A Thinking Man's Liberal

SHADOW & SUBSTANCE by John P. Roche. 468 pages. Macmillan. $6.95.

He has been called an "imperialist" and "the defender of the ancien regime." He has been accused of "whitewashing McCarthy" and "throttling civil liberties." A John Bircher? An editor of the National Review? Not at all. He is John P. Roche (as in coach), national chairman of Americans for Democratic Action.

Times have changed, and so have many liberals. While championing some of the old, established causes to the hilt, Roche, a respected constitutional historian at Brandeis, belongs to a new breed of "tough-minded" liberals who try to avoid inflexible positions and judge the issues on their merits. Naturally, this does not sit well with ideological types, who, according to Roche, "seem to be preserved, like flies in amber, in the militant postures of their youth." In this collection of essays Roche has written, in effect, a brilliant riposte to the dogmatic left.

The Right to Oppress. A standard lament of the left is that U.S. liberties are fast dwindling under the pressures of mass, conformist society. Roche, who has investigated early Americans, dissents. There was a greater diversity of communities in the past, he writes, but within the communities no diversity was tolerated. Wise Roman Catholics steered clear of Puritans, Puritans shunned Anglicans, and Mormons avoided everybody: "Colonial America was an open society dotted with closed enclaves, and one could settle in with his cobelievers in safety and comfort, and exercise the right of oppression."

Thanks to urbanization and industrialization, writes Roche, Americans have more freedom today than ever before. Modern cities tolerate a multitude of opinions and muffle direct personal clashes. There is more legal protection of individual rights. "Even the Communists today," writes Roche, "exercise rights that lead the old Wobbly, Socialist, or trade-union organizer to smile condescendingly when the Daily Worker proclaims the existence of a 'reign of terror' in the United States."

Priorities of Fear. Roche has no patience with liberal apologists for totalitarians of the left like Castro: "I have never known a man who treated a gun as a symbol--instead of an instrument--who was not fundamentally depraved. When such an addict of romantic violence appears in politics mouthing left-wing slogans, are we to deny the insights of experience for the nostalgia of a phrase?" Roche also advises liberals to stop worrying and writing so much about the radical right. Right-wing extremists like the late Joseph F. McCarthy and Robert Welch must be fought but kept in perspective. After all, there has always been one or another on the rampage in every period of American history: "While among ourselves we may on occasion suspect that A.D.A. could not fight its way out of a wet paper sack, we take the John Birch Society on its own assessment as a tightly knit, single-purposed conspiratorial cadre. There are a lot of things that scare me to death--nuclear war, automobile accidents, lung cancer, to mention but three--but I have only a limited time to devote to fright. I therefore have a scale of priorities on which the 'menace from the Right' ranks 23rd--between the fear of being eaten by piranha and the fear of college presidents."

Importance of Anachronisms. For all his practicality, Roche does not advocate real politics alone: "Those who put their faith in Machiavelli all too often forget that the Florentine died both broke and out of office." One of the most moving chapters of his long book is devoted to the late Frank Murphy, Roosevelt's Attorney General and later a Supreme Court Justice, whom liberals and conservatives alike dismissed as a hopeless ideologue. In the starry-eyed pursuit of his principles, Murphy occasionally forgot about the real world he was living in. While admitting that Murphy was a "ritualistic liberal" and a "utopian pilgrim," Roche makes a convincing case that no other Justice of the high court in recent times has so consistently championed civil liberties. During World War II, especially, when every other Justice forgot about civil liberties for the duration, Murphy never wavered, and his lone dissent from the decision to incarcerate the California Nisei was a model of both courage and good law. Along with its pragmatists, Roche concludes, the U.S. needs a sprinkling of such Utopians as Murphy.

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