Is America in the Grip of Hysteria? [1952]

This rebuttal of The New Leader was published under the general heading used here and below a shorter, descriptive title, “Mr. Russell’s Statement”, 35, no. 9 (3 March 1952): 2–3 (B&R C52.05). Although it sustained the controversy started by Russell’s attack on state education in Indiana in 77, a more proximate stimulus was the anti-communist New York weekly’s critique of some allegedly “astonishing statements” made by him in a different article (36). Russell’s letter to the editor was not unsolicited but written in acceptance of an offer by the New Leader to address these three questions, originally posed in an editorial entitled “Russell Off Base”:

Is it really the absence or prevalence of a capitalist economy that chiefly characterizes the two worlds that lie east and west of the Elbe?

Is it true that the United States is in the grip of an intellectual and political conformity comparable to that in the Soviet Union?

Is the world today divided into two halves primarily because “persecution of opinion” makes it impossible for the two blocs to “understand each other”?

Although the column was unsigned, authorship was later claimed by Sidney Hook, in a note in the hand of the American philosopher on a clipping in RA. This prominent New York intellectual was a friend and admirer of Russell’s who became an implacable critic of his later Cold War politics (see Hook 1987, Chap. 23). The journal (or, rather, Hook) answered each of its own queries with a resounding “no” and wondered whether Russell, “in his zeal to protect the flame of liberalism from internal enemies who would dim its glow, has not forgotten the external foes who would snuff it out altogether” (Hook 1951).