Age of Fear and Doubt

"When the Atom Bomb exploded, the fears that had always haunted the febrile brain of human beings--fear of death, fear of living, fear of pain and hunger, fear of magic and the night found new roots in the dark uncertainties of life."

Roosevelt's Attorney General, Francis Biddle, contends that from this fear we have "step by step" welcomed "the new tyranny to soothe the ache of our own uncertainties as if safety lay in closing the book of our minds."

The A-Bomb, the Cold War with the resulting fear of Russia, the Soviet discovery of atomic energy in 1949, and the espionage trials in the U.S. have produced fear after fear, according to Biddle, and from this has come the laws, acts, ideas that threaten our freedom.

This, Biddle's fourth major book, is an unsuccessful analysis, however. It fails to define what this overpowering fear is, it falls to show the true meaning of the "anti-subversive" laws, and it does not analyze the "hysteria." Instead, the book is a reportorial discussion of the effects of anti-subversive legislation and international anxiety.

Biddle contends that post-war hysteria has produced such bills as New York's Feingold Law, Maryland's Ober Law, and the McCarran Act ("A curious hodgepodge of unwise and unworkable provisions.") He praised President Truman for the Federal Loyalty Procedure Act of 1947.

But, later on, he deplauds all loyalty measures in one of the mere perceptive passages in the book. He states: "It is a life which we have freely chosen, which has not been forced on us, or inherited by us. We must therefore be allowed to select our own form of loyalty. If our conception is based our the exciting free play of thought and idea, not only as a means of creating self-government but as a good in itself, with all other goods, we shall then permit endless varletys of loyalty. This is intrinsically a moral concept."

Biddle even questions the material worth of Truman's loyalty board. He notes that out of 8288 cases adjudicated by the board, only 246 persons were dismissed and of these, there were no spies or traitors.

The hysteria has had a stiffing effect on college teaching, Biddle reports. Only two college presidents have stood firm on the issue of communist teachers on the faculty, he holds, and they are President Conant and former University of Chicago head Robert M. Hutchins.

The book has many defects: it is disappointingly shallow, it draws faulty analogies between England of 1798 and Germany of 1935 with the United States today, and falls to find a pattern in the disconnected incidents of violations of individual liberties.

But as a report of the U. S. today--a report, not an interpretation--the book, well-wirtten though superficial is successful.