Reverence—for What?

hard to tell. But that was, at any rate, the earnestly debated policy of the American Communist Party—which controlled at the time, I learn from Mr. Draper’s book, as many as ten thousand votes, most of them foreign-born!

Draper’s book, though so painstaking about political and ideological details—too much so, perhaps, for those never possessed (and educated) by the Communist dream—is enlivened by excellent character sketches of the main actors in the story—also by photographs and drawings of 43 of them. Their mild and rather ordinary aspect will be an instructive surprise to those who ascribe to a Communist conspirator the aspect of a villain in one of the old barnstorming melodramas. We are up against something more subtle and baffling than a villain or a conspiracy of villains: a world religion, namely, and one that exacts as sober a mental discipline as Thomas Aquinas did, and a self-sacrifice and sacrifice of father and mother in the cause of man’s salvation not unlike that demanded by the early Christian Church. It happens to be right here on earth that man is to be saved, and he is to be saved by fighting hate instead of kindly love. But that is temporary—a “transition period”—the goal is similar to that dreamed of by the Church fathers. Those caught in by it are more likely to resemble bright and hard-working YMCA secretaries than villains in a melodrama. You can’t count so blithely on their being foiled in the last act.

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F. Reid Buckley

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hard to tell. But that was, at any rate, the earnestly debated policy of the American Communist Party—which controlled at the time, I learn from Mr. Draper’s book, as many as ten thousand votes, most of them foreign-born!

Draper’s book, though so painstaking about political and ideological details—too much so, perhaps, for those never possessed (and educated) by the Communist dream—is enlivened by excellent character sketches of the main actors in the story—also by photographs and drawings of 43 of them. Their mild and rather ordinary aspect will be an instructive surprise to those who ascribe to a Communist conspirator the aspect of a villain in one of the old barnstorming melodramas. We are up against something more subtle and baffling than a villain or a conspiracy of villains: a world religion, namely, and one that exacts as sober a mental discipline as Thomas Aquinas did, and a self-sacrifice and sacrifice of father and mother in the cause of man’s salvation not unlike that demanded by the early Christian Church. It happens to be right here on earth that man is to be saved, and he is to be saved by fighting hate instead of kindly love. But that is temporary—a “transition period”—the goal is similar to that dreamed of by the Church fathers. Those caught in by it are more likely to resemble bright and hard-working YMCA secretaries than villains in a melodrama. You can’t count so blithely on their being foiled in the last act.