It may be that the best book that will ever be written about today’s progressive mind-set was published in 1941. That in The Red Decadeauthor Eugene Lyons was, in fact, describing the Communist-dominated American Left of the Depression-wracked 1930s and 1940s makes his observations even more meaningful, for it is sobering to be confronted with how little has been gained by hard experience. The celebration of feelings over reason? The certainty of moral virtue? The disdain for tradition and the revising of history for ideological ends? The embrace of the latest definition of correct thought? Lyons was one of the most gifted reporters of his time, and among the bravest, and his story of the spell cast by Stalinist-tinged social-justice activism over that day’s purported best and brightest—literary titans, Hollywood celebrities, leading academics, religious leaders, media heavies—would be jaw-dropping if it weren’t so eerily familiar.
Indeed, looking backward from a time when, according to surveys, more millennials would rather live under socialism than capitalism, it’s apparent that Lyons was documenting not just a historical moment but also a species of historical illiteracy as unchanging as it is poisonous, its utopianism able to flourish only at the expense of independent thought. On a range of issues, alternative views were defined as not merely mistaken but morally reprehensible; and among the elites who dominated the cultural sphere, deviants from approved opinion were subject to special abuse. Of course, having lived and worked in Soviet Russia, Lyons made distinctions about relative abuses of power. Under Stalinism, dissidents were liquidated, or vanished into the gulag; the American Left could only liquidate careers and disappear reputations.
That it was all a colossal fraud was obvious all along, or should have been. For anyone willing to see, Stalin’s Russian paradise was a totalitarian horror show, equaled only by Hitler’s Third Reich. For all the regime’s numerous apologists in the press, led by the New York Times’s Walter Duranty (who won the Pulitzer Prize for his efforts), word of the true state of affairs in Russia was not hard to come by because by the mid-1930s, reports on the Great Famine (the planned execution by starvation of millions of recalcitrant Ukrainian peasants) were too persistent to ignore without sustained effort. So, too, were those of systematic state thuggery, culminating in the confessions-by-torture of veteran Bolsheviks in the purge trials of 1937–38 and, in Spain, in the guise of fighting fascism, the systematic elimination of rival leftist parties by Soviet secret police.
By the time he published The Red Decade, Lyons, a rare journalist given to damn-the-consequences honesty, had come to know his twin subjects exceedingly well—that is, Stalinism and the American liberals so ready to overlook its savage immorality. Having arrived from Russia as a small child and grown up in the poverty of the Jewish Lower East Side, he came of age a committed leftist, and, as he’d later acknowledge, when he returned to the land of his birth, in 1928 as a 30-year-old correspondent for the United Press, his aim was to use that privileged perch to promote the Revolution. It was on this basis that, in 1930, he scored a stunning journalistic coup that brought him worldwide recognition: the first-ever interview by a Western correspondent with the reclusive Stalin. And, to his subsequent shame, he joined other leading reporters in mostly running cover for the regime, including on the famine.
Within a few years, though, he began harboring doubts, and before long he was running afoul of Soviet censors by finding ways to alert readers to the regime’s hypocrisy and cronyism, the failure of its various economic plans, and, especially, its ruthlessness and brutality.
That during those Depression years, the legions of starry- and steely-eyed included a disproportionate number of what we’d now call millennials was unsurprising; for the idealistic, emotion-driven young, hard questions always have easy solutions, and even in good times, there’s no competing with the romance of the Left. But what Lyons found far more unsettling was the credulity of those in the vanguard of progressive thought: leading figures in academia, entertainment, publishing, media, and the highest councils of government, from New York to Hollywood and everywhere between. These were the powerful and influential, the men and women who shaped public attitudes and opinion. While among them were many convinced ideologues, more numerous still were the careerists, or those simply following political fashion, sentimental liberals drawn to causes by the magic words: “justice,” “democracy,” “peace.” Lyons well understood the seductive power of the call for fundamental social transformation, but he also knew, as did few others, that it invariably led to the naming of enemies and the doling out of retribution, and to unspeakable moral chaos—and, moreover, that it didn’t even work.
But in this saga of equal parts moral blindness and impenetrable self-righteousness, it is Lyons’s extended treatment of Hollywood that will likely strike contemporary readers as most familiar. For while the film community had more than its share of those steeped in Communist Party doctrine, the Party’s great achievement was in making leftism fashionable. “I saw Social Consciousness quicken and come to a boil in actors, writers and directors whose names rival Rinso and Camels as household words,” he writes of witnessing the spectacle at close hand. “The political pig-Latin of class struggle, anti-fascism, and revolutionary tactics rippled around swimming pools and across dance floors. . . . They had not the remotest idea what communism was in terms of economic structures or political superstates. For nearly all of them it was an intoxicated state of mind, a glow of inner virtue, and a sort of comradeship of super-charity.”
From the Soviet gulags and the brutal crackdowns in Hungary and Czechoslovakia, to children turning on parents during the Cultural Revolution and the Cambodian genocide, much that was once common knowledge seems to have been forgotten or gone unlearned. How many schools still make Orwell required reading? How many college history majors have even heard of the masterwork of his fellow prophet, Arthur Koestler, author of Darkness at Noon?
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