adaption to the Zeitgeist.) The Hiss trial, the Lattimore imbroglio, the prosecution under the Smith Act of the Communist Party leadership, all turned on questions of fact: Did Hiss turn over State Department documents to Chambers? Was Lattimore working with the comrades at the Institute of Pacific Relations? Were the Communist leaders conspiring to advocate the overthrow of the government by violence? In the simple old days, revolutionaries used the courts as forums: Trotsky’s ringing indictment of capitalism at his trial for leading the 1905 revolution, Debs’s similar courtroom behavior during the First World War. But Hiss and Lattimore insisted they had always been respectable to the point of tedium, and the Communist leaders, far from lecturing Judge Medina on the evils of capitalism, competed with the prosecution in avowals of devotion to Jeffersonian democracy. The post-Stalin degeneration of Communism into conspiratorial real-politik was in part responsible; cf., the widespread use of the Fifth Amendment to assert the right not to state one’s politics (the old-style radicals had insisted on the opposite right).[7] But there was also involved the American habit of reducing large issues to matters of Fact. What other nation would have spent so much time, money, and newsprint to arrive at definitive political biographies of so many of its citizens? (Consider one aspect of the federal government’s security checks alone: the amount of expensive man-hours devoted by earnest, clean-cut young FBI agents, all of them law-school graduates, to interviewing many thousands of citizens about the political and personal—sex and alcohol—pasts of many thousands of other citizens working for the government or aspiring to do so.) The evil effects of this obsession have been copiously exposed in the liberal press, and for the most part I agree, but there is also perhaps discernible a political virtue. Granted the criteria for “pro-Communism” were much too broad, still at least a serious attempt was made in each individual case to establish some kind of factual basis for judgment; whole classes of people were not condemned en masse.
One of the most frightening aspects of the Moscow Trials was that both defendants and accusers seemed to have lost the ability to distinguish between a fact (the defendant committed this or that criminal act) and an inference (his political views were such that it was reasonable to suppose that he committed the act, or, if he didn’t, it was merely because he didn’t have a chance to, and so he was guilty because he was the sort of person from whose politics certain criminal acts “logically followed”). In Soviet Russia questions of fact are decided by appealing to general principles, just as it was in the Middle Ages—the wheel has come full circle again.
I prefer our own naïve, unimaginative overvaluation of the Fact. It leads us, at least in form, to think of questions as having two sides. Thus a widely distributed monthly financed by a Texas millionaire of pronouncedly illiberal views is called Facts Forum and goes in for features like the one in the November, 1955, issue: “Who Is Right about the Fund for the Republic?” in which Commander Collins of the American Legion and President Robert M. Hutchins of the Fund for the Republic state their antithetical views at equal length. Or there is the example of Fulton Lewis, Jr., a virulently antiliberal radio commentator who used to attack the Fund for the Republic almost nightly. When the Fund bought time on the same network to ask listeners to write in for their annual report, Mr. Lewis commented (September 15, 1955): “Now this, I think, is a really excellent idea, and I want to co-operate with Mr. Hutchins in full. So let me urge you strongly to send for the annual report of the Fund for the Republic, 60 East Forty-second Street, New York City. In that way you can have before you this report and see the pretty words and grandiose language while I am explaining to you night by night what each item means and what is really going on.”
Perhaps Mr. Lewis’ let’s-look-at-the-record,