The Theme Is Freedom.

WHEN SOCIALISM was still an untried dream, nobody aid much attention to the motives which brought people to its ranks. Those who were interested in freedom thought they could get along with the people who had a yearning for tidiness, or "planning." The natural-born anarchists thought they could manage the power hunters; the lovers of life feared nothing from those who were attracted to Marxism as a way of canalizing their pathological hatred of life.

The moment that socialism became a power system, however, it was written in the stars that the lovers of freedom, the natural anarchists and the yea-sayers, would suffer a vast disillusionment. If they had only come to their senses in a body, they might have gone on to form a new movement to provide themselves with a basis of mutual support. But those who came to socialism in search of freedom were impelled to quit one by one, in a ragged sequence which left each backtracking rebel feeling friendless and alone. The emigres from the world of Communism have never had much power to help each other.

The main reason for this frustration is, of course, the nature of "liberal" society, which is profoundly influenced by Communist and fellow-traveler gossip without knowing it. Liberals have invariably picked off each rebel against socialism, giving ever-renewed currency to the myth that anyone who grows up sufficiently to change his mind is a black dog, or a 'reactionary." They picked off Benjamin Stolberg in the early Thirties, with Heywood Broun carrying out the hatchet job. They picked off Whittaker Chambers and others by sneering at their 'instability," or by whispering innuendos against their "morals." And they knocked off John Dos Passos by averring that he had lost his skill as a writer.

In this curious book called The Theme Is Freedom, Mr. Dos Passos sets forth the fever-chart of his own disillusionment with Communism, and with socialism of any kind. This book consists of a series of old Dos Passos articles taken from books and the tattered back numbers of defunct or barely surviving magazines. In each case Mr. Dos Passos, who is the most honest of men, has left his original wording intact. But he has interspersed his old material with a new running commentary in italics. For the most part the new commentary endeavors to explain how the face of tyranny has changed over the years. In some cases it really has changed, and Dos Passos proves it; in other cases he was palpably the victim of his own short-sightedness about capitalism, a short-sightedness which he willingly admits whenever he recognizes it.

It will be extremely interesting to watch what the liberals make of this book in the light of the KrushchevBulganin repudiation of Stalin and the general Western European socialist" rediscovery of the validity of the profit motive, as recently reported by Miss Barbara Ward in the New York Times. For Mr. Dos Passos, as it turns out, merely erred by being "premature" in discovering things that virtually everybody else has since discovered. But even in their anti-Communism the liberals are still affected by the stories which Communists have circulated. I doubt I will ever live to see the day when the latest breeds of anti-Communist have the decency to make amends to people like Benjamin Stolberg and John Dos Passos, who saw the Abominable Snowmen when it was really dangerous to see them.

Dos Passos originally got into the "radical movement" by way of the Sacco-Vanzetti case. Part Portuguese in his own origins, he was drawn to the poor Massachusetts anarchists from the Mediterranean world who had obviously been "framed" during the anti-foreign hysteria of the early Twenties. Dos Passos spoke of Vanzetti as sharing "the hope that has grown up in Latin countries of the Mediterranean basin that somehow men's predatory instincts, incarnate in the capitalist system, can be canalized into other channels, leaving free communities of artisans and farmers and fishermen and cattle breeders who would work for their livelihood with pleasure, because the work was itself enjoyable in the serene white light of a reasonable world." If he were to write that over again, Dos Passos would leave out the crack about the capitalist system, for he now knows that men's Predatory instincts" can be 'incarnate" in any system whatsoever. But for the rest of it Dos Passos would let his defense of Sacco and Vanzetti stand; he still thinks they got the rawest of raw deals.

The Sacco-Vanzetti case, however, opened Dos Passos's eyes to the nature of the Communists themselves: he watched them trying to use the martyrdom of the good shoemaker and the poor fish peddler to the ends of achieving total power for themselves in a radical movement that would ultimately have no use for anyone who distrusted the Big State. At first Dos Passos couldn't believe what he saw. But a trip to Russia in the late Twenties increased his uneasiness. He kept trying to put off the day when he would have to make a personal decision, but his Russian expedition ended in a "real funk for fear they wouldn't let me leave the last few days I was in Moscow ... the last impression I came away with was fear, fear of the brutal invisible intricate machinery of the police state."

The disillusion with the Communists became complete when Dos Passos went to Spain during the Civil War to help work on a documentary film designed for propaganda uses in America. Just as Carlo Tresca had predicted they would, the Communists took over the shaping of the film. Dos Passos was horrified to discover that the Spain of "well-intentioned men" had no chance against the Fascists on the Right and the Communists on the Left. He returned to America with a will to believe in the New Deal, only to discover that Franklin Roosevelt had ceased listening." A trip to England in 1946, when the Labor Party was in power, completed the rout of all of Dos Passos's socialist opinions.

What bothers Dos Passos today is that socialism "has retained a sort of negative hold on the mind of the educated classes ... that makes it hard to induce them to examine any divergent ideas." 'Our college population," he says, "isn't exactly socialist, but its hackles rise if you try to clear any of the socialist preconceptions out of the way in order to discuss industrial society from some different point of view."

What Mr. Dos Passos has come up against is the great inertia of liberal society. Though this society has blamed its petrification on a terror" allegedly unloosed by Joe McCarthy, it had really stopped thinking long before Joe was ever elected senator. Dos Passos tries valiantly to move this society, but it will have none of him because he is no longer certified as a liberal himself. The liberals do not stop to reflect that it was they themselves who withdrew Mr. Dos Passos's certification for no reason beyond the desire to propitiate a Communist force which everybody now professes to hate.