Black on White

Charles Recht, whose review of William Henry Chamberlin’s book on Russia I took to task recently, believes it to be “the best established bourgeois newspaper ethics” that an “answer to a libel gets the same prominent space as the libel itself.”

He is much too kind to bourgeois newspapers. It has been my experience that libels get front-page bang-up display and counter-blasts must content themselves with a tiny inside paragraph, if that much. But not to disappoint his naive faith in us capitalists, I quote as much of his letter as seems to me (in the light of space limitations) pertinent to the issue.

Mr. Recht begins, of course, by crediting my outburst to my bourgeois loyalty, since I, like Chamberlin, was a bourgeois correspondent in Moscow. He then proceeds:

“You state that during the War I was ‘in the forefront’ of those who defended deportees from this country, and that I would now justify like treatment of foreigners in the Soviet Union. True. But who were the victims of the deportation crusades in America? Were they capitalists, fascists, anarchists, or renegade-radicals mildewed into liberals? From the day of my intellectual maturity I have thrown in my lot with the working class. The fact that I would justify deportation from the Workers’ Republic of its enemies, is in no way inconsistent with my defense of working-class deportees.

“Nowhere in my review did I imply that Mr. Chamberlin was obliged to echo the ‘official views’ of the Kremlin. Walter Duranty, who cannot be accused of being a Communist, has time and again in his dispatches, presented criticisms which were anything but the official views. Nevertheless, Duranty is still regarded as a friend of the Soviet Union. My criticism of Chamberlin was, in the main, of his method and the motives which inspired that method. It is not because Mr. Chamberlin pointed to the shortcomings, but that he skilfully balanced the accomplishments against the defects. so that the latter would preponderate. If he were openly anti-Soviet, his attack would not be half as pernicious.

“You say that without having sufficiently analyzed the book, I have called Chamberlin a liar. While in my review no such impolite word does appear, you have doubtless surmised the implication that while figures do not lie, liars figure. But this gratuitous implication you invoke in defense of Mr. Chamberlin is not mine, for withal I hold Mr. Chamberlin to be a gentleman and a fit representative of a bourgeois newspaper.”

I shall not take undue advantage of Mr. Recht’s slip of the memory in listing anarchists among those who were spared by the Red-baiters of the deportation era. His own office files will reveal that anarchists were a large sector, if not the majority, of the deportees whom he defended.

The assumption that the “enemies” subject to deportation from the Soviet Union—or, what is closer to the facts, deportation to Siberia and the North—are a lot of capitalists, fascists and mildewed liberals is tragically mistaken. These varieties are included, but the great mass of exiles consists of poverty-stricken peasants; and it includes a vast contingent of Communists and other working-class revolutionaries whose views are distasteful to the Kremlin. The puerile expedient of labeling every deportee and exile, from Trotsky down, a kulak or a capitalist does not alter the facts.

All that is far beyond the point which I raised. In defending the deportation of anarchists Mr. Recht goes even farther than I suspected he would. What got up my Irish had been his description of Chamberlin’s painstakingly honest summation as “a betrayal of twelve years’ hospitality.” That formulation is so exactly the one hurled at foreign radicals here that Mr. Recht, I suspect, was unconsciously quoting a Hearst editorial. The same heresy-hunting instinct finds the same formula. The implication, to my biased mind, was that Chamberlin should have trimmed views slowly and honestly evolved during a dozen years of close study in order not to betray Soviet hospitality.

Whether that constitutes, impolitely, a lie, or is merely, politely, “pernicious,” is legalistic hair-splitting. In any case it is taken by Mr. Recht as sufficient warant for neither mentioning nor denying the staggering facts in the book. It even frees him of the necessity of proving to his readers that the scale of defects was perniciously weighted.

Curiously enough, the testimony of bourgeois correspondents favorable to the Kremlin methods is accepted by Mr. Recht and those of his mind despite his bourgeois origin. Even Chamberlin’s earlier dispatches, though he was then as now a bourgeois correspondent, were acceptable. When the testimony is unpleasant, it is discarded as pernicious without so much as an attempt to disprove it. May I recall that John Reed was a bourgeois correspondent during the ten days that shook the world and that, had he spent these last twelve years in Moscow, he might easily have merited Mr. Recht’s indignant strictures?

Mr. Recht is under the false impression that everything published in a Jewish paper is automatically converted into eine Judensache. There was no intention of turning the Recht-Chamberlin bout into a Jewish issue. That impression provides him with the following peroration:

“As I recall, it was Bismarck who once asked the elder Liebknecht, ‘Warum sind die Juden immer an der Linken?’ To which Liebknecht replied, ‘Weil Sie keine Rechte haben.’

“There are those who agree with Lenin that the Jewish question can be solved only in a socialist society. Therefore an attack on the Soviet Union is also eine Judensache.”