The 50s

by The New Yorker Magazine

  Such has been the general trend—a trend with economic overtones. The decline in the popularity of the Catholic Worker began, however, with a head-on clash between expediency and principle, in which the Workers, as they always do, clung to principle. The conflict arose over their stand on the Spanish civil war. From the beginning of that war, the entire Catholic hierarchy and the bulk of the lower clergy and the Catholic laity supported Franco, as the champion of religion against infidel Communism and anarchism. The only Catholic publications in New York that refused to support him were the Worker and the Commonweal, both of which took a neutral position. “There is much right and much wrong on both sides,” the Catholic Worker editorialized in September, 1936. “Our main concern is that ‘the members of Christ tear one another.’ This is not a condemnation. It is a cry of anguish, the sob of one who sees his brother in agony.” Three months later, the Workers devoted the whole front page of their paper to a translation of an article, written by a Spanish Catholic, which had appeared in Esprit, a French radical Catholic magazine, and condemned both sides in the civil war. The Workers’ was, indeed, an unpopular front.

  Popular or unpopular, the work goes on, and Miss Day goes on with it. “In the last two months, I have visited twenty-seven cities, from Fall River, Mass., to Fargo, North Dakota,” she wrote in the Catholic Worker last autumn. “I have been bone-tired and mind-tired. I have slept on buses and trains, on boards and beds, in rooms with babies, in dormitories, in solitary splendor. I have eaten in homes where elegance is the rule and at Houses of Hospitality with men from skid row.” The only real vacation she has taken since the organization of the Workers was during parts of 1943 and 1944, when she felt that after ten years of uninterrupted work it was spiritually necessary for her to renew acquaintance with herself and with God by meditation. She spent six months in a convent and another six months living quietly in the country with her daughter, who by that time had married and set up housekeeping on a farm in Virginia. A priest told Miss Day that once having put her hand to the plow, she had no right to withdraw it, but she knew better; she felt that she was not the “indispensable leader,” or that if she was, it was high time the movement learned to dispense with her. Since her cross-country trip last fall, she has confined her travels to the East and has pretty much let the Chrystie Street house run itself, spending only a night or so a week in the tiny hall bedroom that is reserved for her there. Most of her time has been divided between Peter Maurin Farm and her daughter’s present home, a mile down the road; Teresa now has five children of her own, and Miss Day helps with them and with the housework. She is also engaged in writing a book—a biography of Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, a nineteenth-century Carmelite nun. “The sophisticates don’t like her,” Miss Day says. “They think she is flowery and sentimental. But the common people like her, and so do I.”

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  “Where there is no love, put in love and you will take out love,” wrote Saint John of the Cross. The Catholic Workers quote this and believe it. Usually it works, but when it doesn’t, they are not resentful, since they consider love an end and not a means. Some years ago, they rented an apartment in Cleveland to shelter single women; a homeless married couple was temporarily admitted; once in, they wouldn’t move out or let anyone else in. The Workers, although they had paid the rent in advance, sighed and looked for another apartment. Perhaps the saddest experience they have had was with their first communal farm, near Easton, Pennsylvania, which, as the years passed, was more and more taken over by down-and-out families, who came to consider the place theirs and to resent the Workers’ using it at all. At last, the Workers sold half the farm and gave the rest to the families who had preempted it.

  The Workers’ abhorrence of coercion extends even to proselytizing. They never ask the religion of the people they help, and the men on the bread line don’t have to pray or sing psalms to get fed, nor do their boarders (whose favorite paper is the Daily News, not the Catholic Worker) have to attend the two brief daily services held in the Chrystie Street house. Any discipline makes Miss Day uneasy. John Cort, a former disciple of the Workers and now a C.I.O. official and labor columnist, once lived with ten other men on the top floor of the old Mott Street house. “Some of them slept late, left their beds in a mess, and shirked their turn to sweep up,” he has since recalled. “Finally, I typed out three rules and posted them: ‘One, everybody out of bed by 9 A.M. Two, each man is expected to make up his own bed. Three, each man is expected to take turns sweeping up.’ One of the fellows there felt these rules were a violation of personalism, a doctrine of inner discipline that Dorothy and Peter were strong for. We took it to Dorothy—the Abbess, as some of us called her—and she agreed with him. The rules came down. I think it possible that she really agreed with me but ruled for this other guy because he was excited about it and she felt his faith in the movement was more brittle than mine. She herself was personal all the way, and she often decided things on a personal basis.”

  Some of the Workers have at times found freedom oppressive. One of the most energetic toilers on the Easton farm once went on strike because he didn’t have a boss. Sitting down under a tree, he announced, “I won’t work until someone asks me to and tells me what to do.” No one did, and after a time he gave up and grumpily picked up his hoe again. Maurin used to do a lot of heavy work, like breaking rocks for making roads; sometimes he went so far as to leave mauls lying around in conspicuous places, but if no one took the hint, he just swung all the harder. More practical and less principled than Maurin, Miss Day admits that when she gets “really desperate,” she actually asks members of her staff to do this or that. If they refuse, however, there is no penalty. “I could stay in my room all day reading or just sitting and no one would say anything,” one of her present crop of Workers said not long ago. “After a month, they might act a little cold toward me, of course.”

  As Cort’s story indicates, Miss Day does have a certain authority, but it is an authority that is yielded to her voluntarily, out of love and respect—all too voluntarily, from her point of view, for she is a leader whose chief worry is that her followers have too great a tendency to follow. “Low in mind all day, full of tears,” she wrote one evening in 1936 in a journal she has kept since she was a girl. “What with Easton, New York, Boston, Ottawa, Toronto, and Missouri groups all discouraged, all looking for organization instead of self-organization, all weary of the idea of freedom and personal responsibility—I feel bitterly oppressed. I am in the position of a dictator trying to legislate himself out of existence. They all complain that there is no boss. Today I happened to read Dostoevski’s ‘Grand Inquisitor,’ most apropos. Freedom—how men hate it and chafe under it, how unhappy they are with it!”

  In the old days, Miss Day used to look at Maurin in moments of discouragement and, with a groan, say, “Why did you have to start all this anyway?” In a gloomy passage in her journal, she remarks, “Sometimes you get discouraged, there’s so little change in people. Those who drank go on drinking, those who were ornery go on being ornery.” But faith and hope always rise again in her, no matter how great the despair of the moment, and a few pages farther on she is writing, “The goodness of people makes my heart expand in happiness.”

  E. B. White

  JUNE 12, 1954 (ON THE CASE AGAINST SENATOR MCCARTHY)

  HE SENATE, BY a simple majority vote, can remove a committee member from the chairmanship of his committee. We think the Senate, when the proper moment comes, should take a vote on Senator McCarthy. We don’t know whether he ought to be removed for malpractice, but he certainly ought to be fired for incompetence. His conduct of hearings, as chairman of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, has succeeded only in making the country less secure, and his concept of internal security has kept America in an uproar just when it should have a firm grip on itself. He has tried, with some success, to change the nature and function of Congressional investigation, giving it almost judicial significance and almost execut
ive force. He has become a one-man F.B.I., with his own sources of information, his own stable of informers, his own set of rules governing what a senator is entitled to have in his possession in the way of documents. He is by temperament a sleuth, not a legislator, and he should join a private-eye squad and leave lawmaking to men of thoughtful mien.

  · · ·

  Whether the Army resorted to blackmail, whether McCarthy and Cohn used improper pressure, are questions that interest everybody. But one thing is quite clear: this is no “squabble” (as it is often called) between the Army and McCarthy. This is the showdown on the country’s top problem in internal security. It involves the infiltration of Communists into places where nobody wants them to be, and it involves the infiltration of Senator McCarthy into the institutions that he doesn’t approve of and would like to rearrange: the Constitution, the White House, the Army, and the Department of Justice; the press and other forms of “extreme Left Wing” dissent; the two-party system (in which you can call the other side anything you want to except “traitor”); the delicate balance between the three main branches of government; due process; and the nice old idea that a citizen isn’t guilty of anything just because someone “names” him as guilty.

  · · ·

  The hearings in Washington are structurally bizarre. The committee sits in solemn style, investigating itself, like a monkey looking for fleas. The members sometimes listen thoughtfully to the testimony. At other times, one of them takes the stand, adds to the testimony, then returns to his seat and broods silently on what he has sworn to. Senator Mundt, presumably a conscientious moderator, has a political stake in the hearings. As far as that goes, every senator on the committee does. The Democratic senators, obviously intoxicated by so gaudy a display of Republican embarrassment, have recently been challenged on the score of bias, and Symington has been asked to disqualify himself—as though there had ever been a remote possibility that a committee consisting of Democrats and Republicans could investigate itself dispassionately. Perhaps something useful will emerge from this harlequinade, but if it does, it simply means that this country is, as usual, sort of lucky.

  · · ·

  Although everyone is interested in the specific charges, Army vs. McCarthy, it seems to us that people are even more deeply concerned with finding the answer to the permanent question about the permanent chairman of that permanent subcommittee; namely, must the country continue to be torn to pieces, day by day, week by week, merely because one quick-witted senator has discovered a way to do it and a reason for doing it? That’s what America wants to find out, and only the Senate can come up with the answer. If McCarthy were a medium-sized threat to internal security, if he were a bush-league demagogue, if he had done three or four naughty deeds, involving three or four innocent people, perhaps the Senate would be justified in keeping him on in the job. But the Senator’s score is imposing and he is not medium-sized—as he well knows. The twenty-years-of-treason junket, the use of the word “guilt” in hearing rooms where nobody is on trial and where no judge sits, the Zwicker inquisition, the willingness to shatter an army to locate a dentist, the sly substitution of the name “Alger” for the name “Adlai,” the labelling of the majority of the press as “extreme Left Wing,” the distortion of facts and figures, the challenge of the power of the White House, the use of the grand elision in the phrase “Fifth Amendment Communist,” the queer notion that he, and he alone, is entitled to receive raw information that it is illegal for others to have in their possession, the steady attack on national confidence and national faith, as though confidence were evil and suspicion were good—the score is familiar and need not be recited in its long detail. Whatever else can be said for and against the Senator, it has become obvious that he dislikes a great many things about our form of government. To disapprove of these well-loved principles and rules is not a crime, but neither is it a help in performing the duties of a committee chairman in the United States Senate.

  James Thurber

  MAY 28, 1955 (ON FIFTIES JARGON)

  BELIEVE THERE ARE no scientific investigators that actually call themselves psychosemanticists, but it is surely time for these highly specialized therapeuticians to set up offices. They must not be carelessly confused with psychosomaticists, who study the effects of mental weather upon the ramparts of the body. The psychosemanticists will specialize in the havoc wrought by verbal artillery upon the fortress of reason. Their job will be to cope with the psychic trauma caused by linguistic meaninglessness, to prevent the language from degenerating into gibberish, and to save the sanity of persons threatened by the onset of polysyllabic monstrosititis.

  We have always been a nation of categorizationists, but what was once merely a national characteristic is showing signs of malignancy. I shall not attempt to discover the incipient primary lesion, for I am not a qualified research scholar in this field. Indeed, for having had the impudence to trespass thus far I shall no doubt be denounced by the classificationists as a fractional impactionist (one who hits subjects a glancing blow), an unauthorized incursionist, a unilateral conclusionist, and a presumptuous deductionist. Our national predilection for ponderous phraseology has been traced by one authority as far back as the awkward expression “taxation without representation” (unjust impost). It is interesting to note that the irate American colonists of that period in our history would be categorized today as “anti-taxation-without-representationists.”

  Not long ago, for the most recent instance in my collection, Senator Lyndon Johnson was described by a Washington newspaperman as a pragmatic functionalist, a term that was used in a laudatory sense. It isn’t always easy nowadays to tell the laudatory from the derogatory at first glance, but we should be glad that this Democratic leader is not a dogmatic divisionary or an occlusive impedimentarian. The most alarming incidence of verbal premalignancy occurs, of course, in this very area of politics, but let us skip over such worn and familiar double-jointedisms as creeping Socialists, disgruntled ex-employees, ritualistic liberals, massive retaliationists, agonized reappraisalists, unorthodox thinkers, unwitting handmaidens (male), to name only a few out of hundreds, and take a look at excessive prewar anti-Fascism, a colossal (I use the adjective as a noun, in the manner of television’s “spectacular”) that was disgorged a few years ago. Here the classificatory degradationists brought a time element into what might be called the post-evaluation of political morality. The operation of this kind of judgment during and after the Civil War would have thrown indelible suspicion upon all the Northern patriots, including Abraham Lincoln, who wanted Robert E. Lee to take command of the Federal Armies in the field. They would be known today as “overenthusiastic pre-Manassas pro-Leeists.”

  The carcinomenclature of our time is, to be sure, an agglomerative phenomenon of accumulated concretions, to which a dozen different types of elaborative descriptivists have contributed—eminently the old Communist intellectuals, with their “dialectical materialists,” “factional deviationists,” “unimplemented obscurantists,” and so on, and so on. Once the political terminologists of all parties began to cross-infect our moribund vocabulary, the rate of degeneration became appalling. Elephantiasis of cliché set in, synonym atrophied, the pulse of inventiveness slowed alarmingly, and paraphrase died of impaction. Multiple sclerosis was apparent in the dragging rhythms of speech, and the complexion of writing and of conversation began to take on the tight, dry parchment look of death. We have become satisfied with gangrenous repetitions of threadbarisms, like an old man cackling in a chimney corner, and the onset of utter meaninglessness is imminent.

  The symptoms of this ominous condition show up most clearly in the tertiary stage of “controversial figure.” The most complicated specimen of this type of modern American is the man of unquestionable loyalty, distinguished public service, and outstanding ability and experience who has nonetheless “lost his usefulness.” Actually, this victim of verbositosis has not lost his usefulness, his nation has lost it. It doesn’t do the nati
onal psyche any good to realize that a man may be cut off in the full flower of his usefulness, on the ground that that is not what it is. I trust I have made the urgent need for psychosemanticists apparent, even though I have admittedly become contaminated in the process, and I doubt whether my own psychosemanticist, after treating me, will ever be able to turn to my wife and say cheerfully, “Madam, your husband will write clearly again.”

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  Before visiting my hypothetical psychosemanticist for a brief imaginary interview, I feel that I should get something reassuring into this survey of depressing ailments of the tongue. We have, then, cured, or at least survived, various incipient mouth maladies in the past. There was a moment when “globaloneyism,” growing out of the Timethod of wordoggle, seemed likely to become epidemic, but it fortunately turned out to be no worse than a touch of pig Latin or a slight case of Knock, Knock, Who’s There? Congress was not prepared to adopt the telescoping of words, which takes both time and ingenuity, and unless an expression becomes absorbed by Congressionalese, it has little chance of general survival. This brings me to what may easily be the direct cause of my being bundled off to the psychosemanticist’s before long: the beating the word “security” is taking in this great, scared land of ours. It is becoming paralyzed. This is bound to occur to any forceful word when it loses its quality of affirmation and is employed exclusively in a connotation of fear, uncertainty, and suspicion. The most frequent use of “security” (I hate to add to its shakiness with quotation marks, which have taken on a tone of mockery in our day) is in “security risk,” “weakest link in our chain of security,” and “lulled into a false sense of security.” Precision of speech and meaning takes a small tossing around in the last of those three phrases. “Lulled” is actually what happens to a nation after it has been argued, tricked, maneuvered, reasoned, coaxed, cajoled, or jockeyed into a false sense of security, but the inflexibility that has descended upon us has ruled out the once noble search for the perfect word and the exact expression. What Eric Partridge calls “a poverty of linguistic resource” is exemplified by the practically exclusive use of two verbs in any public-forum discussion of national security. It is threatened or it is bolstered; I never heard of its being supported, reinforced, fortified, buttressed, or shored up, and only very rarely is it menaced, endangered, or in jeopardy.