Liberal to a Fault

ALL OUR YEARS (373 pp.)--Robert Morss Lovett--Viking ($3.75).

On the evening of March 27, 1944, a strange and moving scene took place in a park at St. Thomas, in the Virgin Islands. Crowds of natives, "shaking and kissing my hands, some kneeling and weeping," gathered to say goodbye to Government Secretary Robert Morss Lovett.* Officially he had resigned. His boss, Interior Secretary Harold L. Ickes, had not wanted to fire him. But the Dies Committee had charged him with subversiveness and Communist sympathies. Lovett's real crime was old-fashioned liberalism. It made no real difference that the U.S. Court of Claims later called his dismissal "a shocking and outrageous injustice" and that the U.S. Supreme Court eventually ordered his back pay restored. That day in the park at St. Thomas, Lovett's Government career had ended.

At 77, plump, kindly Robert Morss Lovett is an aged, living monument to the courage, the warm heart--and the poor judgment--of one brand of U.S. liberalism. All Our Years, his expectantly awaited autobiography ("some 23 publishers have expressed a blind but generous faith in this book"), is chiefly important as a record of his personal decency and kindliness. It is the account of a great good will expansive enough to regard even U.S. Communists as well-intentioned.

In spite of a lifetime of impulsive do-gooding and indiscriminate joining, Lovett will probably be best remembered as a teacher of writing and English literature at the University of Chicago. For some 40 years, schoolboys have known him as co-editor of Moody & Lovett's A History of English Literature. The roll of his students who made the grade as professional writers reads like a partial Who's Who of U.S. authors. Some of them: John Gunther, Vincent Sheean, Glenway Wescott, Elizabeth Madox Roberts, Vardis Fisher, Harry Hansen, Helen Hull, Janet Planner.

Lovett came to the University of Chicago when the Midway was little more than a swampy sandlot. At Harvard he had stood at the head of his class, remained as an instructor after graduating. During his 43 years at the University of Chicago, Lovett joined everything he was invited to join except the Socialist Party. He was a leader of such starry-eyed, leftish setups as the League for Industrial Democracy and the League of American Writers. For one year he was editor of the Dial, a famed fortnightly magazine whose staff included Philosopher John Dewey and Economist Thorstein Veblen; later he spent eight years as an active editor of the New Republic when that magazine was a small, bright influence guided by the liberal idealism of Herbert Croly.

All Our Years is disappointingly barren of significant comment on Lovett's many important chores. For 16 years he lived at Jane Addams' famed Hull House in Chicago, but his recollections are those of a friendly, casual onlooker instead of the devoted worker he was. He aided all sorts of liberal causes as writer, speaker and organizer, usually with more energy and enthusiasm than his petition-signing, hat-passing colleagues, but this account of his impulsive championship of the underdog reads like a genial assurance that he couldn't say no in a good cause.

All Our Years might have been a critical, informal history of modern U.S. liberalism--a faith more often characterized by editorial fervor than by practical solutions. As Lovett has written it, his autobiography is little more than a pleasant wave to old friends and causes, a sorrowful stare at the enemies of a lifetime.

* No kin to Under Secretary of State Robert Abercrombie Lovett.

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