IDEOLOGIES: Ideas Can Be Dangerous

More battles have been lost through confusion than through treachery. Americans, involved in a clangorous hunt for traitors and spies, seemed increasingly confused about even graver dangers that they faced in their battle with Communism. This situation was illustrated by the story of three men in the news last week. The men were the U.S.’s Professor Owen Lattimore, Britain’s Secretary for War John Strachey and France’s Atomic Energy Boss Frédéric Joliot-Curie.

Despite obvious differences, the three had some significant qualities in common. All formed their political consciousness in the years after World War I, when a generation was assaulted by the century’s most vicious fallacy, i.e., that Communism was kin to progress. All were affected by the fallacy in varying ways, and all, being gifted with brilliant intellects, did a great deal to spread its paralyzing poison through the West’s thinking.

The fact did not make any of them a traitor, either in law or in morals. No fair-minded man would deny their right to their opinions, or the obligation of their fellow” citizens to defend their right to voice them. But the legal right to be wrong had somehow gotten distorted into a lazy toleration that assumes all ideas to be created equal, part right, part wrong—and who is man to try to judge between them? It was this soft public negligence about ideas that made wrong ideas dangerous.

The Professor & the Dump Heap. When the headlines fade away, it will probably be clear that Professor Owen Lattimore (see NATIONAL AFFAIRS) is neither a Russian spy nor a Communist, and that his accuser, Senator Joseph McCarthy, is an irresponsible demagogue. But the fact that Lattimore is no Soviet agent does not clear him of having had, in less dramatic ways, a disastrous influence on the foreign policy of his country.

Owen Lattimore was perhaps the best brain, and certainly the best pen, in a group of experts, educators and diplomats—both in & out of the State Department—who strongly influenced U.S. policy in Asia. Specifically, this group consistently opposed U.S. aid to Nationalist China and Chiang Kaishek, whom Lattimore regards as the No. 1 enemy of progress in Asia. In his twelve books (The Mongols of Manchuria, America and Asia, The Situation in Asia, etc.), Lattimore has offered the U.S. a lot of advice on how to win friends in the Far East. One of his opinions, preached steadily for years’, was that China’s Communists were not really subservient to Moscow and were, on the whole, well deserving of U.S. cooperation.

Another was the opinion that it was the West itself which provoked Russia into her truculent attitude—through such steps as the Truman Doctrine—and that it was not Stalin but Churchill, in his famous Fulton speech, who “rang down the Iron Curtain.” Lattimore’s policy memorandum last autumn to the State Department, which McCarthy cited as evidence of Lattimore’s disloyalty to the U.S., did not prove any such thing as disloyalty, but it did prove that Lattimore was still on the side of a soft policy that could result only in a Russian victory in Asia. The memorandum paid lip service to the idea that Asiatic Communism must not be appeased, but it was in effect a thorough and detailed program for appeasement.

Lattimore’s plausible argument, which he expounded in his writings in recent years, proposed that the U.S. be nice to Chinese Communist Boss Mao Tse-tung in order to encourage him to become an Asian Tito; the U.S., suggested Lattimore, was too weak to organize an anti-Russian front in the Far East and therefore should encourage “third countries,” dependent neither on Russia nor on the U.S., but open to friendly U.S. influence.

In his memorandum, Lattimore specifically urged the U.S. to 1) pull out of Korea; 2) forget Japan as a potential chief ally in Asia; 3 ) hurry up recognition and trade with Communist China; 4) divorce itself from America’s European allies in the Far East, i.e., Britain, France, The Netherlands; 5) avoid local entanglements—meaning, presumably, military assistance to non-Communist nations—that might annoy the Russians if & when the U.S. negotiates an overall deal with Joseph Stalin.

U.S. policy in Asia in recent years had led to disasters many times worse than Pearl Harbor. Yet it was not fair either to Lattimore or the U.S. Government to charge, as McCarthy did and does, that Lattimore was the “chief architect” of that policy. Dump heaps have no architects. But Lattimore’s’ ideas did work to thwart the development of an effective program of U.S. help to anti-Communist forces in Asia.

Those ideas did not constitute a crime, and they did not constitute disloyalty. But it was nevertheless a tragedy that U.S. complacency about Asia allowed the ideas of Lattimore & Co. to have as much effect as they did.

The Etonian & the Plumbers. Unlike Professor Lattimore, Evelyn John St. Loe Strachey, His Britannic Majesty’s Secretary of State for War, was for years an open and eloquent Communist spokesman (after a brief partnership with Sir Oswald Mosley, who became a fascist). Ever since his appointment, which drew violent protests from part of the British press (TIME, March 13), U.S. officials have been worrying about Strachey’s reliability. Last week, from the Western Defense Ministers’ conference at The Hague, came a sensational story: U.S. Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson had told British Defense Minister Emanuel Shinwell (who is Strachey’s boss and who formerly hewed pretty closely to the Communist Party line) that the U.S. intends to bypass Strachey with any really important military information that it may furnish Britain. Both Johnson and Shinwell denied the story: newsmen nevertheless were sure that it was at least partly true.

The British press huffed & puffed indignantly about U.S. interference in British affairs, reminded the U.S. that Old Etonian Strachey had publicly broken with the Reds in 1940, had since spoken and written against Russian-style Communism (he once fondly described it as a “movement for better plumbing”). Yet as late as 1944, in a book called Socialism Looks Forward (a careful revision of an earlier work), John Strachey still displayed rhapsodic admiration for Soviet Russia—as well as incredible misinformation about it. In a chapter called “I Have Seen the Future and It Works,”* Strachey wrote: “. . . You can argue forever as to the merits of this new [Communist] economic system, but you cannot argue away the fact that … 170 million people are . . living, working, producing their daily bread, marrying, bearing children . without the ‘help’ of any capitalists, landlords or employers . . . But, somebody may say, isn’t Russia a pretty tough sort of place? What about the purges and the shootings and the lack of civil liberties . .? Yes, Russia is pretty tough Things have happened there which I,’for one, most passionately hope may never happen in Britain. But let us never forget this. It is very largely we and the other capitalist states of the world who have made Russia tough . . .”

The question whether John Strachey would grab a few top-secret documents from his desk and pass them to the Russian ambassador was irrelevant in 1950; Strachey was probably just as good a “security risk” (in the cops & robbers sense) as anybody else. The important question was whether a man who can write (and apparently still believes) such drivel about Soviet Russia has any business being Britain’s War Minister at a time when all the West (including the capitalistic societies which Strachey so openly hates) is fighting for its life. To give Strachey his present job was not so much a “security risk” as it was evidence of confusion in high places as to why the free world and Russia are opposed.

The Physicist & His Girl Friend. In a sense, the case of Fr&#233déric Joliot-Curie was the weirdest of the three. France, the democratic nations’ chief ally on the Continent, receiver of nearly four and a half billion U.S. dollars since the war’s end, which had solemnly signed the Atlantic pact and was last week receiving its first shipment of U.S. arms, maintained an avowed Communist Party member as the chief of its atomic-energy program.

In 1948, Raoul Dautry, then French armaments minister, had tried to justify this situation with Gallic sophistication: “Our atomic scientists are men of all political views. You cannot control what goes on in their minds. Who knows what a man really means when he tells a girl he loves her?” Last week, Joliot-Curie left no doubt in anybody’s mind about what he meant. At a Communist Party meeting he declared that he would not collaborate with the U.S. on atomic-energy matters. Said he -“We Communists know that the Soviet Union will not be the first to use the atomic bomb . . . That is why a truly progressive scientist will never donate a particle of his scientific knowledge for the purpose of making war against the Soviet Union …” ,

The French government hastily assured the U.S. that Joliot-Curie was engaged only in “nonmilitary” research while the really important work was done by “another agency” (a scientifically impossible distinction); anyway, the French added, Joliot-Curie was under constant police surveillance. Very likely, the French would catch him tf he tried to pass any secrets to Russia. But again, that was not the point. The point was that the free world, while frantically searching for Communists under the bed, was overlooking a Communist right in the bedclothes.

It could be said with as much assurance as is ever brought to human affairs that Lattimore, Strachey and Joliot-Curie were not spies. The ideas of Lattimore, Strachey and Joliot-Curie were not the same, but anyone with a lively sense of danger in the free world could legitimately hold the opinion that the ideas of these three might be more dangerous than a carload of spies.

The cure for dangerous ideas is not (as the Communists think) suppression. But neither is it the smug Western pretense that ideas do not matter much, anyhow.

*A phrase adapted from Lincoln Steffens. When Steffens returned from his trip to Russia soon after the Revolution, he visited his old friend, Sculptor Jo Davidson, who was busy doing a bust of Bernard Baruch. Said Baruch: “So you’ve been over into Russia.” Replied Steffens: “I have been over into the future, and it works.”