The
clay feet of liberal saints
Jonah Goldberg
From the Los Angeles Times
January 5, 2006
THE HOTTEST VOICE of Hollywood's conscience, George Clooney, recently
declared, "Yes, I'm a liberal, and I'm sick of it being a bad word. I
don't know at what time in history liberals have stood on the wrong
side of social issues."
I'd forgotten about this intriguingly categorical declaration until I
read in this newspaper a fascinating story about how the father of
journalistic muckraking, Upton Sinclair, not only knew that Nicola
Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were guilty but withheld his information
for the good of the "movement," for his personal safety and his
professional success. Sacco and Vanzetti, if you recall, were Italian
anarchists sentenced to death for the 1920 murders of a paymaster and
his guard in Braintree, Mass.
Sinclair, the Pulitzer Prize-winning crusader who penned the famous
novel "The Jungle," prompting Teddy Roosevelt to coin the term
"muckraker," had, quite simply, lied. But before he lied, he was a true
believer. He'd gone to Massachusetts to research his book "Boston,"
which was set against the backdrop of the trial — the trial, that is,
of two supposedly innocent men. Unfortunately for Sinclair, Sacco and
Vanzetti's lawyer told him the unvarnished truth: The pair were just
plain guilty, and their alibis were a pack of lies.
"I faced the most difficult ethical problem of my life," Sinclair wrote
to his attorney. "I had come to Boston with the announcement that I was
going to write the truth about the case." But the truth would cost him
too many readers. "It is much better copy as a naive defense of Sacco
and Vanzetti because this is what all my foreign readers expect, and
they are 90% of my public."
That Sacco and Vanzetti were guilty is no surprise to those who've
looked into the case (though some die-hards claim Vanzetti was merely a
co-conspirator after the fact). But that didn't stop the martyrdom
campaign. Their execution was used to galvanize everyone from
establishment liberals to the very, very hard left. Josef Stalin
publicly lamented it. Protests erupted in the capitals of Europe and
across the U.S. A young Felix Frankfurter staked his reputation on
their innocence. Sacco and Vanzetti became props in a passion play
about the evils of the U.S. in the 1920s, and the myth endured.
What is amazing is how familiar this story is. Much the same thing
happened with Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, the convicted Soviet spies.
Alger Hiss, a goliath of the East Coast liberal establishment, was a
spy. Yet he was backed by liberals who considered anti-communism, at a
minimum, gauche. In the 1960s, the saints and martyrs tumbled out
faster. "Free Huey!" was the cry, and American liberals and leftists
rallied to a whole pride of Black Panthers and other criminals, one
more murderous and cruel than the next. While at Yale, a young Hillary
Rodham volunteered for Panther lawyers. Revered conductor Leonard
Bernstein held a fundraiser for the cop-murdering Panthers in 1970.
In recent years, the lies and mythmaking have become perhaps even more
egregious. Tawana Brawley was lying, but Al Sharpton didn't care
because he was "building a movement." Mumia Abu-Jamal is guilty, but
don't say that in a faculty lounge. Stanley Tookie Williams was guilty.
Matthew Shepherd did not die "because he was gay" but because he was a
drug addict caught up with other drug addicts. The "Hollywood Ten" were
a complicated bunch, but they were Communists, even Stalinists. "It
matters not," quoth the liberals. "Print the legend."
It's difficult to find many liberal martyr-saints who haven't been
burnished by deceit. Oh, of course, there were many personally and
intellectually decent liberal heroes — Reinhold Niebuhr, John Dewey,
Michael Harrington, et al — but when they reach icon status, the facts
get inconvenient. To be sure, Martin Luther King Jr. deserves his place
among American heroes. But it's worth noting that what makes him an
American icon, as opposed to purely a liberal one, is his vision for a
colorblind nation. And colorblindness is no longer a core tenet of the
American left. President Kennedy was hardly the liberal of Oliver
Stone's imagination. And his brother, Bobby, was more hostile to civil
liberties than John Ashcroft, eagerly wiretapping Americans, including
King.
But then, "what is history," asked Napoleon, "but a fable agreed upon?"
Which returns us to Clooney, a decent-seeming fellow and certainly
brighter than the dim-bulb stereotype of many Hollywood liberals.
Still, he too is in the fable business: He has unilaterally beatified
Edward R. Murrow as another hero of liberalism. The truth is that
Murrow was just another journalist, better than average but flawed like
all of them, who arrived late to the anti-McCarthy bandwagon. Never
mind. Clooney's fans, like Sinclair's, always order the usual. And
always seem to get it.