Vol. 10.12, December 1977

A Monthly Newsletter

THE
Libertarian Forum

Joseph R. Peden; Publisher		Murray N. Rothbard, Editor
VOLUME X NUMBER 12	DECEMBER, 1977	US-ISSN0047-4517

L’Affaire Efron

People from all over the country are asking me what my response is to Edith Efron’s wild and free-swinging attack on the libertarian movement in general and on me personally in her Viewpoint column in the February Reason. Well, to give you an idea, dear reader, consider how you would feel if you were well-known in your community, and a prominent writer published several dramatic untruths that you had allegedly told her, in order to discredit you and your activities. That’s about the way I feel.

Everything that Miss Efron wrote about my alleged disclosures to her is untrue: they are either lies or fabrications emerging from her own paranoid fantasies. To be specific: I never tried to “take over” any party of which Eldridge Cleaver was the head (a pretty idiotic thing for me to have attempted); in working with leftists against the draft and the Vietnam War I never had the absurd notion of converting them to capitalism, either sneakily (as Miss Efron would have it) or in any other way.

And, above all, on her most dramatic point which virtually forms the leitmotif of her article, no one has ever pulled a gun on me, in the ribs or in any other way. Nor, of course, did I ever tell her any of this rubbish; it is all preposterous nonsense, every word of it.

Miss Efron needed the “gun in the ribs” gambit as a major theme in order to prove to everyone’s satisfaction that all leftists are thugs, and that a gun in the ribs is always the result of any dealings with them. Apparently, her pals in the Pentagon are devoid of any lethal weaponry.

But the outrage I feel is the general frustration of a victim who has been falsely accused in the public prints. Miss Efron makes a dramatic statement about me; I deny it; what is the average reader to think? Or, how am I to tell? Especially if they are not personal friends of either one. Personal friends of mine have no trouble figuring out which one to believe. As one of them has said, I’m not the sort of person to hoard stories, and it is inconceivable that I would have told a saga as dramatic as the “gun-in-the-ribs” only to someone like Miss Efron who has merely been a slight acquaintance. Surely, they would have heard it many times over. The reason they haven’t, of course, is that Miss Efron has created it out of the whole cloth.

It is monstrous that a malicious falsehood carries equal weight with readers as an outraged rebuttal from the victim. What can a reader do in these circumstances? The only moral path is to believe nothing about anyone without supporting evidence, and Miss Efron of course has only offered her own unsupported word—a word which I, for one, shall not take seriously ever again.

As for the rest of Miss Efron’s article, it is about on a par with her statements about me: a farrago of gross ignorance and malice that is simply and literally not to be believed. There is scarcely a sentence that has any contact with truth or reality. For Miss Efron, who has not had anything to do with the libertarian movement in ten years, who from the testimony of her own article is scarcely a libertarian at all, for her to presume to read people out of libertarianism is unparalleled chutzpah. It’s as if I should write an article attempting to dictate theology and ritual to the Greek Orthodox Church, telling it whom it should expel for heresy and whom it should revere.

Apparently, Miss Efron had no desire whatever to remedy her appalling ignorance of the libertarian movement before writing about it; instead of doing research, she seems to have relied for facts on her own febrile imagination. What can we say, for example, of an alleged reporter who presumes to denounce the magazine Inquiry without having read any of it—even though she was offered a gift of the two issues that had already appeared when she wrote her calumny? Apparently, in penning her diatribe she didn’t want to be confused by the facts.

Miss Efron’s charge that libertarians such as myself ally ourselves only with the Left is ignorant hogwash; we believe in allying ourselves with whoever has a libertarian position on issues important to us. We hail a Nat Hentoff on civil liberties and a Henry Hazlitt on economics. This is not inconsistent; on the contrary, it means that we consistently welcome people for the libertarian positions they hold on particular Issues, a welcome which in no sense means that we endorse their stand on every conceivable question. But to libertarians, this is nothing new. Most of us have known for a long time that our position cuts across the conventional left-right spectrum, that we agree with liberals on some issues and with conservatives on others. That is because we are consistent upholders of liberty, and they of course are not.

Miss Efron’s charge that we libertarians are lax in saluting the greatness and importance of free-market economists Ludwig von Mises and F.A. Hayek is an obscenity; how many times has she hailed them in print as compared to myself? Her Implication that we have Joined the Left in “evad(ing) mass murder in Cambodia” is false on two important counts. First, because much of the information that we have, and that she can self-righteously refer to, on the monstrosity that is Cambodia comes to us from Leftists who staunchly opposed the war in Indochina: from James Forest, Jean Lacouture, Father Ponchaud, etc. And second, because while I myself, as she well knows, wrote a blistering attack on the Cambodian regime in Libertarian Review, where and when did Miss Efron ever write on the subject before she penned her broadside attack?

Miss Efron’s appalling ignorance of the libertarian movement is revealed by her lament that the limited government people have struck some sort of “deal” with anarcho-capitalists never to engage in discussion or debate over their ultimate ideological differences. Miss Efron has apparently not been reading, not only Libertarian Toma, or the Journal of Libertarian Studies, which has published numerous anarchist critiques of Robert Nozick, but not even Reason itself, where John Hospers and I have squared off. The debate continues; it is only the activists in the Libertarian Party who wisely concluded that they would get nowhere facing concrete political issues if they spent their energies on such theoretical questions. These disputes, while ultimately, important, are hardly relevant to contesting the next election. The Libertarian Party is not the entire movement

Sometimes her article is relieved by some (unconscious) humor; thus, Miss Efron expresses horror that a “distinguished laissez-faire economist”, Roger LeRoy Miller, was asked to write a review of a book on the political economy of whorehouses. What she fails to realise is that Professor Miller has precisely written on such topics as whorehouses, as has the emminent free-market economist George W. Hilton, who has even spoken at a convention of COYOTE, an organization of prostitutes defending their right to do business.

But this gaffe is of a piece with Miss Efron’s moral horror at libertarians’ concern for the freedom of speech and voluntary activities of all people, even the most disreputable. From her sneering at such freedom, it is obvious that her devotion to civil liberties is minimal. This conclusion is reinforced by her affinity for Irving Kristol, a “libertarian” who advocates increased censorship and a theocratic enforcement of religious values. Miss Efron employs the usual conservative trick of linking civil libertarians with the life-styles of those whose rights they are defending. If one defends the rights of prostitutes or drug-takers, why this makes one a drug-taker, too. Attacking people such as myself for being hippies and blind adherents of all aspects of every liberation movement can only reap a horselaugh from anyone in the least familiar with my own views over the years.

Sometimes, Miss Efron’s ignorance turns positively malignant. There are some smears which should not be allowed to go unchallenged. Timothy Leary, for all his peccadilloes, has not been “drag-soaked” for a long while; in fact, he now strongly, opposes drugs. To call either Marcus Raskin or Kart Hess “Maoists” is breathtaking in its malevolent absurdity; an absurdity topped only by her gall in asserting that Hass “now calls himself” a Maoist.

What, then, is Miss Efron? From the evidence of her loathsome article, she is certainly a “news twister” par excellence. But when have we seen this before, this amalgam of hysterical smears and Red-baiting, joined to an ideology that scorns civil liberties and calls for love and “reverence” for the State? There are not many laissez-faire thinkers of the past who, though upholding limited government, have actually loved and revered it. On the contrary. For them, as for modern libertarians, love and reverence has been reserved for such values as liberty and human dignity, and even for one’s land, culture, and country but not, ye gods, for the State, which, even in the limited government lexicon, is at best simply a policeman and not something to be revered and worshipped. But then, despite Miss Efron’s ritualistic invocation of the Founding Fathers, it is clear that she knows next to nothing about American history. If she did, she would realize that most of those Fathers were far closer to our position than to has; what they had reverence for, and fought a revolution to maintain, was liberty, and definitely not the State.

Where have we seen these tantrums, this hopped-up and wild-swinging disregard for accuracy, combined with an ideology that reveres not only the American State, but even more the State of Israel? We have seen them in the fever swamps of the tar Right, most specifically of the Randian variety.

Is this the “love”, the “reverence,” these old paranoid bones of the. 1960’s, that the libertarian movement is supposed to crawl back to? Certainly not, and not at the behest of someone as profoundly anti-libertarian as Miss Efron. We are an adult movement now, and we can put away the childish tantrums and bickering of isolated sects. We are making an impact on the mainstream of American life, and we have just begun.

To Our Readers

You have all noticed that the issues of the Lib. Forum have been falling ever more disgracefully behind. In a profound sense, our problems have been problems of success—the great expanding success of the libertarian movement in the last year or two. The demands on the time of the Editor, as well as the outlets for his writing, have expanded greatly. These outlets have also increased proportionately for those who would ordinarily be contributing articles to the Lib. Forum.

And yet we do not want to yield to the pressure of events and abandon the Lib. Forum. We feel that despite the many worthy magazines and journals now competing for your attention, there is still nothing quite like: the hard-hitting and knowledgeable commentary we give to news events, foreign and domestic, our sometimes acerbic coverage of the libertarian movement, our discussions of libertarian theory, the raising high the banner of the Old Culture by Mr. First Nighter, or even the occasional rap across the knuckles of our young whippersnappers by the Old Curmudgeon. We frankly feel that the libertarian movement would be the poorer for our absence from the scene.

And so, we have decided to continue as ever—with one exception: that we will appear every other month instead of monthly. Every subscriber will still receive the same NUMBER of issues as before, but they will now stretch out over twice the period of time, thus, the basic subscription will still be 8 dollars for 12 issues—but now the twelve issues will appear over a two-year period. Notice, too, that our subscription price will continue at $8.00 per twelve issues (now amounting to $4.00 per year), which is surely one of the great bargains in the libertarian movement. Even if we are not the best of all the magazines, we are certainly one of the least expensive.

We will begin the new policy with our next issue, which will be January/February 1978, to be followed by March/April 1978, and so on. The size and spirit of each issue will remain the same.

Truth On the Scaffold

by Justus D. Doenecke

Carol S. Gruber, Mars and Minerva: World War I and the Uses of the Higher Learning in America. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1975.

George T. Blakey, Historians on the Homefront: American Propagandists for the Great War. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. 1970.

Philip Knightley, The First Casualty; From the Crimea to Vietnam: The War Correspondent as Hero, Propagandist, and Myth Maker. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975.

Allan M. Winkler, The Politics of Propaganda: The Office of War Information, 1942-1945. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1978.

John Morton Blum, Politics and American Culture During World War II. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976.

When James Russell Lowell wrote of truth being on the scaffold, doing so in his poem, “The Impending Crisis,” he was referring to the Mexican War. We have long known, however, that such observations are not just limited to the Polk administration, or even to the presidency as an institution. Rather, truth is betrayed whenever massive groups are in conflict, and often the betrayers are the most able of intellectuals acting from the noblest of motives.

What was once called the Great War epitomizes what happens when professors are called to the colors, and Carol Gruber of William Paterson College tells the story well. When World War I came to America, the modern university was barely in its adolescence. Administered by bureaucratic hierarchies and beset with a specialized curriculum, it lacked a clear identity, much less a sense of purpose. True, it was vaguely committed to the ideal of national service, but the disciplines themselves were defined amorphously and the faculty perceived as employees of the administration. In the background was the Progressive movement, with its cloudy longing for unity of knowledge and the restoration of community.

The outbreak of the European war found a few intellectuals pro-German. Political scientist John W. Burgess, retired from Columbia, claimed that the Reich was a peaceloving, democratic nation. It was, he continued, Allied imperialism exclusively that had caused the conflict: Russia sought the Balkans, France Alsace-Lorraine, and Britain had long been jealous of Germany’s political and economic power. Several other professors—historians William R. Shepherd of Columbia and Preserved Smith, economist Simon Patten of Pennsylvania—expressed sympathy for the German position, while Columbia anthropologist Franz Boas said that such a thickly settled country must sometimes sacrifice individual freedom for collective welfare.

Yet, from the very beginning, most of the professoriate favored the Allied cause. George B. Adams, historian at Yale, found England holding no interest in the war not shared by the United States. Johns Hopkins philosopher Arthur O. Lovejoy saw any weakening of Britain threatening the moral as well as the material interest of the United States. Wisconsin economist Richard T. Ely hoped that after the war America and Britain could unite in “an intellectual and spiritual Empire.” Illinois political scientist James W. Garner called the destruction of the University of Louvain the most heinous crime “since the burning of the library of Alexandria.” It was the historians in particular who attacked the Kaiser, with Chicago’s Andrew D. McLaughlin referring to “Little Will,” Claude H. Van Tyne of Michigan writing of the “International ‘Bugaboo Bill,’” and Chicago’s William E. Dodd labelling the man “a menace to mankind.”

Such labels were the beginning, not the end, of abuse. Historian Albert Bushnell Hart demanded that a Harvard colleague of German-American background prove his loyalty by publicly denouncing the entire German people. His colleague Ralph Barton Perry, a prominent philosopher, attempted to rationalize such irrational hatred, declaring that “In moral matters there is no judging without feeling.” At times an early version of the domino theory was articulated, with Wisconsin historian Frederick Jackson Turner claiming, “If we will not fight for free seas, we will not, fight a (German) coaling station in Mexico, or a revolution of the German colony in Brazil, or a German protectorate over Columbia (sic).” When Wilson armed American merchant vessels early in 1917, Columbia political scientist Charles A. Beard called for “more drastic action,” one that would “help eliminate Prussianism from the earth.”

True, for many of these scholars, such as Hart and archeologist James Henry Breasted, there was an initial period of doubt. Once, however, the United States entered the war, all misgivings were over. Gruber writes that “Not to join with the call for victory, when the life of the nation is threatened and its blood and treasure are committed to the battlefield, is an invitation to charges of lack of patriotism, if not of treason.”

This is not to say that university faculties were at all reluctant. John Dewey welcomed the conflict, believing that it would lead to permanent socialization and international organization. Perry, Ely, Breasted, Minnesota historian William Stearns Davis, Yale historian Charles Seymour—all regretted not being able to serve in the armed forces, not yet realizing that some of them would be called to man the brigades of the typewriters. In the meantime, Columbia’s departments of mechanical and electrical engineering placed themselves entirely at the disposal of the Navy Department. Harvard organized a committee on military affairs, giving it the task of coordinating all university plans with the government. Fifty scientists at the University of Chicago volunteered their personal services, while offering to turn over their laboratories to the state.

For professors not tapped for war propaganda (see below), staffing the Students’ Army Training Corps (SATC) offered employment of the most patriotic kind. War had created heavy losses of students, faculty, and administrative personnel. With functions seriously impaired, standards declining, and financial crisis threatening, the turning over of entire institutions to the War Department was a godsend. For every student-soldier enrolled, a school was guaranteed tuition, room, and board, and reimbursed for administrative expenses and use of university facilities as well. In addition, so Gruber writes, the SATC “offered an unmatched opportunity for the institutions of higher learning to demonstrate their usefulness and, by implication, to lay the ghost of ivory-towerism that haunted them.” In fact, well before the United States entered the war, Princeton was sponsoring rifle practice, and Yale had formed four student artillery corps.

Only when the universities became transformed into military camps did the faculties begin to object, but by then it was too late. English courses were devoted to the drafting of military reports, fine arts to military sketching, modern languages to military terminology. SATC students marched to and from class, and stood at attention while reciting. To enter campus buildings, faculty had to show passes to military guards. Complained political scientist Edward S. Corwin, “Princeton. . .is not Princeton just now—only a cog of the military machine, and we professors are cogs within cogs.”

Part of the SATC program involved a War Issues Course, one that would reveal “the supreme importance to civilization of the cause for which we are fighting.” By and large, professors welcomed the idea The course broke down departmental jealousies, laid the ground for basic education, and showed the direct relevance of the undergraduate curriculum to the day’s problems. When Columbia’s course in contemporary civilization was introduced in 1919, it was promoted as a bulwark against radicalism, thereby betraying its origins in the War Issues Course. Since each institution had autonomy in developing syllabi, content varied considerably. In a lecture at the University of Michigan, historian William A. Frayer found Bolshevism more dangerous than Prussianism, remarked that a “surprising number” of revolutionists were Jews, and warned students that Communist sympathizers “are everywhere—in Germany, in France . . . in Italy, in Holland, in England, in the United States— they are on the campus of the University of Michigan.”

Gruber’s comments are scathing. She writes, “Even prowar professors might have concluded that the most valuable service they had to offer as professors was to maintain the critical intellect and the institution of higher learning as citadels of sanity in the inevitable madness of war, in order to protect, and promote the very values and freedoms in whose name the fight was being waged. Instead, they made themselves servants of the state’s pursuit of victory and became implicated in all the compromises and concessions unavoidably involved in that pursuit. When Richard T. Ely delivered a patriotic address that deliberately stimulated a mindless revulsion against Germans as a people and when John R. Commons worked to defeat the socialist Victor Berger’s senatorial bid in 1918 by crudely implicating Berger in treason, they donated their intellectual talents in a way that clearly compromised the standards of their profession” (emphasis Gruber).

Edward Potts Cheyney, historian at the University of Pennsylvania, was one of the few dissenters. He wrote a colleague in August of 1917, “I feel that the most patriotic man is the one who clings most firmly to the highest ideals of his nation, not the one who ‘goes along’ more ardently at war any more than when she is at peace.” Yet Cheyney, whose son had been committed to a federal penitentiary (apparently in connection with pacifist activities), felt so ostracized by his associates that he did not attend the historical retreat that fall in Branford, Connecticut.

The indictment is bolstered by Gruber’s discoveries concerning academic freedom, for she finds that the profession at large bent willingly to majority pressures. One would have thought that the American Association of University Professors, organized in 1915 to foster “professional vigilance and redress,” would have aided dissenting academicians. However, in 1917 AAUP president Frank Thilly called for tolerance of those “scholars who are loyal at heart”; loyalty, in short, was seen as relevant to an academic post. Administrators, Thilly hoped, would let the faculty draw the line “between the allowable and unallowable in speech and conduct,” thereby implicitly asserting that certain views were “unallowable.”

The AAUP’s Committee on Academic Freedom in Wartime turned the screws even tighter, and in so doing reneged on a principled commitment to unconditional free inquiry. Professors, it said early in 1917, could be dismissed for “disobedience to any statute or lawful executive order relating to the war.” They could also be fired for engaging in “propaganda designed, or unmistakably leading, to cause others to resist or evade compulsory service law or the regulations of the military authorities.” As examples of valid grounds for dismissal, the report mentioned claims that all war participation was immoral, that payment of taxes was unjust, or that deserters from the Russian army deserved commendation.

There was more to the report. Interference with the purchase of liberty bonds or support for war charities was “dangerous to the public security” and “irreconcilable with good citizenship”; hence, these activities too were cause for dismissal. Professors of German and Austro-Hungarian background should show, by “utterances” and “associations,” that they supported American efforts. Indeed, they “should refrain from public discussion of the war; and in their private intercourse with their neighbors, colleagues and students. . .(should) avoid all hostile or offensive expressions concerning the United States or its government” (all emphasis Gruber’s). For this minority, only actual thought control could serve as a more effective proscription. Gruber writes most aptly, “In effect, the AAUP was opening the floodgates of repression, or at least was stepping aside, when it might have been expected to make every effort to hold back the waters.”

Given such attitudes by the only professional group in a position to protect academic freedom, it is hardly surprising that purges of suspect faculty took place at Wisconsin, Oregon, Virginia, Michigan, Nebraska, Minnesota, Wellesley, and Toledo. Columbia fired psychologist James McKeen Catell and English professor Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Dana. Contrary to myth, most of the Columbia faculty, including the relevant faculty committee, thought the action warranted; objections centered on President Nicholas Murray Butler’s method of execution.

There were other forms of biogotry. Richard T. Ely, president of the Madison chapter of the Wisconsin Loyalty League, joined with fellow progressive John R. Commons and historian Carl Russell Fish in an effort to purge the state of Robert M. LaFollette. Drafting a round-robin signed by over ninety per cent of the faculty, as well as by the university president and deans, they accused the anti-war senator of having “given aid and comfort to Germany and her allies in the present war,” and of having failed “loyally to support the government in the prosecution of the war.”

Little wonder that Gruber finds the professors betraying their calling. Rather than remaining independent of “sources of economic and political power, whose objectives are remote from, if not inimical to, the search for truth,” they enlisted for the duration. “Service to society” she finds “a mutually beneficial goal”; “service to the state,” however, “contained the danger of becoming servitude.” Julien Benda’s phrase trahison des clercs, or “treason of the intellectuals,” has no more telling example. American faculties never came to grips with the carnage of the conflict. Instead, she notes, scholars luxuriated in indicting a “guilty people.” conveniently ignoring the harsh tactics used by British and Belgians against “backward” populations.

Gruber, however, is not content with moralizing, but ably analyzes the prowar fervor. Strongly influenced by her mentor Richard Hofstadter, with whom she studied at Columbia, she explains such behavior in the light of prewar alienation. Before 1917, the academy was uncertain about its role and purpose, and it desired to belong to a wider social world; in short, it was floundering. The war, in a sense, served as a “legitimizer,” wherein professors could “demonstrate their worth to themselves and to the public upon which they depended for support.” By the same token, in an all-too-brief discussion of Ray Abrams’s Preachers Present Arms (see Libertarian Forum, November, 1977, pp. 5-6), she surmises that the clergy found in war a rapprochement with the state, increased prestige, and renewal of the pulpit.

George T. Blakey, a member of the Eastern Indiana Center at Earlham College, focusses on a more narrow topic, but one equally damning to the academy: the historian as propagandist. By the time World War I broke out, the historical guild was becoming more professionalized—thanks to the German concept of “scientific history,” the influence of Johns Hopkins University, the initiation of graduate programs, and the seminar method of studying source material. Both the American Historical Association (AHA) and the American Historical Review (AHR) became staffed with trained scholars, and such gifted “amateurs” as Henry Adams and James Ford Rhodes gave way to such German-trained “professionals” as Albert Bushnell Hart and William E. Dodd.

Once war broke out, some historians went directly into war work. Civil War specialist James G. Randall, for example, took a leave of absence from Roanoke College to join the United States Shipping Board. Slavery expert Ulrich B. Phillips left the University of Michigan to become educational secretary of YMCA Camp Gordon in Georgia. The work, Phillips said, was “the most inspiring thing I have ever experienced.”

Soon more appropriate tasks were in store. Columbia’s James T. Shotwell, Princeton’s Dana C. Munro, Illinois’s Evarts B. Greene, and the AHR editors J. Franklin Jameson and Waldo G. Leland all fostered, indeed led, the National Board for Historical Service (NBHS), a body that distributed pamphlets, arranged speaking tours, revised school curricula, and investigated government projects. A second propaganda body, George Creel’s Committee on Public Information (CPI), sponsored a Division of Civic and Educational Cooperation, with Minnesota’s Guy Stanton Ford as director. This body subsidized massive amounts of court history, enrolling several historians in its ranks.

A third organization was the National Security League (NSL), a group that had backed compulsory military training and opposed antiwar politicians before the United States entered the conflict. When America declared war, the NSL established a Committee on Patriotism Through Education, with tasks similar to those of the CPI and the NBHS. The chairmanship was first given to Albert Bushnell Hart, then to Princeton’s Robert M. McElroy. Hart had been president of both the AHA and the American Political Science Association. During the war “Bushy” denied that Germany possessed any “eminent professors of history”; indeed, the only thing the Reich had of value was its beer. McElroy’s professional record was far less distinguished, but his fervor—if anything—exceeded Hart’s.

During the war, the CPI and the NBHS distributed some 33 million pamphlets, with the press serializing some items, (There is no record of NSL outreach although it must have been considerable). Minnesota’s William Stearns Davis, author of European history surveys and historical novels, edited a pamphlet containing Wilson’s war message; his footnotes supplied historical justification for US belligerency. (John Latane of Johns Hopkins, himself with the NSL, called Davis’s effort “so full of errors of fact and inference that it is an insult to the intelligence of the American people.”) McElroy lined pacific quotations of Wilson alongside belligerent comments by Nietzsche, Treitschke, and Frederick the Great. The German soul, said the Princeton man, was “a soul perverted, and black as hell itself.”

Other pamphlets continued in the same vein. Van Tyne warned against anti-British accounts of the American Revolution. Carl Becker compared America’s “ideal of democracy” to “the German ideal of a world empire established by ruthless aggression.” Wallace K. Notestein of Minnesota offered 160 pages of warlike German statements. (Notestein’s original edition had several antiwar references, but the CPI editors deleted these; they might—so the CPI maintained—blunt the impact of the pamphlet, besides calling attention to Notestein’s German name). Earl E. Sperry of Syracuse wrote a leaflet entitled “The Tentacles of the German Octopus in America,” in which German-American newspapers, schools, and clubs were “exposed” as appendages of the German government.

Perhaps most ambitious of all was the CPI’s War Cyclopedia. This volume, subtitled A Handbook for Ready References on the Great War, was edited by Frederick L. Paxson of the University of Wisconsin. Princeton’s Corwin and Bernadotte E. Schmitt of Western Reserve served on the staff. Beard was slated for essays on “Atrocities”, “Frightfulness,” “Rheims,” and “Belgian violations;” Becker for articles on “Scraps of Paper,” “Poilu,” “Tommy,” “Boch,” and “Italia Irridenta;” Sidney Bradshaw Fay wrote on “Berlin to Bagdad,” “Place in the Sun,” and “Bernardi;” and Chicago’s Andrew C. McLaughlin discussed “Edith Cavell,” “Blacklist,” and “Louvain.” According to such entries, the Central Powers were the wickedest of the wicked, the Allies the purest of the pure.

Historians carried such fervor to the lecture podium. Ford described the German destruction of churches and convents to a capacity audience at the Mormon Tabernacle. Hart accused a Wilson critic of “outright treason,” doing so at a forum held at New York’s Church of the Ascension. Jameson drew up “lantern slides” that confronted audiences with Bismarck, the Krupp works, and a Zeppelin raid on England.

Sometimes efforts backfired. For example, in a speech given at the University of Wisconsin, McElroy noted the apathy of some cadets in the audience, forced to listen to the patriotic speeches for three hours in pouring rain. “By God, I believe you are traitors,” he snapped, thereby subjecting himself and the NSL to severe criticism.

Part of the historians’ task involved censorship. Columbia’s James Harvey Robinson, with the aid of colleague James T. Shotwell, altered a text to meet criticism from the Justice Department and Theodore Roosevelt. Whereas the 1916 edition of Medieval and Modern Times divided war guilt among all belligerents, the 1919 edition condemned Germany alone. Ford and his assistant Samuel B. Harding of Indiana University supervised the translating of CPI pamphlets into German, working in the hope that these new materials would replace traditional texts in German language classes. Historians monitored the foreign language press, reporting their findings to the Creel Committee. Bernadotte E. Schmitt covered Cleveland; George Sabine, Missouri; Solon J. Buck, Minnesqta. Charles Altschul, an Anglophile businessman, and Harry Elmer Barnes surveyed a hundred textbooks, after which they wrote the report The American Revolution in Our School Textbooks. Both men urged all authors to stress the common heritage of the English-speaking peoples.

The controversy over the Sisson Documents offers a prime example of such historical prostitution. In March 1918, Edgar Sisson, former editor of Cosmopolitan Magazine, was serving as a CPI representative in Russia. He obtained documents purporting to prove that the Bolshevik regime was a puppet of the German general staff. The State Department doubted the authenticity of these materials, but Sisson and Creel convinced Wilson that they were genuine. The President in turn suggested the CPI publicize the Sisson Documents. When Creel gladly complied, much of the American press began claiming that they were fraudulent. The NBHS appointed AHR editor of J. Franklin Jameson and Samuel N. Harper, professor of Russian language at Chicago to “investigate.” Jameson knew little Russian; Harper had been vocal in his opposition to the Soviet regime and had already committed himself in print to their authenticity. After less than a week of study, but under heavy CPI pressure to confirm to its verdict, the two historians testified to their veracity. In fact, they wrote a 300 page report on it all, The German-Bolshevik Conspiracy, which appeared just before the armistice. Soviet authority George F. Kennan, researching the issue decades later, asks how American experts could have possibly arrived at such a judgement, for any serious examination would have revealed the papers as forgeries.

Historians also attempted to propagandize the classrooms directly. The AHA sponsored the History Teacher’s Magazine, which claimed to offer “The common ground on which history and patriotism meet.” In its pages, Breasted showed how ancient showed how ancient Egypt’s desire for empire had contemporary parallels, and William D. Gray of Smith indicated how “ancient Caesarism and imperialism are living forces in Germany today.” (Both societies, Gray argued, had “pompous and arrogant speeches” and “grandiose and brutal triumphal monuments.”) Charles H. McIlwain found America the legal descendant of medieval England. Becker described the Monroe Doctrine in a folksy manner; the United States, he said, could no longer adopt a Little Jack Homer attitude in defending its interests. Both World War I and the American Civil War, said Middle Period expert Carl Russell Fish of Wisconsin, involved restriction of the press and suppression of some legal rights; however, such measures were justified in efforts to free subject peoples.

Only when the war ended did the historians come under attack. H. L. Mencken labelled them “Star Spangled Men.” The Sage of Baltimore proposed a decoration: The Grand Cross of the Order would be composed of “a gold badge in polychrome enamel and stained glass, a baldric of the national colors, a violet plug hat with a sunburst on the side.” In addition, the historians would receive a pension for prostituting professional ethics. Soon Harry Elmer Barnes repented of his propaganda efforts, encouraging his protege C. Hartely Grattan in 1927 to write a biting expose for the American Mercury.

Yet most historians remained unaffected by their wartime role. As Blakey writes, “For the most part they regarded their extraordinary venture into patriotic service as an aberrant chapter in their lives, an atypical departure from scholarship necessitated by the national crisis and obviating judgement by professional standards. Their lives and careers would return to normal with the armistice in the same way as military, scientific, and medical participants in the war effort would resume prewar activities, overcoming the brief but troublesome disruption caused by the international conflict.” Ford, Munro, and Greene all became president of the AHA; Ford served as editor of the AHR from 1941 to 1953. Hart was widely recognized as an authority on George Washington. Van Tyne’s War of Independence (1929) won a Pulitzer Prize, as did McLaughlin’s Constitutional History of the United States (1935). Shotwell took time out from editing 400 volumes on the war to advise various projects for international organization. Jameson directed the Library of Congress’s manuscripts division. Notestein wrote the widely respected English Peoples on the Eve of Colonization (1954). Only Harding and McElroy fell into relative obscurity, with the former editing children’s books, the latter lecturing at British universities.

Despite the breach of professional ethics, intellectuals found it appropriate to make themselves available as government servants. The basic conviction—that the highest professional obligation was to provide useful service to the state—was not challenged. Revisionists such as Beard and Bicker, so Carol Gruber argues, changed their minds about the particular cause which they had promoted, but they never reevaluated the fundamental social role.

If professors—individuals whose vocation involves upholding truth at all cost—are guilty of distortion, it is hardly surprising to find journalists often lacking objectivity. Philip Knightley, an independent writer, offers an account based primarily on memoirs and secondary sources. His title comes from a comment made by California senator Hiram Johnson, who said in 1917 that “The first casualty when war comes is truth.” It is an apt title, for Knightley’s account spares no one, including such sacrosanct newspapers as the New York Times, New Statesman, Times of London, and Manchester Guardian.

Knightley begins his account with stories of journalistic bungling in such conflicts as the Crimean, American Civil, Franco-Prussian, and Boer Wars. He devotes several chapters to World War I, a conflict in which censorship of battle losses was combined with frentic propaganda efforts. Much attention is given to the British propaganda organization, which, writes Knightley, was so masterful that Goebbels later used it as his model. It was, in fact, Allied correspondents who first invented tales of German Corpse factories and Belgian babies without hands, while Rudyard Kipling wrote, “There are only two divisions in the world today, human beings and Germans.”

True, the Germans also circulated atrocity stories, such as the rumor that Gurkha and Sikh troops would sneak across the lines at night, slit German throats, and drink blood. However, they bungled the Edith Cavell incident, in which a British nurse working in a Brussels hospital was executed for helping Allied prisoners escape. The French, after all, had already shot one woman for exactly the same offense, and they would shoot eight more for similar transgressions before the war ended.

In the meantime, the real combat accounts were stifled. At first Lord Kitchener refused to allow correspondents in France (“Out of my way, you drunken swabs,” he had bellowed in the Sudan), and several were imprisoned. British war illustrators were forbidden to draw corpses. “We must be our own censors,” said George Bernard Shaw, while H. G. Wells, who like Shaw visited the front, hoped that witnessing death would not turn him into “a mere useless gibbering stop-the-war-at-any-price pacifist.” News of the Mons defeat and the German victory at Tannenberg was suppressed and the Battle of the Frontiers, in which the Germans wiped out some 300,000 French soldiers in August 1914, remained unreported until the war was over. The British and French people did not know the full extent of their casualties until victory; in 1916 the German military had begun to falsify losses.

Given such limitations, the truth concerning Russia was particularly long in coming. During the Tsarist regime, censors kept the public from reading dispatches dealing with the incompetence of Russian forces or the shortcomings of her aristocracy. British and French correspondents refused to contemplate the impact of a possible Russian defeat on the Western Front, and—besides—one could not attack an ally in a war portrayed as a struggle between good and evil. The Times of London ignored accounts critical of the Russian effort while carrying such headlines as RUSSIA FIRM AND UNITED. Except for John Reed of The Masses and Philip Price of the Manchester Guardian, correspondents refused to take the growing Bolshevik movement seriously.

Once the Communists assumed power, The New York Times kept predicting imminent defeat. Within two years, the August newspaper had Lenin and Trotsky planning flight (four times) and already fleeing (twice), with Lenin alone planning retirement (twice), killed (once), and in prison (three times). Ever hopeful that Russia might stay in the war, it featured the headline BOLSHEVIKI MAY HELP ALLIES BEST. Stories of the Allied intervention were underplayed, and few in the West knew of the severe drubbing taken by White armies. Little wonder that diplomat John Cudahy wrote years after the American intervention in Siberia, “When the last battalion set sail from Archangel, not a soldier knew, not even vaguely, why he had fought or why he was going now, and why his comrades were left behind, so many of them beneath wooden crosses.”

Coverage of Mussolini’s war against Ethiopia was little better. Journalists, confined to Addis Ababa and usually pro-Abbyssinian, fell prey to Haile Selassie’s handouts predicting brilliant guerrilla campaigns and quick victories. New York Times correspondent Herbert L. Matthews, who admired the fascists, was almost a lone exception. Matthews warned that the Abbyssinians could not withstand Italy’s forces, but his comments went unheeded.

In the Spanish Civil War journalistic partisanship was even more extreme, in fact quite destructive. Ernest Hemingway, who represented the North American Newspaper Alliance, had been chairman of the American Friends of Spanish Democracy and aided in drilling International Brigades. Louis Fischer of the Nation took it upon himself to advise the Soviet ambassador to Spain and served as quartermaster of the International Brigade depot in Albacete. Arthur Koestler, correspondent for the London New Chronicle, worked undercover for the Comintern. His Spanish Testament, which pretended to be an eye-witness account of Spanish atrocities, was composed in Paris, not Madrid, and written under the direction of German Communist Willi Muenzenberg.

Such sentiment soon led to gross naivete, with only an occasional dissenter, such as George Orwell, standing aloof. When Orwell correctly claimed that Stalin was more concerned with eliminating the left than with fighting Franco, the New Statesman refused to print his disptaches. Then left-wing publisher Victor Gollancz turned down Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, of which only 600 copies were sold in Orwell’s lifetime.

Hemingway might have been the chief offender. He predicted Republican victory six months before Franco won, basing his optimisro on glowing reports from the Pravda and Isvestia correspondent. Even more irresponsibly, he failed to report that the Communists were summarily executing “untrustworthy” Republican elements, although he certainly knew of such behavior. Had the prominent novelist shared his knowledge, argues Knightley, he might have prevented further horrors. In passing, Knightley claims that the Guernica raid—contrary to myth—was a legitimate military objective; the German attack was not levelled primarily to demoralize civilians. Similarly, he questions the authenticity of Robert Capa’s “Moment of Death,” the famous photograph of a Republican militiaman falling backwards on Spanish soil.

World War II, of course, brought about one journalistic snafu after another. Take the British. After the Russians invaded Finland, such journalists as Virginia Cowles so exaggerated early Finnish successes that the West was surprised to learn that Russia had won the war. Skillful propaganda turned the evacuation at Dunkirk into a moral victory. Only now do we learn that reports of merciless bombing were highly exaggerated, that some survivors had no desire to return, that troop behavior before and during the embarcation was by no means exemplary, that the British deliberately underplayed France’s significant role in delaying the Germans, and that indeed the whole retreat was unnecessary.

There is more. Churchill personally ordered a blackout on all news concerning the sinking of British ships on the Atlantic, causing even the pro-British Edward R. Murrow to complain bitterly. British correspondents boasted that Singapore was invincible (“ready for anything,” said Leonard Mosely of the Daily Sketch) weeks before its fall, while exaggerating the minor and costly operations of guerrilla leader Orde Wingate in Burma.

Knightley offers a revisionist account of the Battle of Britain. While acknowledging “amazing acts of bravery,” he notes that Britain was never the underdog, that numbers of German losses were exaggerated to maintain morale, and that the Blitz was not a great social leveller. Protection for a rich Londoner was quite different from protection for a poor one, and many parents who could afford to send their children overseas did so. (By the way, it was Hurricanes, not Spitfires, that were the RAF’s major weapon.) Contrary to popular myth, Knightley finds Coventry a legitimate military target, as it contained several motor, piston ring, and aircraft engine factories.

The Soviets in particular sought to shut out news of defeat. Nothing, they believed, should be told the Russian people, much less the world, that might damage morale. American journalists soon suffered the censor’s pen, and only later—claims Knightley—was it realized how poorly planned the German invasion was. (Example: Germany entered Russia with 3,200 tanks; the Soviets had 20,000, more than the rest of the world put together). Knightley also notes how the battle of Kursk, which he finds the real military turning point of the war, went unreported in the excitement over Stalingrad. The Western public remained unaware of the mass exile of over 300,000 Crimean Tartars who collaborated with the Germans, and it took the Soviet account of the; Katyn massacres at face value.

The record of the United States was not unspotted, particularly in regards to the Pacific War. When Secretary of the Navy Frank-Knox deliberately underestimated the damage at Pearl Harbor, the press took his appraisal at face value. Correspondents to the Asian mainland boosted Chiang’s cause, doing so in the full knowledge that the Generalissimo’s forces were refusing to engage in serious fighting. Chinese Nationalist leaders would show travelling US correspondents the same batch of captured equipment and prisoners of war again and again, moving the POW’s and booty from one place to another before the Americans arrived. (One correspondent proved it by scratching his initials on a helmet). Leland Stowe soon found the Chicago Daily News suppressing his reports of Chiang’s corruption, and Theodore White saw Time doctoring his reports of Koumintang profiteering. The American press presented the Battle of the Coral Seas as a major victory, one that involved the saving of Australia; in reality it was a draw and the Japanese were not capable of major invasion. Censors curbed reports of kamikaze raids and kept the public from learning that 9,300 Japanese balloons, each carrying anti-personnel bombs, had drifted across the Pacific. Nor did Americans learn of trouble between GIs and Australian forces, with tensions so severe that a pitched battle took place in Queensland.

A nation seldom reveals its own atrocities, and the United States was no exception. For example, official communiques claimed that American planes bombed only military objectives in Tokyo, and bombed them with “pinpoint accuracy.” In reality, as we now know, Tokyo bombings were indiscriminate fire raids, causing more casualties than the atomic bomb at Hiroshima. (One raid killed 140,000 and left a million homeless). For a month after Hiroshima, MacArthur kept all southern Japan “off-limits” to the press. When Wilfred Burchett of the London Daily Express described the resulting radiation sickness, he was challenged by Major General Leslie R. Groves, head of the Manhattan Project. In short, many of the scandals connected with Viet Nam—the attempted silencing of David Halberstam, the longtime ignorance of the conflict in Cambodia, the efforts to suppress news of My Lai—have quite a long ancestry.

Much of Knightley’s material is invaluable; however, he could have done far more with it. The important questions remain unanswered, undoubtedly because the book lacks any analytical framework. We do not know how typical his examples are, or how the press as an institution has changed over time. Surely more could have been done with the ideology of reporters, the ownership of journals, the politics of censors, the general policy-making proclivities of the fourth estate. Indeed, is objectivity ever possible, particularly in wartime? Should reporters make their biases explicit, as so many of the “new journalists” appear to be doing? In short, is a more responsible journalism possible, and if so, have we any positive models of it? What Knightley gives us in exposes; what we should be getting is analysis.

Such analysis is found in two treatments of American government propaganda during World War II. (Although Blum’s book has valuable material on blacks, the economy, and political maneuverings, this essay will only deal with his treatment of propaganda.) Blum and Winkler, both Yale historians, describe the Office of Facts and Figures (OFF), and the Office of War Information (OWI), two efforts to mobilize sentiment on behalf of the war. The agencies were directed by liberal interventionists, including poet Archibald MacLeish, playwright Robert E. Sherwood, and broadcaster Elmer Davis.

However, despite the ambitious goals of the OFF and OWI, their efforts were often weak, and neither agency had the impact of the Creel Committee. If their pamphlets ranged from the need for doctors to Negro employment in war industries, definition of war aims was often banal. For example, one character in an OFF radio drama proclaims that the war was “about all young people like us. About love and gettin’ hitched, and havin’ a home and some kids, and breathin’ fresh air out in the suburbs. . .about livin’ an’ workin’ decent, like free people.”

Some propagandists, of course, wanted headier wine, and Blum describes some of their thoughts. Harold Lasswell, propaganda expert and a major OFF figure, believed that propaganda needed “a large element of fake in it. . .That only truthful statements should be used. . .seems. . .an impractical maxim.” Sherman H. Dryer, a critic of radio, said, “The strategy of truth. . .is a handicap. . .Truth. . .will enhance the integrity of our officialdom, but it is a moot question whether it will enhance either the efficiency or the effectiveness of our efforts to elicit concerned action from the public.” Archer Oboler, a writer for OFF staffer Norman Corwin, called for “hate on the air,” at which point MacLeish claimed that OFF stood in the Christian tradition of hating the sin but loving; the sinner. The German and Japanese people should not be hated, MacLeish commented; only their evil deeds. Blum writes at this point, “But that admirable distinction, as MacLeish must have realized, was beyond the grasp of many of those engaged in selling the war and most of those whom they were trying to reach.”

FDR eliminated MacLeish’s OFF in the spring of 1942, and soon Davis’s OWI was in charge of major propaganda efforts. However, the OWI was soon beset with factionalism—struggles between those who sought to make new policy and those who sought to interpret existing policy, between liberals promoting a global New Deal and professional advertisers engaged in boosterism for its own sake. One OWI poster, designed by a former advertising manager for Coca Cola, displayed a Coke bottle wrapped in an American flag. The legend below read, “Step right up and get your four delicious freedoms. It’s a refreshing war.”

Because of such antics, a host of writers, including journalist Henry Pringle and historian Arhtur M. Schlesinger, Jr., resigned. “As we see it,” their statement read, “the activities of the OWI on the home front are dominated by high-pressure promoters who prefer slick salesmanship to honest information. . .They are turning this Office of War Information into an Office of War Bally-hoo.”

Some OWI propaganda was censored. For example, as Winkler notes, the State Department found a pamphlet on the four Freedoms unsuitable for India as “it might incite the Indians against the British.” Nor could the OWI make any criticism of the Chiang regime or the Darlan deal. If American policy was vague or ambiguous, OWI attempted to patch over the points of contention and indicate that solutions were underway.

Though neither author mentions it, some 2,000 writers worked for a variety of government agencies. Included were such luminaries as the Reverend Harry Emerson Fosdick, humorist Alexander Woolcott, novelist John P. Marquand—and stripper Gypsy Rose Lee. The Writers’ War Board was headed by mystery writer Rex Stout, who boasted, “I hate Germans, and am not ashamed of it.” Critic Clifton Fadiman concurred: “The only way to make a German understand is to kill him, and even then he doesn’t get the point.”

Although Blum mentions neither Stout nor Fadiman, he offers a strong indictment. The War production Board, he notes, approved an ad calling for the extermination of Japanese “rats,” comic strips portrayed the Japanese with ape-like characteristics, and even quasi-scholarly treatment of Japanese culture stressed an inherent warrior ethic. Fiction writers Helen Maclnnes, Glenway Wescott, and Nevil Shute found brutality an essentially German trait, while Upton Sinclair’s globetrotting hero Lanny Budd preached that there was nothing to do but to kill.

Blum writes aptly, “Sinclair’s point was simplistic. His war was waged between Americans and Germans, Roosevelt and Hitler, absolute good and absolute evil. That was the kind of war in which many Americans came to believe. Missing from the picture of the enemy that the novelists painted was the gentle conviction of Archibald MacLeish, his reminder to his countrymen that Christian doctrine called upon man to hate the sin but to forgive the sinner.”

Stripping the enemy of all humanity might have made for greater unity, and for increased war production as well, but it did little to prepare Americans for the complexities of the postwar world. And when the international stability promised after the war was not forthcoming, public attitudes—as any student of the Truman period knows—were rife with apathy and cynicism. After the conflict, as Blum points out, a different set of novels was written—Norman Mailer’s Naked and the Dead, James Jones’s From Here to Eternity, Irwin Shaw’s Young Lions. Such works, as well as the poems of Randall Jerrell, indict oppressive militarism, and a closed and brutal social system. Indeed for the authors, the war was a pointless one.

John Hersey, so Blum notes, went full circle. In Men of Bataan, Hersey wrote that the American people “adored their MacArthur as if he were a young genius who had just flown across the dim Atlantic. . .or as if he were a big and perfect slugger. . .or. . .some new shiek of the silver screen.” MacArthur’s men were “wonderfully brave. . .they encompass the highest human values.” By the time he wrote A Bell for Adano, as he wrote later, he realized that “the American hero. . .might be a dangerous shit.” In The Wall, a novel dealing with life in the Warsaw ghetto, he has one Jewish resistant say, “nationalism can be as frightful in a Jew as in a German.” “Or an American,” adds Blum, “or any other man who permitted his concern for the unit—the platoon, the country—to eclipse his concern for mankind.”

War fervor, followed by war cynicism, is no isolated occurrence in American history, and as Knightley shows, even some of the more prominent Vietnam doves were once hawks, Wrote David Halberstam, author of the damning Best and the Brightest, “We would have liked nothing better than to believe that the war was going well, and that it would eventually be won.” Neil Sheehan, who broke the story of the Ellsbery-Pentagon Papers, hoped as late at 1966 for an American victory. Charles Mohr, who protested Time’s distortion of his pessimistic dispatches, said, “Everyone thought I left (Time) because I was against the war. I just thought it wasn’t working. I didn’t come to think of it as immoral until the very end.” Mohr, in fact, was so hawkish that, when he returned to Vietnam as a New York Times correspondent, he carried an M-16 and participated in the American retaking of Hue Citadel.

Further war, or crises of any sort, will doubtless bring more journalistic and academic distortion. It seems to be in the nature of the human beast. Today it is primarily the left that is calling for professional “engagement” on a number of issues, ranging from demands for “anti-racist” history to calls to aid Third World revolution. The left, of course, is not alone, as witness the prominent academics enlisted in various Cold War lobbies. Howard Becker once asked his colleagues at the American Sociological Society, “Whose side are you on?” It can be a dangerous question.

Arts and Movies

by Mr. First Nighter

Good Movies! In the past weeks, we have seen several excellent films—a remarkable statement from our ordinarily jaundiced perspective. Three of them have been comedies, and unusually fine ones. One of the best, and surely the least heralded, was Semi-Tough, Michael Ritchie, dir., with Burt Reynolds, Jill Clayburgh, Kris Kristofferson, and Bert Convy, and Lotte Lenya. Semi-Tough is, first and foremost, extremely funny, featuring on-target and acidulous satires of Est (“Beat”), Rolfing (“Pelfing”), Gravity Therapy and all the other modern psycho-lunacies. In fact, its major theme is a satiric look at the whole psycho-babble culture. Lotte Lenya is superb as Clara Pelf (“You can only learn through . . . Pain!” she declaims in her thick mittel-Europeanaccent, as she digs her elbow into Burt Reynolds’ chest.) Bert Convy is excellent and incisive as the smarmy Werner Erhard look-alike, and Kris Kristofferson is properly drippy as the Est-head: (“You’re perfect; I’m perfect”). Burt Reynolds is at his finest in his usual pleasantly mocking role. And the audience lets out a great cheer when Bert Convy emits one “That’s beautiful, too,” too many, and gets a well-deserved and hilarious punch in the face.

But the remarkable thing about Semi-Tough is that is is not confined to one theme, as so many Hollywood comedies are. In its richness of texture, in its mosaic of funny bits and themes, Semi-Gough, more than any film in a long, long time, takes on the quality of the marvelous old Hollywood comedies of the thirties—the Cary Grant-Claudette Colbert-Katharine Hepburn glories of long ago. For whereas the typical Hollywood comedy takes one joke and repeats and underlines it for twenty minutes, until the veriest moron in the audience has to get the point, Semi-Tough has many interesting and funny things going on at the same time. Semi-Tough is the sort of picture that will repay many sittings with fresh nuances and insights. The leitmotif of dollar poker played repeatedly by Reynolds and Jill Clayburgh is just one of the examples. Of course, there is an important difference between Semi-Tough and the old comedies: the addition of the obligatory doses of obscenity. But the thirties flavor is retained nevertheless.

This leaves perhaps the best for last: for Jill Clayburgh is a marvel as the daffy, intelligent, independent, and spontaneously expressive heroine. Her personality and style are strongly reminiscent of Claudette Colbert’s, and what greater compliment could she receive? Much of the thirties flavor in the movie is her doing.

It is unfortunate that Semi-Tough was not even even nominated for an Academy Award, and neither were any of the actors. They deserved top consideration.

It has been the fashion to disparage Neil Simon, but his The Goodbye Girl is an excellent comedy, and one of his best efforts in a long time. Simon has been denounced for his one-liners, but if one-liners are funny, why shouldn’t a comedy have them? And particularly when, in Goodbye Girl, the one-liners are embedded in a plot and characterizations that are interesting and hold together well. Make no mistake: Goodbye Girl with only one Theme, is not nearly as good a movie, as well directed or as funny, as Semi-Tough; but it is good nevertheless. If Semi-Tough harks back to the thirties comedies, Goodbye Girl is in the spirit of the forties wartime comedies where several people are forced to crowd together in one small apartment. The rest almost writes itself, but there are Simon’s superior one-liners. Not only that: Simon has drawn excellent performances from the actors. Indeed, he has performed one of the great feats of the year: making Richard Dreyfuss into a likable comic actor. If Dreyfuss abandons his former pushy persona and sticks to comedy, he can become a new, Jewish Jack Lemmon. Quinn Cummings, as the hip yet vulnerable young daughter of Marsha Mason, is outstanding and deserves the Academy Awayd for best supporting actress.

The only slightly sour spot in the casting is The Goodbye Girl herself, Marsha Mason, who, after making every allowance, simply comes off as harsh and rather unattractive. Since Miss Mason was unusually appealing in Cinderella Liberty not too many years ago, the fault here must be chalked up to her husband, Neil Simon.

Similar in many ways to the Goodbye Girl is the brand-new House Calls, which opened to reviews far more negative than it deserves. Directed by Howard Zieff, and, more importantly, written by the veteran comic writer Max Shulman, House Calls features the marvelous comic talents of sardonic, stoop-shouldered, slobby, middle-aged Walter Matthau, who also helped write his own part. Matthau plays a recently widower, a surgeon now enthusiastically indulging in the bachelor life; Glenda Jackson resembles Miss Mason as the short-haired, flinty foil to Matthau. Except that Miss Jackson is both flintier and more intelligent. The predictable love story between the two is the plot line for hanging a myriad of laughs. Another funny situation is the down-at-the-heels-hospital, run ineptly and a bit malevolently by an overaged Art Carney. The surprising thing about House Calls is that the critics rated it so far below Goodbye Girl; they are about on a par, which is good enough. Perhaps the reason is that Simon is better known and far more popular than Shulman in the entertainment industry.

Another excellent film, this time in the suspense field, is Michael Crichton’s Coma, which deals with a more malevolent hospital than the one in House Calls. With Coma, one must ignore the schlock ads, which imply a Grade Z cross between Jaws and The Exorcist. Also, some of the reviews charged that Coma is filled with excessive gore, which it most emphatically is not (contrast most of the early Hammer Films from Britain, or even those of Sam Peckinpah.) On the contrary, Coma is taunt, suspenseful, exciting, just what an adventure film should be. It has the best kind of suspense plot: an innocent, brave young hero (in this case, heroine) drawn slowly but inexorably into a network of events where everyone—superficial good guys and bad guys alike—seems to be in on the evil plot. The picture gains immeasurably from author Crichton’s medical knowledge (an ex-medical student, Crichton has written the Andromeda Strain and other medical-suspense classics.)

Coma is not only suspenseful, but it is also libertarian. I don’t want to give away too much of the plot, but the bad guys are essentially the government-medical complex and its fascinating machinations. (This is not a picture to see before going into a hospital!)

Direction and acting are excellent, marred only by the casting of Genevieve Bujold in the central role. Miss Bujold is simply not good enough to sustain a role that requires being onscreen almost the entire picture; for one thing, it is difficult to accept someone who looks like a young fifteen year-old in the role of a brilliant young physician. But this is only a minor flaw: see Coma!