doubt
less want to cut off aid from the ungrateful French or
British! Such men cannot admit that they did not make
"their" money by their own efforts; they would like to
abolish tie income tax, and with it the whole nexus of
defense and international relations, if only to assert their
own anachronistic individualism the more firmly. They
are likely to be clients, not only of lawyers who specialize
in the capital gains tax, but also of prophets and politi
cians specializing in the bogeys of adults.

THE INTELLECTUALS AND THE DISCONTENTED CLASSES 65

The rapid and unanticipated acquisition of power seems
to produce a sense of unreality people are "up in the air."
We face the paradox that many Americans are more
fearful today though more prosperous than ever before
and though America is in some ways more powerful.

It is the professional business of politicians, as of other
promoters and organizers, to find in the electorate or other
constituency organizable blocs who will shift their alle
giance to them, who will respond with passion in the
midst of indifference, and with identification in the midst
of diffuse and plural ties. In the pre- World War I days of
the great outcry against the Trusts, it was possible to
find a few old and dislocated middle-class elements which
resented the new dominance by big and baronial business
in some respects, these were precursors of the present
discontented classes, though with more to hope for and
less to fear. In the thirties, the way had already in large
measure been prepared for an appeal to unemployed
factory workers and Southern and Western fanners on
the basis of Wilsonian and Populist rhetoric, made into a
heady brew by more recent infusions of radicalism, native
and imported. These discontented masses showed in their
voting behavior (in NLRB and Agricultural Adjustment
Act elections as well as at the polls) that the appeal,
whatever it meant to those who made it, hit home in
terms of the listeners* wants and situation.

How can the discontented classes of today be welded
into a political bloc? This is the question that haunts and
tempts politicians. The uncertainty of the Democrats
faced with Stevenson and of the Republicans faced with
McCarthy signifies not only disagreements of principle but
also doubts as to whether a proper appeal has as yet

gg The New American Right

been found on which a ruling or controlling coalition can
be built. As geologists cover the earth prospecting for
oil, so politicians cover the electorate prospecting for
hidden hatreds and identities.

In local elections campaigns can be waged on the
promise to hold down taxes and build no more schools.
And many people in national affairs will respond to a
promise to hold down inflation or to create more jobs.
But when voters feel insecure in the midst of prosperity,
it is not an economic appeal that will really arouse them.
For it is not the jobs or goods they do not have that
worry them; indeed, what worries them is often that they
do not know what worries them, or why, having reached
the promised land, they still suffer. Sharply felt needs
have been replaced by vague discontents; and at such a
time programs or clear-cut ideas of any kind are worse
than useless, politically speaking. This is one reason why
the appeal to the discontented classes is so often more a
matter of tone than of substancewhy a gesture of retro
active vindictiveness like the Bricker Amendment can
arouse angry Minute Women and small-town lawyers,
why on the whole the pseudo-conservative right has so
small a program and so belligerent a stance. In this
situation, ideology tends to become more important than
economics. 5

And when one must resort to ideology in a prosperous
America, one must fall back on the vaguely recalled,
half-dreamlike allegiances and prejudices serving most
people for ideology. Americanism, of course, will play a
major role; but, paradoxically enough, so do those under
ground half-conscious ethnic allegiances and prejudices
which, as Samuel Lubell has shown, still play a large part
in American politics. In much that passes for anti-Com
munism these strands are combined, as for instance for
many Irish or Polish Catholics whose avid anti-Com
munism enables them to feel more solidly American than

THE INTELLECTUALS AND THE DISCONTENTED CLASSES 67

some less fanatical Protestants who, as earlier arrivals,
once looked down on them; similarly, a good deal of
McCarthy s support represents the comeback of the
German-Americans after two world wars. A haunting
doubt about Americanism and disloyalty, however, affects
not only those of recent enemy or socially devalued
stocks but also those many businessmen forced to operate
under government regulations of price and materials
control, or under defense contracts. As Talcott Parsons
has observed (see Chapter 5), these men are constantly
being asked, on grounds of patriotism, to obey govern
ment norms which they are as constantly opposing and
evading; for them it is convenient to discover that it is
not they who are ambivalent toward defense, but those
others, the Reds or the State Department or the Demo
crats. Many of these men, especially perhaps in small
business, are victims of a prosperity which has made them
rich but neither as enlightened as many big business
managers nor as independent as their ideology expects
them to be.

Not all members of the discontented classes come from
similar backgrounds or arrive at similar destinations;
nevertheless, mobility a fast rise from humble origins, or
a transplantation to the city, or a move from the factory
class to the white-collar class is a general characteristic.
They or their parents are likely to have voted Democratic
sometime between 1930 and 1948, and such a memory
makes them more susceptible to ideological appeals, for
in rising above their impoverished or ethnically "un-
American" beginnings, they have found it "time for a
change" in identification: they would like to rise "above"
economic appeals ("don t let them take it away") to ideo
logical ones or, in more amiable terms, "above" self-
interest to patriotism. Such people could not be brought
in one move into the Republican Party, which would
seem too much like a betrayal of origins, but they could

68 The New American Right

be brought to take a stand "above party"-and to vote for
a non-partisan general whom the Democrats had also
sought. According to a recent study reported by Professor
Malcolm Moos, in two counties outside Boston the self-
declared "independent" voters now outnumber the Repub
licans and Democrats combined a reflection of this roving
background of discontented classes which has become
the most dynamic force in American political life. 6 Re
cently, a woman who had campaigned for Eisenhower
(while her husband voted for Stevenson) told one of us
how much she admired Ike s sincerity, adding, "Actually
I don t know enough about politics to identify myself
with either one [major party], and I am a what do you
call it an independent." Of course, not all independents
stand in this sort of proud ignorance above parties and
above the politicians who may have helped their parents
with jobs or visas or the warmth of recognition.

Just as many among the newly prosperous tend at pres
ent to reject the traditional party labels (while others
seek, perhaps after a split ticket or two, the protective
coloration of the GOP), so they also reject the traditional
cultural and educational leadership of the enlightened
upper and upper-middle classes. They have sent their
children to college as one way of maintaining the family s
social and occupational mobility. Some of these children
have become eager strivers for cosmopolitanism and
culture, rejecting the values now held by the discon
tented classes. But many of those who have swamped
the colleges have acquired there, and helped their fami
lies learn, a half-educated resentment for the traditional
intellectual values some of their teachers and schoolmates
represented, While their humbler parents may have main
tained in many cases a certain reverence for education,
their children have gained enough familiarity to feel con
tempt (Tragically, the high schools and colleges have
often felt compelled at the same time to lower their

[HE INTELLECTUALS AND THE DISCONTENTED CLASSES 69

;tandards to meet the still lower level of aspiration of
iese youngsters, no eager beavers for learning, but too
well off to enter the labor force.) In many local school
board fights, the old conservative and hence intellectually
libertarian elites have been routed by lower-middle-class
pressure groups who, often to their surprise, discovered
the weakness of the schools and their defenders in many
of these fights, much as on the national scene, ethnic
elements helped identify the combatants. Once having
seen the political weakness, combined with social prestige,
of the traditional cultural values, the discontented classes,
trained to despise weakness, became still less impressed
by the intellectual cadres furnishing much of the leader
ship in the Thirties.

The high school and college training has had a further
effect of strengthening the desire of the graduates to take
some part in political life, at least by voting: we know
that non-voting and non-participation generally is far
more common among the uneducated. Even more, it has
strengthened their need for an intellectual position to
give a name, an identity, to their malaise. Whatever they
think of intellectuals as such, they cannot do without
them, and sustenance rejected in the form of the adult
education work of the Ford Foundation is sought or
accepted from mentors like Hunt s Facts Forum whose
tone reflects their own uneasiness and yet gives it a
factual, "scientific" cast. Thus they repay their "educa
tion for citizenship."

We have spoken earlier of the xenophobia and slowness
in altering opinions characteristic of the lower classes. If
in a survey people are asked, "Do you think it wise to
trust others?" the less educated are always the more
suspicious; they have in the course of life gained a
peasant-like guile, the sort of sloganized cynicism so
beautifully described by Richard Wright in Black Boy.
In an hierarchical society, this distrust does not become

yo The New American Right

a dynamic social and political factor; except insofar as it
prevents the organization of the masses it remains a
problem only for individuals in their relations with, other
individuals. But when the mistrustful, with prosperity, are
suddenly pushed into positions of leverage, attitudes pre
viously channeled within the family and neighborhood
are projected upon the national and international scene.

Recent psychoanalytically-oriented work on ethnic
prejudice provides possible clues as to why overt anti-
Semitism has declined at the same time that attacks on
Harvard and other symbols of Eastern seaboard culture
seem to have increased, In their valuable book, The
Dynamics of Prejudice, Bruno Bettelheim and Morris
Janowitz make the point that in America Jews and Ne
groes divide between them the hostilities which spring
from internal conflict: The super-ego is involved in anti-
Semitism, since the Jew is felt to represent the valued
but unachieved goals of ambition, money, and group
loyalty ("clannishness"), whereas fear and hatred of the
Negro spring from id tendencies which the individual
cannot manage, his repressed desires for promiscuity,
destruction of property, and general looseness of living.
(In Europe, the Jews must do double duty, as the outlet
for both id and super-ego dynamisms.) Today, on the
one hand, the increasing sexual emancipation of Ameri
cans has made the Negro a less fearsome image in terms
of sexuality (though he remains a realistic threat to neigh
borhood real estate and communal values) and, on the
other hand, prosperity has meant that the Jew is no
longer a salient emblem of enviable financial success.
Thus, while the KKK declines the former "racial" bigot
finds a new threat: the older educated classes of the East,
with their culture and refinement, with "softness" and
other amenities he does not yet feel able to afford. 7

Furthermore, the sexual emancipation which has made
the Negro less of a feared and admired symbol of potency

THE INTELLECTUALS AND THE DISCONTENTED CLASSES Jl

has presented men with a much more difficult problem:
the fear of homosexuality. Indeed, homosexuality becomes
a much more feared enemy than the Negro. (It may also
be that homosexuality is itself spreading or news of it is
spreading, so that people are presented with an issue
which formerly was kept under cover another conse
quence of enlightenment.) How powerful, then, is the
political consequence of combining the image of the
homosexual with the image of the intellectual the State
Department cooky-pusher Harvard-trained sissy thus be
comes the focus of social hatred and the Jew becomes
merely one variant of the intellectual sissyactually less
important than the Eastern-educated snob! Many people
say of McCarthy that they approve of his ends but not
of his methods. We think this statement should be re
versed to read that they approve of his methods, which
are so obviously not sissified, but care little about his
ends, which are irrelevant provided that the targets are
drawn with the foregoing constellation in mind.

As a result of all this, the left-wing and liberal intel
lectuals, who came forward during the New Deal and
who played so effective a role in the fight against Nazism
and in "prematurely" delineating the nature of the Com
munist as an enemy, today find themselves without an
audience, their tone deprecated, their slogans ineffectual.

Apart from this central social change, much has hap
pened to reduce the intellectuals to a silence only tem
porarily broken by such a clamor as that over McCarthy.

For one thing, the success of the New Deal has silenced
them. The New Deal as a triumphant movement at once
of the "folk," liberal government officials, and the intel
lectuals, came to an end in 1937. By this time the major

72 The New American Right

reforms, such as the NLRB and Social Security, had
already been institutionalized, and many of the remaining
unspent energies of the movement were dissipated in the
Court-packing fight nominally waged to preserve the
reforms. After this, the crusading spirit could only work
on modifications and defenses of an extant structure (for
instance, the last major New Deal bill, the Wages and
Hours Act of 1938). This vacuum of goals was concealed
by affairs in Europe; Fascism in Spain and Germany, and
its repercussions in this country, absorbed many New
Dealers, the intellectuals, and their allies among the
cultivated, and provided them with an agenda. But it was
assumed that, once the war was over, the New Dealers
and their allies could return to the unending problem of
controlling the business cycle and reforming the economy.
The business cycle, however, refused to turn down, or
did not turn down very far. The one postwar victory
based on something like the old New Deal approach and
coalition that of 1948 owed more to the anger of well-
to-do farmers at the sag in agricultural prices than it did
to the self-interested voting of the city workers. Had the
depression come, the alliance forged by Roosevelt might
have emerged unimpaired from the war-time National
Unity front. But it turned out to be "too easy* to control
the business cycle: Keynesianism was no longer esoteric
knowledge but the normal working doctrine of adminis
trators, liberal or conservative, and even the Republicans,
as was demonstrated in 1953-4, could keep a down-turn
in the business cycle under control.

What was left on the home front? One could raise the
floor under wages, but in a time of prosperity and infla
tion that could not excite many beyond those, like the
Textile Workers Union, who spoke for the worst-paid
workers. One could press for socialized medicine, but
this had little of the force of the old New Deal campaigns.

THE INTELLECTUALS AND THE DISCONTENTED CLASSES 73

One could denounce Wall Street and the interests, but it
looked old-fashioned, and more, it divided the liberal
intellectuals from those who, on the issues that still
counted, were natural allies. For Wall Street was closer
to the liberal intellectuals on the two domestic issues that
were still alive civil rights and civil liberties and on
the whole range of issues related to foreign policy than
were the former allies of the liberal intellectuals, the
fanners and the lower classes of the city, both in their
old form as factory workers and in their new form as
white-collar workers.

Indeed, what has happened is that the old issues died,
and on the new issues former friends or allies have be
come enemies, and former enemies have become friends.
Thus: the liberal intellectuals have had to switch their
attitudes toward Wall Street as symbolizing both the
great financiers and the giant corporations they organize
and toward "small business." By 1940, one could no
longer speak of Wall Street as "the enemy." Demographic
shifts and the Depression, along with the increasing
ability of industry to finance expansion from reserves,
had already weakened the hegemony of Eastern capital.
The New Deal, by rhetoric and by such legislation as the
SEC and the Holding Company Act, weakened it further,
in comparison with the growing power of mid-continent
businessmen (not to speak of tax-privileged oil and gas
men). And the war had the same effect, for the small
businessmen and tougher big businessmen of the Midwest
paid less taxes and less attention to OPA and WPB. Wall
Street lawyers Stimson and McCloy (perhaps Wendell
Willkie might be added), Wall Street bankers Forrestal,
Lovett, and Harriman, all have had a far greater cosmo
politanism and tolerance for intellectuals than do, for
example, the big and little car dealers and other "small
businessmen" of the Eisenhower Administration. 8 In gen-

74 The New American Right

eral, Wall Streeters, like the British Tories, are a chas
tened lot and an easy symbol of abuse for pastoral and
Populist simplifications. But, while Harry Hopkins and
Tommy Corcoran recruited such men for Roosevelt, many
New Dealers and their journalist and intellectual sup
porters resented their entrance.

They also resented the military, who were frequently
similarly chastened men, sensitive to the limits of "free
enterprise." The liberal political imagination in America,
with its tendency to consider generals and admirals hope
less conservatives, and its tendency to consider war an
outmoded barbarity that serious thinkers should not con
cern themselves with, was incapable of seeing that mili
tary men, like Wall Streeters, might be natural allies in
the new epoch, and that military issues would become at
least as important as the domestic economic issues of the
New Deal era. What could be more crucial today than
the outcome of the struggle between the Strategic Air
Command and the Army Ground Forces? Yet who con
cerns himself with it? (The self-styled conservatives,
being so often isolationists with overtones of manifest-
destiny jingoism, have been on the whole even less well
prepared to consider such issues.)

When the comments on policy of intellectuals and aca
demic people are dated by ignorance, the military man
who might be guided by thoughtful civilians-and there
are many such-feels the hopelessness of communication;
he must, in spite of himself, resort to pressure and public
relations to defend his service and with it his country.
Aside from a few journalists like the Alsops, several able
magazine editors, and a handful of academic people like
Bernard Brodie and the late Edward Mead Earle, only
atomic scientists (and their occasional sociological coun
selors such as Edward A. Shils) have made serious efforts
to grapple with such factors.
Today, the Federal defense budget is so large as to

THE INTELLECTUALS AND THE DISCONTENTED CLASSES 75

leave little room for major socio-cultural argument; in
Washington, at least, anything outside of it can be no
more than a fringe benefit. As Eliot Janeway has pointed
out, we are now in a defense cycle rather than a business
cycle; and Daniel Bell, tracing this out in terms of the
capital expansion consequences of military commitments,
has emphasized how many of the conventional areas of
business and social decision are foreclosed. If a depression
permitting reshaping of political thinking is unlikely, so
also is a huge surplus the spending of which could lead to
a healthy controversy outside the warring military services
and their highly placed civilian partisans. Everywhere we
look, then, there is room for change only within a narrow
margin, if we interpret change in terms traditional among
intellectuals.

At home, indeed, only the cause of racial emancipation
remains to arouse enthusiasm. And this cause differs poli
tically from the old New Deal causes in that it represents
for many liberals and intellectuals a withdrawal from the
larger statist concerns it is a cause which is carried into
personal life and into the field of culture where it attracts
many reflective young people who appear apathetic to
civic and electoral politics. By its nature, the field of race
is one in which everyone can have a hand: institution-
alization has not proceeded nearly so far as it has with
economic underprivilege. Thus, every state has some form
of social security, but only a few have an FEPC; and, as
many Americans become more sensitive to interpersonal
considerations, they feel it imperative to work for the
amelioration of racial slights that would not have troubled
an earlier generation. But as we have indicated, the de
mand for tolerance of Negroes cannot replace, politically,
the demand for "economic equality": it is a very great and
aggravating demand to make on children of white immi
grants who are paying off the mortgage on their first
suburban house.

76 The New American Right

Thus, for liberal intellectuals in the postwar era the
home front could not be the arena for major policies, mo
bilizing a majority coalition, that it was in the 1930 s; the
focus had shifted to foreign policy. But for this the New
Dealers and the intellectuals were generally unprepared.
In particular, they were not prepared to view the Com
munists and the Soviet Union as the enemy in the way
they had earlier recognized Fascism as the enemy, and
for this failure they were to suffer seriously. Not many
New Dealers had actually been pro-Soviet: the liberal
politicians, lawyers, and civil servants had little in com
mon with Popular Front writers, who were contemptuous
of reform and addicted to slogans about Marx, the prole
tariat, and the Revolution. Indeed, the New Dealers were
almost too ready to dismiss both the Stalinists and their
left-wing sectarian critics; preoccupied with domestic re
forms and anti-fascism, they formed no clear-cut image of
Communism. They did not sympathize with it, let alone
accept it, but they did not see it as a major enemy.

Understandably, they could not be as ebullient in carry
ing on a policy in which Communism was the major
enemy as they could be in attacking depression and the
interests. True, they did what was necessary: Truman s
Point IV program and the Marshall Plan were the major
postwar achievements of the American political imagina
tion. However, these brilliant anti-Communist measures
have not succeeded in saving the New Dealers from the
taint of fellow-traveling. Moreover, these measures were
not able to arouse among intellectuals, and sensitive young
people, very much enthusiasm, even in the hearts of those
active in administration of the aid program. For one thing,
with the whole planet sending in distress signals, Point IV

THE INTELLECTUALS AND THE DISCONTENTED CLASSES 77

seems a drop of milk in a rusty Malthusian bucket to be
defended more for what it symbolizes at home than for
its often ambiguous blessings (lowered death rates and
uncontrollable population growth) abroad. For another
thing, all these measures of international hope and help
have been launched and caught up in the spirit of cold-
war public relations, Thus, no one knows any longer
whether he supports a program because it is worthwhile
and an expression of humaneness, or because it is neces
sary to harry Soviet satellites or win over neutralists in
Europe and Asia, or because it is necessary to appear
tough-minded vis-^-vis congressmen and Philistines gen
erally. A military "angle" has been discovered in, for in
stance, the work of anthropologists seeking to mediate the
coming of industry to Indonesia. While such practical
compromises and dual motives are always involved in
reform, in this case they have often served to confuse the
reformers, who deny, even to themselves, that they are
motivated by anything visionary; hence the intellectual
climate becomes less and less open to political imagina
tion. 9

As the hope of solving our foreign problems by indis
criminately and rapidly raising the standard of living of
the rest of the world has waned, the more informed critics
of contemporary politics have had to fall back on an
austerity programa program promising less and requiring
more: more money, more soldiers, more arms, more aid,
hence more taxes. All this is required, of course, not for
redistribution within America, though a good deal of this
does ensue, but to provide a new carrier (it costs as
much as a Valley Authority) or a radar early-warning
defense (as costly as socialized medicine). This program
divides the intellectuals among themselves many still
agitate for socialized medicine but divides them still
more grievously from the poor and uneducated for the
latter, whatever the bellicose consequences of their

-8 The New American Right

xenophobia and love of verbal violence, always oppose
war and sacrifice.

It is perhaps in reaction to these dilemmas that one
new issue that of the protection of traditional civil liber
tieshas risen in recent years to monopolize almost com
pletely the intellectuals attention. But this, too, is an
issue which demands sacrifice from the uneducated
masses not financial sacrifice but the practice of defer
ence and restraint which is understood and appreciated
only among the well-to-do and highly educated strata. 10
Thus, a focus on civil liberties and on foreign policy tends,
as we have seen, to make intellectuals seek allies among
the rich and well-born, rather than among the working-
men and fanners they had earlier courted and cared
about; indeed, it tends to make them conservative, once
it becomes clear that civil liberties are protected, not by
majority vote (which is overwhelmingly unsympathetic),
but by traditional institutions, class prerogatives, and
judicial life-tenure.

At the same time, the protection of civil liberties has
had to cope with the Communist issue, much as other
liberal causes have. The Sacco-Vanzetti case united the
liberals; the Rosenberg case divided them. The great civil
liberties cases of the post-Enlightenment era were not
fought to save the Czar s spies and police from detection
and punishment; they were fought for anarchists, for
socialists and liberals, for professors teaching evolution
or economics; and it takes either a case-hardened and
sometimes disingenuous naivete about Communists or a
subtle strategic decision about where to draw the line to
muster much enthusiasm for the defense of intellectuals
who plead the Fifth Amendment. In this situation, the
defense becomes at best a rear-guard action, but cannot
hope to be a "positive" program-a demand on the basis
of which political identities can be reshaped.

Where do the college-bred young stand in all this? In

THE INTELLECTUALS AND THE DISCONTENTED CLASSES 7Q

the late Thirties they were offered blood, sweat, and tears
in the fight against Nazism. Some sought and accepted
the agenda. But the fight against Nazism was made real
by its domestic opponents: one saw almost all that was
despicable anti-Semites, fascists, Europe-haters, the big
oted and the crack-potlined up on the pro-Nazi side.
Today, the pathetic passel of domestic Communists can
not be compared with these fascists who organized street
gangs or shook down businessmen; and many of the Com
munists allies are decent, if misguided, liberals who
haven t learned." In international politics, we must accept
alliances with despots no more savory than our erstwhile
domestic fascists. Thus, the young are asked to fight
international Communism not on the basis of street ex
perience but of what they are taught. Cool in spirit gen
erally, they can hardly be expected to show enthusiasm.
Indeed, a holding game against the Communists is a
reality and a prospect to sober the most enthusiastic. The
question of appeasement that most thoughtful people
could reject offhand in the pre-atom-bomb era now be
comes more insistent intellectually even while it becomes
outlawed politically.

If we leave substance aside, and consider the tone of
politics, we realize that the loss of initiative by intellec
tuals is coupled with a change of emotional accent. The
conservative and ascetic program just sketched is not
avant-garde; it is dull; there is no hope in it of saving the
world; it assumes the world is well enough and only
wishes the Communists thought so too.

Demands are the basis of politics: the demands of a
group or class, formulated by its intellectual leaders or,
more accurately, the demands create and identify the
group or class which then is led. When a group is either
satisfied or exhausted, when for whatever reason it no
longer makes demands, then it has lost the elan which
can attract new forces. It can only hope that the institu-

go The New American Right

tions and battalions that have been built up by the van
ished elan of the past are large enough to withstand the
onslaught of those who do make new demands.

6

It is not only the dilemmas of policy that have been
responsible for the decline of enthusiasm and vitality
among the liberal intellectuals in the last decade or so.
Another factor is hard to discuss without sounding like
E. A. Ross, Henry Pratt Fairchild, and other pre- World
War I opponents of immigration from Eastern and South
ern Europe; yet it seems evident to us that the American
crusading spirit has been sustained in considerable meas
ure by the non-conformist conscience of New England
and its offshoots in the Western Reserve and the Far
West. 11 As long as the new immigrants looked up to this
model, they tended to imitate the benign as well as the
sharp-shooting doctrines and practices of the Yankees, but
in a cumulative process which is only now reaching its
end, the New Englanders themselves have run out of
confidence and prestige: their land is now Vacationland,
rather than the source of Abolitionist and other gospel; in
the home territory, surrounded by Irish, Italians, Poles,
French Canadians, Portuguese whom they have influenced
more than either party will admit, they feel defeated and
out of control in the charter institutions. 12

This is not the place to trace the complex relations
between the New England conscience and pragmatic
reform. The remaining possessors of that conscience are
still a national asset, but there are fewer of them propor
tionately; their wealth is smaller proportionately; and,
scattered throughout the country, they are more remote
from the centers of ideas. New ideas have their head
quarters in New York. They often originate with, or are

THE INTELLECTUALS AND THE DISCONTENTED CLASSES 8l

mediated by, Jews who have more reasons for hesitation
and are perhaps psychologically as well as sociologically
more vulnerable to pressure than the New Englanders
just as the newer media (movies and broadcasting) in
which they are influential are weaker in the face of
censorship than the older media (book publishing and
the press ) in which they play less part than the Yankees
do. To be sure, there are many affinities between Jews
and Puritans both are people of the Book and a political
and intellectual alliance of the sort that Holmes and
Brandeis once typified is still to be found, especially in
smaller communities.

On the whole, as Americanization spreads, the old
Puritan families have been slowly losing status. Some have
responded by eccentricity, leadership, intellectuality, and
liberalism; others have joined angry "pro-America" move
mentswhere, ironically enough (save in the DAR), they
meet the very Irish or Italian or other newer elements
who have displaced or jostled them. 13 Since they can no
longer safely snub these ex- Wops, ex-Shanty Irish, and
ex-Hunkies, they displace their animus onto the weak
targets provided by intellectuals, "left-wingers," "one-
worlders," and so on. 14 And they can blame these latter
people for the very social changes that have brought the
descendants of lowly immigrants into the top councils of
what was once, in some areas, the ethnically rather ex
clusive club of the Republican Party. Their blame, more
over, is not entirely misplaced, for the New Deal, along
with the war, did help bring prosperity and mobility and
reputability to Catholics and Jews.

After the war, the recognition of the Communist men
ace still further boosted the status of Catholics by making
them almost automatically charter members of the anti-
Communist crusade. By the same token, the intellectuals,
their limited links with Communism continuously and
extravagantly exposed, became more vulnerable. We be-

8 2 The New American Right

lieve that Granville Hicks in Where We Came Out pre
sents a reasonably just picture of the actual extent of
Communist influence in the Thirties-an influence much
less than is now often supposed even among intellectuals;
indeed, his picture does not take sufficient account of the
infinitesimal extent of Party effectiveness outside the
major seaboard cities. The New Dealers, as we have
already said, were even less affected than the intellectuals,
but they shared with the latter some personal and journal
istic ties; this, plus some dramatic cases like those of
Harry Dexter White and Alger Hiss and the belated
fellow-traveling of Henry Wallace, made it politically
possible though fantastic to damn the New Deal as a
Communist-front organization. This has created a situa
tion obviously quite different from that of earlier decades,
when though liberal intellectuals and New Dealers were
also called Communists, they only became as a result
firmer and angrier. Today such libel is not only a disaster
for public relations but cause for an anxious inner
scrutiny. For as it becomes clear that few of the causes
liberals have espoused have been immune to exploitation
by the Communists, the liberal intellectuals lose their
former sure conviction about their causes and are put,
inside as well as out, on the defensive. One evidence of
this is the strategy of continuous balancing so many of
us engage in: if one day we defend Negroes (one of the
few causes which, though taken up by Communists, still
gets relatively unambiguous attention from intellectuals),
then the next day we set the record straight by calling
for more aid to Indo-China not, let us repeat, merely for
protective coloration but to make clear to ourselves that
we are not fools or dupes of fellow-traveler rhetoric.

The intellectuals themselves are further weakened in
their own minds, at least-by the fact that their ideas,
even where relevant to contemporary discontent, are
quickly taken over by the mass media and transmuted

THE INTELLECTUALS AND THE DISCONTENTED CLASSES 83

into the common stock of middlebrow conceptions. They
can no longer control, even by intentional opacity, the
pace of distribution. Thus, what they produce soon be
comes dissociated from them and their immediate coteries;
in the division of labor, the middlebrows take over the
function of dissemination and translation, and this aliena
tion from their "product" leaves the intellectuals, even
when they may reach a wider audience with more dis
patch than ever before in history, with a feeling of
impotence and isolation.

And, finally, the self-confidence of the liberal intellec
tuals is weakened by their own egalitarian ideology, which
has led them not only to attack ethnic and class barriers
but to defer to the manners and mores of the lower
classes generally. Whereas in the days of Eastern sea
board hegemony the masses sought to imitate the classes,
if they sought to rise at all, today imitation is a two-way
process, and intellectuals are no longer protected by class
and elite arrogance (and the strategic ignorances arro
gance protects) against the attitudes of their enemies. 15
We find, for example, the cynicism of the lower strata
reflected in the desire of the intellectuals to appear tough-
minded and in their fear to be thought naive. Such tough-
mindedness in turn may then require acceptance of bel
ligerent and vindictive attitudes in domestic and foreign
affairs, and a further weakening of any visionary hopes
and motives.

What the left has lost in tone and initiative, the right
has gained. The right has believed, ever since "that man"
entered the White House, in the utter deviltry of the
New Deal. But what was once a domestic misanthropy
has now been writ large upon the globe: the right has
hit on what it regards as an unquestioned truth, which
needs only to be spread (the utter sinfulness, the total
evil, of the idea of Communism and the total perfection
of the idea of Americanism); it maintains the zeal of

g. The New American Right

missionaries in propagating this truth; it feels today it
possesses a newer, better, altogether more avant-garde
knowledge, even though about so limited a subject as the
influence of Communists on American culture and politics
(look at The Freeman and The American Mercury, or at
McCarthy and His Enemies for illustration). Moreover,
this new right possesses that convenient and perhaps
essential feeling of martyrdom which its very presence
gives to many liberal intellectuals: it sees itself as a
minority suffering for its desire to enlighten the people
(Peter Viereck has referred to the "bleeding hearts of
the right"). 16

But the parallel is far from complete. For the left and
the liberals in their days of influence really wanted some
thing: they had specific reforms in mind, and specific
legislation. The new right, with its few intellectuals trying
to create a program for it, wants at best an atmosphere:
it really has no desire to change the face of the nation;
it is much more interested in changing the past, in rewrit
ing the history of the New Deal, of the Second World
War and its aftermath, or in more ambitious efforts, of
the whole modern movement. Here again the comparison
of the new right with the Communists is instructive, for
the latter, too, in this country have been preoccupied with
a state of mind: they have aimed, if not to make Ameri
cans sympathetic to the Soviet Union, at least unsympa
thetic toward its enemies here and overseas. To this end,
their greatest efforts have been in rewriting recent and
current history, in presenting a certain picture of the
world in which big business, on the one side, supported
fascism and anti-Semitism, while the Soviet Union, on
the other side, fostered Negroes, Jews, and other minori
ties, and defended the working class. American domestic
politics have been useful to the Communists in providing
object-lessons for this general theory and in recruiting
stalwarts for its further propagation. In the same way,

THE INTFT ,T .ECTUALS AND THE DISCONTENTED CLASSES 85

one can read or listen to the organs of the new right and
find nothing that amounts to a legislative program: the
bills they want passed are those which give expression to
their feelings about the past, such as the Bricker Amend
ment, 17 or withdrawing Hiss s pension and otherwise
harrassing Communists (often in ways that such veteran
Communist-hunters as Governor Dewey think unjust and
unwise) the fight for these measures is an educative
fight in re-interpreting the past, When it comes to coping
with world Communism, this group has nothing to pro
pose in the way of strengthening anti-Communists abroad
nothing but withdrawal or muted quasi-suicidal hints of
preventive war. In fact, the hatred this group feels for
the modern world, as manifested at home, in America, is
so huge that there is little energy left over for the rest of
the globe rather, there is an aimless destructiveness in
which legislative and local battles simply focus and dram
atize resentment.

Nevertheless, this group now possesses the enthusiasm
and momentum previously held by liberals. Its leaders
cannot channel discontent; they can interpret it: they can
explain why everything has gone wrong for the while,
that is enough. Thus, the picture today in American poli
tics is of intelligence without force or enthusiasm facing
force and enthusiasm without intelligence.

How much longer can this pattern last? International
developments will probably be determinative the bellig
erence coupled with isolationism of this rightist group
may tempt or frighten the Soviet Union into further
adventures and incidents, finally touching off a war of
annihilation (we think this most unlikely, and assuredly
not inevitable). But the present leadership of the discon
tented classes has to do more than symbolize their disori-
entation and lack of satisfying political loyalties if it is
to solidify new allegiances. For this, no intellectual reserve
of demands appears in the offing. Instead, the leadership

86 The New American Right

is continually subject to the temptation to fall back on
the more developed intellectual positions of laissez-faire
or of various brands of fascismbut these, it knows, will
lose them much of their potential following, which is
neither conservative in the older free enterprise sense nor
on the lookout for, though tempted by, civil commotion
and foreign adventure. It is not surprising that Congress
represents the peak of strength of this group, since Con
gress is a sounding-board for mood and an extraordi
narily democratic one as much as it is a machine for
pork-processing and bill-passing. A tone, however, soon
becomes monotonous and, if not institutionalized when
at its shrillest, fades away.

In sum, the earlier leadership by the intellectuals of
the underprivileged came about through a program of
economic changes; and this program demonstrated an
ability in the leaders to interpret the situation of the
unorganized workers, of minority groups, and of marginal
farmers. Today, a different group of classes (including
many of these former underprivileged groups, now risen
to middle-income status) wants something, but their
wants (partly for the very reason that these people are
now above subsistence or enfranchisement) are much less
easily formulated. These new groups want an interpreta
tion of the world; they want, or rather might be prepared
to want, a more satisfying life.

It is the unsatisfying quality of life as they find it in
America that mostly feeds the discontent of the discon
tented cksses. Their wealth, their partial access to educa
tion and fuller exposure to the mass media indeed, their
possession of many of the insignia they have been taught
to associate with the good life-these leave them restless,
ill at ease in Zion. They must continually seek for reasons
explaining their unrest-and the reasons developed by
intellectuals for the benefit of previous proletariats are of
course quite irrelevant

THE INTELLECTUALS AND THE DISCONTENTED CLASSES 8/

Is it conceivable that the intellectuals, rather than their
enemies, can have a share in providing new interpreta
tions and in dissipating, through creative leadership, some
of the resentment of the discontented classes? What kind
of life, indeed, is appropriate to a society whose lower
classes are being devoured faster by prosperity than
Puerto Rican immigration can replenish? We have almost
no idea about the forms the answers might take, if there
are answers. But we do recognize that one obstacle to
any rapprochement between the discontented classes and
the intellectuals is the fact that many of the latter are
themselves of lower-middle-class origin, and detest the
values they have left behind the dislike is not just one
way. They espouse a snobbery of topic which makes the
interests of the semi-educated wholly alien to them more
alien than the interests of the lower classes. Only in the
great new melting pot of the Army would there appear
to be instances where intellectuals discover that individ
uals in the discontented classes are "not so bad, * despite
their poisonous tastes in politics and culture instances
where the great camaraderie of the male sex and the even
greater one of the brass-haters bridge the gap created by
the uneven development of social mobility and cultural
status. Of course, to suppose that the intellectuals can do
very much to guide the discontented classes by winning
friends and influencing people among them is as ridicu
lous as supposing that Jews can do much to combat
political anti-Semitism by amiability to non-Jews, Never
theless, there is only one side from which understanding
is likely to come, and that is their own.

1 For data on the negligible influence of political campaigns, see Paul
Lazarsfeld, Bernard Berelson, and Hazel Gaudet, The People s Choice
(Harpers, New York, 1948).

2 To be sure, there are enclaves where the underprivileged can still be
found, as in the Southern Alleghenies or the rural Deep South. And, as
we shall see, the fact that "everyone" has moved up means that mobility
may not have kept pace with aspiration, one reason why the slogan
"you never had it so good" is a poor campaign weapon.

3 The concept of "intolerance of ambiguity," developed by Else

gg The New American Right

Frenkel-Brunswik and co-workers, is relevant here: these newly pros
perous ones want to see the world clearly bounded, in blacks and whites;
they have been brought up conventionally, to make use of conventional
categories, and fluidity of boundaries threatens their self-assurance and
their very hold on reality.

* It is at this point that the lack of connection between the small cadre
of truly conservative intellectuals and any sizable anti-liberal audience
becomes a major factor in the present political scene. For patronage
politics and for the untutored businessman, writers like Allen Tate or
Russell Kirk have nothing but contempt; their "conservatism" (as some
critics have pointed out) is based on an irrelevant landed-gentry and
professional-class model. With a few exceptions, the pseudo-conservatives
who have a radical and nihilistic message for the untutored have to face
little intellectual competition, save from occasional socially conscious
clergymen and priests.

5 Strictly speaking, there is no such thing as an "economic" appeal,
nor is a well-paying job a "natural" need of mankind. Rather, the present
insistence of the American workingman that he is entitled to such a job
is the outgrowth of recent experience, clarified and interpreted for him
by his leaders. These combine into a demonstration that depressions are
not necessary (though perhaps wars are), and that therefore jobs and
all that goes with them are necessary.

6 According to a study of the 1952 election by the Survey Research
Center of the University of Michigan, only two groupings in the popula
tion were resistant to these appeals and went more strongly Democratic
than in 1948: these were the Negroes on the one extreme of the social
spectrum and the college-educated, upper income, and professional and
managerial strata at the other extreme the latter also produced more
Republican votes, as the result of a decline in the non-voters. See Angus
Campbell, Gerald Gurin, and Warren E. Miller, The Voter Decides
(Row, Peterson and Co., Evanston, 1954), Table 5.1.

7 Professor Richard Hofstadter, to whose work we are indebted, re
minds us of the status gain involved in being able to bait old-family
Anglo-Saxons on the ground they are un-Americana greater gain than
is to be won by demonstrating superiority simply to the Jews. (See
Chapter 2.)

8 In the perspective employed here, "Engine Charlie" Wilson s Detroit
provides a smaller and less cosmopolitan environment than Secretary
Humphrey s Cleveland.

9 Commenting on an earlier draft of this paper and we are indebted
to such comments for many important revisions Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.,
reminds us of Utopian thinkers still alive and kicking, such as String-
fellow Barr, Clarence Streit, and the United World Federalists. We feel
that the spectrum here is not wide or the proposals terribly imaginative;
moreover, many of the proposals are counsels of despair, to avoid world
catastrophe, rather than of hope, to improve American or planetary Me.

10 ^It was evident in the first opinion polls of the thirties that the con
ventional notion of the rich as conservative and the poor as radical was
correct in the realm of government, labor, and distributive policy-thus,
the poor have no objection to government ownership-but false in the
realm of civil liberties and foreign policy where the greater impact of

THE INTELLECTUALS AND THE DISCONTENTED CLASSES OQ

mistrust and fear of the strange and the stranger among the poor came
to light.

11 In addition, the Southern Scotch-Irish Presbyterians, such as Wood-
row Wilson, have played a great role, especially in the Democratic and
in splinter parties.

12 On the whole, the English settlements over the glohe indicate that
the non-conformist conscience needs to be surrounded by other such
consciences if it is to remain effective. The English Methodist who goes
to Kenya or Australia to make his fortune is likely to retain the values he
went out with, and not be prodded towards wider social sympathies, so
that eventually his descendants will be estranged from Colonial Office
officials representing his cousins who have stayed, and moved intellectu
ally and morally forward in the Old Country. Similarly, the New Eng-
landers who have left New England, the Quakers who have left Penn
sylvania, may notdespite relative ease of intranational movement keep
up with developments in the original centers of cultivated morality. In
deed, New Englanders marooned in the Midwest (the late Robert Taft
came of such stock) have been the source of much soured high-prin
cipled reaction the "colonial" conscience at its worst.

13 The Jews, so largely beneficiaries of inflation and gainers of middle-
class and professional status, have overwhelmingly remained Roosevelt
Democrats, though a kind of "leakage * has provided some of the leader
ship and newspaper support for the new right.

14 See Richard Hofstadter s excellent essay, "The Pseudo-Conservative
Revolt" (Chapter 2).

15 We ourselves had an experience of this when we undertook to write
a criticism of Norman Dodd s report as Staff Director of the Reece Com
mittee investigating foundations. We criticized not only the crackpot
notions that socialists and the great foundations had plotted to take
America over on behalf of education and the Federal government a plot
somehow connected with "empiricism" and the prestige-laden "name"
universities but we also ridiculed the illiteracy, the demi-educated vein
in which the report was written. Then we had misgivings about pulling
the rank of our own education and relative fluency, and withdrew our
comments on the style of the report. It is no longer comfortable (or
expedient) to bait the hillbilly, the hick, the Negro preacher, or the
night-school lawyer so, too, with the political arriviste. The ridicule that
greeted Bryan in Tennessee did not greet Congressman Reece.

16 When not long ago we heard Frank Chodorov, a leading organizer
and publicist of the right, speak to a businessmen s luncheon, we felt
that he bore much the same relation to his audience that, for instance,
a speaker sent out by the American League for Peace and Democracy
might have borne to a meeting of a Unitarian Sunday evening forum:
he was more extreme, and therefore seemed more daring, but he shared
enough of the values and verbal tags of the group to disguise somewhat
the extent to which he was pushing their logics and rhetorics to fanatical
limits. Indeed, Communist organizing tactics have often given lessons to
rightists, and the little library in a New Hampshire town that might
have received, from an anonymous donor, a copy of a novel by Howard
Fast or a subscription to The National Guardian will now get the Buckley
and Bozell book or The Freeman.

go The New American Right

17 The Minute Women of America who buttonholed Senators on behalf
of the Bricker Amendment are of course quite different in social position
from the lower-class women who, in a few interviews a student super-"
vised by one of us conducted by telephone, praised Senator McCarthy
as the only one in Washington who was cleaning out the crooks and the
Commies: they saw him as a land of Lone Ranger, bravely fighting an
all-powerful "they." Throughout this paper, we have had to collapse
such distinctions to form general categories; we hope to stimulate
further discussion of the coalitions and the contradictionsthat we lump
as the discontented classes.

The Revolt Against the Elite

PETER VIERECK

Defeat of western silver.

Defeat of the wheat.

Victory of letterfiles

And plutocrats in miles

With dollar signs upon their coats

And spats on their feet.

Victory of custodians,

Plymouth Rock,

And all that inbred landlord stock.

Victory of the neat

Defeat of the Pacific and the long Mississippi

And all these in their helpless days

By the dour East oppressed, . . .

91

02, The New American Right

Crucifying half the West,
Till the whole Atlantic coast

Seemed a giant spiders 9 nest

And all the way to frightened Maine the old East

heard them call, . . .
Prairie avenger, mountain lion,
Bryan, Bryan, Bryan, Bryan,
Smashing Plymouth Rock with his boulders from the

West.

from Vachel Lindsay s "higher vaudeville" imita
tion of how a sixteen-year-old Bryanite Populist
radical in 1896 would have viewed the revolt of
western mass egalitarianism against Atlantic coast
traditionalism and aristocracy. Note the stress on re
venge ("avenger, mountain lion") for having been
humiliated and patronized intellectually or socially
by "that inbred landlord stock" of Plymouth Rock;
this emotion of revenge for humiliation is often
shared by recent immigrants in Boston and the east
as well as by the Populist older stock in Wisconsin
and the west.

DUBING THE Jacobin Revolution of
1793, in those quaint days when the lower classes still
thought of themselves as the lower classes, it was for
upper-class sympathies and for not reading "subversive
leftist literature" that aristocrats got in trouble.

Note the reversal in America. Here the lower classes
seem to be the upper classes they have automobiles, lace
curtains and votes. Here, in consequence, it is for alleged
lower-class sympathies-for leftist" sympathies that the
aristocrats are purged by the lower class.

In reality those lower-class sympathies are microscopic
in most of that social register (Lodge, Bohlen, Acheson,
Stevenson, and Harvard presidents) which McCarthy is

THE REVOLT AGAINST THE ELITE 93

trying to purge; even so, leftist sympathies are the pretext
given for the purge. Why is it necessary to allege those
lower-class sympathies as pretext? Why the pretext in the
first place? Because in America the suddenly enthroned
lower classes cannot prove to themselves psychologically
that they are now upper-class unless they can indict for
pro-proletariat subversion those whom they know in their
hearts to be America s real intellectual and social aris
tocracy.

Ostensibly our aristocrats are being metaphorically
guillotined for having signed, twenty years ago, some
pinko-front petition by that egghead Voltaire (a typical
reversal of the 1793 pretext) and for having said, not
"Let them eat cake," but "Let them read books (viola
tion of loyalty oath to TV). Behind these ostensible pre
texts, the aristocratic pro-proletarian conspirators are
actually being guillotined for having been too exclusive
socially and, even worse, intellectually at those fancy
parties at Versailles-sur-Hudson. McCarthyism is the
revenge of the noses that for twenty years of fancy parties
were pressed against the outside window pane.

In Populist-Progressive days and in New Deal days,
those same noses were pressed with openly radical, openly
lower-class resentment. During 1953 and 1954, the same
noses snorted triumphantly with right-wing Republic
anism. This demagogue s spree of symbolically decapi
tating America s intellectual and social upper class, but
doing so while shouting a two hundred per cent upper-
class ideology, suggests that McCarthyism is actually a
leftist instinct behind a self-deceptive rightist veneer.
This combination bolsters the self-esteem of sons of
Democratic urban day laborers whose status rose into
stuffy Republican suburbia. Their status rose thanks to
the Communism-preventing social reforms of Roosevelt.
Here for once is a radicalism expressing not poverty but
sudden prosperity, biting the New Deal hand that fed it.

Q . The New American Right

y^t

What figure represents the transition, the missing link,
between the often noble, idealistic Populist-Progressives
(like that truly noble idealist, La Follette) and the
degeneration of that movement into something so differ
ent, so bigoted as McCarthyism? According to my hy
pothesis, that transition, that missing link is Father
Charles Coughlin. All liberals know that Coughlin ended
by defending Hitler in World War II and preaching the
vilest anti-Semitism. They sometimes forget that Coughlin
began his career by preaching social reforms to the left
of the New Deal; his link with Populism and western
Progressivism emerges from the fact that Coughlin s chief
panacea was the old Populist panacea of "free silver/ as
a weapon against Wall Street bankers, eastern seaboard
intellectuals, and internationalists, three groups hated
alike by democratic Populists and by semi-fascist Cough-
linites. And Coughlin s right-wing fascist anti-Semitism
sounds word for word the same as the vile tirades against
"Jewish international bankers" by the left-wing egalitarian
Populist, Ignatius Donnelly.

On the surface, Senators like Wheeler and Nye (origi
nally Progressives and campaigners for La Follette)
seemed to reverse themselves completely when they
shifted in a shift partly similar to Coughlin sfrom
"liberal" Progressives to "reactionary" America Firsters.
But basically they never changed at all; throughout, they
remained passionately Anglophobe, Germanophile, isola
tionist, and anti-eastern-seaboard, first under leftist and
then under rightist pretexts. Another example is Senator
McCarran, who died in 1954. McCarran ended as a Mc-
Carthyite Democrat, hating the New Deal more than did
any Republican. This same McCarran had been an eager
New Dealer in 1933, voting for the Wagner Act and even
for the NRA. Yet throughout these changes, he remained
consistently anti-internationalist, anti-British, anti-eastern-
intellectual.

THE REVOLT AGAINST THE ELITE 95

Broadening the generalization, we may tentatively con
clude: the entire midwest Old Guard Republican wing of
today, journalistically or vulgarly referred to as "conser
vative," does not merit that word at all. Theirs is not the
traditional conservatism of a Winston Churchill or of a
Burke or of our own Federalist papers. Theirs is not true
American conservatism in the sense in which Irving Bab
bitt defines indirect democracy (in his great book Democ
racy and Leadership), as opposed to plebiscitarian, Tom
Painean direct democracy. "Conservative" is no proper
label for western Old Guard Republicans, nor for their
incongruous allies among the status-craving, increasingly
prosperous, but socially insecure immigrants in South
Boston and the non-elite part of the east. What all these
groups are at heart is the same old isolationist, Anglo-
phobe, Germanophile revolt of radical Populist lunatic-
fringers against the eastern, educated, Anglicized elite.
Only this time it is a Populism gone sour; this time it lacks
the generous, idealistic, social reformist instincts which
partly justified the original Populists.

Many of our intellectual aristocrats have helped to
make the McCarthyite attack on themselves a success by
denouncing McCarthyism as a rightist movement, a con
servative movement. At first they even denounced it as a
Red-baiting, anti-Communist movement, which is exactly
what it wanted to be denounced as. By now they have at
least caught on to the fact that it is not anti-Communist,
has not trapped a single Red spy whether at Fort Mon-
mouth, the Voice of America, or the State Department
and is a major cause of the increased neutralism in
Europe, McCarthy being the "Typhoid Mary" of anti-
Americanism.

But although American liberals have now realized that
McCarthyism is not anti-Communist (which is more than
many American businessmen and Republicans have real
ized), they have still not caught on to the full and deep-

g5 The New American Right

rooted extent of its radical anti-conservatism. That is
because they are steeped in misleading analogies with the
very different context of Europe and of the European
kind of fascism. Partly they still overlook the special
situation in America, where the masses are more bourgeois
than the bourgeoisie. I am speaking in terms of psychol
ogy, not only of economics. A lot more is involved
psychologically in the American ideal of the mass man
than the old economic boast (a smug and shallow boast)
that simply "everybody" is "so prosperous" in America.
"Every man a king" is not true of America today. Rather,
every man is a king except the kings.

The real kings (the cultural elite that would rank first
in any traditional hierarchy of the Hellenic-Roman West)
are now becoming declassed scapegoats: the eggheads.
The fact that they partly brought that fate on themselves
by fumbling the Communist issue does not justify their
fate, especially as the sacred civil liberties of everybody,
the innocent as much as the guilty, must suffer for that
retribution.

America is the country where the masses won t admit
they are masses. Consequently America is the country
where the thought-controllers can self-deceptively "make
like" patriotic pillars of respectability instead of admitting
what they are: revolutionaries of savage direct democracy
(Napoleon plus Rousseau plus Tom Paine plus the Wild
West frontier) against the traditional, aristocratic courts
and Constitution and against the protection of minority
intellectual elites by the anti-majoritarian Bill of Rights.
The McCarthyites threaten liberty precisely because they
are so egalitarian, ruling foreign policy by mass telegrams
to the Executive Branch and by radio speeches and Gallup
Poll. The spread of democratic equal rights facilitates, as
Nietzsche prophesied, the equal violation of rights.

Is liberte incompatible with sudden egalite? It was, as
people used to say in the Thirties, "no accident that" an

THE REVOLT AGAINST THE ELITE 97

American Legion meeting in New York in July, 1954,
passed two resolutions side by side the first condemning
another Legion branch for racial discrimination (the
"Forty and Eight" society) and the second endorsing
McCarthyism. This juxtaposition is noted not in order to
disparage the long overdue anti-bigotry of the first resolu
tion. Rather, the juxtaposition is noted in order to caution
the oversimplifying optimism of many liberal reformers
who have been assuming that the fight for free speech and
the fight for racial tolerance were synonymous.

Admittedly not all nationalist bigots have yet "caught
on" to the more lucrative new trend of their own racket.
Many will continue to persecute racial minorities as
viciously as in the past, though surely decreasingly and
with less profit. Because of the Southern atmosphere of
Washington, the anti-segregation resolution could not be
repeated when the Legion met there a month later.

Often untypical or tardy about new trends, the South
is more opposed to the good cause of Negro rights and to
the bad cause of McCarthyism than the rest of the nation.
One Southerner (I am not implying that lie represents
the majority of the South) told me he regards as Com
munistic the defenders of the civil liberties of any of our
several racial minorities; then he went on to reproach the
North for "not fighting for its civil liberties against that
fascist McCarthy."

The same day I heard that statement, I read an account
of a McCarthy mass meeting in the North at which racial
discrimination was denounced as un-American and in
which anyone defending civil liberties against McCarthy
was called Communistic. At the same meeting, a rabbi
accused the opposition to Roy Cohn of anti-Semitic
intolerance. Next, Cohn s was called "the American Drey
fus Case * by a representative of a student McCarthyite
organization, Students for America. This young represen
tative of both McCarythism and racial brotherhood con-

g8 The New American Right

eluded amid loud applause: "Roy Cohn and Joe McCarthy
will be redeemed when the people have taken back their
government from the criminal alliance of Communists,
Socialists, New Dealers, and the Eisenhower-Dewey Re
publicans."

This outburst of direct democracy 1 comes straight from
the leftist rhetoric of the old Populists and Progressives,
a rhetoric forever urging the People to take back "their"
government from the conspiring Powers That Be. What
else remained but for Rabbi Schultz, at a second Cohn-
McCarthy dinner, to appeal to "the plain people of
America" to "march on Washington" in order to save, with
direct democracy, their tribune McCarthy from the big
bosses of the Senate censure committee?

Bigotry s New Look is perhaps best evidenced by
McCarthy s abstention, so far, from anti-Semitic and
anti-Negro propaganda and, more important, by countless
similar items totally unconnected with the ephemeral
McCarthy. A similar juxtaposition occurs in a typical
New York Times headline of September 4, 1954, page
one: PRESIDENT SIGNS BILL TO EXECUTE PEACETIME SPIES;
ALSO BOLSTERS BAN ON BIAS. Moving beyond that relatively
middle-of-the-road area to the extremist fringe, note the
significant change in "For America." This nationalist
group is a xenophobic and isolationist revival of the old
America First Committee. But instead of appeasing the
open Nazis who then still ruled Germany, as in the old-
fashioned and blunter days of Father Coughlin, "For
America" began greatly expanding its mass base in 1954
by "quietly canvassing Jewish and Negro prospects."

And so it goes. From these multiplying examples we
may tentatively generalize: Manifestations of ethnic intol
erance today tend to decrease in proportion as ideological
intolerance increases. In sharp contrast, both bigotries
previously used to increase together.

THE REVOLT AGAINST THE ELITE 99

If sociologists require a new term for this change (as
if there were not enough jargon already), then at least
let it be a brief, unponderous term, I would suggest the
word "transtolerance" for this curious interplay between
the new tolerance and the new intolerance. Transtolerance
is ready to give all minorities their glorious democratic
freedomprovided they accept McCarthyism or some
other mob conformism of Right or Left. I add "or Left"
because liberals sometimes assume conformism is inevit
ably of the Right. Yet "Right" and "Left" are mere fluc
tuating pretexts, mere fluid surfaces for the deeper anti-
individualism (anti-aristocracy) of the mass man, who
ten years ago was trying to thought-control our premature
anti-Communists as "warmongers" and who today damns
them as "Reds" and who ten years from now, in a new
appeasement of Russia, may again be damning them as
"Wall Street warmongers" and "disloyal internationalist
bankers/*

Transtolerance is the form that xenophobia takes when
practiced by a "xeno" Transtolerant McCarthyism is
partly a movement of recent immigrants who present
themselves (not so much to the world as to themselves)
as a two hundred per cent hate-the-foreigner movement.
And by extension: Hate "alien" ideas. Transtolerance is
also a sublimated Jim Crow: against "wrong" thinkers,
not "wrong" races. As such, it is a Jim Crow that can be
participated in with a clear conscience by the new, non-
segregated flag-waving Negro, who will be increasingly
emerging from the increased egalitarian laws in housing
and education. In the same way it is the Irishman s
version of Mick-baiting and a strictly kosher anti-Semi
tism. It very sincerely champions against anti-Semites
"that American Dreyfus, Roy Cohn"; simultaneously it
glows with the same mob emotions that in all previous
or comparable movements have been anti-Semitic.

too The New American Right

The final surrealist culmination of this new develop
ment would be for the Ku Klux Klan to hold non-segre
gated lynching bees.

At the same moment when America fortunately is
nearer racial equality than ever before (an exciting gain,
insufficiently noted by American-baiters in Europe and
India), America is moving further from liberty of opin
ion. "Now remember, boys, tolerance and equality/ my
very progressive schoolma am in high school used to
preach, "come from cooperation in some common task."
If Orwell s 1984 should ever come to America, you can
guess what "some common task" will turn out to be.
Won t it be a "team" (as they will obviously call it) of
"buddies" from "all three religions" plus the significantly
increasing number of Negro McCarthyites, all "cooperat
ing" in the "common task" of burning books on civil
liberties or segregating all individualists of "all three"
religions?

It required Robespierre to teach French intellectuals
that egalite is not synonymous with liberte. Similarly,
Joseph McCarthy is the educator of the educators; by
his threat to our lawful liberties, he is educating America
intellectuals out of a kind of liberalism and back to a
kind of conservatism. The intellectual liberals who twenty
years ago wanted to pack the Supreme Court as frustrat
ing the will of the masses (which is exactly what it ought
to frustrate) and who were quoting Charles Beard to
show that lie Constitution is a mere rationalization of
economic loot-those same liberals today are hugging for
dear life that same court and that same Constitution,
including its Fifth Amendment. They are hugging those
two most conservative of "outdated" institutions as their
kst life preservers against the McCarthyite version of
what their Henry Wallaces used to call "the century of
the common man."
Our right to civil liberties, our right to an unlimited

THE BEVOLT AGAINST THE ELITE 101

non-violent dissent, is as ruggedly conservative and tradi
tional as Senator Flanders and the mountains of Vermont.
It is a right so aristocratic that it enables one lonely
individual, sustained by nine non-elected nobles in black
robes, to think differently from 99.9 per cent of the
nation, even if a majority of "all races, creeds, and
colors," in an honest democratic election, votes to sup
press the thinking of that one individual.

But what will happen to that individual and his liberties
if ever the 99.9 per cent unite in direct democracy to
substitute, as final arbiter of law, the white sheets for the
black robes?

Asians and Europeans ought never to confuse genuine
American anti-Communism, a necessary shield for peace
and freedom against aggression, with the pseudo-anti-
Communism of the demagogues, which is not anti-
Communism at all but a racket. American anti-Com
munism, in the proper sense of the term, usually turns
out to be a surprisingly sober and reasonable movement,
fair-minded and sincerely dedicated to civil liberties.
Indeed, when you consider the disappointed hopes and
the murderous provocations suffered by an unprepared
public opinion in the five years between Yalta illusions
and Korean casualty lists, there emerges a reality more
typical and impressive than the not-to-be-minimized
existence of racketeers and thought-controllers; and that
impressive reality is the sobriety, the reasonableness of
America s genuine anti-Communists, whether Eisenhower,
Stevenson or Norman Thomas.

Pro-Communist periodicals in Europe have been link
ing American anti-Communists and McCarthy, as if there
were some necessary connection. The zany rumor that

102 The New American Eight

McCarthyism is anti-Communism may be spread by
honest ignorance, but it may also be spread maliciously:
to give anti-Communism a bad name abroad, to make
anti-Communism as intellectually disreputable as it
seemed during the Popular Front era, But the fact that
pro-Communists find it strategic to link the McCarthy
methods with American anti-Communism is no reason
for our American anti-Communists to do so, or to allow
even the hint of such a linkage to continue.

To move to a different but overlapping problem: There
is likewise no reason for philosophical conservatives
(disciples of Burke, Coleridge, Tocqueville, Irving Bab
bitt and the Federalists, rather than of President McKin-
ley or Neville Chamberlain) to condone even the hint of
any linkage between our philosophical conservatism and
that rigor mortis of Manchester liberalism known as the
Old Guard of the Republican Party.

I now propose to develop the above two generaliza
tions. First, if McCarthyism does not represent anti-
Communism, what does it represent? Second, if the pres
ent Republican Party does not merit the support of
philosophical (Burkean or Federalist) conservatives, then
who does merit that support in 1956?

To a certain extent, the new nationalist toughness
("McCarthyism") is the revenge of those who felt
snubbed in 1928, when the man with the brown derby
lost the election, and who felt snubbed a second time in
1932, when the nomination went to his victorious rival
from Groton and Harvard.

But even more important than that old wound (the
Irish Catholic role in McCarthyism being intolerantly
overstressed by its liberal foes) is the McCarthy-Dirksen-
Bricker coalition of nationalism, Asia Firstism and Europe-
Last isolationism; and what is this coalition but a Mid
west hick-Protestant revenge against that same "fancy"
and condescending east? That revenge is sufficiently emo-

THE REVOLT AGAINST THE ELITE 103

tional to unite a radical wing with a reactionary wing.
The revenge-emotion of McCarthyism has united the old
Midwest Populist instincts on the down-with-everybody
Left (barn-burners from way back and distrusters of
Anglicized highbrow city-slickers ) with the rich Chicago
Tribune nationalists on the authoritarian Right, Both these
Midwest groups are Protestant, not Catholic. Both are
against an east viewed as Europe First and Asia Last-
shorthand for an east viewed as aristocratic, interna
tionalist, over-educated, and metaphorically (if rarely
literally) Grotonian.

By itself and without allies, the resentment of lower-
middle-class Celtic South Boston against Harvard (simul
taneous symbol of Reds and Wall Street plutocrats ) was
relatively powerless. (Note that no serious mass move
ment like McCarthy s was achieved by the earlier out
burst of that resentment in Coughlinism. ) It was only
when the South Boston resentment coalesced with the
resentment of flag-waving Chicago isolationists and
newly-rich Protestant Texans (still denied entree into
the chicte of Wall Street) that the American seaboard
aristocracy was seriously threatened in its domination of
both governmental and intellectual public opinion and
in its domination of its special old-school-tie preserve,
the Foreign Service. Against the latter, the old Populist
and La Follette weapon against diplomats of "you inter
nationalist Anglophile snob" was replaced by the dead
lier weapon of "you egghead security-risk" meaning, as
the case might be, alleged unbeliever and subverter or
alleged homosexual or alleged tippler and babbler. All
of these allegations have been made for centuries by
pseudo-wholesome, "pious" peasants against "effete"
noblemen.

What is at stake in this revolt? Liberty or mere eco
nomic profit? Probably neither. Nobody in any mass
movement on any side in any country is really willing to

104 The New American Right

bear the burden of liberty (which is why liberty is pre
served not by mass-will nor by counting noses but by
tiny, heroic natural-aristocracies and by the majesty
beyond mob majorities of moral law). As for economic
profit, there is enough of that lying around in lavish
America to keep both sides happily glutted, in defiance
of both Marx and Adam Smith, Instead, the true goal
of both sides the McCarthyite rebels and the seaboard
aristocracy is the psychological satisfaction of determin
ing the future value-pattern of American society.

As a pretext for its drive toward this true goal, the
first side uses "anti-Communism." (Falsely so, because
nothing would please the Communists more than a vic
tory of the Bricker, McCarthy and Chicago Tribune side,
thereby isolating America from Western Europe.) As a
counter-pretext, the second side uses "civil liberties/

The latter is not solely a pretext but valid enough at
the moment, now that this side is seeing its own ox being
gored. But ultimately much of its oratory about civil
liberties rings as false as that of self-appointed anti-
Communism, if only you consider the silence of the second
side about "civil liberties" when the gored ox was not
their own pet Foreign Service aristocrats and professors
but the violated civil liberties of thousands of interned
Japanese-Americans during World War II or the Min
neapolis Trotskyites jailed under the Smith Act (in both
cases under Roosevelt), not to mention the hair-raising
precedent of currently denying a passport to the anti-
Stalinist Marxist, Max Schachtman. With some honorable
exceptions, the internment of friendless Japanese- Ameri
cans, of un-"forward-looking" conscientious objectors and
of presumably un-chic Trotskyites has evoked fewer
decibels of "witch-hunt, witch-hunt!" from fashionable
liberals, fewer sonorous quotations of what Jefferson
wrote to Madison about free minds, than does the current
harassing of a more respectably bourgeois and salonfdhig

THE BEVOLT AGAINST THE ELITE K>5

ex-Stalinoid from the Institute of Pacific Relations. Thus
does snobbism take precedence over ideology in the con-
f ormism known as "anti-conformism."

In every American community, picture some eagle
scout of "anti-Communism" battling some village Hamp-
den of "civil liberties." What a spectacle! Insincerity or
self-deception on both sides.

Which of the two unattractive alternatives can be
sufficiently improved and matured to become not merely
a lesser evil but a positive good? Since the noble pretexts
of both sides ring so hollow, why do I favor (while
retaining an independent third position) a victory by the
second of these two sides? Not for its beaux yeuxnot,
that is, for its comic snobbism, its mutually contradictory
brands of "progressive" political chic, "avant-garde" cul
tural chic, and Eastern-college, country-club social chic.
Even its trump card, namely, the ethical superiority to
McCarthyism of its upper-class educated liberals, remains
badly compromised by the 1930s the silence, because of
expediency, during the Moscow Trials and the business-
baiting McCarthyism-of-the-Left of too many New Deal
agitations and investigations, Still, despite everything,
the heritage known as "New England" (a moral rather
than sectional term and diffused through all sections)
does inspiringly combine the two things that mean most
to me in determining my choice: respect for the free
mind and respect for the moral law.

This combination of moral duty and liberty may by
1956 have a new birth of nationwide appeal, owing to
the providential emergence of the leadership of Adlai
Stevenson, a blender of New England and Middle West,
an intellectual uncompromised by Popular Frontist illu
sions or by the era of Yalta appeasement.

No "great man" theories, no determinism: Let us take
Stevenson merely as symbolizing imperfectly a still poten
tial goal, a new era that may or may not be attained by

lo g The New American Right

his very diverse followers. For intellectuals, he symbolizes
the mature outgrowing and discarding of what in part
was their bad and silly era. A bad era insofar as they
sacrificed ethical means to a progress achieved by Machia
vellian social engineering. (Defined metaphysically, the
ethical double standard of many toward Russia was a
logical consequence of the initial false step of seeking a
short-cut to material progress outside the moral frame
work.) A silly era insofar as they alternated this expedi
ency with the opposite extreme, that of idealistic a priori
blueprints and abstractions; these lack the concrete con
text of any mature, organically evolved idealism. An
oscillation between these extremes was likewise character
istic of the eighteenth-century liberal intellectuals, oscil
lating between impractical Utopian yearnings and an all-
too-practical softness (double standard) toward Jacobin
social engineering.

Here is one extremely small but revealing example of
the new, maturer kind of intellectual leadership: Steven
son did not have his name listed to endorse die Nation
magazine (that Last Mohican from the liberal illusions
of tiie 1930s), even though such routine endorsements in
past years came automatically from the highest liberal
intellectuals and New Dealers. Today, most liberal intel
lectuals have learned to distinguish between the "liberal
ism" of certain double-standard Nation experts (even
while rightly defending their free speech against Mc-
Carthyism or thought control) and tike valid liberalism
of, say, the New Republic, the Progressive, or the Repor
ter. Five years ago, when I began writing the chapter
about the Nation in Shame and Glory of the Intellectuals,
that ethical distinction was still unclear to most liberal
intellectuals. How much saner America would be today if
those businessmen who would like to be "conservatives"
had some Republican version of Mr. Stevenson to teach
them the comparable quality of distinguishing between

THE BEVOLT AGAINST THE ELITE 107

endorsing genuine anti-Communism and endorsing the
"anti-Communism" of the McCarthys, Jenners and Dirk-
sens!

What businessman today whether in the New York-
Detroit axis or even in Chicago .Tri&tmeland sees any
thing radical or even liberal about the SEC or insurance
of bank deposits? These and other New Deal cushionings
of capitalism have become so traditional, so built-in a
part of our eastern business communities that their old
feud with the New Deal becomes a fading anachronism,
a feud dangerous only if it still hampers their support of
Eisenhower s "New Deal Republicans" against the isola
tionist nationalist Republicans.

Though the partly unintentional effect of such New
Deal reforms has been conservative, this does not mean
we can go to the opposite extreme and call the New
Deal as a whole conservative. In contrast with its Com
munism-preventing social reforms, its procedures of agita
tional direct democracy were occasionally as radical as
the business world alleged them to be, by-passing the
Supreme Court, the Constitution, and the rest of our
indirect democracy. Further, the Popular Front attitude
of expediency toward the sheer evil of Communism,
though it mesmerized New Deal talkers in New York
more than actual New Deal doers in Washington, was as
radical an anti-ethics on the Left as ison the Right the
similar anti-ethics of a Popular Front with McCarthyism.

It is the bad and silly aspects of the New Deal, the
procedural and unethical aspects, which have been rightly
outgrown in new leaders like Stevenson, who rightly
retain the valuable humane and conservative aspects.
This refreshing development, by which unlike its nation
alist Republican foes a fallible movement outgrows its
own errors, is the decisive argument for supporting
Stevenson and the Democrats in the Presidential election
of 1956. The same support was actually earned by them

io8 The New American Right

already in 1952, but less obviously then, owing to the
then legitimate hope that Eisenhower could help the
Republicans to similarly outgrow their errors.

Despite the magnificent personal intentions of our
decent and kindly President, the present Republican Ad
ministrationwhen considered as a whole, Knowland,
Nixon and all has obviously failed to evoke a world-
minded, responsible American conservatism. Instead, the
Republican leadership has left to others (like the bipar
tisan Watkins Committee) its own plain duty of restrain
ing its wild men of the Right, whose activity was defined
by the ever perceptive Will Herberg (New Leader,
January 18, 1954) as "government by rabble-rousing, the
very opposite of a new conservatism." Such revolutionary
agitators would never be tolerated in the more truly
conservative party of Eden, Butler and Churchill.

A conservative kind of government would bring the
following qualities: a return to established ways, relaxa
tion of tension and calm confidence, reverence for the
Constitution and every single one of its time-hallowed
amendments and liberties, orderly gradualism, protection
of the Executive Branch from outside mob pressure. The
conservative kind of government would bring an increased
respect even to the point of pompous stuffiness for time-
honored authority and for venerable dignitaries. Specific
ally, that would mean an increased respect for such
dignitaries as Justices of the Supreme Court, famous gen
erals decorated for heroism or with a Nobel Prize for
statesmanship, past Presidents (because of the impersonal
dignity of that office and because of the traditionalist s
need of historical continuity), and any present President
and his top appointments, especially in such a snobbishly
aristocratic preserve as the Foreign Service. The above
qualities are the stodgier virtues. They are not invariably
a good thing, nor is conservatism in every context a good
thing. AH I am saying is that these happen to be the

THE BEVOLT AGAINST THE ELITE 1CX)

qualities of conservative rule, and the Republican Admin
istration has not brought us a single one of them.

The Democrats were voted out of office partly because
the country was fed up (and rightly so) with certain of
the more radical notions and agitations of the New Deal
1930s. Yet, it now appears, by contrast, that those now-
nostalgic "twenty years of treason" gave America a bit
more of old-fashioned conservative virtues than the
present self-styled anti-soap-boxing of Republican soap
boxers.

Unless one of two unexpected events occurs, the Re
publican Party has forfeited its claim to retain in 1956
those decisive votes of non-partisan independents which
gave it victory in 1952. The unexpected events are either
a far firmer assertion of presidential leadership over the
anti-Eisenhower barn-burners and. wild men in the Senate,
or else their secession into a radical third party. If either
of these blessings occurs, there will again be good reason
for independents to vote for Eisenhower: on moral
grounds if he asserts his leadership, on strategic grounds
if there is a McCarthy third party. The latter would save
the Republicans in the same unexpected way that the
secession of pro-Communists into the Progressive Party
saved Truman in 1948.

If neither of these unlikely blessings occurs for the
Republicans, then the last remaining obstacle has been
cleared away for all thoughtful conservatives and inde
pendents, as well as liberals and Democrats, to support
Adlai Stevenson for President in 1956. Though neither
giddy optimism nor personal hero-worship is in order, at
least there is a good chancein proportion to our own
efforts to make it a good chance that a Stevenson party,
outgrowing the bad and the silly aspects of the 1930s,
will lead America beyond the two false alternatives of
Babbitt Senior Republicans and Babbitt Junior liberals.
Ahead potentially lies an American synthesis of Mill with

no The New American Right

Burke, of liberal free dissent with conservative roots in
historical continuity.

Of two American alternatives with bad records, the
slanderous wild nationalists and the sometimes double-
standard civil-libertarians, only the second alternative is
capable of outgrowing a bad and silly past. The 1956
elections can bring it a better and wiser future under the
better and wiser intellectualism of Stevenson. Here ends
a cycle once partly symbolized by Alger Hiss ("a genera
tion on trial" ). Here, symbolized by Adlai Stevenson,
begins potentially a new cycle of the glory, not the shame,
of the eggheads.

In view of America s present mood of prosperous mod
eration, the McCarthy revolution and all other extremes
of right and left will almost certainly lose. All that might
rescue them is the emotionalism that would accompany a
lost or costly war in China, But, luckily, the stakes are
neither that high nor that desperate. America is no
Weimar Republic, and McCarthyism tends to be more a
racket than a conspiracy, more a cruel publicity hoax
(played on Fort Monmouth, the Voice of America, the
State Department) than a serious "fascist" or war party.
Despite demagogic speeches ("speak loudly and carry a
small stick"), the nationalist wing of the Republicans cares
no more about really blockading and fighting the Red
Chinese despotism than Hamlet s vehement player cared
about Hecuba. Our indispensable European allies need
not fear that Americans, even our nationalist wild men,
will become preventive-warriors or trigger-happy. The
struggle to be the new American ruling (taste-determin
ing) ckss is a domestic struggle, in which foreign policy

THE BEVOLT AGAINST THE ELITE 111

and Our Boys in China merely furnish heartless slogans
to embarrass the older ruling class.

In this struggle, two points emerge about diction: First,
"nationalism" is less often a synonym of "national inter
est" than an antonym; second, no alchemy has yet been
invented by which a loud repetition of the word "anti-
Communism" transforms a Yahoo into a Houyhnhnm.

That the McCarthy movement normally accuses only
non-Communists of "Communism" is one of the main
rules of the game. Why? Not because the Communist
menace to America has decreased (it has increased since
Malenkov), but because McCarthy is not after the scalps
of Communists in the first place but after the scalps of
all those traditionalists who, like Senators Watkins and
Flanders, favor government by law. And the reason why
emotional McCarthyism, more by instinct than design,
simply must be against traditionalists, conservatives and
government-by-law is explained by its unadmitted but
basic revolutionary nature. It is a radical movement trying
to overthrow an old ruling class and replace it from
below by a new ruling class.

I use "ruling class" not in the rigid Marxist sense but
to mean the determiners of culture patterns, taste pat
terns, value patterns. For in America classes are fluid,
unhereditary, and more psychological than economic. As
suggested earlier, our old ruling class includes eastern,
educated, mellowed wealth internationalist and at least
superficially liberalized, like the Achesons of Wall Street
or the Paul Hoffmans of the easternized fraction of
Detroit industrialists. The new would-be rulers include
unmellowed plebeian western wealth (Chicago, Texas,
much of Detroit) and their enormous, gullible mass-base:
the nationalist alliance between the sticks and the slums,
between the hick-Protestant mentalities in the west (Pop
ulist-Progressive on the Left, Know-Nothing on the Right)

us The New American Right

and the South Boston mentalities in the east. The latter
are, metaphorically, an unexplored underground cata
comb, long smoldering against the airy, oblivious palaces
of both portions (liberal and Wall Street) of the eastern
upper world.

Nobody except McCarthy personally can bridge this
incongruous alliance of sticks and slums, and likewise
span both sides of their respective religions, Too many
commentators assume that the censured McCarthy, being
increasingly discredited, will now be replaced by a
smoother operator, by a more reliably Republican type
like Nixon. To be sure, an Arrow collar ad like Nixon,
eager-eyed, clean-shaven and grinning boyishly while he
assesses the precise spot for the stiletto, is socially more
acceptable in the station-wagons of all kinds of junior
executives on the make. However, even though the Vice
President s tamer version of the McCarthy drama would
flutter more lorgnettes in respectable suburbia, that gain
would be counterbalanced by the loss of the still more
numerous South Boston mentalities. The latter would
thereupon revert to the Democratic party, from which
only a "proletarian," non-Protestant McCarthy, never a
bourgeois Rotarian Nixon, can lure them.

A fact insufficiently stressed is that McCarthy himself
was originally a member of the Wisconsin "Democrat
Party/ The otherwise similar Senator Pat McCarran pre
ferred to remain, at least nominally, a Democrat to the
end. Here, clearly, is a function of voter-wooing-namely,
wooing to Republicanism the slummier part of the
thought-control bloc-which only a McCarthy and not
even the most "glamorous" Nixon or Dirksen can perform
for the wealthy, suburban, Republican anti-civil-liber-
tarians I would, therefore, disagree with Adlai Stevenson
when he equates Nixon s appeal with McCarthy s

No one but McCarthy can combine these incompatibles
ot Catholic slums and Protestant sticks into one move-

THE REVOLT AGAINST THE ELITE 113

ment, not to mention scooping up en passant the scattered
lunatic fringes that emerged from anti-anti-Fascist isola
tionism during World War II. Therefore, it is premature
to write McCarthy off as finished. What will indeed
destroy him in the long run is the fact that his organizing
ability does not keep pace with his publicizing ability,
and that the left (New Deal) and right (Wall Street)
wings of the old aristocracy can today partly team up
whenever they need to protect their common interests.
The wealthy Wall Street lawyer Acheson symbolized this
team-up under Truman and was hated for it; his aristo
cratic, old-school-tie, Anglicized mannerisms were a Red
flag to the McCarthyite plebeian revolution.

The New Deal and Wall Street battled in the 1930s
when their imagined interests seemed irreconcilable. (I
say "imagined" and "seemed" because it was hardly a
threat to Wall Street when the New Deal reforms immu
nized workers against that lure of Communism to which
French workers succumbed.) But the common Anglo-
philism of the internationalist, educated eastern seaboard
united them (fortunately for the cause of liberty) on the
interventionist, anti-Nazi side during World War II. And,
by today, the New Deal reforms have become so deeply
rooted and traditional a part of the status quo, so conser
vative in a relative (though not absolute) sense, that the
new plebeian money from the Midwest can no longer
count on a split between social chic (eastern money in
New Canaan and Long Island) and progressive chic
(cliches of "forwards-looking uplift). Whether under
Eisenhower Republicans or Stevenson Democrats, there
will be no such split. And, unless there is a lost war, this
partial unity between the financial and the liberal wings
of aristocracy will fortunately smash the McCarthyite
plebeian insurrection of "direct democracy" (government
by mass meetings and telegrams).

The partial rapprochement between Wall Street and a

114 The New American Right

now middle-aged New Deal is evidenced by the many
recent books by veteran New Dealers on the advantages
of enlightened "bigness" in businessbooks, for example,
by David Lilienthal, J. K. Galbraith and Adolf Berle.
These three valuable writers I profoundly admire on most
points, but I disagree on the following rhetorical question:
While fully recognizing the harmful snob-motives of the
medieval feudal mind, was there not, nevertheless, some
sound moral core within its "reactionary" distrust of the
cash-nexus bourgeois?

Are liberal intellectuals, in a mirror-image of their
former Left Bank stance, now suddenly to become joiners,
good sports, success-worshipers, members of The Team?
Will it next be a triumph of their adaptability to suffer in
silence, without the old "holy indignation/ the spectacle
of a Republican auto dealer patronizing a great scientist
as if he were his clerk instead of approaching him cap in
hand? In that case, who on earth, if not the intellectuals,
will resist the periodic stampedes to entrust American
culture to the manipulators of gadgets? This resistance to
stampedes ought to express not the conformism of "non-
conformism," flaunted to pose as a devil of a fellow, but
the sensitivity of a deeper and finer grain, an ear conform
ing not to bandwagon-tunes but to the finer, older, deeper
rhythms of American culture.

A few years ago, liberal intellectuals were reproaching
me for refusing to bait Big Business-and today (in
several cases) for refusing to equate it with Santa Glaus.
Why do either? Business-baiting was and is a cheap
bohemian flourish, a wearing of one s soulfulness on one s
sleeve, and no substitute for seriously analyzing the real
problem: namely, the compulsion of modern technics
(whether under capitalist bigness or a socialist bigness)
to put know-how before know-why.

When the alternative is the neo-Populist barn-burners
from Wisconsin and Texas, naturally I ardently prefer

THE REVOLT AGAINST THE ELITE

Big Business, especially a noblesse-obligated and New
Dealized Big Business. For its vanity (desire to seem
sophisticated) makes a point of allowing a lot more elbow-
room to the free mind. But what a choice! All America s
great creative spirits of the past, like Melville (who spoke
of "the impieties of Progress") and conservative Henry
Adams, would turn in their graves, as indignantly as
would liberal Abraham Lincoln, at even the hint that no
noble third alternative remained for a nation boasting of
itself as the freest on earth.

Insofar as they refute the old Stalinist lie about Amer
ica s imaginary mass poverty and the imaginary pros
perity of the Soviet slave kennels, let us welcome the
belated liberal conversions to anti-business-baiting. But
what when they go to the other extreme of whitewashing
almost everything, from the old robber barons to the new
"bigness"? What when the paeans to economic prosperity
ignore the psychological starvation, the cultural starva
tion, the mechanized mediocrity of too-efficient bigness?
At that point, the value-conserver must protest: Judge
our American elephantiasis of know-how not solely in
contrast with the unspeakably low values of Soviet Com
munism but also in contrast with our own high anti-
commercial traditions of Hawthorne, Melville and Thor-
eau, all of whom knew well enough that the railroad
rides upon us, not we on the railroad.

Where the Communist police state is the alternative,
let us continue to emphasize that American Big Business
is an incomparably lesser evil. But beyond that special
situation no further concessions, least of all unnecessary
ones. Let us frankly embrace as enjoyable conveniences
the leisure and services resulting from IBM efficiency.
But must the embrace be corybantic? Shall intellectuals
positively wallow in abdicating before a bigness which
admittedly gives Americans economic prosperity and, at
present, a relative political freedom but which robotizes

n6 The New American Right

them into a tractable, pap-fed, Readers-Digested and
manipulated mass-culture?

Too utilitarian for a sense of tragic reverence or a sense
of humor, and prone (behind "daring" progressive
cliches) to an almost infinite smugness, one kind of
bourgeois liberal is forever making quite unnecessary sac
rifices of principle to expediency first to the fellow-
traveling Popular Front line in the 1930s, now to the
opposite line in the 1950s. But there comes a time when
lasting values are conserved not by matey back-slapping
but by wayward walks in the drizzle, not by seemingly
practical adjustments but by the ornery Unadjusted Man.

1 What do we mean by "direct democracy" as contrasted with "indi
rect democracy* ? Let us re-apply to today the conservative thesis of
Madison s tenth Federalist paper and of Irving Babbitt s Democracy
and Leadership.

Direct democracy (our mob tradition of Tom Paine, Jacobinism, and
the Midwestern Populist parties) is government by referendum and
mass petition, such as the McCarthyite Committee of Ten Million.

Indirect democracy (our semi-aristocratic and Constitutionalist tradi
tion of Madison and the Federalist) likewise fulfills the will of the
people but by filtering it through parliamentary Constitutional channels
and traditional ethical restraints.

Both are ultimately majority rule, and ought to be. But direct democ
racy, being immediate and hotheaded, facilitates revolution, demagogy,
and Robespieman thought control, while indirect democracy, being
calmed and canalized, facilitates evolution, a statesmanship of noblesse
obUge, and civil liberties.

Social Strains in America

TALCOTT PARSONS

To THE relatively objective ob
server, whether American or foreign, it seems clear that
the complex of phenomena that have come to be known
as "McCarthyism" must be symptoms of a process in
American society of some deep and general significance.
Some interpret it simply as political reaction, even as a
kind of neofascism. Some think of it as simply a manifes
tation of nationalism. The present paper proposes to bring
to bear some theoretical perspectives of sociology in an
attempt to work out an interpretation which goes beyond
catchwords of this order.

McCarthyism can be understood as a relatively acute
symptom of the strains which accompany a major change

117

1 18 The New American Right

in the situation and structure of American society, a
change which in this instance consists in the development
of the attitudes and institutional machinery required to
implement a greatly enhanced level of national political
responsibility. The necessity for this development arises
both from our own growth to an enormous potential of
power, and from the changed relation to the rest of the
world which this growth in itself, and other changes
extraneous to American development, have entailed. The
strains to which I refer derive primarily from conflicts
between the demands imposed by the new situation and
the inertia of those elements of our social structure which
are most resistant to the necessary changes.

The situation I have in mind centers on the American
position in international affairs. The main facts are famil
iar to all. It is not something that has come about sud
denly, but the impact of its pressures has been cumulative.
The starting point is the relative geographical isolation
of the United States in the "formative" period of its
national history, down to, let us say, about the opening
of the present century. The Spanish-American War ex
tended our involvements into the Spanish-speaking areas
of the Caribbean and to the Philippines, and the Boxer
episode in China and our mediation of the Russo-Japanese
War indicated rapidly growing interests in the Orient.
Then the First World War brought us in as one of the
major belligerents, with a brief possibility of taking a
role of world leadership. From this advanced degree of
international involvement, however, we recoiled with a
violent reaction, repudiating the Treaty of Versailles and
the League of Nations.

In the ensuing period of "normalcy," until the shock of
Pearl Harbor settled the question, it could still be held
that the "quarrels" of foreign powers beyond the Amer
icas were none of our concern, unless some "arbitrary"
disturbance impinged too closely on our national inter-

SOCIAL STRAINS IN AMERICA 1*9

ests. By the end of the Second World War, however, this
attitude could not again be revived by any body of
opinion which pretended to depend upon a realistic
appraisal of our situation. Our own strength, in spite of
our massive disarmament and demobilization, had grown
too great; the defeat of France and the disorganization
of Germany destroyed such continental European balance
of power as had existed; Britain, though victorious, was
greatly weakened in the face of world-wide commit
ments; and Soviet Russia emerged as a victorious and
expanding power, leading with a revolutionary ideology
a movement which could readily destroy such elements
of stability favorable to our own national values and
interests as still remained in the world. Along with all
this have come developments in military technology that
have drastically neutralized the protections formerly con
ferred by geographical distance, so that even the elemen
tary military security of the United States cannot now be
taken for granted apart from world-wide political order.

The vicissitudes of American foreign policy and its rela
tions to domestic politics over this period show the dis
turbing effect of this developing situation on our society.
We have twice intervened militarily on a grand scale.
With a notable difference of degree, we have both times
recoiled from the implications of our intervention. In the
second case the recoil did not last long, since the begin
nings of the Cold War about 1947 made it clear that only
American action was able to prevent Soviet domination
of the whole continent of Europe. It can, however, be
argued that this early and grand-scale resumption of re
sponsibility imposed serious internal strains because it
did not allow time for "digesting" the implications of our
role in the war.

The outstanding characteristic of the society on which
this greatly changed situation has impinged is that it had
come to be the industrial society par excellence partly

120 The New American Right

because the settlement of the continental area coincided
with the later industrial revolution, partly because of the
immense area and natural resources of the country, but
partly too because of certain important differences be
tween American and European society. Since the United
States did not have a class structure tightly integrated
with a political organization that had developed its main
forms before the industrial revolution, the economy has
had a freedom to develop and to set the tone for the
whole society in a way markedly different from any
European country or Japan.

All highly industrialized societies exhibit many features
in common which are independent of the particular his
torical paths by which their developments have taken
place. These include the bureaucratic organization of the
productive process itself, in the sense that the roles of
individuals are of the occupational type and the organiza
tions in which they are grouped are mainly "specific
function" organizations. Under this arrangement the peas
ant type of agricultural holding, where farming is very
closely bound up with a kinship unit, is minimized; so too
of small family businesses; people tend to look to their
productive function and to profit as a measure of success
and hence of emancipation from conflicting ties and
claims; the rights of property ownership are centered
primarily in the organization which carries functional
responsibility, and hence permits a high degree of segre
gation between private life and occupational roles for
production purposes; contract plays a central part in the
system of exchange, and para-economic elements tend to
be reduced in importance.

Outside the sphere which touches the organization of
the economy itself, industrialism means above all that the
structures which would interfere with the free function
ing of the economy, and of their adaptation to it, are
minimized. The first of these is family and kinship. The

SOCIAL STRAINS IN AMERICA 121

American family system, chiefly characterized by the iso
lation of the nuclear or conjugal family, has gone farther
than in any European society toward removing all inter
ferences with the occupational roles of the breadwinning
members, and with occupational mobility. A second field
is religion. The American combination of federalism and
the separation of church and state has resulted in a
system of "denominational pluralism" which prevents or
ganized religion from constituting a monolithic structure
standing in the way of secular social developments. The
third field concerns the matter of social stratification.
The United States of course has a class structure; but it
is one which has its primary roots in the system of occu
pational roles, and in contrast to the typical European
situation it acts as no more than a brake on the processes
of social mobility which are most important to an indus
trial type of occupational system. Under an effective
family system there must be some continuity of class
status from generation to generation, and there cannot
be complete "equality of opportunity." In America, how
ever, it is clearly the occupational system rather than
kinship continuity that prevails.

Linked to this situation is our system of formal educa
tion. The United States was among the pioneers in devel
oping publicly supported education; but this has taken
place in a notably decentralized way. Not only is there no
Department of Education in the Federal government,
but even the various state departments are to a large
extent service organizations for the locally controlled
school systems. Higher education further has been con
siderably more independent of class standards which
equate the "scholar" with the "gentleman" (in a class
sense) than has been the case in Europe. Also a far larger
proportion of each age-group attends institutions of
higher education than in European countries.

Politically the most important fact about American in-

122 The New American Right

dustrialism is that it has developed overwhelmingly under
the aegis of free enterprise, Historically the center of
gravity of the integration of American society has not
rested in the political field. There came to be established
a kind of "burden of proof expectation that responsibili
ties should not be undertaken by government unless,
first, the necessity for their being undertaken at all was
clearly established, and second, there was no other obvi
ously adequate way to get the job done. It is therefore
not surprising that the opening up of vast new fields of
governmental responsibility should meet with consider
able resistance and conflict.

The impact of this problem on our orientation to
foreign relations has been complicated by an important
set of internal circumstances. It is a commonplace that
industrialism creates on a large scale two sets of problems
which uniformly in all industrialized countries have re
quired modifications of any doctrinaire "laissez-faire"
policy: the problems of controlling the processes of the
economy itself, and of dealing with certain social reper
cussions of industrialization.

As the process of industrialization has developed in
America there has been a steady increase in the amount
of public control imposed on the economy, with the
initiative mainly in the hands of the Federal government.
This trend was accelerated in the latter years of the nine
teenth century, and has continued, with interruptions,
through the New Deal. The New Deal, however, was
more concerned with the social repercussions of indus
trialization, rather than with more narrowly economic
problems. The introduction of a national system of social
security and legislation more favorable to labor are per
haps the most typical developments. This internal process
of government intervention has not gone far enough to
satisfy European socialists, but it certainly constitutes a
great modification of the earlier situation. Moreover, in

SOCIAL STRAINS IN AMERICA

broad lines it can be regarded as firmly established. It is
significant that the major political parties now tend to
vie with each other in promoting the extension of social
security benefits, that there is no likelihood of repeal of
the Federal Reserve Act, and that there is no strong
movement to place the unions under really severe legal
restraints.

On the whole, business groups have accepted the new
situation and cooperated to make it work with consid
erably more good faith than in Continental Europe.
Nevertheless, these internal changes have been sufficiently
recent and far-reaching to keep the strains attendant on
them from being fully resolved. Moreover they have
created an important part of the problems with which
this examination is chiefly concerned, problems touching
the composition of the higher strata of the society, where
the primary burden of responsibility must fall.

By contrast with European countries, perhaps in some
ways particularly Britain, the United States has been
conspicuous for the absence or relative weakness of two
types of elite elements. The first of these is a hereditary
upper class with a status continuous from pre-industrial
times, closely integrated with politics and public service.
The second is an occupational elite whose roots are essen
tially independent of the business world in the indepen
dent professions, the universities, the church, or govern
ment, including civil and military services.

In America the businessmen have tended to be the
natural leaders of the general community. But, both for
the reasons just reviewed and for certain others, this
leadership has not remained undisputed. On the whole
the business community has, step by step, resisted the
processes of internal change necessitated by industrializa
tion rather than taken the leadership in introducing them.
The leadership that has emerged has been miscellaneous
in social origin, including professional politicians, espe-

The New American Right

daily those in touch with the urban political machines,
leaders in the labor union movement and elements in
close touch with them. An important part has been played
by men and women who may be said to exhibit a more
or less "aristocratic" tinge, particularly in the Eastern
cities, President Roosevelt of course having been among
them. An important part has been played by lawyers
who have made themselves more independent of the
business connection than the typical corporation lawyer
of a generation ago. Under the pressure of emergency,
there has been a tendency for high military officers to
play important roles in public life.

Another important group has been composed of "intel
lectuals" again a rather miscellaneous assembly including
writers, newspapermen, and members of university facul
ties. In general the importance of the universities has
been steadily enhanced by the increasingly technical
character of the operations of the economy; businessmen
themselves have had to be more highly educated than
their predecessors, and have become increasingly depen
dent on still more highly trained technicians of various
lands.

The important point is that the "natural" tendency for
a relatively unequivocal business leadership of the general
community has been frustrated, and the business group
has had to give way at many points. Nevertheless, a
clearly defined non-business component of the elite has
not yet crystallized. In my opinion, the striking feature of
the American elite is not what Soviet propaganda con
tends that it is the clear-cut dominance by "capitalists"
but rather its fluid and relatively unstructured character.
In particular, there is no clear determination of where
political leadership, in the sense including both "politics"
and "administration," is to center.

A further feature of the structure of American society
is intimately related to the residual strains left by recent

SOCIAL STRAINS IN AMERICA

social changes, There is a continuing tendency for earlier
economic developments to leave a "precipitate" of upper
groups, the position of whose members is founded in the
achievements of their ancestors, in this case relatively
recent ones. By historical necessity these groups are
strongest in the older parts of the country. Hence the
cities of the Eastern seaboard have tended to develop
groups that are the closest approach we have though still
very different from their European equivalent to an aris
tocracy. They have generally originated in business in
terests, but have taken on a form somewhat similar to the
mercantile aristocracies of some earlier European socie
ties, such as the Hanseatic cities. In the perspective of
popular democratic sentiments, these groups have tended
to symbolize at the same time capitalistic interests and
social snobbery. In certain circumstances they may be
identified with "bohemianism" and related phenomena
which are sources of uneasiness to traditional morality.
As the American social and economic center has shifted
westward, such groups in the great Middle Western area
and beyond have been progressively less prominent There
the elites have consisted of new men. In the nature of
the case the proportional contribution to the economy
and the society in general from the older and the newer
parts of the country has shifted, with the newer progres
sively increasing their share. But at the same time there
is the sense among them of having had to fight for this
share against the "dominance" of the East. A similar
feeling permeates the lower levels of. the class structure.
A major theme of the populist type of agrarian and other
radicalism had combined class and sectional elements,
locating the source of people s troubles in the bankers
and railway magnates of the East and in Wall Street. It
must not be forgotten that the isolationism of the between-
the-wars period was intimately connected with this sec
tional and class sentiment. The elder La Follette, who was

126 The New American Right

one of the principal destroyers of the League of Nations,
was not a "conservative" or in any usual sense a reac
tionary, but a principal leader of the popular revolt
against "the interests,"

It must also not be forgotten that a large proportion
of the American population are descendants of relatively
recent immigrants whose cultural origins are different
from the dominant Protestant Anglo-Saxon elements. A
generation and more ago the bulk of the new immigration
constituted an urban proletariat largely dominated by the
political machines of the great cities. By now a great
change has taken place. The children of these immigrants
have been very much Americanized, but to a considerable
degree they are still sensitive about their full acceptance.
This sensitivity is if anything heightened by the fact that
on the whole most of these elements have risen rapidly in
the economic and social scale. They are no longer the
inhabitants of the scandalous slums; many have climbed
to lower middle class status and higher. They have a
certain susceptibility to "democratic" appeals which are
directed against the alleged snobbery of the older domi
nant elements.

Finally, the effect of the great depression of the 1930 s
on the leading business groups must not be forgotten.
Such a collapse of the economy could not fail to be felt
as a major failure of the expectation that business leaders
should bear the major responsibility for the welfare of the
economy as a whole and thus of the community. In gen
eral it was not the businessmen but the government, under
leadership which was broadly antagonistic to business,
which came to the rescue. Similarly, the other great class
of American proprietors, the farmers, had to accept gov
ernmental help of a sort that entailed controls, which in
turn inevitably entailed severe conflicts with the individ
ualistic traditions of their history. The fact that the strains
of the war and postwar periods have been piled so imme-

SOCIAL STRAINS IN AMERICA

diately on those of depression has much to do with the
severity of the tensions with which this analysis is con
cerned.

My thesis, then, is that the strains of the international
situation have impinged on a society undergoing impor
tant internal changes which have themselves been sources
of strain, with the effect of superimposing one kind of
strain on another. What responses to this compound
strain are to be expected?

It is a generalization well established in social science
that neither individuals nor societies can undergo major
structural changes without the likelihood of producing a
considerable element of "irrational" behavior. There will
tend to be conspicuous distortions of the patterns of value
and of the normal beliefs about the facts of situations.
These distorted beliefs and promptings to irrational action
will also tend to be heavily weighted with emotion, to
be "overdetermined" as the psychologists say.

The psychology of such reactions is complex, but for
present purposes it will suffice to distinguish two main
components. On the negative side, there will tend to be
high levels of anxiety and aggression, focused on what
rightly or wrongly are felt to be the sources of strain and
difficulty. On the positive side there will tend to be
wishful patterns of belief with a strong "regressive"
flavor, whose chief function is to wish away the disturbing
situation and establish a situation in phantasy where
"everything will be all right," preferably as it was before
the disturbing situation came about. Very generally then
the psychological formula tends to prescribe a set of
beliefs that certain specific, symbolic agencies are respon
sible for the present state of distress; they have "arbi
trarily" upset a satisfactory state of affairs. If only they
could be eliminated the trouble would disappear and
a satisfactory state restored. The role of this type of
mechanism in primitive magic is quite well known.

The New American Right

In a normal process of learning in the individual, or of
developmental change in the social system, such irrational
phenomena are temporary, and tend to subside as capac
ity to deal with the new situation grows. This may be
more or less easily achieved of course, and resolution of
the conflicts and strains may fail to be achieved for a
long period or may even be permanently unsuccessful.
But under favorable circumstances these reactions are
superseded by an increasingly realistic facing of the
situation by institutionalized means.

Our present problem therefore centers on the need to
mobilize American society to cope with a dangerous and
threatening situation which is also intrinsically difficult.
It can clearly only be coped with at the governmental
level; and hence the problem is in essence a matter of
political action, involving both questions of leadership
of who, promoting what policies, shall take the primary
responsibility and of the commitment of the many heter
ogeneous elements of our population to the national
interest.

Consequently there has come to be an enormous in
crease in pressure to subordinate private interests to the
public interest, and this in a society where the presump
tions have been more strongly in favor of the private
interest than in most. Readiness to make commitments to
a collective interest is the focus of what we ordinarily
mean by "loyalty." It seems to me that the problem of
loyalty at its core is a genuine and realistic one; but
attitudes toward it shade all the way from a reasonable
concern with getting the necessary degree of loyal co
operation by legitimate appeals, to a grossly irrational set
of anxieties about the prevalence of disloyalty, and a
readiness to vent the accompanying aggression on inno
cent scapegoats.

Underlying the concern for loyalty in general, and
explaining a good deal of the reaction to it, is the ambiva-

SOCIAL STRAINS IN AMERICA 129

lence of our approach to the situation: The people in
the most "exposed" positions are on the one hand pulled
by patriotic motives toward fulfillment of the expectations
inherent in the new situation; they want to "do their bit."
But at the same time their established attitudes and orien
tations resist fulfillment of the obligation. In the conflict
of motives which ensues it is a natural consequence for
the resistance to be displaced or projected on to other
objects which function as scapegoats. In the present
situation it is precisely those parts of our population
where individualistic traditions are strongest that are
placed under the greatest strain, and that produce the
severest resistances to accepting the obligations of our
situation. Such resistances, however, conflict with equally
strong patriotic motives. In such a situation, when one s
own resistance to loyal acceptance of unpalatable obliga
tions, such as paying high taxes, are particularly strong,
it is easy to impute disloyal intentions to others.

Our present emotional preoccupation with the problem
of loyalty indicates above all that the crisis is not, as some
tend to think, primarily concerned with fundamental
values, but rather with their implementation. It is true
that certain features of the pattern of reaction, such as
tendencies to aggressive nationalism and to abdication
of responsibilities, would, if carried through, lead to
severe conflict with our values, But the main problem is
not concerned with doubts about whether the stable
political order of a free world is a goal worth sacrificing
for, but rather with the question of how our population
is rising or failing to rise to the challenge.

The primary symbol that connects the objective exter
nal problem and its dangers with the internal strain and
its structure is "Communism." "World Communism" and
its spread constitute the features of the world situation
on which the difficulty of our international problem
clearly centers. Internally it is felt that Communists and

The New American Right

their "sympathizers" constitute the primary focus of
actual or potential disloyalty.

With respect to the external situation, the focus of the
difficulty in the current role of Soviet Russia is of course
reasonable enough. Problems then arise mainly in connec
tion with certain elements of "obsessiveness" in the way
in which the situation is approached, manifested for
instance in a tendency to subordinate all other approaches
to the situation exclusively to the military, and in the
extreme violence of reaction in some circles to the Chinese
situation, in contrast to the relative tolerance with which
Yugoslavia is regarded.

Internally, the realistic difficulty resides mainly in the
fact that there has indeed been a considerable amount of
Communist infiltration in the United States, particularly
in the 1930 s. It is true that the Communist Party itself
has never achieved great electoral success, but for a time
Communist influence was paramount in a number of im
portant labor unions, and a considerable number of
the associations Americans so like to join were revealed
to be Communist-front organizations, with effective Com
munist control behind the public participation of many
non-Communists. Perhaps most important was the fact
that considerable numbers of the intellectuals became
fellow-travelers. In the days of the rise of Nazism and of
the popular front, many of them felt that only Soviet
Russia was sincere in its commitment to collective secu
rity; tihat there was a Franco-British "plot" to get Ger
many and Russia embroiled with each other, etc. The
shock of the Nazi-Soviet pact woke up many fellow-
travelers, but by no means all; and the cause was con
siderably retrieved by Hitler s attack on Russia.

Two other features of the Communist movement which
make it an ideal negative symbol in the context of the
present loyalty problem are the combination of conspira-

SOCIAL STRAINS IN AMERICA

torial methods and foreign control with the progressive
component of its ideological system. On the one hand
the party has drastically repudiated the procedures of
constitutional democracy, and on this issue has broken
with all the democratic socialist parties of Europe; it
claims the protection of democratic procedures and civil
liberties, but does not hesitate to abuse them when this
seems to be advantageous. There has further never been
any question of the American party determining its own
policies by democratic procedures. Perhaps in fact the
knowledge of the extent to which the "front" organiza
tions have been manipulated from behind the scenes has
been the most disillusioning aspect for liberal Americans
of their experience with Communism at home.

At the same time the movement had a large content of
professed idealism, which may be taken to account for
the appeal of Communism before the Cold War era for
such large elements of liberal opinion in the United
States, as in other Western countries. Marx was, after all,
himself a child of the Enlightenment, and the Communist
movement has incorporated in its ideology many of the
doctrines of human rights that have formed a part of
our general inheritance. However grossly the symbols of
democracy, of the rights of men, of peace and brother
hood, have been abused by the Communists, they are
powerful symbols in our own tradition, and their appeal
is understandable.

Hence the symbol "Communism" is one to which a
special order of ambivalence readily attaches. It has
powerful sources of appeal to the liberal tradition, but
those who are out of sympathy with the main tradition
of American liberalism can find a powerful target for
their objections in the totalitarian tactics of Communism
and can readily stigmatize it as "un-American." Then, by
extending their objections to the liberal component of

The New American Right

Communist ideology, they can attack liberalism in gen
eral, on the grounds that association with Communist
totalitarianism makes anything liberal suspect.

These considerations account for the anti-Communist s
readiness to carry over a stereotype from those who have
really been party members or advanced fellow-travelers
to large elements of the intellectuals, the labor movement,
etc., who have been essentially democratic liberals of
various shades of opinion. Since by and large the Demo
cratic Party has more of this liberalism than has the
Republican, it is not surprising that a tendency to label
it as "sympathizing" with or "soft toward" Communism
has appeared. Such a label has also been extended, though
not very seriously, to the Protestant clergy.

But there is one further extension of the association
that is not accounted for in these terms, nor is the failure
to include certain plausible targets so accountable. The
extension I have in mind is that which leads to the inclu
sion as "pro-Communist" of certain men or institutions
that have been associated with political responsibility in
the international field. Two symbols stand out here. The
first is Dean Acheson. Mr. Acheson has for years served
the Democratic Party. But he has belonged to the con
servative, not the New Deal wing of the party. Further
more, the coupling of General Marshall with him, though
only in connection with China, and only by extremists,
clearly precludes political radicalism as the primary ob
jection, since Marshall has never in any way been identi
fied with New Deal views. The other case is that of
Harvard University as an alleged "hot-bed" of Commu
nism and fellow-traveling. The relevant point is that Mr.
Acheson typifies the "aristocrat" in public service; he
came of a wealthy family, he went to a select private
school (Groton) and to Yale and Harvard Law School.
He represents symbolically those Eastern vested interests,
against whom antagonism has existed among the new men

SOCIAL STRAINS IN AMERICA 133

of the Middle West and the populist movement, including
the descendants of recent immigrants. Similarly, among
American universities Harvard has been particularly
identified as educating a social elite, the members of
which are thought of as "just the type," in their striped
trousers and morning coats, to sell out the country to the
social snobs of European capitals. It is the combination of
aristocratic associations through the Boston Brahmins
and a kind of urban-bohemian sophistication along with
its devotion to intellectual and cultural values, including
precisely its high intellectual standards, which makes
Harvard a vulnerable symbol in this context.

The symbol "Communism," then, from its area of legiti
mate application, tends to be generalized to include
groups in the population who have been associated with
political liberalism of many shades and with intellectual
values in general and to include the Eastern upper-class
groups who have tended to be relatively internationalist
in their outlook.

A second underlying ambivalent attitude-structure is
discernible in addition to that concerning the relation
between the totalitarian and the progressive aspects of
Communism. On the one hand, Communism very obvi
ously symbolizes what is anathema to the individualistic
tradition of a business economy the feared attempt to
destroy private enterprise and with it the great tradition
of individual freedom. But on the other hand, in order to
rise to the challenge of the current political situation, it is
necessary for the older balance between a free economy
and the power of government to be considerably shifted
in favor of the latter. We must have a stronger govern
ment than we have traditionally been accustomed to, and
we must come to trust it more fully. It has had in recent
times to assume very substantial regulatory functions in
relation to the economy, and now vastly enhanced respon
sibilities in relation to international affairs.

134 The New American Right

But, on the basis of a philosophy which, in a very
different way from our individualistic tradition, gives
primacy to "economic interests/ namely the Marxist phil
osophy, the Communist movement asserts the unquali
fied, the totalitarian supremacy of government over the
economy. It is precisely an actual change in our own
system in what in one sense is clearly this direction that
emerges as the primary focus of the frustrations to which
the older American system has been subjected. The
leaders of the economy, the businessmen, have been
forced to accept far more "interference" from government
with what they have considered "their affairs" than they
have liked. And now they must, like everyone else, pay
unprecedentedly high taxes to support an enormous mili
tary establishment, and give the government in other
respects unprecedentedly great powers over the popula
tion. The result of this situation is an ambivalence of
attitude that on the one hand demands a stringent display
of loyalty going to lengths far beyond our tradition of
individual liberty, and on the other hand is ready to
blame elements which by ordinary logic have little or
nothing to do with Communism, for working in league
with the Communist movement to create this horrible
situation.

Generally speaking, the indefensible aspect of this ten
dency in a realistic assessment appears in a readiness to
question the loyalty of all those who have assumed re
sponsibility for leadership in meeting the exigencies of
the new situation. These include many who have helped
to solve the internal problems of the control of the
economy, those who in the uneasy later thirties and
the first phase of the war tried to get American policy
and public opinion to face the dangers of the international
situation, and those who since the war have tried to take
responsibility in relation to the difficult postwar situation.
Roughly, these are the presumptively disloyal elements

SOCIAL STRAINS IN AJVCERICA 135

who are also presumptively tainted with Communism. Here
again, admittedly, certain features of our historical record
and attitudes provide some realistic basis for this ten
dency. In fact many elements in both parties have failed
lamentably to assess correctly the dangers of the situation,
both internally and externally. New Dealers have stigma
tized even the most responsible elements of the business
world as economic royalists and the like, while many
elements in business have clung long past a reasonable
time to an outmoded belief in the possibility of a society
with only a "night watchman" government. In foreign
affairs, some members of the Democratic Party have been
slow to learn how formidable a danger was presented by
totalitarian Communism, but this is matched by the
utopianism of many Republicans about the consequences
of American withdrawal from international responsibili
ties, through high tariffs as well as political isolationism.
The necessity to learn the hard realities of a complex
world and the difficulty of the process is not a task to be
imposed on only part of the body politic. No party or
group can claim a monopoly either of patriotic motive or
of competent understanding of affairs.

In a double sense, then, Communism symbolizes "the
intruder." Externally the world Communist movement is
the obvious source of the most serious difficulties we have
to face. On the other hand, although Communism has
constituted to some degree a realistic internal danger, it
has above all come to symbolize those factors that have
disturbed the beneficent natural state of an American
society which allegedly and in phantasy existed before
the urgent problems of control of the economy and greatly
enhanced responsibility in international affairs had to be
tackled.

Against this background it can perhaps be made clear
why the description of McCarthyism as simply a political
reactionary movement is inadequate. In the first place, it

136 The New American Right

is clearly not simply a cloak for the "vested interests" but
rather a movement that profoundly splits the previously
dominant groups. This is evident in the split, particularly
conspicuous since about 1952, within the Republican
Party, An important part of the business elite, especially
in the Middle West and in Texas, the * newest" area of
all, have tended in varying degrees to be attracted by the
McCarthy appeal. But other important groups, notably in
the East, have shied away from it and apparently have
come to be more and more consolidated against it. Very
broadly, these can be identified with the business element
among the Eisenhower Republicans.

But at the same time the McCarthy following is by no
means confined to the vested-interest groups. There has
been an important popular following of very miscella
neous composition. It has comprised an important part
of those who aspire to full status in the American system
but have, realistically or not, felt discriminated against
in various ways, especially the Mid- Western lower and
lower middle classes and much of the population of recent
immigrant origin. The elements of continuity between
Western agrarian populism and McCarthyism are not by
any means purely fortuitous. At the levels of both lead
ership and popular following, the division of American
political opinion over this issue cuts clean across the
traditional lines of distinction between "conservatives"
and "progressives" especially where that tends to be
defined, as it so often is, in terms of the capitalistic or
moneyed interests as against those who seek to bring them
under more stringent control. McCarthyism is both a
movement supported by certain vested-interest elements
and a popular revolt against the upper classes.

Another striking characteristic of McCarthyism is that
it is highly selective in the liberal causes it attacks. Apart
from the issue of Communism in the labor unions, now
largely solved, there has been no concerted attack on the

SOCIAL STRAINS IN AMERICA 137

general position of the labor movement. Further, the
social program aimed toward the reduction of racial
discrimination has continued to be pressed, to which fact
the decision of the Supreme Court outlawing segregation
in public education and its calm reception provide drama
tic evidence. Nevertheless, so far as I am aware there has
been no outcry from McCarthyite quarters to the effect
that this decision is further evidence of Communist influ
ence in high circles in spite of the fact that eight out of
nine members of the present court were appointed by
Roosevelt and Truman.

Perhaps even more notable is the fact that, unlike the
1930 s, when Father Coughlin and others were preaching
a vicious anti-Semitism, anti-Semitism as a public issue
has since the war been very nearly absent from the
American scene. This is of course associated with full
employment. But particularly in view of the rather large
and conspicuous participation of Jewish intellectuals in
the fellow-traveling of the 1930 s, it is notable that Jewish-
ness has not been singled out as a symbolic focus for the
questioning of loyalty. A critical difference from German
Nazism is evident here. To the Nazis the Jew was the
primary negative symbol, the Communist the most promi
nent secondary one. But it must also be remembered that
capitalism was symbolically involved. One of the functions
of the Jew was to link Communism and capitalism to
gether. This trio were the "intruders" to the Nazis. They
symbolized different aspects of the disturbance created
by the rapid development of industrialism to the older
pre-industrial Gemeinschaft of German political roman
ticism. It was the obverse of the American case a new
economy destroying an old political system, not new
political responsibilities interfering with the accustomed
ways of economic life.

Negatively, then, the use of the symbol "Communism"
as the focus of anxiety and aggression is associated with

138 The New American Right

a high order of selectivity among possibly vulnerable
targets. This selectivity is, I submit, consistent with the
hypothesis that the focus of the strain expressed by
McCarthyism lies in the area of political responsibility
not, as Marxists would hold, in the structure of the
economy as such, nor in the class structure in any simple,
Marxian-tinged sense.

The same interpretation is confirmed by the evidence
on the positive side. The broadest formula for what the
McCarthyites positively "want" besides the elimination
of all Communist influence, real or alleged is perhaps
"isolationism." The dominant note is, I think, the regres
sive one. It is the wishful preservation of an old order,
which allegedly need never have been disturbed but for
the wilful interference of malevolent elements, Com
munists and their sympathizers. The nationalistic over
tones center on a phantasy of a happy "American way"
where everything used to be all right. Naturally it is
tinged with the ideology of traditional laissez-faire, but
not perhaps unduly so. Also it tends to spill over into a
kind of irritated activism. On the one hand we want to
keep out of trouble; but on the other hand, having identi
fied an enemy, we want to smash him forthwith. The
connection between the two can be seen, for example, in
relation to China, where the phantasy seems to be that
by drastic action it would be possible to "clean up" the
Chinese situation quickly and then our troubles would
be over.

The main contention of these pages has been that
McCarthyism is best understood as a symptom of the
strains attendant on a deep-seated process of change in
our society, rather than as a "movement" presenting a
policy or set of values for the American people to act on.
Its content is overwhelmingly negative, not positive. It
advocates "getting rid" of undesirable influences, and
has amazingly little to say about what should be done.

SOCIAL STRAINS IN AMERICA 139

This negativism is primarily the expression of fear,
secondarily of anger, the aggression which is a product of
frustration. The solution, which is both realistically feasi
ble and within the great American tradition, is to regain
our national self-confidence and to take active steps to
cope with the situation with which we are faced.

On the popular level the crisis is primarily a crisis of
confidence. We are baffled and anxious, and tend to seek
relief in hunting scapegoats. We must improve our under
standing and come to realize our strength and trust in it.
But this cannot be done simply by wishing it to be done.
I have consistently argued that the changed situation in
which we are placed demands a far-reaching change in
the structure of our society. It demands policies, and
confidence, but it demands more than these. It demands
above all three things. The first is a revision of our con
ception of citizenship to encourage the ordinary man to
accept greater responsibility. The second is the develop
ment of the necessary implementing machinery. Third is
national political leadership, not only in the sense of
individual candidates for office or appointment, but in the
sense of social strata where a traditional political respon
sibility is ingrained.

The most important of these requirements is the third.
Under American conditions, a politically leading stratum
must be made up of a combination of business and non-
business elements. The role of the economy in American
society and of the business element in it is such that
political leadership without prominent business participa
tion is doomed to ineffectiveness and to the perpetuation
of dangerous internal conflict. It is not possible to lead
the American people against the leaders of the business
world. But at the same time, so varied now are the na
tional elements which make a legitimate claim to be rep
resented, the business element cannot monopolize or
dominate political leadership and responsibility. Broadly,
I think, a political elite in the two main aspects of

140 The New American Right

"politicians" whose specialties consist in the management
of public opinion, and of "administrators" in both civil
and military services, must be greatly strengthened. It is
here that the practical consequences of McCarthyism
run most directly counter to the realistic needs of the
time. But along with such a specifically political elite there
must also be close alliance with other, predominantly
"cultural" elements, notably perhaps in the universities,
but also in the churches.

In the final sense, then, the solution of the problem of
McCarthyism lies in the successful accomplishment of
the social changes to which we are called by our position
in the world and by our own domestic requirements. We
have already made notable progress toward this objective;
the current flare-up of stress in the form of McCarthyism
can be taken simply as evidence that the process is not
complete.

The Polls on Communism
and Conformity 1

NATHAN GLAZER AND
SEYMOUR MARTIN LIPSET

TEN OR twenty years ago, no one
could have predicted that the defense of civil liberties
would become the complicated matter it became in the
Fifties. A generation raised on campaigns for the defense
of the civil liberties of socialists, pacifists, anarchists, and
an outspoken or queer teacher here or there, found the
problem simple. It could even extend its protection to
the odd teacher or crackpot who supported the Nazis
and the Fascists; there were too few of them to matter.
But now the matter is more complicated. The Communist
Party, however few actual party members there may
have been at any given time, did have a far greater
influence over American intellectual and cultural life, and

141

The New American Right

in American government too, than anything that can be
legitimately called Nazism or Fascism. And there is no
question, too, that the American people-however defined
-feel more intensely about Communists than they felt
about Nazism and Fascism. This attitude was stiffened
by the disclosures of past Communist influence, particu
larly the espionage roles of some hidden units in govern
ment, by lie rising chill of the cold war, and by the
aggression of the Communists in Korea, Security became
a natural issue almost a national idee fixe at least on the
official levels of opinion and government. So, the last ten
years have seen the creation of a whole system of law,
administrative regulations, regulative bodies, and private
agencies devoted, at one extreme, to putting Communists
in jail, and at the other, to simply making life miserable
for people who might have been or might be Communists.
In the resulting hullaballoo and confusion, many people
have been properly concerned over the erosion or abroga
tion of civil liberties of Communists and non-Commu
nists; other people have been properly concerned over
the extent of the threat of Communism, and whether
these measures form a really effective defense against the
Communist movement. But how concerned were the
American people about Communism? And who among
them manifested these concerns, and to what extent?
How far would Americans go in supporting restrictions on
Communists and who among the people would go farth
est? How much support could Senator McCarthy mobilize
for his charges? The book which was published under the
sponsorship of the Fund for the Republic Communism,
Conformity, and Civil Liberties by Samuel A. Stouffer of
Harvard is intended as an answer to some of these ques
tions. It is, we should understand, a limited contribution
and deals with only one part of the problem. It is a survey
of opinions. From any survey of opinions we find out
what people think. In this book we find out what the

THE POLLS ON COMMUNISM AND CONFORMITY 143

American people think about allowing advocates of public
ownership of industry, opponents of religion, suspected
Communists, and admitted Communists, to speak, pub
lish, teach, hold government jobs, and so on. To a much
smaller and less adequate extent, we find out how serious
they consider the danger posed by domestic Communists
to be.

But this means (and perhaps this labors the obvious),
that we will not find out whether, in fact, the civil liberties
of advocates of public ownership, atheists and Commu
nists have been infringed, whether they should be limited,
how the present situation in this respect compares with
the past, and whether it is likely to deteriorate or im
prove in the future.

Nor does this, as a study of opinions, concern itself with
other realities that socialists and atheists and even Com
munists regularly publish newspapers, and make speeches,
and that, despite the "will of the American people" as
reflected in opinion polls, persons in the first two cate
gories teach and work for the government and for colleges
and even school boards without major disturbances; in
short, that liberty is not to be measured, or not solely,
by the opinions of a random sample, the vast majority of
whom have never thought about or considered the ques
tions with which they are confronted; and that legislatures
and courts and constitutions and the customary practices
of our institutions are surer defenses of liberty than the
off-the-cuff feelings of the man on the street. It seems,
indeed, that it is almost in an absent-minded or abstracted
way that the average American will propose very drastic
measures for Communists. Most people just don t seem to
be terribly concerned with domestic Communism or any
political issue. Almost half the population, 44 per cent,
report that they hardly ever follow news about Com
munists. When asked, "Do you happen to know the names
of any Senators and Congressmen who have been taking

The New American Right

a leading part in these investigations of Communism?"
SO per cent of the national cross-section "could not come
up with a single correct name not even the name of
Senator McCarthy!" It is clear from other data in the
study, that this non-interested group overlaps considerably
with those Americans who do not vote and are uninter
ested in politics in general. This group with presumably
little or no weight in the body politic is actually much
more anti-civil libertarian than those persons who are
interested in the Communist problem, or in politics gen
erally. Yet, whether people think about Communism,
which people think about it, and, of that group, what
they think ought to be done about it, is itself one of the
most important facts in the situation. If public opinion
is indifferent or enlightened, then government leaders
may safely take whatever measures they think the extent
of the Communist threat requires. If public opinion is
violently anti-Communist and badly informed, then legis
lators and officials may have to take measures which they
feel are unwise, or the braver ones may have to undertake
the difficult job of educating public opinion. So, despite
the necessary limitations of the techniques used, much of
value can be uncovered by a survey of what people think.
Let us turn now to the study. Two organizations Gal-
lup s American Institute of Public Opinion and the Na
tional Opinion Research Center conducted independent
interviewing, using the same questionnaire, and drawing
samples of roughly the same size 2,400 persons in each
sample so that they could check their results against each
other. In most cases, the differences were minor, so we
can accept these results as reliable. In addition to this
national sample of 4,800 cases, a second sample of com
munity leaders was interviewed by the two organizations.
In a random sample of over 100 cities of more than
10,000 and fewer than 150,000 people, fourteen leaders-
political leaders, business and civic leaders, labor leaders,

THE POLLS ON COMMUNISM AND CONFORMITY 145

and heads of major voluntary organizations were inter
viewed, being given the same questionnaire that was
administered to the national sample. Thus, some 1,500
community leaders were interviewed and it became pos
sible to compare people of position and substance in the
middle-sized cities of the country with the rest of the
people of those towns, and with the country as a whole.

Generally speaking, we find that a large proportion of
the American people are intolerant on a variety of issues.
Only 37 per cent of the general sample answered affirma
tively the question: "If a person wanted to make a speech
in your community against churches and religion, should
he be allowed to speak or not?" Even more startling, only
12 per cent of the population would allow "such a person
... to teach/ while three-fifths would favor removing
a book attacking churches and religion from public libra
ries. 2

While critics of religion are in an especially vulnerable
position, many Americans would also deny traditional
rights to those who, while not Communists, favored the
nationalization of industry. Fewer than three-fifths of
Americans answered yes to the question: "If a person
wanted to make a speech in your community favoring
government ownership of all the railroads and big indus
tries, should he be allowed to speak or not?" Only a slim
majority, 52 per cent, would retain a book favoring gov
ernment ownership in the public library. Only one-third
would permit an advocate of government ownership "to
teach in a college or university."

As might be expected, the freedoms of Communist
advocates find short shrift with the American public.
Only 27 per cent would allow an admitted Communist
to make a speech. Nine-tenths of the population would
not allow him to teach in a high school or university.
Two-thirds would remove a book by a Communist from
the public library. Approximately two-thirds would not

146 The New American Right

allow a Communist to work as a clerk in a store or be a
radio singer. Over 75 per cent would take away his
citizenship. Slightly over half, 51 per cent, would put an
admitted Communist in jail. So concerned are Americans
with suppressing Communism, that almost three-fifths of
the people thought it more important "to find out all the
Communists even if some innocent people should be
hurt," while less than a third chose the alternate statement
that it was more important "to protect the rights of inno
cent people even if some Communists are not found out."
(If it is any consolation, the "level of tolerance" if we
measure it by what people say has never been assuringly
high. ". . . even in 1943, after the battle of Stalingrad,
two out of five Americans would have prohibited any
Communist party member from speaking on the radio.
By 1948 this proportion was up to 57 per cent; by 1952
it had risen to 77 per cent; and in ... January, 1954 the
figure was 81 per cent. ... An NORC survey before the
war found 25 per cent who would deny socialists the
right to publish newspapers; by 1953 [this figure had
risen to] 45 per cent.")

The finding that the majority of Americans tend to be
politically intolerant is checked by the converse report
of a larger proportion who felt that many civil liberties
were being denied. Only 56 per cent agreed with the
statement that "all people in this country feel as free to
say what they think as they used to"; 31 per cent believed
that some people do not feel as free as before, and 10 per
cent stated that "hardly anyone feels as free to say what
he thinks as he used to."

When asked about themselves personally, 13 per cent
of the sample replied that they felt less free to speak their
mind than in years before. One can interpret these find
ings in two ways: only 13 per cent felt less free than
before, or as many as 13 per cent of the American people
now feel less free. Our inclination is to choose the latter

THE POLLS ON COMMUNISM AND CONFORMITY 147

interpretation, for in any society few people ever want to
speak their mind on a political subject and, if 13 per cent
of the adult population, presumably 13,000,000 Ameri
cans, feel inhibited to speak out politically, this is a serious
situation. (Unfortunately, Professor Stouffer does not tell
us who this 13 per cent may be. )

Rather than deal with these very many questions on
many specific issues, however, Dr. Stouffer combines
fifteen questions to form a "scale of tolerance/ and then
examines the distribution of tolerance in the population. 3
In effect he maps out those elements in the population
which are strongest in their feeling for liberty, and those
which are most indifferent, or most actively opposed to
it for certain groups.

If we arbitrarily take a cut-off point in the scale of
tolerance, and call those achieving this score the "more
tolerant" we find that:

31 per cent of the national sample are "more tolerant"

39 per cent of the people who live in metropolitan
areas are "more tolerant/

46 per cent of the people who live in the West are
"more tolerant/

47 per cent of those aged 21-29 are "more tolerant/
66 per cent of college graduates are "more tolerant/
The concentrations of the less tolerant" are to be found

among the old, the poorly educated, Southerners, small
town dwellers and workers and farmers. Of course, all
these factors and some others of lesser weight in deter
mining tolerance may be interrelated. The young tend
to be better educated than the old, the people who live
in big cities tend to be better educated than those in
small towns, a higher proportion of Westerners than of
Southerners live in big cities, etc.

What is it then that makes a man more tolerant, when
two or more of these factors come together, as they often
do? One wishes that the author had done more to deter-

148 The New American Right

mine which of these factors was more important, but,
even without this help, it seems that education is by far
the most important. Two indications of its importance
extracted from the data are these: if one takes all those
between the ages of 21 and 60 and who are high-school
graduates or of lesser educationand this forms a huge
block of the population one finds that age seems to have
no effect on tolerance while amount of education is deci
sive. Thus, in this group, roughly 20 per cent of those
with only grade school education, about 30 per cent of
those with some high school education and close to 45
per cent of high school graduates are "more tolerant-
regardless of the ages in these educational categories.

Another case: the South is far less tolerant than the
other regions of the country; thus, only 16 per cent of the
South is rated "more tolerant" as against 31 per cent of
the Midwest, 39 per cent of the East, and 46 per cent
of the West. But these very large differences are reduced
to very small ones if one compares educated Southerners
with educated people from other regions. Of college
graduates in metropolitan areas, 62 per cent of South
erners are among the "more tolerant/ compared (for the
same category) with 64 per cent of the Middle West, 78
per cent of the East, and 73 per cent of the West. Pretty
much the same story is told when we compare those with
"some college." It is only when we get to those with a
high school education or less that we find the great gap
between the South and the rest of the country.

Education is perhaps most closely related to what is
generally called "socio-economic status" or class, and
which in many public opinion studies appears in the form
of occupation. There is, however, considerable evidence
to suggest that among men at the same educational level,
occupational variation does make for a difference in their
political attitudes. 4 Unfortunately, and most surprisingly,
there is little data reported directly on this point, with

THE POLLS ON COMMUNISM AND CONFORMITY 149

the exception of one table and chart which indicate that
farmers are the least tolerant group, followed in order of
increasing tolerance by manual workers, clerical and sales
people, proprietors, managers and officials, and as the
most tolerant group, professionals and semi-professionals.

These findings on education and occupation prepare us
for a major conclusion of the study, namely that, by con
trast with the opinions of the American people as a whole,
the community leaders stand forth as bulwarks of civil
liberties. Almost 85 per cent of the community leaders,
as against only 58 per cent of the population as a whole,
would allow an individual who favored nationalization of
industries to speak. (Seventy-six per cent of American
Legion post commanders and 75 per cent of D.A.R.
regents would also allow him to speak. ) A heavy majority
of the national cross-section (60 per cent) would not
allow a man to make a speech against church and religion,
while only a third of the community leaders would take
the same position. Slightly over half (51 per cent) of
the national cross-section said an admitted Communist
should be jailed, while only 27 per cent of the com
munity leaders held the same position. (The fact that
commanders of American Legion posts and regents of
the Daughters of the American Revolution are far more
liberal than the American people in general is a surprise.
But this may be a reflection less of a concern for civil
liberties by the Legion and D.A.R. than the fact that
the American people in general are indifferent to the
ordinary requirements of democracy. )

These community leaders are drawn from the well-
educated, professional and upper-level business classes. 5
The majority of the following categories of community
leaders, according to Stouffer, are in the more tolerant
group: mayors (60 per cent), presidents of school boards
(62 per cent), presidents of library boards (79 per cent),
chairmen of Republican county central committees (70

The New American Right

per cent), chairmen of the equivalent Democratic com
mittees (64 per cent), presidents of chambers of com
merce (65 per cent), presidents of labor unions (62 per
cent), chairmen of Community Chests (82 per cent),
presidents of bar associations (77 per cent), newspaper
publishers (84 per cent), presidents of Parent-Teacher
Associations (68 per cent).

In only three groups of community leaders did the pro
portion in the "more tolerant group fall below 50 per
cent: Commanders of the American Legion, regents of
the Daughters of the American Revolution, and presidents
of women s clubs. These leaders, however, who fell in
the range of 46 to 49 per cent, were about as tolerant as
the lower strata of the non-manual sector of the popula
tion, or high school graduates. Since one would guess
that the bulk of the leaders in these three categories have
higher educational and status backgrounds than these,
this finding would suggest that these three groups tend
to recruit the less tolerant individuals among people in
their class position.

There can be little doubt that in the United States the
rights of dissidents and of Communists are protected pri
marily by the powerful classes who accept the traditional
norms under which a democratic system operates. This
seems to be true in other countries as well, that is, the
upper and better educated strata are more likely to be
tolerant of dissent, and to recognize the need for civil
liberties than the workers, the farmers, and the less edu
cated. The question may be raised as to why, if similar
forces are operating here as elsewhere, the United States
is more extreme in its reactions than other democratic
countries. This problem was outside the focus of Professor
Stouffer s study. Some reasons are suggested in the chap
ter that follows.

Having mapped out the areas of tolerance and intoler
ance, we come to the really difficult questions that must

THE POLLS ON COMMUNISM AND CONFORMITY

precede any sort of deeper understanding. What does it
mean to say, for example, that the less educated, the
people in rural areas, the Southerners, and the old people
are less tolerant? If we were to educate the uneducated,
and encourage migration from rural areas to cities, and
from the South to the North, does it mean that the level
of tolerance in this country would be raised and our
problems solved? At times Dr. Stouffer writes almost as
if they would be, but this would be to take an extremely
limited view. Clearly there are two problems. The first
might legitimately be called that of intolerancethe
meanness and narrowness that are the natural conse
quences, at least in America, of isolation, poverty, lack
of advantages," and old age. The intolerant are as likely
to keep a socialist from opening his mouth as to throw a
Communist into jail Communism as a peculiar problem
does not affect this kind of personhis intolerance pre
dates it and will outlive it. This is, in effect, a social prob
lem. The Communists and their actions are occasions for
the expression of this intolerance rather than its own true
cause. Dr. Stouffer is right in linking this kind of intoler
ance to Communism with intolerance of unorthodoxy in
the fields of economics and religion. About this aspect of
the problem, Dr, Stouffer tells a fairly complete story.

But second, there is the fact that the level of political
tolerance and intolerance changes from one period to
another. For example, data reported in the Stouffer study
indicate that the proportion of the population who would
have denied various freedoms to Communists, socialists,
or other deviants from conventional national values, was
somewhat lower during the 1930s and World War II.
Obviously the increase in intolerance is not a result of
the fact that there now are more poorly educated people,
or that the farm population has increased. The reverse is,
of course, true. The important factor which has affected
the degree of tolerance is the political problem of Com
munism and how to deal with it, which is intimately

152 The New American Right

related to the state of civil liberties. But this question is
more dependent on changes in international affairs and
domestic American politics than on the raising of the
educational level.

Basically, there is a failure to distinguish between what
we may call the intolerant those who will say "Kill the
Communists" as easily as they will say "Jail die sex de
viants" and "Fire a teacher who is a freethinker" and
the concerned those who are sincerely worried about
Communism, and think strong measures are necessary to
deal with it. These two very different forms of what might
be called intolerance are never distinguished in the anal
ysis. The majority rules in public opinion research as in
voting; and if the majority of the intolerant are poorly
educated, come from backward areas, are old why, then,
that characterizes all the "intolerant."

These are admittedly subtle distinctions for a public
opinion poll not that they could not be made if one were
aware of their importance. We think that they are crucial
for an understanding of the whole problem of Com
munism, conformism, and civil liberties which Dr. Stouf-
fer has taken up. If one does not make these distinctions,
one can easily, by a process of damnation by association,
dismiss important political problems which deserve to be
discussed on their own merits, and not dismissed on the
basis of who holds them. One cannot dispose of the ques
tion of what measures are necessary to deal with Com
munism by demonstrating that the poor and ignorant
predominate among those who want to get tough with
Communists, and that the well educated, the middle
classes, and the community leaders tend to favor un
limited civil liberties.

This confusion between important categories becomes
apparent in the construction of the scale of tolerance
itself. The scale studies a single variable-tolerance. It
assumes that the attitudes and motivation affecting a

THE POLLS ON COMMUNISM AND CONFORMITY 153

person who would deny certain civil liberties to Com
munists, but grant them to atheists and socialists, are of
the same order only different in degree from the atti
tudes and motivations that would lead a person to deny
civil liberties to all three categories. Mathematically, it
appears that Dr. Stouffer is justified in his procedure
the theory of scales asserts that when there is a certain
pattern in the answers to a series of questions, then all
the questions are measuring a single variable. But one
must then say that while the scale is mathematically
rational it is not politically rational. Regardless of what
mathematics tells us, we know from our experience of
politics that a person s attitude toward the question of
rights for Communists may involve completely different
considerations from those affecting his attitude toward
rights for atheists and socialists.

The difficulties inherent in operating with a simple
dichotomy of the tolerant and intolerant emerge most
strikingly when Dr. Stouffer directly takes up the problem
of considering just what is the relationship between
concern with Communism and tolerance. As the reader
will recall, a measure of tolerance was derived from a
series of questions about advocates of government owner
ship of industry, opponents of religion, and accused and
actual Communists. A new factor is now introduced that
of "perception of the internal Communist threat." This
is measured by a scale which includes such questions as
"Do you think there are any Communists teaching in
American public schools (or working in American defense
pknts, etc.?") followed by the question, "How much
danger is there that these Communists can hurt the coun
try. . . ." The author considers the relationships between
the perception of the internal Communist threat and
tolerance of great importance, on the ground that, if
there is a positive relationship we might expect an in
crease in tolerance if the internal Communist threat is

The New American Right

perceived as falling; while a negative relationship-that
is, the fact that people could be intolerant even though
they perceived the internal Communist threat was unim
portantwould suggest the need for "a long-sustained
program of public education" to increase tolerance. It
turns out that there is a positive relationship. And on
this basis, the author concludes, "The relationship is high
enough and consistent enough to suggest that if the
internal Communist threat is now exaggerated, and if the
American people were told this and believed it, tolerance
of non-conformists would increase."

Now something important has gone wrong in this
demonstration. Dr. Stouffer has so set up his problem
that any lover of tolerance should logically desire the
perception of the Communist danger to be low for low
perception, his figures show us, is related to high toler
ance. This means, consequently, that if we desire toler
ance, we should want people to believe what may be a
falsehood (that is, the non-existence of a Communist
threat in America); for this would make them more
tolerant.

Now this is not the first time that the values of tolerance
and truth have been in apparent opposition. If we want
people to be more tolerant to Negroes, it is possibly best
that they should not believe that there are more Negro
than white criminals, dope addicts, paupers, and so on-
even though the facts are that there are more Negro
criminals, paupers, and dope addicts. However, as Paul
Kecskemeti argued in Commentary (March 1951) in his
review of The Authoritarian Personality, there is some
thing mechanical and ultimately false about this pro
cedure of saying that everything associated with a good
is itself a good, Dr. Kecskemeti pointed out that if anti-
Semitism is associated with hostility to Soviet Russia,
and lack of anti-Semitism with friendliness to Soviet
Russia, it does not follow that we have to encourage

THE POLLS ON COMMUNISM AND CONFORMITY 155

friendliness toward the Soviet Union to encourage friend
ship for the Jews. These relations are, if not fortuitous,
then certainly historical, products of given moments,
given combinations of events. These relations may change.
It then becomes incumbent on us to decide, from the
point of view of our own values and our own conception
of the world, what is good and what is true, and try to
achieve that directly, rather than to mechanically follow
the pattern of accepting whatever cluster of attitudes fall
together at any given moment as organically and neces
sarily related.

In the present situation, it would follow that if we
believe it is true that native Communists exist and have
played a considerable role in American government,
society, and culture, and still play some role, then we
need not resign ourselves to having these truths forgotten
or actively denied, simply because that denial is related
to tolerance.

As a matter of fact, of course, there are many people,
even in Dr. Stouffer s sample, who take the sensible atti
tude of being aware of the extent of Communist activity
in this country, without being intolerant (just as there are
others who rate low in perception of the internal Commu
nist threat and are intolerant). Perhaps it is just those lead
ership groups the educated, and those in professional
occupations who in general turn out to be the main
supporters of tolerance who both perceive the Com
munist danger and yet are tolerant. Dr. Stouffer, how
ever, is so interested in following the majority, that large
group which has a high perception of the Communist
danger and are intolerant, that he gives little considera
tion to these perhaps crucial minority groups. We find
out little about them who they are, where they live,
and how their numbers might be increased. Dr. Stouffer
operates with one major value tolerance. Everything else
is secondary. And what is associated with intolerance

The New American Right

(statistically speaking) should wither away and die, if
we are to have a good society. Recall his conclusion: "If
the internal Communist threat is now exaggerated, and
if the American people were told this and believed it,
tolerance of non-conformists would increase."

It would seem crucial to determine whether the internal
Communist threat is exaggerated or not: if it is, there is
no conflict between the values of truth and tolerance.
If it is not, then there is a conflict, for Dr. Stouffer seems
to take it for granted that the sensible position of being
aware of the threat and yet upholding tolerance cannot
be expected to grow. But on this crucial if, Dr. Stouffer
does not commit himself. Dr. Stouffer, it seems, would
like to take the position that the threat is exaggerated
but, hampered by a crippling notion of scientific objec
tivity, never quite decides to take the leap. He seems to
have fallen a victim of that canon of contemporary
scientific research which defines the universe of any
study by the methods used in that study. Because there
is no way of deciding the extent of the Communist threat
with the methods of public opinion research, Dr. Stouffer
finds it impossible to take a stand on this question. And
yet, if social science is to make a contribution to a prob
lem it must try to encompass it in all its reality and not
limit itself to that part of it which falls within the purview
of a given method.

To return then to our distinction between the intol
erant and the concerned between those who want to
throw the Communists into jail just as they want to throw
anyone with whom they disagree into jail, and those
who are aware of the existence of a Communist problem,
and diverge in their views as to what measures are
necessary to deal with it. Dr. Stouffer has told us the
story about the first group, which must indeed always
concern us, and in doing so he has made a contribution
to sociology. The second group, however, is for the most

THE POLLS ON COMMUNISM AND CONFORMITY 157

part lost in his sample, and its crucial characteristics
cannot be easily discerned. It is this group which is most
important politically. Their tolerance (or intolerance) is
different from that of the less educated majority; their
perception of the internal Communist threat (or lack of
it) is also different. It is possible to be tolerant out of
complete indifference to political developments and abys
mal ignorance. It is also possible to be tolerant out of a
commitment to democracy. It is possible to be intolerant
out of a sadistic and brutal attitude to other people. It is
also possible to be intolerant out of love of one s country
and a rational and strong belief that it is so seriously
threatened that certain measures, unnecessary in other
times and in the face of other enemies, may be necessary.
Without an awareness of these distinctions and these
distinctions play no role in Dr. Stouffer s study-^-one can
make no contribution to the political problems of Com
munism and civil liberties.

The failure to be interested in the political problem of
civil liberties led Dr. Stouffer to make little use of one
of the unique aspects of this study, the interviews with
1,500 community leaders. We learn little or nothing about
the factors which affect the differences in attitude toward
Communism and civil liberties within this group, or
among the privileged and educated classes from whom
they are largely selected. In a political context, it is the
views of these groups which matter most because they
write to the newspapers, fill the legislatures, and control
the local communities. If this upper stratum was more
unified in its support of civil liberties, as are seemingly
comparable groups in Great Britain and English-speaking
Canada, then the fact that the large majority was intol
erant would be of little significance politically/

If we look at this elite group, we find many individuals
who are convinced that Communists represent a "very
great" or a "great" danger to the country, but nevertheless

X g3 The New American Right

are high in tolerance. There is comparatively little differ
ence between the proportion of community leaders, 37
per cent, who believe that Communists are a "great" or
"very great" danger and the 43 per cent of the general
population who have the same sentiments. However, 57
per cent of the community leaders who believe Com
munists present a serious threat are high on the scale of
tolerance, while only 27 per cent of the general popula
tion who are similarly fearful of Communists hold a com
parable position on the tolerance scale. Or if we compare
the reactions of the college educated and those who did
not go beyond grammar school to perception of the
Communist danger, we find very little difference. Twenty-
nine per cent of the college group score high on the scale
of perception of the internal Communist threat, as con
trasted with 27 per cent of the least educated group.
The differences are striking, however, with regard to
tolerance. Half of the college group who score high on
perception of the threat also score high on tolerance,
while only 11 per cent of the grammar school group
who see a serious Communist menace are high in toler
ance.

The ability of many individuals to differentiate between
sensitive areas, and the diffuse attacks on civil rights of
Communists and dissidents, is brought out sharply by the
responses to the specific items which make up the toler
ance scale. Although community leaders are much more
tolerant than the bulk of the population, they do not
differ from the lower classes and tie uneducated on the
question whether Communists should work in defense
plants, or teach. Close to 90 per cent of both groups would
deny these forms of employment to Communists i.e. for
them, a sensitive area. On the other hand, the majority
of the population favor putting an admitted Communist
in jail, but only 27 per cent of the community leaders
have the same opinion.

These variations in the responses of different groups

THE POLLS ON COMMUNISM AND CONFORMITY 159

suggest the need for a more elaborate politically oriented
classification of groups, rather than simply high and low
on tolerance. It is possible to differentiate among four
groups: those who perceive the Communist danger as
great, and are intolerant; those who perceive the danger
as great, but are tolerant; those who see little danger and
are tolerant; and a group who see little danger and are
still intolerant. The great debate in America as to how to
treat Communists has been carried out among the first
three groups. And we would suggest that the strongest
supporters of civil liberties in the country are those who
recognize the Communist threat as great, but who would
still maintain all the guarantees of political freedom for
obnoxious and even dangerous minorities. When we
argue with people who think that Communists are a
danger, and who favor harsh measures against them, it
is the latter attitude, not the perception of danger which
should be changed. Dr. Stouffer could have added greatly
to the debt that we already owe him for this informative
study, if he had told us more about the factors which
are related to such a pattern of tolerance.

One other major problem arises in using the survey
technique. While the polls can tell us in considerable
detail the nuances of attitude difference among a wide
variety of stratified groups, these results are often mis
leading if interpreted without reference to the specific
organizational commitments which in action may modify
or even contradict the abstract attitude. To take a sharp
example: In Australia, in 1951, a national referendum was
held on the proposal, advanced by the Liberal govern
ment, to outlaw the Communist Party. Just prior to the
announcement of the referendum, a Gallup poll showed
that 80 per cent of those questioned favored such a move.
Yet, the vote in the referendum held three months later
was 50.6 per cent against outlawing the Communist
Party. What had happened? As a general fact, most of
the Australian people, especially the Catholics, were in

160 The New American Right

favor of the action. But because it was proposed by the
government, it became a party issue, with the Labor
Party and the trade unions coming out in strong opposi
tion. In the end, the Catholics were less in favor of out
lawing the Communist Party than any Protestant group.
The reason is that three-fourths of the Catholics, as
workers, vote Labor. Their political and trade-union loyal
ties turned the trick. 7

From Stouffer s data we see that Democrats, being in
greater proportion workers, and less educated, are, in
consequence, less tolerant than Republicans. Yet, on the
questions reported in the final chapter dealing with
Congressional investigations, Democrats are more hostile
to the anti-Communist investigations than Republicans.
Here again context modified attitude, for party position
became the chief determinant.

The question of what determines the party s attitude
is quite a complex one. Generally speaking, the weight
of party strategy is still determined by economic class
issues, and these traditionally carry with them ideological
commitments. Sometimes these are along liberal-and-
conservative lines, defined historically. Sometimes these
are shaped by other traditional attitudes. This is con
firmed, strikingly, in the picture of the South, as seen on
Stouffer s scales. On the questions of civil liberties, the
South is the least tolerant section of the country. How
ever, the South was the most anti-McCarthy section of
the country. There are many reasons: the traditional
attachment to the Democratic Party and the fact that
McCarthy is a Republican; McCarthy is a Catholic and
the South is the most anti-Catholic section in the country;
McCarthy attacked the Army, and the South has tradi
tionally been the most pro-military section of the country;
the South is politically the least informed and people
follow local leaders and local opinion which may be more
unrelated to national issues at large. Whatever the source

THE POLLS ON COMMUNISM AND CONFORMITY l6l

of the contradictions, knowing that the South, in general,
is intolerant, does not tell us how it will react to a specific
instance of intolerance.

The problem of attitude and context can be examined,
too, against the background of European history. A study
by the UNESCO institute in Cologne showed that upper-
class Germans were more in favor of a democratic political
structure (a multi-party as compared to a one party or
no party system) than lower-class groups. (Similar find
ings were reported, too, for Japan with regard to concern
for civil liberties.) Education here too, tended to make
the upper-class groups more pro-democratic than the
lower-class groups. But the political parties supported by
the upper- and middle-class groups have tended to be
anti-democratic, while those of the working-class have
fought harder for democratic rights. Clearly the relation
ship between "authoritarian" attitudes and party and
political structure is quite complex. Clearly too, political
events, in the large, are the results mainly of what or
ganized groups do, and this may have little relevance to
the sentiments of their members or supporters considered
in the mass,

The relationship between attitude and context is dis
cussed by Dr. Stouffer towards the end of his book
(pages 210-215) and we have no quarrel with him on
this score. If we were to make a criticism it is that in
writing a book concerned with the dynamic factors
affecting civil liberties, he stresses static structural vari
ables such as education, sex, and religion, and for the
most part ignores the way in which the interplay of
different institutional and political factors may affect any
actual problem of civil liberties. Thus the possible effect
of an increase in the educational level of the American
population seems more important in this book than a
change in the policy of the Republican leadership. But as
we have seen, a change in Republican policy toward

The New American Right

Senator McCarthy has sharply changed the climate of
opinion within a short space of time. Thus the optimistic
thought that as the young grow older and more people
become better educated there will be an increase in
"tolerance," may not be warranted. This depends on the
political situation.

The most significant problem of civil liberties in
America is not why did a minority launch an attack on
the rights of others, but rather why was the defense to
that attack so weak at first, and so late in coming. Some
partial reasons may be suggested. The conservative upper
class individuals who believe in civil liberties did not
respond to the attack by leftists and liberals with whom
they disagreed, because it was put as a party issue. The
liberals and Democrats, on the other hand, were initially
unable to distinguish between legitimate exposes of Com
munist subversion and espionage, and the indiscriminate
red-baiting and attacks on liberals; as a result the Demo
crats fought every charge of Communism or espionage
as a political smear. Since some of the charges were true,
the liberals and Democrats either buried their heads in
the sand, or later sought to outdo the Republican anti-
Communists. Thus the Democratic members of Congress
for a long time shied away from fighting Senator Mc
Carthy because they felt they were vulnerable to the
charge of having accepted Communist support, or be
cause public opinion polls, which did not differentiate
among the politically potent and impotent as Stouffer has
done, indicated that large sections of the American popu
lation supported McCarthy. And later, to demonstrate
their anti-Communism, three of the most liberal members
of the Senate pushed through the bill to outlaw the
Communist Party.

Actually the right-wing attacks were halted only when
the conservative defenders of civil liberties stood up to
the issue. McCarthy was stopped in the Senate by Eisen-

THE POLLS ON COMMUNISM AND CONFORMITY 163

hower and the southern Democrats. In the local com
munities, vigilante attacks against schools, colleges and
libraries have been stopped most effectively when leaders
of the conservative upper class stepped in, and defended
civil liberties. In this instance, at least, the instincts of
the American conservative group finally responded to the
tradition of civil liberties and democratic procedure,
rather than to political advantage. Whether these conser
vative groups would respond in similar fashion to the
defense of democratic rights on a direct economic class
issue is a moot point to the extent that American business
accepts its own ideology of fighting state intervention,
and to the extent it remembers how fascist states throttled
business, too, it will respect democratic rights in these
matters as well.

Unfortunately, no effort has been made to combine the
techniques of survey research, so admirably employed in
the Stouffer study, with an intensive study of those
aspects of American society which encourage or challenge
efforts to reduce civil liberties. One cannot criticize Pro
fessor Stouffer for not dealing with such problems, yet it
would cast much light on American politics if we had
some answers. For example, who are the minority of
community leaders who are intolerant? Some clues are
provided by the different roles of such leaders, i.e. those
who are tied to patriotic functions tend to be more
intolerant; but who among the possible adherents of the
American Legion or the D.A.R. participate in such
groups? (One answer might be that people who psy
chologically tend to be authoritarian, within the family
and society, are intolerant of deviation in general, and
tend to be more patriotic and nationalistic. The Stouffer
data show a relationship between such indicators of an
"authoritarian personality," and intolerance.)

From sociological hypotheses, we would expect that
support of right-wing extremism in American life is to be

164 The New American Right

found disproportionately among the upward-mobile, the
nouveaux riches, and among the downward mobile as
well. This is perhaps particularly true of minority ethnic
groups, which in becoming upward mobile, have tended
to take over the norms of 100 per cent Americanism in
order to become accepted. (Unfortunately, Stouffer re
ports no data relating ethnic groups or social mobility
and intolerance.) And, one may point to the fact that
two centers of right-extremist and intolerant activity,
Texas and southern California, are also areas in which,
on an elite level, there are a disproportionate number of
nouveaux riches. It is to these sociological hypotheses
and an attempt to locate such groups in the social struc
turethat the next chapter is addressed.

1 The authors wish to acknowledge the kind cooperation and advice
of Mr. David Riesman. The suggestion for the chapter grew out of dis
cussions with him. They have been guided by some of the ideas
expressed by Mr. Riesman in his critique of the Stouffer book presented
before the American Association for Public Opinion Research in Madison,
Wisconsin, April, 1955.

2 Professor Stouffer in interpreting these findings describes them as
reactions to atheists. The questions, however, dealt with attacks on
churches and religion, not advocacy of atheism, The two are not neces
sarily the same.

3 In this chapter, we shall follow Dr. Stouffer s use of the term
"tolerant" to describe people who would allow Communists, and religious
and political dissidents basic civil liberties. While we do not want to
argue the question in detail here, we are somewhat troubled by the use
of the term tolerance to describe the right of minority free expression.
When Republicans support the right of Democrats to speak or run can
didates, they are not being "tolerant"; presumably they believe that the
welfare of the country requires the existence of opposition. The original
meaning of the word "tolerance" involved an assumption that one

tolerated" the existence or rights of someone who was in error. The
American Creed is not a creed of tolerance, but rather the belief that
the greater good for society comes out of opposition and free discussion.

4 Data on businessmen, from the Stouffer study, which the book omits
is reported in the May, 1955 Fortune. These data reveal a wide variation
in the attitudes of businessmen between the poorly educated and the
well educated. One would want to know whether this difference corre
sponds to the variation between small and large businessmen or inde
pendent businessmen and the executives of large corporations.

5 Unfortunately, Professor Stouffer did not compare community leaders
with other individuals in the same socio-economic strata; whether com-

THE POLLS ON COMMUNISM AND CONFORMITY 165

munity participation draws the more tolerant individuals, or whether the
responsibility of community leadership makes one more tolerant would
have been an interesting question to pursue.

16 It is interesting to note that a survey of Canadian opinion on civil
liberties indicates that the bulk of the population in that country are
as opposed to civil liberties for Communists as are Americans. For ex
ample, in a poll taken in Canada in 1950, 58 per cent favored a law to
"make it a criminal offense to be a member of any Commmunist organi
zation." Stouffer s 1954 study reports that 51 per cent of the Americans
favor putting "an admitted Communist in jail." The same Canadian
survey reports that 83 per cent would bar a Communist from govern
ment employment, and 57 per cent supported a law to "prevent a Com
munist from voting in any election." Stouffer does not have any com
parable questions to these, but the 83 per cent figure for Canadians who
would bar Communists from public employment, compares with the 86
per cent of Americans who would not allow Communists to teach in
colleges.

The difference between Canadian political reactions to the problem
of internal Communism as compared with those which occurred in the
United States appears to rest more on the nature of its elite and political
structure than on differences in basic sentiments of the population. See
Chapter 7 for a discussion of this problem.

7 See Leicester Webb, Communism and Democracy in Australia (New
York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1955).

The Sources of the
"Radical Right" 1

SEYMOUR MARTIN UPSET

IN THE last five years we have seen
the emergence of an important American political phe
nomenon, the radical right This group is characterized
as radical because it desires to make far-reaching changes
in American institutions, and because it seeks to eliminate
from American political life those persons and institutions
which threaten either its values, or its economic interests.
Needless to say, this movement is opposed to the social
and economic reforms of the last twenty years, and to
the internationalist foreign policy pursued by the succes
sive Administrations in that period.

The activities of the radical right would be of less
interest if it sought its ends through the traditional demo-

166

THE SOURCES OF THE "RADICAL RIGHT* l6/

cratic procedures of pressure-group tactics, lobbying, and
the ballot box. But, while most individuals and organiza
tions which we shall consider as part of the radical right
do use these means, many use undemocratic methods as
well. The singular fact is that radical right agitation has
facilitated the growth of practices which threaten to
undermine the social fabric of democratic politics. The
threats to democratic procedure which are, in part, an
outgrowth of radical right agitation involve attempts to
destroy the right of assembly, the right of petition, the
freedom of association, the freedom to travel, and the
freedom to teach or conduct scholarly research without
conforming to political tests. 2 This movement, therefore,
must be seriously considered by all those who would
preserve democratic constitutional procedures in this
country.

In evaluating the activities of the radical right, this
chapter is divided into three sections: Part 1 deals with
continuing sources of extremist politics in America as they
have their sources in American history; Part 2 analyzes
the social groups which are more prone than others to
support the radical right today; and Part 3 deals with
the specific character of McCarthyism as the principal
expression of radical right ideology on the current scene.

1

STATUS AND CLASS POLITICS

Any analysis of the role of political extremism in the
United States must recognize two fundamental political
forces operating under the varying historical conditions
of American society. These forces may be distinguished
by the terms status politics and class politics. Ckss politics
refers to political division based on the discord between

168 The New American Right

the traditional left and the right, i.e., between those who
favor redistribution of income, and those favoring the
preservation of the status quo. Status politics, as used
here, refers to political movements whose appeal is to the
not uncommon resentments of individuals or groups who
desire to maintain or improve their social status. 3

In the United States, political movements or parties
which stress the need for economic reform have usually
gained strength during times of unemployment and de
pression, On the other hand, status politics becomes
ascendant in periods of prosperity, especially when full
employment is accompanied by inflation, and when many
individuals are able to improve their economic position.
The groups which are receptive to status-oriented appeals
are not only those which have risen in the economic
structure and who may be frustrated in their desire to
be accepted socially by those who already hold status,
but also those groups already possessing status who feel
that the rapid social change threatens their own claims
to high social position, or enables previously lower status
groups to claim equal status with their own.

The political consequences of status frustrations are
very different from those resulting from economic depri
vation, for while in economic conflict the goals are clear
a redistribution of incomein status conflict there are no
clear-cut solutions. Where there are status anxieties, there
is little or nothing which a government can do. It is not
surprising, therefore, that the political movements which
have successfully appealed to status resentments have
been irrational in character, and have sought scapegoats
which conveniently serve to symbolize the status threat.
Historically, the most common scapegoats in the United
States have been the minority ethnic or religious groups.
Such groups have repeatedly been the victims of political
aggression in periods of prosperity, for it is precisely in
these times that status anxieties are most pressing. 4

THE SOURCES OF THE "RADICAL RIGHT" 169

American political history from this perspective emerges
in a fairly consistent pattern. Before the Civil War, there
was considerable anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant activ
ity. Such agitation often took the form of organized
political parties, the most important of which was the
Know-Nothing or American Party. And it was during a
prosperous decade that these parties and movements
were at their height. The Know-Nothings who polled one
fourth of the total popular vote for President in 1856
reached their greatest power in a period of widespread
prosperity and inflation and practically vanished in the
depression year 1857. 5 The American Protective Associa
tion (A.P.A.), which emerged in the late 1880 s, was the
next major organized anti-Catholic movement and it too
arose in a period of renewed prosperity. A contemporary
analyst of this movement has pointed to the status con
cerns which motivated many of the members of the A.P.A.
Latter day Know-Nothingism (A.P.A.ism) in the
west, was perhaps due as well to envy of the grow
ing social and industrial strength of Catholic Ameri
cans.

In the second generation American Catholics began
to attain higher industrial positions and better occu
pations. All through the west, they were taking their
place in the professional and business world. They
were among the doctors and the lawyers, the editors
and the teachers of the community. Sometimes they
were the leading merchants as well as the leading
politicians of their locality. 6

Interestingly enough, the publisher of many anti-
Catholic A.P.A. works was also the publisher of the Social
Register, which was first copyrighted in 1887, the year
in which the A.P.A. was organized, 7 a fact which suggests
a possible link between this mass organization and the
desire of high-status, old family Americans to resist the
upward mobility of the second generation Catholics. A
large, number of individuals listed in the Social Register

170 The New American Right

were among the important financial supporters of the
A.P.A., as well as of other anti-immigration organizations.
The Progressive movement, which flourished from
1900-1912, is yet another protest movement which at
tracted the interest and participation of large numbers
of Americans during a period of high prosperity. This
movement, while differing considerably from the others,
since it was concerned with liberal social reforms, may,
nevertheless, be a reflection of status politics. Richard
Hofstadter has suggested that it was based in large meas
ure on the reaction of the Protestant middle class against
threats to its values and status. 3 The Progressive move
ment had two scapegoats the "plutocrat" millionaires,
and the immigrants. 9 The rise of the "robber barons," the
great millionaires and plutocrats of the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries, served to challenge the
status of many old, upper-middle-class American families
which had previously considered themselves the most
important group in society; these new millionaires were
able to outdo them in philanthropy and in setting new
styles of life. The Progressive movement, like previous
expressions of status politics, was also opposed to immi
gration. It viewed the immigrant and the urban city
machines based on immigrant support as a basic threat
to American middle-class Protestant values.

And finally the Ku Klux Klan, which vigorously attacked
the rights of minority groups, also emerged in prosperous
times, the 1920 s. It is important to note, however, that
while the Klan was against Jews, Catholics and Negroes,
it also represented the antagonism of the small town and
provincial city Protestant lower-middle class and working
class against the "cosmopolitanism" of the upper classes.
The upper-class, largely metropolitan-centered, Protestant
churches were a frequent target of Klan attack The
^English minister of a high Protestant church, divorced
women who were accused of "playing around," physicians

THE SOURCES OF THE ^RADICAL RIGHt"

who had allegedly engaged in sexual irregularities with
patients, were among those subjected to Klan violence. 10

At its height, the Klan had the support of millions of
individuals, and dominated political life in Indiana,
Maine, Colorado, Oklahoma, Texas, Oregon, Arkansas,
Ohio, and California. It would be rash to give any simpli
fied interpretation of the factors underlying such an im
portant social movement If, however, one asks what had
occurred on the American scene to encourage such a mass
expression of provincial resentment, one important factor
is the growing predominance of the large metropolitan
centers, which were centers of Catholics, Jews, and high-
status Protestants. In the changing world of post- World
War I America, the fundamentalist provincial was faced
with the fact that he and his communities had lost much
of their independence and status. The war boom, and
later, the prosperity of the twenties, made it possible for
many individuals to rise economically, including members
of previously lower-class minority groups, such as the
Jews and Catholics. The Catholics were also beginning
to get national political power. These changes were
paralleled by a seeming decline in basic morality, and
a growth in religious cynicism. The Klan, with its attack
on metropolitan "cosmopolitanism" and the more tradi
tional minority ethnic scapegoats, seems to have provided
an outlet to the frustrated residents of provincial America,
who felt their values, power, and status slipping away.

The hypothesis that the Klan represented the reaction
of a large section of provincial America to the frustrations
of boom-time social change may, of course, be questioned
in view of the fact that it declined considerably as an
organization after 1926, before prosperity ended. This
decline, however, seems in large measure to be related to
the fact that the overwhelming majority of Klan leaders
were publicly exposed as obvious charlatans, who were
using the organization to feather their own nest, and to

172 The New American Right

the social pressure directed against the Klan by the upper
class and every section of the press. The loss of respect
ability led to a rapid withdrawal from the organization by
its middle-class adherents, and the jailing for fraud of
some of its leaders soon disillusioned the large section of
working-class supporters.

The 1928 Presidential election campaign, however, wit
nessed a new outburst of bigotry directed against the
Catholic Democratic candidate, Al Smith (which showed
that the sentiments which gave rise to the Klan had not
vanished). In this election, the Democratic Party increased
its vote in the large metropolitan centers, while reaching
its lowest point in decades in the smaller communities.

These four movements, Know-Nothings, A.P.A., Pro
gressives, and Ku Klux Klan, all illustrate the way in
which. American society has thrown up major protest
movements in periods of prosperity, thus confounding
the general assumption that protest politics are primarily
products of depressions. The prosperity movements differ
from those groups who are products of economic crises
in that they find "scapegoats" who threaten their value
system, while other protest groups have direct economic
targets. The Progressives, a group one does not normally
see this way, were concerned with the manner in which
the nouveaux riches and the immigrants were corrupting
American institutions, while the Klan, a status-resentment
group par-excellence, attacked the "cosmopolitanism" of
Catholics, Jews, and the metropolitan elite, which under
mined the middle-class Protestant virtues. Perhaps the
most significant single fact concerning the strength of the
Klan and the role of organized bigotry in America is that
every effort to build a mass social movement based on
bigotry during the great depression of the 1930 s had little
success. It is the common concern with the protection of
"traditional" American values that characterizes "status
politics" as contrasted with the regard for jobs, cheap

THE SOURCES OF THE "RADICAL RIGHT* 173

credit, or high farm prices, which have been the main
emphases of depression-born "class politics."

If we assume that this is a pattern in American politics,
it is not surprising that the continuing prosperity of the
late nineteen forties and early fifties should also have
developed a political movement resembling the four
discussed above. McCarthyism, like its predecessors, is
characterized by an attack on a convenient scapegoat,
which is defined as a threat to American institutions, and
also involves an attempt to link "cosmopolitan" changes
in the society to a foreign plot. 11

THE STATE OF TOLERANCE IN AMERICA

A second important factor to consider in evaluating
present trends in American politics is the traditional atti
tude toward tolerance in American society. The historical
evidence, some of which has been cited above, indicates
that, as compared to the citizens of a number of other
countries, especially Great Britain and Scandinavia, Amer
icans are not a tolerant people. In addition to discrimina
tion against ethnic and religious minorities, each war and
most pre-war situations have been characterized by the
denial of civil liberties to minorities, often even of minori
ties which were not opposed to the war. Abolitionists, for
example, faced great difficulties in many areas, North as
well as South, before the Civil War. Many were fired from
schools and universities. During World War I, German-
Americans and Socialists often experienced personal phys
ical attacks, as well as economic discrimination. In the
last war, the entire Japanese- American population on the
west coast was denied the most elementary form of per
sonal freedom. 12

Political intolerance has not been monopolized by
political extremists or wartime vigilantes. The Populists,

174 The New American Right

for example, discharged many university professors in
state universities in states where they came into power in
the 1890 s. Their Republican opponents were not loath
to dismiss teachers who believed in Populist economics.
Public opinion polls, ever since they first began measuring
mass attitudes in the early thirties, have repeatedly shown
that sizable numbers, often a majority, of Americans op
pose the rights of unpopular political minorities. 13 In both
1938 and 1942, a majority of the American public opposed
the right of "radicals" to hold meetings.

The state of current attitudes toward civil liberties has
been reported on in detail in a study by Samuel Stouffer,
based on interviews with a random sample of Ameri
cans in the spring of 1954. Large sections of the
American population opposed the rights of atheists, 14
Socialists, 15 and Communists 1 * to free speech and free
publication.

One important factor affecting this kck of tolerance
in American life is the basic strain of Protestant puritan
ical morality which has always existed in this country.
Americans believe that there is a fundamental difference
between right and wrong, that right must be supported,
and that wrong must be suppressed, that error and evil
have no rights against the truth. This propensity to see
life in terms of all black and all white is most evident,
perhaps most disastrous, in the area of foreign policy,
where allies and enemies cannot be gray, but must be
black or white, 17

The differences in fundamental economic philosophy
and way of life between the Democrats and Republicans
in this country are far less than those which exist between
Conservatives and Socialists in Great Britain. Yet political
rhetoric in this country is comparable in Europe only for
those campaigns between totalitarian and their oppo
nents. While McCarthy has indeed sunk American politi-

THE SOURCES OF THE "RADICAL RIGHT* 175

cal rhetoric to new depths, one should not forget that his
type of invective has been used quite frequently in
American politics. For example, Roosevelt called some of
his isolationist opponents, "Copperheads/ a term equiva
lent to traitor. 1 * If various impressionistic accounts are to
be believed, many Republicans, especially Republican
businessmen, have a far deeper sense of hatred against
Roosevelt and the New Deal, than their British or Scan
dinavian counterparts have against their socialist oppo
nents.

Although Puritanism is probably one of the main
sources of American intolerance, there are certainly many
other elements which have contributed to its continuance
in American life. The lack of an aristocratic tradition in
American politics helped to prevent the emergence of a
moderate rhetoric in political life. Almost from the start
of democratic politics in America with the early adoption
of universal male suffrage, the political machines were led
by professional politicians, many of whom were of lower-
middle-class or even poorer origins, who had to appeal to
a relatively uneducated electorate. This led to the devel
opment of a campaign style in which any tactic that
would win votes was viewed as legitimate. Thus, Jefferson
was charged with "treason," and with being a French
agent before 1800, while Republicans waved the "bloody
shirt" against the Democrats for decades following the
Civil War. In order to involve the masses in politics,
politicians have sought to make every election appear as
if it involved life or death for the country or for their
party.

Another factor which has operated to diminish tolerance
in this country has been mass immigration. The preva
lence of different cultural and religious ways of life has
always constituted a threat to American stability and
cultural unity. In order to build a nation, it was perhaps

176 The New American Right

necessary that men should be intolerant of the practices
of newcomers, and should force them to assimilate. All
through world history, the intermingling of people from
different cultural backgrounds has resulted in strife. Such
conflict is obviously not conducive to the emergence of a
tradition of civic discipline, in which everyone has the
right to live out his life as he sees fit, and in which
minorities are protected.

The minority immigrant groups themselves have con
tributed to the support for conformity. One of the princi
pal reactions of members of such groups to discrimina
tionto being defined as socially inferior by the majority
cultureis to attempt to assimilate completely American
values, to reject their past, and to overidentify with
Americanism. They tend to interpret indiscrimination
against their ethnic group as a consequence of the fact
that they are foreign and they behave differently, that in
short they are insufficiently American. Many of those who
adopt the assimilationist solution attempt to enforce con
formity within their own group, and are intolerant of
those who would perpetuate foreign ways and thus earn
the enmity of those of Anglo-Saxon origin. 19

At least one other element may be suggested as having
operated against the development of tolerance: those
situations which have encouraged or required men to take
the law into their own hands in order to enforce the moral
values of the dominant groups in society. Such events
occurred in the South after the Civil War, and in the
West continuously with the expansion of the frontier. In
the South, as Myrdal has pointed out, the conservative
groups have resisted legal procedures in order to maintain
white supremacy. On the western frontier, many men
considered it necessary to engage in vigilante activities
to eliminate lawlessness. Both of these traditions, espe
cially the continuing Southern one, have helped to destroy
civic discipline.

THE SOURCES OF THE "RADICAL RIGHT" 177

AMERICANISM AS AN IDEOLOGY:
UN-AMERICANISM

A third element in American life related to present
political events is the extent to which the concept of
Americanism has become a compulsive ideology rather
than simply a nationalist term. Americanism is a creed
in a way that "Britishism" is not.

The notion of Americanism as a creed to which men
are converted rather than born stems from two factors:
first, our revolutionary tradition which has led us to
continually reiterate the superiority of the American creed
of equalitarianism, of democracy, against the old reac
tionary, monarchical and more rigidly status-bound sys
tems of European society; and second, the immigrant
character of American society, the fact that people may
become Americans that they are not simply born to
the status.

But if foreigners may become Americans, Americans
may become "un-American." This concept of "un-Ameri
can activities," as far as I know, does not have its counter
part in other countries. American patriotism is allegiance
to values, to a creed, not solely to a nation. An American
political leader could not say, as Winston Churchill did
in 1940, that the English Communist Party was composed
of Englishmen, and he did not fear an Englishman. 20

Unless one recognizes that Americanism is a political
creed, much like Socialism, Communism or Fascism,
much of what is currently happening in this country must
remain unintelligible. 21 Our national rituals are largely
identified with reiterating the accepted values of a politi
cal value system, not solely or even primarily of national
patriotism. For example, Washington s Birthday, Lincoln s
Birthday, and the Fourth of July are ideological celebra-

The New American Right

tions comparable to May Day or Lenin s Birthday in the
Communist world. Only Memorial Day and Veteran s Day
may be placed in the category of purely patriotic, as dis
tinct from ideological, celebrations. Consequently, more
than any other democratic country, the United States
makes ideological conformity one of the conditions for
good citizenship. And it is this emphasis on ideological
conformity to presumably common political values that
legitimatizes the hunt for "un- Americans" in our midst.

THE MULTIPLE ELITES

While factors persistent in the culture have exerted
great pressure towards conformity to the creed of Amer
icanism, yet the rapid growth, and size, of the United
States has prevented American society from developing
an integrated cultural or power structure similar to those
in smaller and older tradition-oriented European nations.
One cannot, for example, speak of an American elite, be
it economic, political or cultural. The elites that exist are
fractioned regionally, ethnically, and culturally, so that
friction and competition constantly arise among these
segmented groups: West against East, North against
South, new rich versus old rich, Anglo-Saxons against
minority ethnics, the graduates of Ivy League schools
against others, etc,

This segmentation has facilitated the emergence of new
social movements, religions, and cultural fads. But it also
has prevented any one of them from engulfing the coun
try. Each new movement is opposed by some segment of
a rival elite, as well as that part of the general population
which follows it. Thus Populism, the Ku Klux Elan, the
abortive labor and socialist parties, the Progressive move
ment, and the Know-Nothings, have all had important
successes within specific regions, communities, or ethnic

THE SOURCES OF THE "RADICAL RIGHT" 179

groups; but each died away without coming to national
power. In the United States, seemingly, with the excep
tion of prohibition, it has been impossible to build a
durable national movement on a single issue, or on an
appeal to a single interest group.

While the heterogeneity and sheer size of the United
States apparently bar any extremist ideological group from
coming to national power, it also promotes the emergence
of such groups on a more parochial base since any can
almost always find enough supporters, leaders, and finan
cial backers to make an impression on the body politic.
Any appeal, be it anti-Catholicism, anti-Semitism, Huey
Long s "Share the Wealth movement," Townsend s Old
Age pension crusade, monetary reform, Technocracy, or
others such as those mentioned earlier, will have some
appeal. It is almost an axiom of American politics that
any movement can find some millionaire backing, and it
does not take many millionaires to set up an impressive
looking propaganda apparatus. Each of the various radical
groups, the Socialist Labor Party, the Socialist Party, and
the Communist Party, has had its millionaires. In recent
decades, the Communists were more successful than
others on the left in this regard.

The fact that it is relatively easy to build a new political
or economic reform movement in America has often been
overlooked by many observers because of the failure of
every effort to construct a third major political party a
difference, obviously, between the ease of a movement
and the difficulty of a party. The failure of third-party
efforts has been a consequence, however, of the American
electoral system with its requirement that only one party
can control the executive branch of the government at
one time. Actually, the two major American parties are
coalitions, and the underlying base of American politics
is much closer to the French multi-party system than it is
to the British two-party political structure. American

The New American Right

parties are coalitions of distinct and often conflicting
factions, and no one interest group is able to dominate
the government. As in France, however, it is relatively
simple for a new ideological or interest group to gain
representation, but it is almost impossible for it to secure
majority control of the government. 22 For example, in the
1920 s many Klan-backed individuals were elected to
Congress, state legislatures, and some governor s office.
At about the same time, the quasi-socialist Non-Partisan
League won control of the Republican Party and the
state government in North Dakota, and had considerable
influence in a number of other midwest states, while an
offshoot of it captured the Democratic Party and the
governor s chair in Oklahoma. In the 1930 s the Demo
cratic Party of California, Oregon and Washington, was
captured temporarily by Socialist factions i.e., Upton
Sinclair s EPIC movement in California, and the Coopera
tive Commonwealth Federation in the other two coast
states. At the same time, three Northern midwestern
states were actually governed by left-wing offshoots of
the Republican Party the Non-Partisan League in North
Dakota, the Progressive Party in Wisconsin, and the
Farmer-Labor Party in Minnesota. Townsend, Huey
Long, Father Coughlin, and the Communists were also
able to send some men to Congress through the mecha
nism of winning primary contests in one of the major
parties. Today, as in the past, various ideological or
interest factions strive to increase their representation in
government through rather than against the traditional
parties.

The fact that the leaders of American political parties
have much less influence over the men whom they elect
than do the heads of parties in the British Commonwealth
also facilitates the emergence of dissident political ten
dencies. A Labor or Tory member of the British parlia
ment could never engage in a one-man crusade with a

THE SOUBCES OF THE "RADICAL BIGHT l8l

power comparable to control of a Senate committee such
as Senators Langer, La Follette, and McCarthy, have
done at different times.

The tendency of American society to throw up new
movements or organizations is, of course, not limited to
the political field. Tocqueville, more than a century ago,
called attention to the American propensity, as compared
with the greater lassitude of Europeans, to form organiza
tions for various purposes. The reason for this distinctive
pattern lay in the fact that America did not have a distinct
aristocratic elite which could fulfill the functions of or
ganization and leadership performed by the elite in
Europe. And, Tocqueville argued, the very multitude of
existing voluntary associations facilitated the emergence
of new ones, since the older associations, because they
train men in the skills of organization, provide a resource
when some new need or new social objective is per
ceived. 23 What little comparative data exist, suggest that
this empirical generalization is still valid. 24

It is hardly surprising, therefore, that Americans who
regard Communism as a great evil should form associa
tions to combat it. These groups are but one more mani
festation of American political and moral activity, much
like the popular attempts to ban liquor, gambling, or
immorality in comic strips. One may point to similar
developments in the sphere of religion. Perhaps no other
country, including Israel, has thrown up so many new
religious sects. Spiritualism, the Mormon Church, Jeho
vah s Witnesses, Seventh Day Adventists, Christian Sci
ence, and the Churches of God, are but some of the
sects with over 100,000 church members which were
born in the United States.

The various dissident social and religious movements
have reflected the openness of the American social order.
Conventional morality is not supported by a cohesive
system of social control since there are, in effect, a variety

The New American Right

of moralities. This generalization does not contradict the
previous discussion of intolerance in American life, for
intolerance to be effective on a national scale must repre
sent the will of a majority or all-powerful group. Fortu
nately, with the exception of groups which are defined as
agents of a foreign actual or potential military enemy, it
has been impossible for any group to convince the country
to actively support restrictions against others who do not
conform to the beliefs of one or another segment of
American society. A Canadian sociologist, S. D. Clark,
has commented on this aspect of American society. He
suggests that the much tighter political and social control
structure of Canada frustrates efforts at dissident move
ments before they can develop, while the United States
permits them to emerge, but frustrates their dreams of
power:

Critics outside the country [the United States]
might well pause to consider not the intolerance
which finds expression in McCarthyism but the tol
erance which makes it possible for McCarthyism
to develop. In Canada it would be hard to conceive
of a state of political freedom great enough to permit
the kind of attacks upon responsible political leaders
of the government which have been carried out in
the United States. More careful examination of the
American community in general, and perhaps of the
academic community in particular, would probably
reveal that, in spite of the witch hunts in that coun
try, the people of the United States enjoy in fact a
much greater degree of freedom than do the people
of Canada. 25

THE SHIFT TO THE RIGHT

Four aspects of American society have been suggested
as contributing to an understanding of extremist political

THE SOURCES OF THE "RADICAL RIGHT" 183

developments in the United States: the role of the status-
driven during periods of prosperity, their fear of other
groups which threaten their status; the absence of a firm
tradition of civic discipline or tolerance; the definition of
Americanism in ideological terms; and the lack of an
integrated cultural and political social control structure.

In order to understand the recent manifestations of
political intolerance, however, it is necessary to discuss a
fifth factor, the consequences of a liberal or conservative
climate of opinion on the power of extremist groups. The
period from 1930 to 1945 saw the predominance of liberal
sentiment in American politics. This was largely the
result of two factors, the depression and the threat of
Fascism. The depression emphasized the need for socio-
economic reforms and helped to undermine the legitimacy
of conservative and business institutions. It was followed
immediately by a war which was defined as a struggle
against Fascism. Since Fascism was a rightist movement,
this fact tended to reinforce the political predominance
of leftist liberal sentiments.

During this period the political dynamic in most demo
cratic countries was in the hands of the left, and it used
this strength to undermine the prestige of conservatism.
In the United States, for example, several Congressional
Committees conducted exposes of "undemocratic" activi
ties of big business. In the thirties, the Nye Committee
"exposed" the way in which Wall Street bankers had
helped plunge the United States into World War I in
order to maintain their investments, while the La Follette
Committee revealed that large corporations employed
labor spies and gangsters to prevent their employees from
forming trade unions. The famous Truman Committee
often exposed big business profiteering during World
War II. All three committees helped to foster an anti-
business and anti-conservative climate of opinion. It is
quite true that the House Un-American Activities Com-

1 8^ The New American Right

mittee operated at the same time as the liberal commit
tees, but though it secured considerable publicity, it was
relatively unimportant compared with the role of anti-
subversive committees in the post-war years.

The period of liberal supremacy was also marked by a
great growth in the influence of the Communist Party.
In the United States, the Communists were concerned
with penetrating and manipulating liberal and moderate
left groups, rather than with building an electoral party.
The Communists, by concealing their real objectives, by
acting positively for liberal causes, by being the best
organizers of the left, were able to penetrate deeply into
various liberal organizations and into the labor movement.
An index of their success may be seen in the fact that
close to a dozen Congressmen, one state governor, many
members of the staffs of liberal Congressmen and Con
gressional Committees, and a number of high-ranking
civil servants, showed by their subsequent political be
havior that they were close followers of the Communist
Party.

The post-war period, on the other hand, has seen a
resurgence of conservative and rightist forces. This has
resulted from two factors, a prolonged period of pros
perity and full employment, and second, the change in
foreign policy. Where once we warred against Fascism,
which is identified with the "right," we now war against
Communism, which identifies with the left." And while
Fascism and Communism are much closer to each other
in moral consequences and actual practice than either is
to the democratic right or left, by the general populace,
the one is considered right and the other left. 26 And just
as the Communists were able to secure considerable influ
ence during the period of liberal ascendency, right-wing
extremists have been able to make considerable headway
during the conservative revival. Thus, the period from
1947-8 to 1954 presents a very different picture from the

THE SOURCES OF THE "RADICAL RIGHT" 185

previous decade and a half. The conservatives and the
extreme right are now on the offensive. The "free enter
prise" system which provides full employment is once
more legitimate. Liberal groups feel in a weak position
politically, and now wage a defensive battle, seeking to
preserve their conquests of the thirties, rather than to
extend them.

It is striking to observe the similarities in the rhetoric
of the liberals and conservatives when on the offensive.
In the thirties, conservatives, isolationists, business lead
ers, Republican Senators and Congressmen were criticized
by some liberals as being semi-Fascist, or with being
outright Fascists. Similarly in the last half-decade, many
conservatives have waged an attack on liberals, Democrats
and opponents of a vigorous anti-Russian foreign policy
for being pro-Communist, or "creeping Socialists." The
sources of die violent attack on conservatism in the earlier
period came in large measure from the Communists and
their fellow travelers, although it was voiced by many
liberals who had no connection with the Communist
Party and were unaware of the extent to which they
had absorbed a Communist ideological position. More
recently, the extreme right wing, the radical right of the
American political spectrum, has been successful in setting
the ideological tone of conservatism.

It is important to note the parallelism in the rhetoric
employed by liberals when criticizing the State Depart
ment s policy toward the Loyalists in the Spanish Civil
War of 1936-1939, and that used by many extreme right
ists toward the policy of the same department a few years
later in the Chinese Civil War. The liberal left magazines
portrayed an American foreign office staffed by men who
were sympathetic to extreme conservatism if not outright
Fascism, and who tricked Roosevelt and Hull into pursu
ing policies which helped Franco. Various individuals,
some of whom are still in the State Department, such as

i86 The New American Right

Robert Murphy, were labeled as pro-Franco. The recent
right-wing accusations that our Chinese policies were a
result of Communist influence in government sound like
a rewritten version of the Fascist conspiracy of the thir
ties. The same allegations about the social background of
State Department members, that many of them come from
Groton, Harvard, and the Brahmin upper class, were
used by the Communists in the thirties to prove that the
State Department was ultra-rightist in its sympathies, and
are used today by McCarthy and other radical rightists
to account for presumed sympathies with Communism. 27
The State Department s refusal to aid Loyalist Spain was
presented as convincing proof of the presence of Fascist
sympathizers within it. In the same way, the radical
right now refuses to acknowledge that men may have
made honest errors of judgment in their dealing with the
Russians or the Chinese Communists.

So similar are the political approaches of the radical
right and the Communists that one may fittingly describe
the radical right doctrine as embodying a theory of
"Social Communism" in the same sense as the Communists
used the term "Social Fascism" in the early thirties. The
Communists, before 1934, argued that all non-Communist
parties including the Socialists were "Social Fascists," that
is, they objectively were paving the way for Fascism. The
principal organ of the radical right today, the Freeman,
contends that all welfare state and planning measures are
"objectively" steps toward the development of a totali
tarian Communist state. The New Deal, Americans for
Democratic Action, the C.I.O. Political Action Committee,
all are charged with "objective" totalitarianism. Both the
Communists and writers for the Freeman have argued
that the "social" variety of Fascism or Communism is
more dangerous than the real thing, for the public is more
easily deceived by a sugar-coated totalitarian program.
The Communists in pre-Hitler Germany concentrated

THE SOURCES OF THE "RADICAL RIGHT l/

their fire not on the Nazis, but on the "Social Fascists,"
the socialists and liberals, and the Freeman and other
sections of the radical right let loose their worst venom on
the American liberals.

An example of the violent character of this ideology
may be seen in a 1950 Freeman article which contended
that, "This new political machine, which . . . rules the
old Democratic Party is an outgrowth of the CIO s
Political Action Committee (PAG)/ It further claimed
that "every single element in the Browder [Communist
Party] program was incorporated in the PAG program.
It has been the policy of the Administration ever since/ 7
The labor movement organized around Truman because
of the Taft-Hartley Act. Why, asked this Freeman writer,
did labor unite against this act, which though it "injured
the Communists . . . certainly did not injure the workers."
. . . Because the Communists executed another strategic
retreat. They let go of their prominent offices in the CIO
but they still had control of the press, and the policy-
making and opinion-forming organs. Then they got their
ideas into the opinion-forming agences of the AFL, espe
cially its League for Political Education.

"How could the AFL be captured by the Communist
policy-makers? It had a great tradition, but in face of
CIO gains/ its leaders thought they had to do some
thing. And the Communists were ready and waiting to
tell them what to do policies nicely hidden behind the
cloak of higher wages, more benefits, but still fitting
perfectly the symbols laid down to guide policy-makers
by Earl Browder in 1944."

The article went on to ask, "What proof have we that
the Politburo in Moscow wanted the election of Wallace?
Wallace certainly did not poll the total Communist vote.
For eight years they had worked on getting control of a
major party. Why give up the Truman party? . . .

"Practically every word of Truman s campaign came,

i88 The New American Right

again, from Browder s pattern of 1944, which is the policy
of the PAG Practically every word of his attack on the
80th Congress can be found earlier in the pages of the
Daily Worker and the People s Daily World.

"What then was the role of Wallace and the third
party? It was the old Communist dialectic. By setting up
Wallace as the left/ the Communists could make Tru
man s platforms and speeches look like the center/ " 28

Here is a picture of the real world that should be
placed side by side with that of the Communists. As they
see a country controlled by a self-conscious plot of Wall
Street magnates, of two "capitalist" parties competing
just to fool the people, this radical rightist sees a night
marish world in which the Communists also have two
political parties in order to fool the people, in which
Wallace s million votes only represented a presumably
small part of total Communist strength.

In both periods, the thirties and the fifties, the ex
tremists have been able to capitalize on sympathetic
predispositions. These ideological predispositions have
not reflected sympathy with extremism by the average
liberal or conservative, but rather led men to view with
sympathy any attack directed against their principal
political opponents. The lack of any normative restric
tions against violent political rhetoric in American politics,
to which attention was called earlier, facilitated the
adoption by basically unideological politicians of termi
nology which in large part resembles that used by rival
totalitarians in Europe. In effect, the extreme left and
right have been able to influence the ideological setting
of American politics since the early thirties. The radical
right today, like the Communists before them, have been
able to win influence far outweighing their numerical
support in the general population, because they have
seemingly been the most effective fighters against those
policies and groups which are repugnant to all conserva
tives.

THE SOURCES OF THE "RADICAL RIGHT** l8g

2

THE TWO CONSERVATIVES

The conservative elements in American society can be
divided into two groups, the moderate conservatives and
the radical right. These two may be differentiated by their
attitude toward the New Deal era. The moderates are
generally willing to accept the past within limits, that is,
they do not want "to turn the clock back." They accept
various Roosevelt reforms; they tolerate the labor move
ment; they tend to be internationalist in ideology and to
accept the policies of Roosevelt in the last war. Moderate
conservatives also believe in constitutional processes, civil
liberties, and due process.

The radical right, on the other hand, refuses to accept
the recent past, or is radical in the quixotic sense that it
rejects the status quo. Most, though not all of the radical
right are opposed to: (1) the welfare state; (2) the labor
movement; (3) the income tax; (4) World War II the
radical right sees the war as an avoidable mistake, and
prefers in retrospect a policy of Russia and Germany
fighting it out alone. 29

In a larger sense, the radical right views our entire
foreign policy from the recognition of Russia to Potsdam
as appeasement, treason and treachery. It is opposed to
membership in the United Nations, and to entangling
foreign commitments. It is Asia-oriented, rather than
Europe-oriented. It is suspicious of Great Britain as a
Machiavellian power which has manipulated us into two
wars, and now refuses to back us in our time of need.

Since the radical right believes that both our domestic
and foreign policies over the last twenty years have repre
sented tremendous setbacks for the country, it seeks an
explanation of these calamitous errors, and finds it in the

igo The New American Right

penetration of the government and the agencies of opinion
formation by the Communist movement. The radical right
is far from having a unified ideology. Some groups are
more concerned with our past and present foreign policy,
others with domestic affairs. But the common denominator
which unites the radical right is the identification of the
policies which it opposes, either in the economic or foreign
sphere, with the "softness" of Franklin Roosevelt and die
Democratic Party to the Soviet Union and the American
Communist Party.

To some extent the two principal sources of bitter
opposition to Roosevelt and the Democrats, the extreme
economic conservatives and the isolationists, have tended
to come together and adopt each other s ideologies. For
example, right-wing Texans were ardent advocates of
American entry into World War II. The Texas legislature
by an almost unanimous vote passed a resolution tilling
Charles Lindbergh that he was not welcome in Texas
during his leadership of America First. Today, however,
many of the same Texans regard our participation in
World War II as a blunder. On the other hand, a number
of isolationists, such as Burton K. Wheeler, William
Henry Chamberlain, and others, who were liberal or radi
cal in economic matters, have become domestic conserva
tives. John T. Flynn is perhaps the outstanding example.
He wrote regularly for the New Republic during the thir
ties and criticized Roosevelt s domestic and international
policies from a left-wing point of view. With the onset of
World War II, Flynn joined the America First movement.
This action subjected him to vicious smears from liberal
interventionists, who charged that he cooperated with Fas
cists. 30 He found increasingly that his audiences and the
magazines that would accept his articles were right-wing
conservatives, and gradually in joining with the right in
foreign policy, he accepted their position on economic
issues as well.

THE SOURCES OF THE RADICAL RIGHT

It is difficult to demonstrate that similar changes in
political ideology have occurred among sections of the
general population. A cursory inspection of election results
in Wisconsin and other midwest states, however, indicates
that many voters who once supported liberal isolationists
are now backing right-wing nationalists. It would be inter
esting to know, for example, what proportion of those
who supported the isolationist but progressive Bob La
Follette in Wisconsin now backs McCarthy. Conversely,
some of the economic radical rightists such as the new
millionaires of Texas, or men who were involved in the
Liberty League in the thirties, have accepted the isola
tionist interpretation of the past, even thought they were
not isolationists before World War II.

Increasingly, a coherent radical right ideology has
emerged which attacks past Democratic foreign policy as
pro-Soviet, and criticizes New Deal economic policy as
Socialist or Communist inspired. What are the sources of
the support of the radical right in this country? It is
difficult to answer this question since the groups who
back the efforts to suppress the civil rights of men with
whom they disagree, do not themselves agree on all or
even most issues. The common denominator on which all
the supporters of extremist action in the political arena
agree is vigorous anti-Communism. This issue, today, has
replaced anti-Catholicism or anti-immigrant sentiment as
the unifying core for mass right-wing extremist action.
One can identify some of the groups which play important
roles in the anti-Communist crusade. These include groups
reacting to the need for status policies, both the upward
mobile ethnic population, and some of the downward
mobile old American groups; groups responding to eco
nomic as well as status appeals; the nouveaux riches, and
the insecure small businessmen; the traditionalist and
authoritarian elements within the working-class groups
whose values or ties to groups in other countries make

192 The New American Right

them especially vulnerable to anti-Communist appeals
(such as the Catholics or people coming from countries
occupied by the Communists); and the traditional isola
tionists, especially those of German ancestry.

STATUS POLITICS AND THE RADICAL RIGHT

One traditional source of extreme conservatism in the
United States is the derivation of status from a claim to
the American past the people who belong to such filio-
pietistic organizations as the Daughters of the American
Revolution, the Colonial Dames, veterans* organizations,
historical commemoration societies, patriotic groups, etc.
The point one must always recognize in considering such
organizations is that few of them are actually what their
name implies. That is, most of these organizations which
supposedly contain all those who have a right to member
ship in the groups by virtue of their own actions or those
of their ancestors only are supported by a minority of
those who are eligible. The Daughters of the American
Revolution, for example, do not contain all the female
descendants of Revolutionary soldiers, but only a small
segment, those who choose to identify themselves in that
fashion. 31 The same point may be made about the mem
bership of groups commemorating the War of 1812, the
Civil War, the Confederacy, and other comparable
groups. Further, in practice, the members who are active
in these groups, who set policy, constitute an infinitesimal
minority of the total membership.

What is the minority deriving status and other gratifica
tions from such membership? Various sociological insights
may be of some help here although unfortunately there
is little or no research on their membership. It has been
suggested that individuals who participate in such socie
ties tend disproportionately to be people who have little

THE SOURCES OF THE "RADICAL RIGHT" 1Q3

other claim to status. They may be members of families
which once were important, but whose present position is
such that on the basis of personal achievement alone
they would have little right to social prestige. Many such
individuals tend to magnify this one claim to status, a
claim to history, a claim to lineage, an identification with
a heroic American past, which other people cannot have.
It is their defense against the newcomers, against the
rising minority ethnic groups. And consequently, such
individuals and their organizations make a fetish out of
tradition and past styles of life, and tend to be arch-
conservative. Thus the groups which have the greatest
sense of status insecurity will oppose both economic re
form and internationalism, both of which are viewed as
challenges to tradition.

While on one hand, the status-threatened old-family
American tends to over-emphasize his identification with
American conservative traditions, and thus be potentially
or actually a supporter of the radical right, the new
American, the minority ethnic, also is in strong need of
asserting his status claims. For while the old American
desires to maintain his status, the new American wishes
to obtain it, to become accepted. This is particukrly true
for those members of the minority groups who have risen
to middle or upper class position in the economic struc
ture. These groups, having entered at the bottom, tend to
view the status hierarchy as paralleling the economic
ladder; they believe that one need only move up the
economic scale to obtain the good things of the society.
But, as they move up economically, they encounter social
resistance. There is discrimination by the old-family
Americans, by the Anglo-Saxon against the minority
ethnics. The Boston Brahmins, for example, do not accept
the wealthy Irish. 32 As Joseph Kennedy, father of the
present Senator and former Ambassador to Great Britain,
once put it in reaction to the fact that the Boston press

The New American Right

continually made reference to him as Irish: "I was born
here, my children were born here. What the hell do I have
to do to be an American?" All through the country, one
can find ethnic groups, often composed of third and fourth
generation Americans, who have developed their own
middle and upper classes, but who are still refused admit
tance into the social circles of Anglo-Saxon Protestants.
One of the major reactions to such discrimination, as indi
cated earlier, is to become overconformist to an assumed
American tradition. Since many members of these ethnic
groups do not want to be defined as European, they also
tend to become isolationist, ultra-patriotic, and even anti-
European. For them, as for the old American tradition
alist, the positive orientation towards Europe of liberals,
of moderate conservative internationalists, creates a chal
lenge to their basic values and to their rejection of Europe.
Thus the status-insecure old-family American middle-
class, and the status-striving minority ethnics, both arrive
at similar political positions.

But to return at this point to the theme developed in
the earlier discussion of status politics, status insecurities
and status aspirations are most likely to appear as sources
of frustration, independent of economic problems, in pe
riods of prolonged prosperity. For such times make it
possible for individuals and groups who have moved up
to constitute a visible threat to the established status
groups; while at the same time the successfully mobile
begin to search for means of improving their status. It is
obvious that there are always many who do not prosper
in periods of prosperity. And it is precisely members of
the older prestigeful groups who are disproportionately
to be found among the rentier class economically, with
many living on fixed incomes, old businesses and die like
sources of income which are prone to decline in their
relative position. 33

Thus, clearly, prosperity magnifies the status problem

THE SOUKCES OF THE "RADICAL RIGHT" 195

by challenging the economic base of the older groups, and
accentuating the claim to status of the emerging ones. As
a general hypothesis I would suggest that the supporters
of the radical right in the 1950 s come disproportionately
from both the rising ethnic groups, and those old-family
Americans who are oriented toward a strong identification
with the past. 84

THE ECONOMIC EXTREMISTS

A second source of support for extreme right-wing
activities, here as in other countries, is the important
group of newly wealthy individuals thrown up by great
prosperity. New wealth most often tends to have extremist
ideologies, to believe in extreme conservative doctrines
in economic matters. 35 The man who makes money himself
feels more insecure about keeping it than do people who
possess inherited wealth. He feels more aggrieved about
social reform measures which involve redistribution of
the wealth, as compared with individuals, still wealthy,
who have grown up in an old traditionalist background,
which inculcates the values of tolerance traditionally
associated with upper-class aristocratic conservatism. It is
not without reason that the new millionaires, such as those
in Texas, have given extensive financial support to radical
right movements, politicians, and to such propaganda
organizations as Facts Forum.

While the most important significance of the newly
wealthy lies in the power which their money can bring,
rather than in their numbers, there is a mass counterpart
for them in the general population, the small independent
businessmen. Statistical data on social mobility in the
United States indicates a great turnover in the ranks of
these groups. 36 A large proportion, if not a majority of
them, come from other social strata: the small storekeepers

196 The New American Right

and businessmen often are of working-class origin; the
small manufacturer often comes out of the ranks of execu
tives, white collar or government workers.

These small businessmen, perhaps more than any other
group, have felt constrained by progressive social legisla
tion and the rise of labor unions. They are squeezed
harder than large business, since their competitive posi
tion does not allow them to pay increases in wages as
readily as can big firms. Governmental measures such as
social security, business taxes, or various regulations which
require filling out forms, all tend to complicate the opera
tion of small business. In general, these people are ori
ented upwards, wish to become larger businessmen, and
take on the values of those who are more successful, or
perhaps more accurately, they tend to take over their
image of the values of more powerful groups, values
which are often those of the radical right. Thus, as an
hypothesis, it may be suggested that in terms of economic
interest motivation, the principal financial support of the
radical right comes from those who have newly acquired
wealth, and from small business. 37

Extreme conservatism on economic matters is, of course,
not new. During the thirties it was represented by the
Liberty League, and by various measures of organized
business groups to block the development of trade unions.
In general, one could probably safely say that most big
business was willing to use undemocratic restrictive
measures, such as labor spies and thugs, to prevent the
emergence of trade unions in the twenties and thirties.
The basic difference between the radical right and the
moderate right, at present, however, is that the moderate
right, which seemingly includes the majority of big busi
ness, has come to accept the changes which have occurred
in the last twenty years, including trade unions and vari
ous social reforms, whereas the radical right still looks
upon these as basic threats to its position. In practice

THE SOURCES OF THE "RADICAL RIGHT* 1Q7

economic rightists efforts to turn the clock back have
been successful in many states which are characterized
by the lack of metropolitan areas, by rural and small-town
predominance in the legislatures. In such states, laws
have been passed outlawing the closed union shop, the
amendment to repeal the income tax amendment to the
Constitution has been endorsed by the legislature, and
other legislation designed to destroy the reforms of the
thirties and forties has been enacted. The fact remains,
however, that the bulk of the reforms and institutions the
liberal left created in the thirties and forties remain intact,
and the business conservatives and the radical right can
not feel secure or victorious.

THE "TORY" WORKER

The previous sections have dealt with factors differen
tiating middle and upper-class supporters of right-wing
extremism from those who back more moderate policies.
The stress on the radical right backers in these strata does
not mean that the principal support of this type of politics
lies here. In fact, survey as well as impressionistic data
suggest that the large majority of these classes adhere to
moderate politics, principally those of the moderate con
servative, and that the overwhelming majority of the
middle and upper groups have been consistently opposed
to McCarthy and the whole radical right movement. The
various studies of attitudes toward civil liberties and
McCarthy suggest that the lower a person is in socio-
economic status or educational attainment, the more likely
he is to support McCarthy, favor restrictions on civil
liberties, and back a "get tough" policy with the Com
munist states. 3 *

The lack of tolerance exhibited by large sections of the
lower classes as compared with the middle classes is, of

ig8 The New American Right

course, quite understandable. Support of civil liberties
or tolerance for persons with whom one strongly disagrees
requires, one would guess, both a high degree of material
and psychic security, and considerable sophistication. As
compared with the bulk of the middle and upper classes,
the working class lacks these attributes. The consequences
of these differences are manifest not only in the political
arena, but in religion as well, for chiliastic evangelical
religions have tended to draw their support from the
lower classes, while liberal "tolerant" denominations have
almost invariably been middle and upper class groups.

When one attempts, however, to go beyond the vari
ables of economic status and education, in distinguishing
between support or opposition to McCarthy or greater or
less tolerance in civil liberties among the lower classes,
the principal differentiating factors seem to be party
allegiance, and religious beliefs. In the United States and
Great Britain, the conservative workers, those who back
the Tory or Republican parties, tend to have the most
intolerant attitudes. Comparative impressionistic data
suggests that these differences are not inherent in varying
social strata, but rather are a consequence of partisan
identifications and values. That is, the Democratic and
Labour parties are more concerned with propagating a
civil libertarian value system than are the conservative
parties. Within the Democratic and Labour parties, how
ever, the working class is more intolerant than the middle
class. 39

The support which a large section of the American
working class gives to right-wing extremism today may
also be jrelated to the greater sense of status deprivation
felt by "failures" in periods of prosperity discussed earlier.
Workers who fail to get ahead while some friends, class
mates, and feUow war veterans do, are also likely to feel
embittered. This prosperity-born bitterness should result
in more varied forms of protest in America than in

THE SOURCES OF THE "RADICAL RIGHT" 199

Europe, since American workers, unlike European ones,
do not have a Socialist ideology which places the blame
for individual failure on the operation of the social sys
tem. 40 While the lower strata constitute the largest section
of the mass base of the radical right, especially of Mc
Carthy, who, as we shall see later, makes a particular
appeal to them, in power terms they are the least signifi
cant. Up to now, there are no organized working-class
groups, other than some of the fundamentalist churches,
which support radical right activities. 41 And unlike the
middle and upper-class supporters of rightist opinions in
the area of civil liberties, and foreign policy, who are also
economic conservatives, many of the lower-class fol
lowers of radical right leaders are in favor of liberal
economic policies. Those workers who tend to back ex
treme right policies in economic as well as civil liberties
and foreign policy areas tend to be the most tradition-
alistic and apolitical in their outlook. The principal sig
nificance of lower-class attitudes, therefore, lies in the
votes and responses to public polls which they contribute
to the radical right rather than in their potential utiliza
tion as part of a mass base for an organized movement. 42

THE ISOLATIONISTS

A fourth basis of strength of the radical right has
developed out of the old isolationist-interventionist con
troversy. The traditional isolationists have become, in
large measure, a base of the radical right. If one looks
over the background of isolationism in this country, it
seems largely rooted in ethnic prejudices or reactions, ties
to the homeland, and populist xenophobia. Samuel
Lubell, for example, suggests, "The hard core of isola
tionism in the United States has been ethnic and emo
tional, not geographic. By far the strongest common

200 The New American Right

characteristic of the isolationist-voting counties is the
residence there of ethnic groups with a pro-German or
anti-British bias, Far from being indifferent to Europe s
wars, the evidence argues that the isolationists are over
sensitive to them." 43

During two wars, the pro-German ethnic groups have
been isolationists. In addition to the Germans, and some
midwestern Scandinavian groups tied to them by religious
and ecological ties, many Irish also have opposed support
of Britain in two wars. Because German influence was
concentrated in the Midwest, and in part because isola
tionist ideologies were part of the value system of agrarian
radicalism, isolationism has been centered in the Midwest,
especially among once-radical agrarians. The agrarian
radicals of the Midwest tended to be xenophobic, suspi
cious of eastern and international finance capitalism. The
various agrarian movements regarded efforts to involve
the United States in European conflicts as motivated by
the desire of eastern bankers to make money. The radical
agrarian character of isolationism, however, gradually
began to change for at least two reasons: (1) numerically
its mass Midwest base became less and less rural as the
farm population declined, and more and more small-town
middle class in character; and (2) interventionism was
identified with the New Deal and social reform. 44 Thus
the small-town midwestern middle class was anti-New
Deal, conservative and isolationist; this all added up to
a fervent opposition to Roosevelt and his domestic and
foreign policy.

This former isolationist group, especially its German
base, was under a need to justify its past, and to a certain
extent, to gain revenge. 45 The Germans, in particular,
were considered disloyal by the Yankees and other native
American stock in two wars. Consequently, campaigns
which seem to demonstrate that they were right and not
disloyal would obviously win their support. The way in

THE SOURCES OF THE "RADICAL RIGHT* 201

which one can understand the resentment against the
UN and other international agencies is that these organi
zations are symbolic of American foreign policy and espe
cially of the foreign policy of World War II, of collective
security, of internationalism, of interventionism; and thus
the attack on UNESCO, the attack on the UN is an
attack on the past, an attack on Roosevelt, an attack on
our whole foreign policy from 33 on.

The common tie which binds the former isolationist
with the economic radical conservative is on the one hand
the common enemy, Roosevelt and the New Deal, and
secondly, the common scapegoat with which they can
justify their past position. Both can now suggest that they
were right, right in opposing the foreign policy or correct
in opposing certain economic policies because these past
policies were motivated or sustained by Communism or
the Communist Party, Thus, both have an interest in
magnifying the Communist plot, in identifying liberal and
internationalist forces in American society with Com
munism.

THE CATHOLICS

A fifth source of mass support for the radical right in
the recent period are many Catholics. As a rapidly rising
group which was largely low status until recently, Catho
lics might be expected to be vulnerable to status-linked
political appeals. In addition and probably more signifi
cant, however, Catholics as a religious group are more
prone to support anti-Communist movements than any
other sect with the possible exception of the fundamen
talist Protestant churches. 46 This predisposition derives
from the long history of Catholic opposition to Socialism
and Communism, an organized opposition which has been
perhaps more formalized in theological church terms than

202 The New American Right

in almost any other group. This opposition has, in recent
years, been magnified by the fact that a number of coun
tries taken over by the Communists in eastern Europe are
Catholic, and it is notable that in Europe those countries
which are most in danger of Communist penetration are,
in fact, Catholic.

In the past, however, Catholics in the United States
and other English-speaking countries, have been tradi
tionally allied with more left-wing parties. For example,
in Great Britain, Australia and New Zealand, the Catho
lics tend to support the Labor Party. In the United States,
they have backed the Democratic Party, while in Canada
they support the Liberal Party. 47

The identification of Catholicism with the left in the
English-speaking countries, as compared with its identifi
cation with the right in Western Europe, is related to the
fact that the Catholic Church is a minority church in the
English-speaking countries, and has been the church of
the minority ethnic immigrants who have been largely
lower class. As a lower status group, Catholics have been
successfully appealed to by the out-party, by the party
of the lower class.

The rise of the Communist threat, however, and the
identification of Communism with the left has created a
conflict for many Catholics. Historically, this ideological
conflict has developed just as the Catholic population in
most of these countries has produced a sizable upper and
middle class of its own, which in economic terms is under
pressure to abandon its traditional identification with the
lower class party. The Republican Party in the United
States and the (conservative) Liberal Party in Australia
as well, it is interesting to note, are now given an oppor
tunity to break the Catholics from their traditional politi
cal mores. The conservatives face the problem in the era
of the welfare state, that welfare politics obviously appeal

THE SOURCES OF THE "RADICAL RIGHT* 203

to lower-class people. Consequently, for the conservatives
to gain a majority (and here I speak not only of the
radical right but of the moderate conservatives as well),
they must have some issues which cut across class lines,
and which can appeal to the lower classes against the
party of that class. Traditionally, nationalism and foreign
policy issues have been among the most successful means
for the conservatives to break through class lines. In this
specific case, if the conservatives can identify the left
with Communism they may gain the support of many
Catholics, both lower and middle class. This combination
of the party desire to win elections plus the general desire
of conservatives to dominate the society has led them to
adopt tactics which normally they would abhor.

It may be appropriate to recall that the use of bigotry
as a tactic by the conservatives to gain a political majority
is not unknown in American history. The Whig Party
before the Civil War, faced with the fact that increased
immigration, largely Catholic, was constantly adding to
the votes of the Democratic Party, realized that they
might never obtain a majority. (They were in much the
same position as the Republican Party from 1932 to
1952. ) The Whigs, led largely by the so-called aristocratic
elements in American society, upper-class Protestants both
north and south, supported mass movements which were
anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant, because of the belief
that this would be the only way to win elections against
the party of the "Demagogues," as they described the
Democratic Party.

The upper-class Whigs hoped to break lower-class
white Protestants from their support of the Democratic
Party by identifying that party with the immigrants and
with the Catholics. Today, of course, the position is
reversed. The attempt is not so much to break Protestants
from the Democrats, but to win the Catholics from the

The New American Right

Democrats. The Republicans wish to break the Demo
cratic allegiance of the Catholics, rather than use them
as a scapegoat to secure lower-class Protestant voters. 48

It is also interesting to note that, since liberal groups
draw so much support from the Catholics, it is an exceed
ingly delicate matter for them to defend themselves
against the charge that they once made common cause
with the Communists. American liberals are under pres
sure to deny their past, rather than defend it. To admit
that liberals ever had sympathy for the Soviet Union, or
that they ever in any way collaborated with Communists
would be akin to confession, at least so far as their
Catholic supporters are concerned, of collaboration with
the Devil. In order to defend itself and to retain its
Catholic base, the liberal left must either outdo the right
in Communist charges, or at least tacitly agree with it.
It fears that a large part of its mass base agrees with the
radical right on the Communist question. 49

The introduction of a bill to outlaw the Communist
Party by the most liberal members of the United States
Senate is an example of this phenomenon. Many of them
are vulnerable to the charge of Communist collaboration.
Paul Douglas, as a Socialist, visited the Soviet Union, and
was addressed as Comrade by Stalin. This interview was
published by the Communist Party. Wayne Morse was
strongly backed by Harry Bridges in his election to the
United States Senate. Hubert Humphrey was elected to
the Senate by the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, short
ly after the Communists captured the old Minnesota
Farmer-Labor Party, and merged it with the Democratic
Party of the state. None of these men ever supported the
Communist Party, or even has any record of fellow-
traveling for a brief period. Nevertheless, facts such as
these would be difficult to explain without these men
giving repeated evidence of their being strongly anti-
Communist.

THE SOURCES OF THE "RADICAL BIGHT*

The situation in the Catholic community, today, is
similar to conditions in the Jewish community during the
thirties. The Jews, concerned with the growth of Nazism,
felt the need to do something about it. Nazism became
an important political issue for them. This situation played
into the hands of the Communists who used the fight
against Nazism as their principal appeal. And it is a fact
that the Communists had considerable success among
the Jews in this period. 50 Perhaps even more important
was the fact that this influence often affected the political
ideology and tactics of Jewish organizations which were
in no way Communist.

Today the Catholics face the Communist issue as the
Jews did Nazism. Even unscrupulous anti-Communism,
the sort which is linked to motives and policies unrelated
to the problem of fighting Communists, can win support
within the Catholic community. And just as the Com
munists were able to press forward various other aspects
of their ideology among the Jews in the 1930 s, so the
radical right, stressing the anti-Communist issue, is able
to advance other parts of its program. The radical right
uses the anti-Communist issue to create or sustain hos
tility among the Catholics against the New Deal, against
social reform, at the same time identifying liberalism
with Communism.

It is, therefore, impossible to analyze the impact of
the radical right on American life without considering
the vulnerability of the Catholics to the Communist issue,
and the effect of this Catholic sensitivity on the political
strategy of both Republican and Democratic politicians
in their reactions to the radical right. For politic reasons
many existing analyses of the radical right have found it
convenient to ignore the Catholics, and attempts have
been made to interpret the problem in terms of other
variables or concepts, some of which, like the minority
ethnic s reaction to status deprivation, have been sug-

206 The New American Right

gested in this chapter as well. While such processes are
important, it should not be forgotten that the majority of
Catholics is still proletarian, and not yet in a position to
make claim to high status. The role of the Catholic
vulnerability to the radical right today, like the similar
reaction of the Jews to the Communists a decade ago,
must be considered independently of the fact that both
groups have also reacted to the situation of being an
ethnic minority. 51

THE CATALYTIC ELEMENTS

No analysis of the social strata and political tendencies
which make up the radical right can be complete without
a discussion of the catalytic elements, members of near
Fascist and so-called borderline organizations, or individ
uals who though never members of such groups have
maintained right-wing authoritarian sentiments. These
groups and individuals have advocated extremist right-
wing ideologies for a long time. Although their number
may vary and their strength may fluctuate, they remain as
a chronic source of potential extremist sentiments and
organization. During the thirties, there were many avow
edly authoritarian Fascist and racist organizations.
Racism, at least in the form of anti-Semitism, lost much
of its appeal during and following World War II. But
while racism became even less useful politically than it
ever had been, exposes of Communist plots, a traditional
activity of most right-wing authoritarians, fitted in with
the popular mood. It is probable that the neo-Fascist
groups and individual authoritarians today use the Com
munist issue instead of anti-Semitism. 52 For many of them
hunting Communists with the seeming approval of society
is much more palatable than attacking Jews. Engaging
in attacks on alleged Communists or subversives may

THE SOURCES OF THE ^RADICAL, RIGHT" 2O/

now serve to enhance their status, while attacks on
minority groups meant accepting the role of a political
and social deviant.

Here again, the analogy may be made with the role of
the Communists in the late thirties and early forties.
Being pro-New Deal and anti-Fascist, political values
which were held by a large part of the population, made
it psychologically much easier for Communists to operate
than when they were primarily engaged in an avowed
struggle for Communism. A number of former Com
munists have reported that many of the party members
and leaders seemed much happier in this role in the late
thirties and early forties than in their earlier phase as
avowed revolutionaries. In this latter period, the Com
munist movement was much more effective in initiating
campaigns which appealed to large sections of the popu
lation.

While there is no right-wing conspiracy equivalent to
that of the Communist Party (the various organizations
and groups are disunited and often conflict with each
other), nevertheless, there is an amorphous radical right
extremist movement which receives the support of many
who are not open members of extremist organizations.
These may be termed the fellow-travelers of the radical
right. In sociological terms, these groups should come
disproportionately from the categories discussed earlier,
that is, from the status-threatened or the status-aspiring,
from the nouueaux riches, from the small businessman,
from the ardent Catholics. However, it may be suggested
that some of the research findings of studies such as the
Authoritarian Personality 53 are relevant in this context.
The Authoritarian Personality and similar studies suggest
that for a certain undefined minority of the population
various personality frustrations and repressions result in
the adoption of scapegoat sentiments. Such individuals
are probably to be found disproportionately among the

The New American Right

members of various patriotic and anti-Communist socie
ties, in the crackpot extremist groups, and significantly in
the committees of various Communist-hunt groups, for
example, in the un-American activities committees of
local Legion posts, and other groups. No one can object to
people fighting Communists. If a minority in an organiza
tion denounces individual X or Y as a Communist, one
may expect a general tendency for other members of the
group to accept the charge in terms of their identification
with the organization. Thus, with the climate of opinion
shifted to the right, and with the Communist issue impor
tant to many people, that minority of individuals who for
one reason or another feel the need to hunt out local
subversive conspirators will be supported by many in
dividuals and groups, who left alone would rarely engage
in such activities. 54

One other group is important in the development of the
radical right since World War II: the ex-Communists.
Some of them, along with some other former non-Com
munist radicals, have given a coherent tone and ideology
to the radical right. Basically, the radical right is unintel-
lectual. Its leaders know very little about Communism or
international affairs, and as a matter of fact, have little
interest in international affairs. The former radicals and
Communists can pinpoint for the ideologists and spokes
men of the radical right those areas in American life
where Communists have been important, those aspects
of American foreign policy which are most vulnerable
to attack. Perhaps the best example of this phenomenon
is to be found in The Freeman. Many of the writers for
this magazine have been former leftists, such as James
Burnham, William Schlamm, John Chamberlain, Ralph De
Toledano, J. B. Matthews, Freda Utley, Eugene Lyons,
John T. Flynn, George Schuyler, and Charlotte Haldane.

Before concluding this review of general tendencies,
one interesting and important contradiction between radi-

THE SOURCES OF THE "RADICAL RIGHT" 2OQ

cal right ideology in the United States and the conse
quences of its promulgation should be stressed. Most of
the intellectual and political spokesmen of the radical
right proclaim a belief in complete liberty for all. The
Freeman reads like a philosophical anarchist magazine.
Its present editor, Frank Chodorov, has proclaimed the
libertarian gospel in two recent books, One is a Crowd,
and The Income Tax: Root of All Evil The New Deal is
often denounced for having endangered civil liberties and
individual freedom by increasing the power of the state
and trade unions. Many of the speakers at the November
29, 1954 Madison Square Garden rally to protest the
Senate censure of Senator McCarthy demanded the pres
ervation of a "government of limited powers." Writers
for The Freeman often criticize the tariff. Basically, the
ideology of extreme conservatism in this country is laissez-
faire. McCarthy s young intellectual spokesman, William
Buckley, strongly supported the doctrines of Adam Smith
in the same book in which he demanded a purge of
American university faculties of left-wingers. 55 In a real
sense, the radical right is led by the Frondists of American
society, those who want to turn the clock back to a
golden age of little government.

3

McCARTHYISM: THE UNIFYING IDEOLOGY 56

Extreme conservatism cannot ever hope to create a
successful mass movement on the basis of its socio-
economic program alone. Except during significant eco
nomic crisis, the majority of the traditional middle and
upper class conservative elements are not likely to support
extremist movements and ideologies, even when presented
in the guise of conservatism, and the lower classes do not

210 The New American Right

support movements in defense of privilege. The problem
of the radical right is to develop a political philosophy
which will have appeal to its traditional rightist support,
but will also enable it to win a mass base. Nazism was
able to do this in Germany by combining a strong nation
alist appeal to the status-threatened German middle and
upper class, together with an "attack on Jewish interna
tional capitalism" designed to win over those most con
cerned with economic reform. As a number of European
political commentators have suggested, anti-Semitism has
often been the extreme rightist equivalent for the Socialist
attack on capitalism. The Jewish banker replaces the
exploiting capitalist as the scapegoat.

In the United States, the radical right had to find some
comparable method of appealing to the groups which
have a sense of being underprivileged, and McCarthy s
principal contribution to the crystallization of the radical
right in the 1950 s has been to locate the key symbols
with which to unite all its potential supporters. 67 Mc
Carthy s crusade is not just against the liberal elements
of the country, cast in the guise of "creeping Socialists;"
he is also campaigning against the same groups midwest
Populism always opposed, the Eastern conservative finan
cial aristocracy. In his famous Wheeling, West Virginia
speech of February 9, 1950, McCarthy began his crusade
against internal Communism by presenting for the first
time an image of the internal enemy:

The reason why we find ourselves in a position of
impotency is not because our only potential enemy
has sent men to invade our shores, but rather be
cause of the traitorous actions of those who have
been treated so well by this nation. It is not the less
fortunate, or members of minority groups who have
been selling this nation out, but rather those who
have had all the benefits the wealthiest nation on
earth has had to offerthe finest homes, the finest
college educations, and the finest jolts in the govern-

THE SOURCES OF THE "RADICAL RIGHT*

ment that we can give. This is glaringly true in the

State Department. There the bright young men who

are horn with silver spoons in their mouth are the

ones who have been worse. 5S

This defense of the minority groups and the under
privileged, and the attack on the upper class has charac
terized the speeches and writings of McCarthy and his
followers. McCarthy differs considerably from earlier
extreme right-wing anti-Communists. He is rarely inter
ested in investigating or publicizing the activities of
men who belong to minority ethnic groups. The image
of the Communist which recurs time and again in his
speeches is one of an easterner, usually of Anglo-Saxon
Episcopalian origins, who has been educated in schools
such as Groton and Harvard.

The attack on the elite recurs frequently in the current
writings of the radical right. The Freeman magazine
writes that "Asian coolies and Harvard professors are
the people . . . most susceptible to Red propaganda/ 59
Facts Forum describes intellectuals as the group most vul
nerable to Communism, and defines intellectuals as,
"lawyers, doctors, bankers, teachers, professors, preachers,
writers, publishers/ 60 In discussing the Hiss case, Facts
Forum argued that the forces defending Hiss which were
most significant were not the Communists, themselves,
but "the American respectables, the socially pedigreed,
the culturally acceptable, the certified gentlemen and
scholars of the day, dripping with college degrees. ... In
general, it was the *best people who were for Alger
Hiss," 61 In discussing McCarthy s enemies, the Freeman
stated: "He possesses, it seems a sort of animal, negative-
pole magnetism which repels alumni of Harvard, Prince
ton, and Yale. And we think we know what it is: This
young man is constitutionally incapable of deference to
social status 962

Over and over again runs the theme, the common men
in America have been victimized by members of the upper

212 The New American Right

classes, by the prosperous, by the wealthy, by the well
educated. When specific names are given, these are almost
invariably individuals whose names and backgrounds per
mit them to be identified with symbols of high status. As
McCarthy could attack other individuals and groups, this
concentration on the Anglo-Saxon elite is no accident,
What are the purposes it serves?

Since McCarthy comes from Wisconsin, where for forty
years isolationism and attacks on eastern business and
Wall Street were staple political fare, he may have been
searching for an equivalent to the La Follette appeal.
Much of the electorate of Wisconsin, and other sections
of the Midwest, the German-Americans and those who
were sympathetic to their isolationist viewpoint, have
been smarting under the charge of disloyalty. McCarthy
has argued that it was not the isolationists, but rather
those who favored our entry into war with Germany who
were the real traitors, since by backing Great Britain
they had played into the hands of the Soviet Union. The
linkage between the attacks on Anglo-Saxon Americans
and Great Britain may be seen in McCarthy s infrequent
speeches on foreign policy; these invariably wind up with
an attack on Great Britain, sometimes with a demand for
action (such as economic sanctions, or pressure to prevent
her from trading with Red China). 63 Thus McCarthy is in
fact attacking the same groups in the United States and
on the world scene, as his liberal predecessors.

On the national scene, McCarthy s attacks are probably
much more important in terms of their appeal to status
frustrations than to resentful isolationism. In the identifi
cation of traditional symbols of status with pro-Com
munism the McCarthy followers, of non-Anglo-Saxon
extraction, can gain a feeling of superiority over the
traditionally privileged groups. Here is a prosperity-born
equivalent for the economic radicalism of depressions.
For the resentment created by prosperity is basically not

THE SOUKCES OF THE "BADICAL BIGHT" 213

against the economic power of Wall Street bankers, or
Yankees, but against their status power. An attack on their
loyalty, on their Americanism, is clearly also an attack
on their status. And this group not only rejects the status
claims of the minority ethnics, but also snubs the nou-
veaux riches millionaires.

The celebrated Army-McCarthy hearings vividly pre
sented to a national television audience the differences
between the McCarthyites and their moderate Republican
opponents. Every member of McCarthy s staff who ap
peared on television, with but one exception, was either
Catholic, Jewish or Greek Orthodox in religion, and Ital
ian, Greek, Irish, or Jewish in national origin. The non-
military spokesmen of the Eisenhower administration on
the other hand were largely wealthy Anglo-Saxon Protes
tants. In a real sense, this televised battle was between
successfully mobile minority ethnics and, in the main,
upper-class Anglo-Saxon Protestants.

It is also interesting to note that McCarthy is probably
the first extreme rightist politician in America to rely
heavily on a number of Jewish advisors. These include
George Sokolsky, the Hearst columnist, Arthur Kohlberg,
a Far-Eastern exporter, and of course, his former counsel,
Roy Cohn. (These Jewish McCarthyites are, however,
unrepresentative of the Jewish population generally, even
of its upper strata, since all survey data as well as impres
sionistic evidence indicate that the large majority of
American Jews are liberal on both economic and civil
liberties issues.)

An attack on the status system could conceivably an
tagonize groups within the radical right: such as the
patriotic societies, the Daughters of the American Revo
lution, and members of old upper-status families like
Archibald Roosevelt, who chaired a testimonial dinner
for Roy Cohn. Yet, attacks on the Anglo-Saxon Yankee
scapegoat do not have this effect because they are directed

The New American Right

against majority elements in the society. Criticism of
Jews or the Irish, or Italians or Negroes, would have
resulted in an immediate response from members of the
attacked group. Anglo-Saxon white Protestants, as a
majority group, however, are not sensitive to criticism,
they are not vulnerable to being attacked, nor do they
expect attack. McCarthy, on the one hand, can throw out
symbols and images which appeal to the minority ethnics,
to the Germans, to the Irish, and the Italians, without at
the same time securing the hostility of radical rightists
who also are members of the D.A.R., the Sons of the
American Revolution, the Patriotic Dames or any other
comparable group. 64 And in spite of his populist-type
symbols, he can retain the support of these groups and
the cooperation of some big businessmen. This is his
peculiar power. To the status-deprived he is a critic of
the upper class; to the privileged, he is a foe of social
change and Communism.

ANTI-COMMUNISM: THE WEAKNESS OF A
SINGLE ISSUE

In spite of its early successes in intimidating opponents,
and gaining widespread support behind some of its
leaders, the radical right has not succeeded in building
even one organization of any political significance. And
without organizing its backing, it cannot hope to secure
any lasting power. This failure is not accidental, or a
result of inept leadership, but stems from the fact rather
that the only political issue which unites the various sup
porters of radical right politicians is anti-Communism. 65
It is only at the leadership level that agreement exists on
a program for domestic and foreign policy. The mass
base, however, is far from united on various issues. For
example, as McCarthy well knows, the dairy farmers of

THE SOURCES OF THE "RADICAL RIGHT" 215

Wisconsin want the government to guarantee 100 per
cent parity prices. But this policy is an example of
government regimentation to some of the extremist ele
ments on his side.

The Catholic working class remains committed to the
economic objectives of the New Deal, and still belongs
to trade unions. While McCarthy and other radical right
ists may gain Catholic support for measures which are
presented under the guise of fighting Communism, they
will lose it on economic issues. And should economic issues
become important again as during a recession, much of
the popular support for McCarthyism will fall away. As
a result any attempt to build a radical right movement
which has a complete political program is risky, and
probably will not occur.

The radical right also faces the problem that it unites
bigots of different varieties. In the South and other parts
of the country, fundamentalist Protestant groups which
are anti-Semitic and anti-Catholic back the radical right
in spite of the fact that McCarthy is a Catholic.

One illustration of the way in which these contradic
tions among his supporters can cause difficulty is a state
ment which appeared in the New York Journal-American:
"I think Joe owes the Army an apology but I doubt if our
soldiers will get it. The Senator has sure lost his touch
since he took up with those oil rich, anti-Catholic Texas
millionaires. They are the very same gang which threw
the shiv at Al Smith back in 1928." 66

Perhaps the greatest threat to the political fortunes of
the radical right has been the victory of Eisenhower in
1952. As long as the Republican Party was in opposition
the radical right could depend upon covert support, or
at worst, neutrality from most of the moderate conserva
tive sections of the Republican Party, Even when they
viewed the methods of the radical right with distaste, the
party leadership saw the group as potential vote gainers.

The New American Right

The frustration of twenty years in opposition reduced the
scruples of many Republicans, especially those who were
involved in party politics.

The differences between the radical right and the mod
erate right are evident indeed and open factionalism
existed in the party long before the election of Eisen
hower. Nevertheless, the evidence is quite clear that a
large proportion, if not the majority of the moderate
Republicans, did not view McCarthy or the radical right
as a menace to the party, until he began his attack upon
them. Walter Lippmann once persuasively argued that
when the Republicans were in office they would be able
to control the radical right, or that the radical right would
conform for the sake of party welfare. Most Republicans
probably at the time agreed. However, the program of
Eisenhower Republicanism has not been one of turning
the clock back, nor has it fed the psychic needs of the
radical right in domestic or foreign policy. Eisenhower s
policies in the White House have certainly not reduced
the needs of radical right groups for political action, for
scapegoatism. They have not reduced McCarthy s desires
to capitalize upon popular issues to maintain power and
prestige in the general body politic. As a result, the radi
cal right is now forced to struggle openly with the
moderate conservatives, essentially the Eisenhower Re
publicans, who in large measure represent established big
business. 67 This is a fight it cannot hope to win, but the
danger exists that the moderates in their efforts to resist
charges of softness to Communism, or simply to defeat
the Democrats, will take over some of the issues of the
radical right, in order to hold its followers, while destroy
ing the political influence of its leaders.

The development of open warfare between the mod
erate Republican, high status, and big business groups
on one hand, and McCarthy and the radical rightists on
the other, has probably represented the turning point in

THE SOURCES OF THE RADICAL RIGHT 217

the power of the latter. Thirty years earlier, the Ku Klux
Klan was severely crippled by the emerging antagonism
of the traditional power groups. As was pointed out
earlier, many of its middle-class members dropped out
of the organization when they discovered that such mem
bership would adversely affect their status and economic
interests. Today as in 1923-24, the moderate conservative
upper-class community has finally been aroused to the
threat to its position and values represented by the radical
right. 68

It is extremely doubtful that the radical right will
grow beyond the peak of 1953-54. It has reached its
optimum strength in a period of prosperity, and a reces
sion will probably cripple its political power. It cannot
build an organized movement. Its principal current sig
nificance, and perhaps permanent impact on the American
scene, lies in its success in overstimulating popular reac
tion to the problem of internal subversion, in supplying
the impetus for changes which may have lasting effects
on American life, e.g., the heightened security program,
political controls on passports, political tests for school
teachers, and increasing lack of respect for an under
standing of the Constitutional guarantees of civil and
juridical rights for unpopular minorities and scoundrels.

It is important, however, not to exaggerate the causal
influence of the radical right on the development of
restrictions on civil liberties in American life. More
significant than the activities of any group of active
extremists are the factors in the total political situation
which made Americans fearful of Communism. Perhaps
most important of all these is the fact that for the first
time since the War of 1812, the United States has been
faced with a major foreign enemy before whom it has had
to retreat The loss of eastern Europe, of China, the
impasse in Korea, Indo-China and Formosa, the seeming
fiasco of our post-war foreign policy, have required an

The New American Right

explanation. The theory that these events occurred be
cause we were "stabbed in the back" by a "hidden force"
is much more palatable than admitting the possibility that
the Communists have stronger political assets than we do.
The fear and impotence forced on us by the impossibility
of a nuclear war requires some outlet. And a hunt for the
internal conspirators may appear as one positive action.
Political extremists are capitalizing on our doubts and
fears, but it is the situation which creates these doubts
and fears, rather than the extremists, that is mainly re
sponsible for the lack of resistance by the political
moderates.

Every major war in American history has brought with
it important restrictions on civil liberties. Recognition of
this fact has often led Americans who were primarily
concerned with the preservation of civil liberties to oppose
our entry into war. Before World War II, such ardent
anti-Fascists as Robert Hutchins and Norman Thomas
opposed an interventionist policy, on the grounds that
entry into a prolonged major war might result in the
destruction of American democracy. History fortunately
records the fact that they were mistaken. The current
situation, however, is obviously more threatening than
any previous one, for one can see no immediate way for
the United States to win the fight against Communism.
And we now face the serious danger that a prolonged
cold war may result in the institutionalization of many
of the current restrictions on personal freedom which
have either been written into law, or have become normal
government administration procedure. Those who regard
extremist anti-civil libertarian phases of American history
as temporary and unimportant in long-range terms should
be cautioned that one of the consequences of the Ku Klux
Klan and the post World War I wave of anti-radical and
anti-foreigner hysteria was the restrictive immigration
laws based on racist assumptions. The Klan died and the

THE SOURCES OF THE "BADICAL

anti-radical hysteria subsided, but the quota restrictions
based on the assumption of Nordic supremacy remained.
Clearly the recent defeat of Senator McCarthy and the
seeming decline of radical right support have not resulted
in an end or even modification of many of the measures
and administrative procedures which were initiated in
response to radical right activity. Consequently if the cold
war continues, the radical right, although organizationally
weak, may play an important role in changing the char
acter of American democracy. 69

1 The intellectual sources of this paper are far more numerous than the
footnote references acknowledge. In particular, I am indebted to Richard
Hofstadter, whose "The Pseudo-Conservative Revolt" forms chapter 2 of
this volume, and Immanuel Wallerstein s "McCarthyism and the Con
servative" (MA. thesis in the Department of Sociology, Columbia Uni
versity, 1954). This paper is Publication No. A169 of the Bureau of
Applied Social Research, Columbia University, one of a series prepared
for the Fund for the Republic.

2 1 do not assert that every or even most individuals or groups I classify
in the radical right are involved in, or sympathetic to efforts to reduce
personal freedom. In fact, as is made clear later in this paper, the ideol
ogy of the radical right is a belief in as much laissez-faire as possible.
Most supporters of radical right politics believe that they are helping to
increase democratic rights for everyone. The point is, however, that the
nature of their attacks on political opponents, the definition they make
of liberal or left politics as illegitimate, un-American, creeping socialism,
fellow-traveling or worse, does have the consequence of encouraging the
denial of civil liberties to their political opponents.

3 For a discussion of class and status politics in another context see,
S M Lipset and R. Bendix, "Social Status and Social Structure," British
Journal of Sociology, II (1951), especially pp. 230-33. Similar concepts
are used by Richard Hofstadter hi Chapter 2.

* It is important to note that scapegoat and ethnic prejudice politics
have not been exclusively the tactic of prosperity-based movements. Anti-
Semitic movements, in particular, have also emerged during depressions.
The Populist movement and Father Coughlin s National Union for
Social Justice are perhaps two of the most significant ones. It should be
noted, however, that both of these movements focused primarily on pro
posed solutions to economic problems rather than racism. Initially, these
groups were concerned with solving economic problems by taking away
control of the credit system from the private bankers. Anti-Semitism
emerged in both as a means of symbolizing their attack on eastern or
international financiers. It is interesting to note that many movements
which center their explanation of the cause for depressions on the credit
system often wind up attacking the Jews. The Social Credit movement
is the most recent example of this pattern. Apparently the underlying

220 The New American Right

cultural identification of the international financier with the international
Jew is too strong for these groups to resist. In each case, however,
Populism, Coughlinism, and Social Credit, the economic program pre
ceded anti-Semitism.

5 Historians have traditionally explained the decline of the Know-
Nothings as a result of their inability to take a firm position on the
slavery issue. Recent research, however, suggests that the depression
may have been even more important than the slavery agitation. Detailed
study of pre-Civil War electoral behavior indicates that the slavery issue
played a minor role in determining shifts from one party to another.
Evidence for these statements will be found in a forthcoming monograph
by Lee Benson of the Bureau of Applied Social Research, Columbia
University.

6 Humphrey J. Desmond, The A.P.A. Movement (Washington: The
New Century Press, 1912), pp. 9-10.

7 While the A.P.A. arose and won strength in a prosperous era, it
continued to grow during the depression of 1893. Gustavus Myers, how
ever, suggests that one of the major reasons for its rapid decline in the
following two or three years was the fact that many of its leaders and
members became actively involved in the class politics which grew out
of this depression. That is, many A.P.A.ers either joined the Bryan move
ment or actively supported McKinley, depending on their socio-economic
position. Thus, the decline of the A.P.A., also, may be laid in large part
to the fact that a depression accentuates economic issues and makes
status concerns less important.

See Gustavus Myers, History of Bigotry in the United States (New
York: Random House, 1943), pp. 244-245.

8 R. Hofstadter, The Age of Reform (New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
1955).

9 Quantitative evidence which fits in with this interpretation of the
Progressive movement may be found in an unpublished paper, "The
Genteel Revolt Against Politics A study of the New York State Progres
sive Party in 1912," by Richard Ravitch. He summed up his statistical
analysis as follows:

"It would be wrong to assume that the Progressives were anti-Catholic,
but it was unusual for a political party in New York to have only one
Catholic in its midst. Several Bull Mooses [Progressives] had belonged
to the Guardians of Liberty, an organization which attacked the Church;
but they withdrew to avoid the political repercussions. Certainly it can
be said that the overwhelming religious affiliation was that of the Con
servative [high status] Protestant sects.

"They were men conspicuous for their lack of association with the two
groups which were slowly becoming the dominant forces in American
fife the industrialist and the union leader. They were part of an older
group which was losing the high status and prestige once held in
American society. The Progressives represented the middle-class of the
nineteenth century with all its emphasis on individualism and a set of
values that was basically provincial. Resenting the encroachment on
his* America by the corporations and urban masses, the formation of the
Progressive Party may he considered his way of protesting what was now
his defensive position in the bewildering drift* which characterized 20th
century society."

THE SOURCES OF THE "RADICAL RIGHT^

Evidence that anti-Catholic sentiment was strong during the pre-
World War I prosperity may also be adduced from the fact that a lead
ing anti-Catholic paper, The Menace, had a circulation of 1,400,000 in
1914.

Emerson H. Loucks, The Ku Klux Klan in Pennsylvania (Harrisburg,
Pennsylvania: The Telegraph Press, 1936), p. 16.

10 This discussion is based largely on an unpublished paper by Nathan
Glazer. For documentation of the various points made here see John
Moffat Mecklin, The Ku Klux Klan: A Study of the American Mind
(New York: Harcourt Brace and Co., 1924); E. H. Loucks, op. tit.;
Henry Fry Peck, The Modern Ku Klux Klan (Boston: Small, Maynard
and Co., 1922); Frank Bohn, "The Ku Klux Klan Interpreted," American
Journal of Sociology, January 1925, pp. 385-407.

11 It is interesting to note in this connection that much of the earlier
extremist agitation also dealt with supposed plots of foreign agents. For
example, the agitation leading to the Alien and Sedition Acts before
1800, the anti-Catholic movements, all involved claims that agents of a
foreign power or of the Pope sought to subvert American life and insti
tutions. The leaders of these movements all argued that men with
loyalties to foreign institutions had no claim to civil liberties in America.
"Can a Romanist be a good citizen of America . . . ? Romanism is a
political system as a political power it must be met. . . . No ballot for
the man who takes his politics from the Vatican. 9 Reverend James B.
Dunn, leader of the A.P.A. quoted in Myers, op. tit,, p. 227. (Emphasis
in Myers. )

The present situation, of course, differs from these past ones in that
there is a foreign directed conspiracy, the Communist Party. But today,
as in the past, the new right seeks to link native, non-Communist expres
sion of dissent to foreign powers as well.

12 Morton Grodzins, Americans Betrayed, Politics and the Japanese
Evacuation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949).

13 See Herbert Hyman and Paul Sheatsley, "Trends in Public Opinion
on Civil Liberties," Journal of Social Issues, IX (1953), No. 3, pp. 6-17.

14 Samuel A. Stouffer, Communism, Conformity, and Civil Liberties
(New York: Doubleday and Co., 1955), p. 32-33; see the summary and
discussion of his findings in Chapter 6.
is Ibid., pp. 28-31.

16 Ibid., pp. 39-46.

17 David Riesman has suggested that the factors sustaining extreme
moralism in American Me are declining as more and more Americans
are becoming "other-oriented," more concerned with being liked than
being right. While Riesman s distinction between inner-oriented and
other-oriented people is useful for analytical purposes, I still believe
that viewed cross-culturally, Americans are more likely to view politics
in moralistic terms than most Europeans. No American politician would
say of an ally, as did Churchill of Russia, that I will ally with the "devil,
himself," for the sake of victory. The American alliance with Russia had
to be an alliance with a "democrat" even if the ally did not know he
was democratic. Both the liberal reaction to the possibility of alliance
with Chiang Kai-shek and Franco, and the conservative reaction to
recognition of Communist China are but the latest examples of the
difficulty which morality creates for our international diplomacy. See

The New American Right

David Riesman, The Lonely Crowd (New Haven: Yale University
Press 1950), for a discussion of the decline of such morality; and
George Kennan, American Diplomacy, 1900-1950 (New York: New
American Library, 1952). Gabriel A. Almond, The American People and
Foreign Policy (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1950), Chap.
Ill, "American Character and Foreign Policy"; Raymond Aron, The
Century of Total War (London: Derek Verschoyle, 1954), pp. 103-104,
for analysis of the way in which morality in politics hampers our foreign

is See Will Herberg, "Government by Rabble-Rousing," The New
Leader, Jan. 18, 1954.

19 It is true, of course, that there has been an alternative nationalist
reaction, such as Zionism among the Jews, the Garvey movement among
the Negroes, and identification with national societies among other
groups. In large measure, however, these patterns have been the reaction
of lower-status, usually foreign-born members of immigrant groups.
Once assimilated, and accepted, immigrant groups often adopt the so-
called "third generation pattern in which they attempt to re-identify
with their past national traditions. While this pattern would seem to
conflict with assumption that conformity is the norm, I would suggest
that it fits into the needs of individuals in a mass urban culture to find
symbols of belongingness which are smaller than the total society.

20 Churchill made this statement in the House, in defending his refusal
to declare the Communist Party, then opposed to the war, illegal.

21 See Leon Samson, Toward A United Front (New York: Farrar and
Rinehart, 1933).

22 For further comments on this theme see S. M. Lipset, Democracy
in Alberta," The Canadian Forum, November and December 1954, pp.
175-177, 190-198.

23 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (London: Oxford
University Press, 1946), pp. 376-381.

24 Arnold Rose, "Voluntary Associations in France," in Theory and
Method in the Social Sciences (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1954), pp. 72-115. Mass Observation, Puzzled People (London:
Victor Gollancz, 1947), pp. 119-122.

25 S. D. Clark, "The Frontier and Democratic Theory," Transactions
of the Royal Society of Canada, Volume XL VII, Series III, June 1954,
p. 72.

26 That this is somewhat legitimate may be seen by analyzing the
social bases of support of these totalitarian movements. In general, Com
munists, where strong, receive support from the same social strata which
vote for democratic socialist or liberal groups in countries with weak
Communist movements. Conversely, Fascist and right authoritarians, such
as De Gaulle, have received their backing from previous supporters of
conservative parties. There is little evidence of an authoritarian appeal
per se. Rather, it would seem that under certain conditions part of the
conservative group will become Fascists, while under others, part of the
support of the democratic left will support the Communists. See S. M.
Lipset, et al., "Psychology of Voting," in Gardner Lindzey, ed., Handbook
of Social Psychology (Cambridge: Addison Wesley, 1954), pp. 1135-
1136.

THE SOURCES OF THE "RADICAL RIGHT* 223

27 For a discussion of the way in which the radical right systematically
attacks the Brahmin upper class in the State Department, see pp. 210-11
of this essay. Even as late as 1952, the left-wing journalist I. F. Stone
attempted to bolster his attack on American policy in Korea by calling
attention to the fact "that Acheson on making his Washington debut
at the Treasury before the war, had been denounced by New Dealers
as a Morgan man/ a Wall Street Trojan Horse, a borer-from-within on
behalf of the big bankers." I. F. Stone, The Hidden History of the
Korean War (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1952), p. 204.

It should be noted that, in so far as education at Harvard, Yale or
Princeton is an indicator of upper-class background, the extremist critics
of the State Department are correct in their claim that persons with a
high-status background are disproportionately represented in the State
Department. A study of 820 Foreign Office Officers indicated that 27 per
cent of them graduated from these institutions, while only 14 per cent
of high-ranking civil servants in other departments had similar collegiate
backgrounds. (R. Bendix, Higher Civil Servants in American Society
[Boulder: University of Colorado Press, 1949] pp. 92-93.)

Some evidence that elite background is even of greater significance
in the higher echelons of the State Department may be found in a recent
article published in the Harvard Alumni Bulletin:

"The new United States Ambassador to the Federal Republic of
Germany (James B. Conant, Harvard 14, and former president of the
University) will find, if he looks about him, fellow alumni in comparable
positions. Across the border to the south and west, the Belgian ambassador
is Frederick M. Alger, Jr. 30, and the French ambassador is C.
Douglas Dillon, 31. Down the Iberian Peninsula the ambassadors to
Spain and Portugal are John D. Lodge 25, and James C. H. Bon-
bright 25. A bit to the north, Ambassador Conant will find Ambassador
Robert D. Coe 23 in Denmark and John M. Cabot 23 in Sweden. In
the forbidden land to the east of him is Charles E. Bohlen 27, Ambas
sador to the U.S.S.R. Near at hand, across the Channel, is the senior
member of Harvard s ambassadorial galaxy, Winthrop W. Aldrich 07,
LL.D. 53, Ambassador to Great Britain. . . . There seem^to be enough

Harvard ambassadors for a baseball team in Europe ( Ambassadors

in Harvard Alumni Bulletin, vol. 57, May 21, 1955, p. 617.)

2s Edna Lonergan, "Anatomy of the PAC," The Freeman, November
27, 1950, pp. 137-139.

29 A good example of extreme right ideology is contained in the news-
paper report of a speech delivered at a meeting of Alliance, Inc., a right-
wing group sponsored by Archibald Roosevelt:

"Gov. jT Bracken Lee of Utah declared last night that We have in
Washington what to my mind amounts to a dictatorship.

"Asserting that high spending was heading the country toward poverty,
he ... [said] that the end result of all dictatorships was the same. They
end up with a ruling class and all the rest of us are peons. ...

"There was no difference, he continued, between the Government in
Russia and an all powerful central government in Washington, ...

all the trouble in Washington began when a constitutional
amendment authorized the income tax. He assailed the United Nations,
foreign aid and Federal grants to the states.

224 The New American Right

"He appealed to those who felt the way he did to speak up now/
When a voice in the audience asked, How, he replied: If you feel that
McCarthy s on our side say so/ This reference to Senator Joseph R.
McCarthy of Wisconsin evoked applause, cheers and whistles/

See "Governor of Utah Sees Dictatorship," New York Times, Febru
ary 18, 1955, p. 19.

For a description of the ideology of the radical right, or as he calls
them, the ultra-conservatives, see Clinton Rossiter, Conservatism in
America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1955) pp. 183-186.

30 One hypothesis which may explain the subsequent bitterness of some
of the former liberals and leftists who broke with Roosevelt over his
foreign policies is contained in a defense of the Moscow trials of the
1930 s written by John T, Flynn in his more leftist days.

"Americans found it difficult to believe that the old Bolsheviks recently
executed in Russia, after all their years of warfare against capitalism,
could have been really guilty of intriguing with Italy and Germany to
destroy Stalin. That seemed unbelievable. This incredulity struck me as
possible only by ignoring the strange distance which the human mind
and heart can lead a man of strong feeling when they begin to generate
hatreds. Now we have a weird case of it in our own far more composed
country. Would anyone have believed, four years ago for instance, that
in 1937 we would behold John Frey, of the A.F.L. as fine a person as
one would care to meet actually consorting with a company union in
steel to defeat and destroy a singularly successful industrial union move
ment led by John L. Lewis? Yet this fantastic thing has occurred. It is
no stranger than a Russian editor full of hatred of Stalin seeking to
circumvent that gentleman s plans by teaming up for the moment with
Hitler." New Republic, March 24, 1937, pp. 209-210 (my emphasis).

31 It is worth noting that existing evidence suggests that there is a
substantial difference in the reactions of men and women to the radical
right. Women are much more likely to support repressive measures
against Communists and other deviant groups than are men as measured
by poll responses, and many of the organizations which are active in
local struggles to intimidate school and library boards are women s
groups. In part this difference may be related to the fact that women
are more explicitly concerned with family status in the community than
are men in the American culture, and hence, may react more than the
men do to status anxieties or frustrations. The organizations of old family
Americans which are concerned with claiming status from the past are
predominantly female. Hence, if the thesis that status concerns are related
to rightist extremism and bigotry is valid, one would expect to find more
women than men affected by it.

Secondly, however, evidence from election and opinion studies in a
number of countries indicates that women are more prone to be con
cerned with morality in politics. They are much more likely to support
prohibition of liquor or gambling, or to vote against corrupt politicians
than men. This concern with morality seems to be related to the greater
participation in religious activities by the female sex. Since Communism
has come to be identified as a moral crusade against evil by every
section of American public opinion, one should expect that women will
be more likely to favor suppression of evil, much as they favor suppres
sion of liquor and gambling. The propensity to support efforts to repress

THE SOURCES OF THE RADICAL RIGHT

"corrupt ideas" is probably intensified by the fact that much of the
concern with the activities of Communists is related to their potential
effect on the young. See H. Tingsten, Political Behavior: Studies in Elec
tion Statistics (London: P. S. King, 1937), pp. 36-75 for a report of
comparative data on women s attitudes and political behavior. In the
1952 Presidential election in the United States, more women voted
Republican than Democratic for the first time in many years. It has
been suggested that this was a product of the raising of strong moral
issues by the Republicans. See L. Harris, Is There A Republican Ma
jority? (New York: Harper s and Sons, 1954), Chapter VI.

The recent Stouffer study of attitudes toward civil liberties further
tends to validate these inferences. The data indicate clearly that in 1954
women were much more intolerant of Communists, critics of religion,
and advocates of nationalized industry than men. Similarly, presidents of
women s clubs were less tolerant than any other group of community
leaders interviewed with the exception of officers of the D.A.R. and the
American Legion. (See S. A. Stouffer, op. cit. f pp. 131-55, 52.) Part
of the difference in attitudes between men and women reported in this
study is accounted for by the fact that women are more religious than
men, and religious people are more likely to be intolerant than the non-
religious. However, even when religious participation is held constant,
women are more likely to be intolerant than are men. I would suggest
that part of this difference is related to the fact that women are more
likely than men to reflect the political concerns derived from status.
Unfortunately, the Stouffer study does not attempt to measure the effect
of status concerns on political beliefs. For an excellent study which does
attempt to do this in the context of analyzing the electoral support
of British political parties see Mark Benney and Phyllis Geiss, "Social
Class and Politics in Greenwich," British Journal of Sociology, 1950,
VoL I, pp. 310-324. The authors of this study found that women were
more likely to report themselves in a higher social class than men at the
same occupational level, and those who reported themselves to be higher
status were more conservative.

32 For an excellent description of the reactions of the Boston Brahmins
to the Irish, see Cleveland Amory, The Proper Bostonians (New York:
E. P. Dutton and Company, 1947), p. 346.

33 La an article written shortly before his death, Franz Neumann sug
gested that one of the social sources of political anxiety which led to
individuals and groups accepting a conspiracy theory of politics is social
mobility:

"In every society that is composed of antagonistic groups there is an
ascent and descent of groups. It is my contention that persecutory
anxiety but one that has a real basis is produced when a group is
threatened in its prestige, income, or its existence. . . .

"The fear of social degradation thus creates for itself *a target for the
discharge of the resentments arising from damaged self-esteem/ . . .

"Hatred, resentment, dread, created by great upheavals, are concen
trated on certain persons, who are denounced as devilish conspirators.
Nothing would be more incorrect than to characterize the enemies as
scapegoats, for they appear as genuine enemies whom one must extirpate
and not as substitutes whom one only needs to send into the wilderness.
The danger consists in the fact that this view of history is never com-

226 The New American Right

pletely false, but always contains a kernel of truth and, indeed, must
contain it, if it is to have a convincing effect."

Franz L. Neumann, "Anxiety in Politics," Dissent, Spring 1955, pp.
141, 139, 135.

34 One study of McCarthy s appeal indicates that, among Protestants,
he gets much more support from persons of non- Anglo-Saxon ancestry
than from those whose forefathers came from Britain. The polls are not
refined enough to locate old Americans who support patriotic organiza
tions, but the activities of groups which belong to the Coalition of
Patriotic Societies are what would be expected in terms of the logic
of this analysis. See Wallerstein, op. cit.

35 These observations about the nouveaux riches are, of course, not
new or limited to current American politics. William Cobbett commented
in 1827:

". . . this hatred to the cause of public liberty is, I am sorry to say it,
but too common amongst merchants, great manufacturers, and great
farmers; especially those who have risen suddenly from the dunghill to
chariot."

G. D. H. Cole and Margaret Cole, eds., The Opinions of William
Cobbett (London: The Cobbett Publishing Co., 1944), pp. 86-87; see
also Walter Weyl, The New Democracy, (New York: The Macmillan
Co., 1912), pp. 242-243 for similar comments on the American nouveaux
riches, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

36 See S. M. Lipset and Reinhard Bendix, "Social Mobility and Occu
pational Career Patterns II. Social Mobility," American Journal of Soci
ology, Vol. LVII (March 1952), pp. 494-504.

37 Again, poll data fit this hypothesis. Material from a 1952 Roper
poll shows that the most pro-McCarthy occupational group in the coun
try is small businessmen. See Wallerstein, op. cit. For an excellent dis
cussion of the reactionary politics of upward mobile small business, see
R. Michels, "Psychologic der anti-Kapitalistischen Massenbewegungen,"
Grundriss der Sozialokonomik, Vol. IX, No. 1, p. 249. A recent study of
post-war elections in Great Britain also suggests that small businessmen
react more negatively to welfare state politics than any other occupa
tional group. John Bonham reports that a larger proportion of small
businessmen shifted away from the Labor Party between 1945 and
1950 than any other stratum. See the Middle Class Vote (London*
Faber and Faber, 1954), p. 129.

88 There is a considerable body of evidence which indicates that
economic liberalism (support of the labor movement, government plan
ning, and so forth) is correlated inversely wtih socio-economic status,
while non-economic "liberalism" (support of civil liberties, and inter
nationalism), is associated positively with socio-economic status. That is,
the poor are for redistribution of wealth, while the more well-to-do are
liberal in non-economic matters. See G. H. Smith, "Liberalism and
Level of Information," Journal of Educational Psychology, February
1948, pp. 65-81; Hyman and Sheatsley, op. cit., pp. 6-17; reports of the
American Institute of Public Opinion, passim.

These findings are paralleled by various reports which suggest that
lower status and education are associated with high scores on scales
designed to measure degree of authoritarianism. See H. H. Hyman and
P. B. Sheatsley, "The Authoritarian Personality-A Methodological

THE SOURCES OF THE "RADICAL BIGHT** 227

Critique," in M. Jahoda and R. Christie, Studies in the Scope and
Method of The Authoritarian Personality (Glencoe, HI.: The Free Press,
1954), p. 94; R. Christie, "Authoritarianism Re-examined/ in ibid., pp.
169-175.

Janowitz and Marvick have reported the interesting finding based on
a national sample that the two most "authoritarian" groups are the
poorly educated lower class, and the poorly educated lower middle
class. See M. Janowitz and D. Marvick, "Authoritarianism and Political
Behavior," Public Opinion Quarterly, Summer 1953, pp. 185-201.

The Stouffer study reports results similar to these earlier ones. In
addition it indicates that leaders of community organizations, most of
whom are drawn from the upper part of the class structure and are
college educated, are much more favorable to civil liberties than the
general population. See S. A. Stouffer, op. cit. t pp. 28-57, and passim.

39 Zetterberg in an unpublished study of attitudes toward civil liber
ties in a New Jersey community found that working-class respondents
were much more intolerant on civil-liberties questions than middle-class
respondents, and that working-class Republicans were somewhat more
anti-civil libertarian than working-class Democrats. Similar conclusions
may be deduced from various reports of the American Institute of
Public Opinion (Gallup Poll) and the Stouffer study. The first indicates
that lower-class respondents are more favorably disposed to McCarthy
than middle and upper class, but that Democrats are more likely to be
anti-McCarthy than are Republicans. Stouffer reports similar findings
with regard to attitudes toward civil liberties. Unfortunately, neither
the Gallup Poll nor Stouffer have presented their results by strata for the
supporters of each party separately. See S. A. Stouffer, op. cit., pp.
210-215. A survey study of the 1952 elections indicates that at every
educational level, persons who scored high on an "authoritarian person
ality" scale were more likely to be Eisenhower voters than were those
who gave "equalitarian" responses. Robert E. Lane, "Political Personality
and Electoral Choice," American Political Science Review, March 1955,
p. 180.

In Britain, Eysenck reports that "middle-class Conservatives are more
tender-minded [less authoritarian] than working-class Conservatives;
middle-class Liberals are more tender-minded than working-class Lib
erals; middle-class Socialists more tender-minded than working-class
Socialists, and even middle-class Communists are more tender-minded
than working-class Communists." H. J. Eysenck, The Psychology of
Politics (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1954), p. 137. Similar
findings are indicated also in a Japanese study which reports that the
lower classes and the less educated are more authoritarian than the
middle and upper strata and the better educated, but the supporters of
the socialist parties are less authoritarian than those who vote for the
two "bourgeois" parties. See Kotaro Kido and M. Sugi, "A Report on
Research on Social Stratification and Social Mobility in Tokyo (III).
The Structure of Social Consciousness," Japanese Sociological Review,
January 1954, pp. 74-100. See also National Public Opinion Research
Institute (of Japan) Report No. 26, A Survey of Public Attitudes Toward
Civil Liberty (Tokyo 195).

An as yet unpublished secondary analysis of German data collected by
the UNESCO Institute at Cologne yields similar results for Germany. The

228 The New American Right

working classes are less favorable to a democratic party system than are
the middle and upper classes. However, within every occupational stratum
men who support the Social-Democrats are more likely to favor demo
cratic practices than those who back the more conservative parties. The
most anti-democratic group of all are workers who vote for non-Socialist
groups. (This analysis was done by the author. )

It is also true that the working class forms the mass base of authori
tarian parties in Argentina, Italy, and France. Ignazio Silone is one of the
few important Socialists who have recognized that recent historical
events challenge the belief that the working class is inherently a pro
gressive and democratic force.

". . . the myth of the liberating power of the proletariat has dissolved
along with that other myth of the inevitability of progress. The recent
examples of the Nazi labor unions, those of Salazar and Peron , . . have
at last convinced of this even those who were reluctant to admit it on
the sole grounds of the totalitarian degeneration of Communism. . . .
The worker, as we have seen and as we continue to see, can work for
the most conflicting causes; he can be Blackshirt or partisan/ Ignazio
Silone, "The Choice of Comrades," Dissent, Winter 1955, p. 14.

It may in fact be argued that the lower classes are most attracted to
chiliastic political movements, which are necessarily intolerant and au
thoritarian. Far from workers in poorer countries being Communists
because they do not realize that the Communists are authoritarian, as
many democratic Socialists have argued and hoped, they may be Com
munists because the evangelical "only truth" aspect of Communism is
more attractive to them than the moderate and democratic gradualism
of the social democracy.

40 See R. K. Merton, "Social Structure and Anomie," in his Social
Theory and Social Structure (Glencoe, 111.: Free Press, 1949), Chapter
IV.

41 The large Catholic working class, although predominantly Demo
cratic, also contributes heavily to the support of extremist tendencies on
the right in questions dealing with civil liberties or foreign policy. This
pattern stems in large measure from their situation as Catholics, and is
discussed in a later section.

42 It is interesting to note in this connection that the large group of
persons who are inactive politically in American society tend to be the
most conservative and authoritarian in their attitudes. These groups,
largely concentrated in the lower classes, do, however, contribute to the
results of public opinion polls since they are interviewed. Consequently
such polls may exaggerate greatly the effective strength of right-wing
extremism. Stouffer reports that those less interested in politics are less
tolerant of the civil liberties of Communists and other deviants than
are those who are interested. See S. A. Stouffer, op. cit., pp. 83-86.
Sanford, who found a negative relationship between socio-economic
status and authoritarian attitudes, states: "We have data showing that
authoritarians are not highly participant in political affairs, do not join
many community groups, do not become officers in the groups they
become members of." F. H. Sanford, Authoritarianism and Leadership
(Philadelphia: Stephenson Brothers, 1950), p. 168; see also G. M. Con
nelly and H. H. Field, "The non-voter-Who he is, what he thinks,"
Public Opinion Quarterly, Vol. 8, 1944, pp. 175-187. Data derived from

THE SOURCES OF THE "RADICAL RIGHT"

a national survey in 1952 indicate that when holding education constant,
individuals who score high on an "authoritarianism" scale are more
likely to belong to voluntary associations than those who score low.
The high "authoritarians," however, are less likely to engage in political
activity or have a sense that they personally can affect the political
process. Robert E. Lane, op. cit., pp. 178-179. On the other hand Bendix
suggests that the apathetic traditionalist group was mobilized by the
Nazis in the final Weimar elections; see R. Bendix, "Social Stratification
and Political Power," American Political Science Review, Vol. 46, 1952,
pp. 357-375.

43 Samuel Lubell, The Future of American Politics (New York:
Harper and Bros., 1952), p. 132. LubelTs thesis has been challenged by
R. H. Schmuckler, "The Region of Isolationism/ American Political
Science Review, June 1953, pp. 388-401. Schmuckler denies that the
statistical evidence proves that any one factor is basically correlated
with voting behavior of isolationist members of Congress. Lubell, how
ever, uses other indicators of the effect of ethnic attitudes on voting on
foreign policy issues, the changes in the election of 1940. Regardless of
who is correct, the basic hypothesis that feelings about past American
policy which are linked to the position of different ethnic groups, affect
the current political behavior of these groups may still be valid.

44 Among once liberal Midwest isolationist politicians who were first
liberals and became extreme rightists were Senators Nye, Wheeler and
Shipstead.

45 "The memory of opposition to the last war seems the real main
spring behind present-day isolationism. What really binds the former
isolationists is not a common view on foreign policy for the future, but
a shared remembrance of American intervention in the last war. The
strength of the Republican appeal for former isolationist voters is essen
tially one of political revenge." Lubell, op. cit., p. 152.

46 Various national surveys have indicated that Catholics are more
likely to be favorable to Senator McCarthy than adherents of other
denominations. (See the reports of the American Institute of Public
Opinion.) The recent survey of attitudes toward civil liberties reports
that outside of the South, church-going Catholics are more intolerant
than church-going Protestants. See S. A. Stouffer, op. cit., pp. 144-145.

47 See S. M. Lipset, et aL, op. cit., p. 1140; Eysenck, op. cit., p. 21.

48 A similar effort is being made at the current time by the Australian
conservatives who are attacking the Labor Party for alleged softness
towards Communism, and for allowing itself to be penetrated by the
Communists. The presence of a large Catholic population in these coun
tries, traditionally linked to the more liberal party, is probably one of
the most important factors affecting the reluctance of the moderate
conservative politicians to oppose the tactics of the extremists on their
own side.

49 In Canada, also, the Catholics have provided the main dynamic for
threats to civil liberties, which are presented as necessary parts of the
struggle against Communism, The government of the Catholic province
of Quebec passed legislation in the thirties which gave the government
the right to invade private homes in search of Communist activities and
to padlock any premises which have been used by the Communists.
Civil liberties groups in Canada have charged that these laws have

230 The New American Right

been used against non-Communist opponents of the government espe
cially in the labor movement.

50 There is, of course, no reliable quantitative way of measuring this
influence, although all students of the Communist movement agree that
its success was greatest among Jews. In Canada, where under a par
liamentary system, the Communist Party was able to conduct election
campaigns in districts where they had hopes of large support, they
elected members to the Federal House and provincial legislatures from
Jewish districts only. Similarly, in Great Britain, one of the two Com
munists elected in 1945 came from a London Jewish district.

51 It is possible to suggest another hypothesis for Catholic support of
political intolerance in this country which ties back to the earlier dis
cussion of the working class. All existing survey data indicate that the
two religious groups which are most anti-civil libertarian ai

w , are the Cath

olics and the fundamentalist Protestant sects. Both groups are predom
inantly low status in membership. In addition, both fall under the
general heading of extreme moralizing or Puritanical religions. In the
past, and to a considerable extent in the present also, the fundamentalists
played a major role in stimulating religious bigotry, especially against
Catholics. It is important, however, to note also that a large part of
the American Catholic church is dominated by priests of Irish birth or
ancestry. French Catholic intellectuals have frequently referred to the
American Catholic church as the Hibernian American church. Irish
Catholics, like French Canadians, are quite different from those in the
European Latin countries. They have been affected by Protestant values,
or perhaps more accurately by the need to preserve the church in a
hostile Protestant environment. One consequence of this need has been
an extreme emphasis on morality, especially in sexual matters. Studies
of the Irish have indicated that they must rank high among the sexually
repressed people of the earth. The church in Ireland has tended to be
extremely intolerant of deviant views and behavior. The pattern of
intolerance among the American Irish Catholics is in large measure a
continuation in somewhat modified form of the social system of Ireland.
Thus the current anti-Communist crusade has united the two most
morally and sexually inhibited groups in America, the fundamentalist
Protestants and the Irish Catholics. I am sure that much could be done
on a psychoanalytical level to analyze the implications of the moral and
political tone of these two groups. For a good report on morality and
sex repression among the Irish in Ireland and America, see John A.
O Brien, ed., The Vanishing Irish (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1953); see
also C. Arensberg and S. Kimball, Family and Community in Ireland
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1948).

52 Many, however, still make Aesopian references to the Jews. For a
good current report on the anti-Semitic fringe within the radical right
see James Rorty, "The Native Anti-Semite s New Look/" Commentary,
Nov., 1954, pp. 413-421. y

In reporting on the Madison Square Garden rally called by the Ten
Million Americans Mobilizing for Justice, a group formed to fight the
move to censure McCarthy, James Rorty suggests that many of the par
ticipants were individuals who had taken part in Fascist rallies in the
thirties.

"Edward S. Fleckenstein, an American agitator and associate of neo-

THE SOURCES OF THE "RADICAL RIGHT* 231

Nazis whom Chancellor Adenauer had the State Department oust from
Germany, had worked overtime to mobilize his Voters Alliance of Ger
man Ancestry. So successful were his efforts that Weehawken, Secaucus,
and other northern New Jersey communities had sent delegations so
large that, according to organizer George Racey Jordan, it had been
necessary to limit their allotment of seats, to avoid giving an unrepre
sentative character to the meeting/ James Rorty, "What Price McCarthy
Now?", Commentary, January 1955, p. 31.

I was present at this rally, and from my limited vantage point, would
agree with Rorty. Men who sat near me spoke of having attended
"similar" rallies ten and fifteen years ago. Perhaps the best indicator of
the temper of this audience was the fact that Roy Cohn, McCarthy s
counsel, felt called upon to make a speech for brotherhood, and reiter
ated the fact that he was a Jew. One had the feeling that Cohn felt
that many in his audience were anti-Semitic.

53 See T. W. Adorno, et al, The Authoritarian Personality (New
York: Harpers, 1950). See also Richard Christie, op. tit., pp. 123-196,
for a summary of more recent work in this field.

54 Stouffer reports that individuals who support "authoritarian . . .
child-rearing practices" and respond positively to the statement: "People
can be divided into two classes the weak and the strong," are prone to
also advocate strong measures against Communists, supporters of nation
alized industry, and critics of religion. These questions are similar to the
ones used on various psychological scales to locate "authoritarian per
sonalities." S. A. Stouffer, op. tit., pp. 94-99.

55 William Buckley, God and Man at Yale (Chicago: Henry Regnery
and Co., 1951).

56 Much of the data in this section are drawn from Wallerstein, op. tit.

57 I am not suggesting that McCarthy or the radical right are Fascists
or even precursors of Fascism. For reasons which are discussed below, I
do not believe they could build a successful social movement even if
they wanted to. Rather, however, I do suggest that the extreme right in
all countries, whether Fascist or not, must find a program or issue which
can appeal to a section of the lower middle class, if not the working class,
if it is to succeed.

58 Congressional Record, February 20, 1950, p. 1954. (My emphasis.)

59 The Freeman, Vol. I, No. 1, p. 13.

* Facts Forum Radio Program, No. 57.

61 Ibid. ( My emphasis. )

162 The Freeman, November 5, 1951, p. 72. (My emphasis.)

63 "Where have we loyal allies? In Britain? I would not stake a shilling
on the reliability of a government which, while enjoying billions in
American munificence, rushed to the recognition of the Chinese Red
regime, traded exorbitantly with the enemy through Hong Kong and has
sought to frustrate American interests in the Far East at every turn/*
Joseph R. McCarthy, The Story of General George Marshall, Americas
Retreat from Victory (No. pubL, 1952), p. 166.

"As of today some money was taken out of your paycheck and sent
to Britain. As of today Britain used that money from your paycheck to
pay for the shipment of the sinews of war to Red China. . . .

"Now what can we do about it We can handle this by saying this to
our allies: If you continue to ship to Red China, while they are imprison-

232 The New American Right

ing and torturing American men, you will not get one cent of American
money." Joseph R. McCarthy, quoted in the New "York Times, November
25, 1953, p. 5: 1-8.

64 It is, of course, possible that Anglo-Saxon Protestant supporters of
McCarthy react similarly to the members of minority ethnic groups to the
mention of Groton, Harvard, striped-pants diplomats, and certified gentle
men, that is, that they too, take gratification in charges which reduce the
prestige of those above them, even if they are also members of the same
ethnic group. In large measure, I would guess that it is the middle-class,
rather than the upper-class members of nationalistic and historical so
cieties who are to be found disproportionately among the supporters of
the radical right. Consequently, they too, may be in the position of
wanting the high and mighty demoted.

165 In addition much if not most of the support for radical right policies
reported by the polls comes from groups which normally show the lowest
levels of voting or other forms of political participation, women, members
of fundamentalist sects, and conservative workers. These groups are the
most difficult to organize politically.

It is unfortunate that most American politicians as well as the general
intellectual public do not recognize that the public opinion poll reports
on civil liberties, foreign policy, and other issues are usually based on
samples of the total adult population, not of the electorate. Consequently,
they probably greatly exaggerate the electoral strength of McCarthyism.
For a related discussion see David Riesman and Nathan Glazer, "The
Meaning of Opinion/ in D, Riesman, Individualism Reconsidered
(Glencoe, HI.: The Free Press, 1954), pp. 492-507.

66 Frank Conniff in the Journal- American, quoted in The Progressive,
April 1954, p. 58.

67 The cleavage in the Republican Party revealed by the vote in the
United States Senate to censure McCarthy largely paralleled the lines
suggested in this paper. The party divided almost evenly in the vote, with
almost all the Republican Senators from eastern states plus Michigan
voting against McCarthy, while most of the Republicans from the Mid
west and far western states voted for him. The cleavage, in part, reflects
the isolationist and China-oriented section of the party on one side, and
the internationalist eastern wing on the other. From another perspective,
it locates the Senators with the closest ties to big business against
McCarthy, and those coming from areas dominated by less powerful
business groups on the other. There are, of course, a number of deviations
from the pattern.

An indication of the temper of the right wing of the Republican Party
may be seen from the speeches and reaction at a right-wing rally held
in Chicago on Lincoln s Birthday. Governor J. Bracken Lee ot Utah
stated, "We have gone farther to the left in the last two years [under
Eisenhower] than in any other period in our history. I have the feeling
that the leadership in Washington is not loyal to the Republican Parly.
Brigadier General William Hale Wilbur, U.S. Army, retired, charged that
the "great political victory of 1952 is being subverted. . . . American
foreign policy is no longer American." McCarthy drew loud cheers while
denouncing the evacuation of the Tachens. Senator George W. Malone of
Nevada stated that Washington is "the most dangerous town in the
United States." New York Times, February 13, 1955, p. 54.

THE SOURCES OF THE "RADICAL BIGHT"

68 Perhaps the most interesting event in the extremist versus moderate
conservative battle occurred in the 1954 senatorial elections in New
Jersey. There, a liberal anti-McCarthyite, Clifford Case, former head of
the Fund for the Republic, ran on the Republican ticket on a platform
of anti-McCarthyism. A small group of right-wingers urged "real Repub
licans * to repudiate Case and write in the name of Fred Hartley, coauthor
of the Taft-Hartley Act on the ballot This campaign began with con
siderable publicity, but soon weakened. One reason for its rapid decline
was that a number of the largest corporations in America put direct
economic pressure on small businessmen, lawyers, and other middle-class
people active in Hartley s behalf. These people were told that unless they
dropped out of the campaign, they would lose contracts or business
privileges with these corporations. It is significant to note that one of the
few remaining groups vulnerable to direct old-fashioned pressure from
big business is the middle-class backers of right-wing extremism.

69 The stress in this paper on the radical right should not lead to
ignoring the contribution of the Communist Party to current coercive
measures. The presence of a foreign controlled conspiracy which has
always operated partially underground, and which engages in espionage
has helped undermine the basis of civil liberties. Democratic procedure
assumes that all groups will play the game, and any actor who consist
ently breaks the rules endangers the continuation of the system. In a real
sense, extremists of the right and left aid each other, for each helps to
destroy the underlying base of a democratic social order.

Index

Acheson, Dean, 50, 53, 57, 92,

111, 113, 132, 223
Adams, Henry, 115
Adams, John, quoted, 8
Adenauer, Konrad, 231
Adorno, Theodore W., 35, 47,

54 f., 231

Aldrich, Winthrop W., 223
Alger, Frederick M., Jr., 223
Almond, Gabriel A., 222
Alsops, 16, 74
Amory, Cleveland, 225
Arensberg, C., 230
Aron, Raymond, 222

Babbitt, Irving, 95, 102, 116
Barr, Stringfellow, 88
Bayard, James Asheton, 7
Beard, Charles A., 30, 100
Beard, Miriam, 31
Bell, Daniel, 31, 75
Bendiz, Reinhard, 219, 223,

226, 229

Benney, Mark, 225
Benson, Lee, 220

Bentham, Jeremy, 25, 31
Berelson, Bernard, 87
Berle, Adolf A., Jr., 57, 114
Bettelheim, Bruno, 55, 70
Biddle, Nicholas, quoted, 7
Boasberg, Leonard, 54
Bohlen, Charles E., 92, 223
Bohn, Frank, 221
Bonbright, James C.H., 223
Bonham, John, 226
Bozell, Brent, 89
BrickerJohnW.,13,102,104
Bridges, Harry, 204
Brodie, Bernard, 74
Brogan, D. W., 54
Brooks, Van Wyck, 18
Browder, Earl 187-188
Brownell, Herbert, Jr., 20
Brunswik, Else Frenkek See

Frenkel-Brunswik, Else
Bryan, William Jennings, 19,

89, 92, 220

Buckley, William, 89, 209, 231
Bukharin, Nikolai I., 22
Burke, Edmund, 95, 102, 110

236

Burnham, James, 20 f., 208
Butler, Richard Austen, 108

Cabot, John M., 223
Calhoun, John C., 28-29
Campbell, Angus, 88
Carnegie, Andrew, 63
Case, Clifford, 233
Chamberlain, John, 208; quoted,

12

Chamberlain, Neville, 102
Chamberlain, William Henry,

190

Chambers, Whittaker, 13
Chiang Kai-shek, 221
Chodorov, Frank, 89, 209
Christie, Richard, 54, 227, 231
Churchill, Sir Winston, 95, 108,

177, 221 f.

Clark, S. D., 182, 222
Clay, Henry, 7

Cobbett, William, quoted, 226
Coe, Robert D., 223
Cohn, Roy, 97 ff., 213, 231
Cole, G. D. H. and M,, 226
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 102
Commons, John R., 30
Conant, James B., 223
Connally, Tom, 57
Connelly, G. M., 228
Conniff, Frank, 232
Corcoran, Tommy, 74
Coughlin, Rev. Charles E., 6, 94,

98, 103, 137, 180, 219

David, Elmer, 40, 54
de Gaulle, Charles, 222
Desmond, Humphrey J., 220
de Tocqueville, Alexis. See

Tocqueville, Alexis de
De Toledano, Ralph, 208
Dewey, Thomas E., 85, 98
Dies, Martin, 57

INDEX

Dillon, C. Douglas, 223
Dirksen, Everett M., 102, 107,

112

Dodd, Norman, 89
Donnelly, Ignatius, 94
Douglas, Paul H,, 204
Dreyfus, Alfred, 97, 99
Dulles, John Foster, 50, 53
Dunn, Rev. James B., quoted,

221

Earle, Edward Mead, 74

Eastman, Max, 20 f .

Eden, Sir Anthony, 108

Eisenhower, Dwight D., 16, 25,
35 f., 41, 53, 57, 68, 73, 98,
107 ff., 113, 134, 162 f., 213,
227, 232

Evans, George Henry, 10

Eysenck, H. J., 227, 229

Fairchild, Henry Pratt, 80
Farley, James A., 55
Fast, Howard, 89
Field, H. H., 228
Flanders, Ralph E., 101, 111
Fleckenstein, Edward S., 230
Flynn, John T., 21, 190, 208;

quoted, 224
Forrestal, James V., 73
Fox, Dixon Ryan, 30
Franco, Francisco, 186 f., 221
Frenkel-Brunswik, Else, 87-88;

quoted, 55
Frey, John, 224
Frick, Henry Clay, 63

Galbraith, J. K., 114

Gallup, George H., 144, 227

Gaudet, Hazel, 87

Gaulle, Charles de, 222

Geiss, Phyllis, 225

Glazer, Nathan, 16, 30, 221, 232

INDEX

Godkin, Edwin L., 27
Greenblum, Joseph, 55
Grodzins, Morton, 221
Gurin, Gerald, 88
Guterman, Norbert, quoted, 54

Harriman, Averell, 59, 73
Haldane, Charlotte, 208
Halevy, Eli, 32
Hamilton, Alexander, 7
Handlin, Oscar, quoted, 31
Harrington, James, quoted, 8
Harris, Louis, 30, 225
Harrison, William Henry, 7
Hartley, Fred, 233
Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 115
Hearst, William Randolph, 64
Herberg Will, 108, 222
Hicks, GranviUe, 21-22, 31, 82
Hiss, Alger, 55, 82, 85, 110, 211
Hitler, Adolf, 55, 94, 130, 186,

224

Hoffman, Paul, 111
Hofstadter, Richard, 15, 88 f.,

170, 219 f.
Holcombe, Arthur N., 30;

quoted, 10
Hoover, J. Edgar, 57
Hopkins, Harry, 74
Hughes, Howard, 63
Hull, Cordell, 185
Humphrey, George M., 88
Humphrey, Hubert H., 204
Hunt, H. L., 69
Hutchins, Robert, 218
Hyman, Herbert, 221, 226

Jackson, Andrew, 7
Jahoda, Marie, 54, 227
Janeway, Eliot, 75
Janowitz, Morris, 55, 70, 227
Jefferson, Thomas, 9, 104, 175
Jenner, William E., 107

Johnson, Lyndon B., 57
Jordan, George Rainey, 231

Kamenev, Lev B., 22
Kant, Immanuel, 28
Kecszkemeti, Paul, 154
Kennan, George, 222
Kennedy, John F., 193
Kennedy, Joseph P., 193
Kido, Kotaro, 227
Kimball, S., 230
Kirk, Russell, 88
Knowland, William F., 13, 108
Knox, Henry, quoted, 8-9
Kohlberg, Arthur, 213
Kohler, Foy, 14

La Follette, Robert M., Sr., 94,

103, 125, 181, 183, 191, 212
Lane, Robert E., 227, 229
Laski, Harold J., 32
Lazarsfeld, Paul, 87
Lee, Ivy, 63
Lee, J. Bracken, quoted, 223,

232

Lemke, William, 6
Lewis, John L., 224
Lilienthal, David, 114
Lincoln, Abraham, 115
Lindbergh, Charles A,, 190
Lindsay, Vachel, 92
Lippmann, Walter, 16, 216;

quoted, 27
Lipset, Seymour Martin, 3, 16,

30, 219, 222, 226, 229
Lodge, Henry Cabot, Jr., 92
Lodge, John D., 223
London, Jack, 26
Lonergan, Edna, 223
Long,Huey, 14, 179 f.
Loucks, Emerson H., 221
Lovett, Robert A., 73
Lowenthal, Leo, quoted, 54

238

Lubell, Samuel, 30, 54, 66, 199,

229
Lyons, Eugene, 21, 208

McAllister, Ward, 63

McCarran, Pat, 94, 112

McCarthy, Joseph R., 3, 13-17
passim, 20-24 passim, 36, 57
f., 63-67 passim, 71, 84, 90,
92 , 97-113 passim, 136,
142, 144, 160, 162, 174, 181,
186, 191, 197 ff., 209-216
passim, 219, 224, 226 f., 229
; quoted, 231

McCloy, John J., 73

McKinley, William, 102, 220

Madison, James, 28, 104, 116;
quoted, 8 f .

Malenkov, Georgi M., Ill

Malone, George W., 232

Marshall, George C., 132

Marshall, Margaret, 22

Marvick, D., 227

Marx, Karl, 104, 131

Mason, A. T., 30

Matthews, J. B., 208

Maverick, Maury, 56-57

May, Allan Nunn, 13

Mead, Margaret, 46, 55

Mecklin, John Moffat, 221

Melville, Herman, 115

Merton, R. K., 228

Michels, R., 226

Mill, John Stuart, 28, 32, 109

Miller, Warren E., 88

Moody, Dwight, 19

Moos, Malcolm, 68

Morris, Robert, 24

Morse, Wayne, 204

Murphy, Robert, 186

Mussolini, Benito, 53

Myers, Gustavus, 220 f .

Myrdal, Gunnar, 176; quoted, 5

INDEX

Napoleon, 96

Neumann, Franz L., 32; quoted,

225-226
Niebuhr, H, Richard, 31, quoted,

19

Niebuhr, Reinhold, 23
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 96
Nixon, Richard M., 108, 112
Nye, Gerald P., 94, 183, 229

O Brien, John A., 230
Owen, Robert, 10
Orwell, George, 21, 100

Paine, Tom, 95 f., 116
Parsons, Talcott, 3, 16, 67
Pearlin, Leonard I., 55
Per6n, Juan D,, 228
Piatakov, 22

Quill, Mike, 6

Rakovsky, Christian G., 22

Ranulf, Svend, 18, 31

Ravitch, Richard, quoted, 220

Rayburn, Sam, 56

Reece, B. Carroll, 89

Reuther, Walter, 6

Riemer, Neal, 32

Riesman, David, 15, 30, 164,
221, 232

Robespierre, 100

Rockefeller, John D., 62-63

Roosevelt, Archibald, 14, 213;
quoted, 223

Roosevelt, Franklin D., 10, 37,
41, 50, 55-57, 59, 72, 74, 83,
89, 93, 102, 104, 124, 137,
175, 185, 189 ., 200 f., 215-
216, 224

Roosevelt, Theodore, 14, 27

Roper, Elmo, 226

Rorty, James, quoted, 230-231

INDEX

Rose, Arnold, 222

Rosenberg, Ethel and Julius, 13,

51,78

Ross, E. A., 80
Rossiter, Clinton, 224
Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 96
Rovere, Richard, 38, 54

Salazar, Antonio de Oliveira, 228
Samson, Leon, 222
Sanford, F. H., quoted, 228
Schachtman, Max, 104
Schlamm, William, 20 f ., 208
Schlesinger, Arthur M., Jr., 23,

88

Schmuclder, R. H,, 229
Schultz, Rabbi, 98
Schuyler, George, 208
Sheatsley, Paul, 221, 226
Shils,EdwardA.,74
Shipstead, Henrik, 229
Silone, Ignazio, quoted, 228
Sinclair, Upton, 180
Smith, Adam, 25
Smith, Alfred E., 55, 102, 104,

172, 209, 215
Smith, G. H., 226
Sokolnikov, Grigory Y., 22
Sokolsky, George, 213
Stalin, Josef, 204, 224
Stevenson, Adlai, 34, 65, 68, 92,

101, 105-106, 107-113 passim
Stimson, Henry L,, 73
Stone, L K, 223
Stouffer, Samuel A., 16, 142-

143, 149-165 passim, 174,

221, 225, 227 ff, 231
Streit, Clarence, 88
Sugi, M., 227
Sweet, W.W., 31

Taft, Robert A., 36, 89

Tate, Allen, 88

Thomas, Norman, 101, 218

Thoreau, Henry, 115

Tingsten, H., 225

Tocqueville, Alexis de, 31, 102,

181; quoted, 19, 54
Townsend, Francis E., 179 f .
Truman, David, 30
Truman, Harry S., 30, 34, 53,

57, 59, 76, 109, 113, 137,

183, 187-188

Utley, Freda, 21 f ., 208

Valtin, Jan, 22
Van Buren, Martin, 7-8
Vaughan, Harry H., 57
Viereck, Peter, 15, 84
Villard, Oswald Garrison, 27
Voltaire, Francois, 93

Webb, Leicester, 165
Webster, Daniel, 7
Wechsler, James A., 23
Weyl, Walter, 226
Wheeler, Burton K., 94, 190,

229

White, Harry Dexter, 57, 82
Wilbur, William H., 232
Wifflde, Wendell, 73
Wilson, Charles E., 88
Wilson, Edmund, 32; quoted, 27
Wilson, Woodrow, 89
Wolfe, Bertram, 14
Wright, Richard, 69

Zetterberg, 227
Zinoviev, Grigori E., 22

100403

rz
CO ^

5 m

ajco
-<>