Jewish Champions of First Amendment

[Howard Schweber]

At 11:08 AM 9/11/2006 -0400, DavidEBernstein at aol.com wrote:
>Just to be clear, my original post in response to Paul specifically 
>referenced folks who were "members of the Communist Party or were 
>otherwise adherents of totalitarian ideologies."  Somehow, this morphed in 
>the post below into an attack on the "entire American Left."

First reaction:  my bad -- I blame the medium.

Second reaction:  "Members of the Communist Party" still seems to me to go 
way too far.  Membership in the Party, in America in particular, has not 
meant adherence to all party principles any more than membership in the GOP 
necessarily means that the person agrees with every element of the 
Republican Platform of a given year.  In the 1920s and 1930s plenty of 
Americans joined the Communist Party because no one else seemed to be doing 
anything about serious problems or paying any attention at all to the 
African-American community.  Before WWII, people were drawn to the Party 
because it seemed as though no one else was interested in fighting the 
Fascists.  My all-time favorite term from the McCarty era was HUAC's label 
for people who had fought on the side of the communists in 
Spain;  "premature anti-fascists."  And the European examples I mentioned 
all involve versions of communist parties that were not, in fact, 
totalitarian ideologies.

As time went on, the difficulty of being a liberal and a communist at the 
same time became greater.  There was a large exodus from the CPUSA after 
1956, and others later as the ugliness of the Soviet system became 
increasingly well documented.  But if we are talking about the Gitlows and 
Schencks of the world, then I stand by the tenore -- although not the 
specifics -- of my previous comments.

Howard Schweber