Volume 7, Number 5 · October 6, 1966
UnAmerican Activities
By Christopher Lasch
Liberals and Communism: The "Red Decade" Revisited
by Frank A. Warren III
Indiana University, 266 pp., $6.95
The Communist Controversy in Washington from the New Deal to McCarthy
by Earl Latham
Harvard, 428 pp., $7.95
Fairness requires a historian to resist easy judgments after the fact. Yet his eagerness to avoid the temptation to condemn the past by 'hindsight' may only deliver him into a form of neutrality in which he excuses everything on the grounds that our predecessors were too benighted to be expected to arrive at the truth; they must be judged 'by the standards of their own day.' What looks at first like historical 'objectivity' reveals itself as a particularly insidious kind of condescension, compared to which even 'hindsight' begins to seem preferable.
Review, 3108 words
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