Quote of the Day, to be filed under "The More Things Change . . ."

From Sam Tanenhaus's outstanding biography of Whittaker Chambers:

"No one seemed to acknowledge that [Chambers] too was a casualty of the [Hiss] case, with an 'incurable wound.' Scarcely a word was written about Chambers's tribulations -- the career he had lost; the manifold indignities had withstood, the gossip, the strenuous defamations; the pain to his family. Instead, he remained for many the monster conjured up by Lloyd Paul Stryker, "bland, dumpy, and devious," in one assessment. In Witness Chambers wrote famously:

'No feature of the Hiss Case is more obvious, or more troubling as history, than the jagged fissure, which it did not so much open as reveal, between the plain men and women of the nation, and those who affected to act, think, and speak for them. It was, not invariably, but in general, the "best people" who were for Alger Hiss and who were prepared to go to any length for him. It was the enlightened and the powerful, the clamorous proponents of the open mind and the common man, who snapped their minds shut in a pro- Hiss psychosis, of a kind which, in an individual patient, means the simple failure of the ability to distinguish between reality and unreality, and, in a nation, is a warning of the end.'

A curious disjunction still ruled the minds of America's liberal community. By and large its members now acknowledged the totalitarian reality of Stalin's Russia, supported the Marshall Plan, the Berlin airlift, the North Atlantic Pact -- all the measures by which the United States, for better of worse, defined its opposition to an expansionist Soviet Union. Yet Hiss's sympathizers failed to grasp what had been occurring before their eyes.

This failure, suggested one shrewd analyst, the literary critic Leslie Fieldler, grew out of 'the implicit dogma of American liberalism,' which inflexibly assumed that in any political drama 'the liberal per se is the hero.' For Hiss's supporters to admit his guilt also meant admitting 'that mere liberal principle is not in itself a guarantee against evil; that the wrongdoer is not always the other -- "they" and not "us"; that there is no magic in the words "left" or "progressive" or "socialist" that can prevent deceit and abuse of power.' The Partisan Review's Philip Rahv, writing in 1952, interpreted this sentiment as 'a symptom of the anguish of the Popular Front mind and its unreasoning anger at being made to confront the facts of political life.' When faced with 'the disorder and evil of history,' the pro-Hiss faction 'fought to save Hiss in order to safeguard their own illusions.'"