Democracy & Security

Two men were held up to public view last week as dangers to the Republic. One was an avowed Communist with a long and sinister record. The other was a New Dealer, with a long record of public service.

The Communist was the German Gerhart Eisler, who was hauled up before the old Dies Committee, now under the chairmanship of New Jersey's John Parnell Thomas. Eisler was obstreperous. The committee leveled a number of charges against him and ordered him rejugged (see below).

No loyal American would criticize the committee's action. Eisler, perhaps the key figure of a number of his ilk who are boring from within, has no loyalty except to Communism. He wants to replace a free U.S. democracy with a sovietized state. This was a case of clearly discernible danger to the U.S., and the U.S. could applaud the Thomas Committee and the FBI for being on the alert.

The Democrat. In another Congressional committee room, David Lilienthal, the President's choice for chairman of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, faced his old enemy Senator "Kenneth McKellar, who tried to prove that Lilienthal, if not a Red, loved Reds. Hour after hour, day after day, McKellar tormented him with questions and charges, until finally, acknowledging that he did not carry the answer to some statistical question in his head, Lilienthal said:

"This I do carry in my head, Senator. ... All Government and all private institutions must be designed to promote and defend the integrity and dignity of the individual." The Communist philosophy, he pointed out, is the direct antithesis of that; in Russia men are means to an end. In a democracy "the individual comes first."

Americans could applaud Lilienthal's statement. It had the ring of truth. But the problem was not simple. There is at work in the U.S. an active, aggressive, malignant thing--conspiratorial Communism--which must be rooted out. It is fairly easy to recognize it in men like Gerhart Eisler.

But beyond Eisler there are a host of other men--fellow travelers, confused liberals, "totalitarian liberals" (see INTERNATIONAL), left-wing New Dealers--who owe muddled allegiance to the idea that government should be omnipotently responsible for the lives of its citizens even to the point of benevolent despotism. They fail to understand that despotism, which has a way of beginning with benevolence, usually ends by being merely despotic. Few of them even understood the incompatibility of their views with democracy, or that it is just such views which makes them so sympathetic to Soviet Russia. But the mass of Americans is beginning to understand this very well.

If the congressional investigators achieved nothing else, they were dramatizing one fact: a man can be a Communist, or a "totalitarian liberal" and call himself a good American--but he cannot expect his fellow Americans to agree. All Americans could heartily echo David Lilienthal's "great belief in civil liberties." But if they believed in democracy and Soviet Russia too, as Henry Wallace did, then it was time they had their heads examined--or their hearts.

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