The Enemy Within: Studies in the American Antipathy to the Left

Abstract

These excellent studies add to the historical commentary on a peculiarity of American life: the absence of a sustained socialist or social democratic contestant within mainline politics. Each of the two authors locates within specific national conditions the reasons why the public has defined the radical Left as being, in twentieth-century terminology, un-American. Each, then, has written not only an inquiry into his specific subject but an examination of the American mind and culture. While the term anticommunism is of more recent vintage, communism, as a generic term for ideologies denying private was in pejorative use before the middle of the nineteenth century. By late in the century, Heale demonstrates, a body of presumptions defending the status and goods of the nation's white affluent classes had developed in the face of union organization, immigrant radicalism, and whatever else seemed to smack of communism. Its components, in Heale's lucidly reasoned presentation, were of old American grain: republicanism, the affirmation of as a ground of personal independence, and a tradition of active citizenship that had its uglier side in the vigilantism that sometimes emerged to confront union organizing or other dissidence. In the longer stretch of history such values have been not so much reactionary as revolutionary, and they have had a more contradictory presence in American popular politics than at first may appear. The nation's egalitarianism, Heale remarks, allowed radicals in the mid-nineteenth century to call for the equalization of property, but they rarely contemplated the abolition of private property (p. 13). The comment deserves more elaboration