THE HARVARD PROGRESSIVE

With the mild tone of a Divinity School graduate but all the conviction of a Marxist, Granville Hicks '23 (who is both) articulates the "leftist case for aid to Britain" in the current Harvard Progressive. Somewhat less polite but equally positive, the student editors disagree with Mr. Hicks. "Disagree" is putting it mildly, for in fact they accuse him of a "lack of faith in democracy". Among us good leftists, this is the unkindest cut of all. It is an epithet which is arrived at in rather interesting fashion.

To Mr. Hicks the present choice is "between German fascism and British imperialism"; he prefers the latter, much as he admits and deplores its "Imperfections." To the editors, that is a craven doctrine; for "the issue is not aid to Britain against no aid to Britain, not British-American imperialism against German imperialism--it is imperialism against democracy."

People Will Rise

Exactly what does that mean? The editors spell it out in poetic if somewhat mystical phraseology. "In every country ravaged by the war the people will grow weary of it and demand peace. In every country oppressed by imperialism and fascism the people will grow tired of want and constriction and demand bread and liberty." Anyone who doubts this lacks the true democratic faith in "the people everywhere."

Mr. Hicks was probably thinking of just such a passage when he gibed at "a vague hope in some utopian revolution," and it is hard to disagree with him, much as one might like to. Maybe it makes me an undemocrat too--but as I see it the moral of the Spanish struggle is not that the democratic forces, the people, turned their bare breasts against the fascist tanks, but that the people lost. Dutch students may riot, yet Hitler crushes Holland with barely a contemptuous glance in their direction. You do not win this war by snowballing brown-shirted legions, as the Czech people did, not so long ago; you win by bombing the Nazi armament works. The "power of the people" could not save Salonika for the Greeks.

What this all adds up to is that Mr. Hicks is correct in saying that the British, though they fight for reasons of self-interest, are doing more to defeat Nazism than--say, the Progressive editors. Yet withal one may still regret, as do the editors, that we have become so bundled up with Britain. Certainly the defense drive has carried with it anti-laborism and undemocratic hysteria; certainly the dollar-a-year men are making every penny count in the defense of their class interests; certainly the American Century is not an epoch most democrats would enjoy living in. Whether one can do more than just regret, now that the United States is so thumpingly committed to lend-lease and its corollaries, is unhappily doubtful.

Down From Tower

William Abrahams '41 climbs down from the Advocate tower long enough to make one wish he had never climbed up. His "Kingdom in the Mirror" is a fascinating poem, imaginatively phrased, on the realness of the world and our refusal to face it. For this poem itself the issue is worth reading.

Perry Miller contributes a Faculty Credo that is more nearly intellectual history. His thesis: "When the scholar or the educator falls behind the march of the society," others will seize his position of leadership, "for leadership there must and shall be." That is the present prosect, since American education has not "fitted the American mind to cope with the issues of American life."

To Harold Solomon '43 falls the task of lambasting rival youth groups. He thinks they are "youth" groups.