Sidney Hook had fewer qualms about curtailing the liberties of Communists. He admitted that the Smith Act dealt not primarily with "overt actions" but with advocacy, incitement, speech, writing, thoughts. Nevertheless, the crucial issue for Hook, as for Diana Trilling, was the way in which the Communists' beliefs necessarily shaped their political conduct. That American Communists represented a "clear, present, flourishing, and extremely powerful" menace to the country's "national survival" seemed to him "undeniable." They were dangerous not because of their ideas, their numbers, or their political strength (none of which was very impressive), but because of their "organizational ties" to the Kremlin. They served "literally" as a "paramilitary fifth column" of the "Red Army"; they were composed of "some tens of thousands of disciplined conspirators, absolutely controlled by a declared enemy" that already dominated the "human and natural resources of one-third of the globe"; they were "obligated to strike whenever their foreign masters give the word." The aim of the Smith Act was to "paralyze" the domestic allies of Moscow before they could come close to achieving their goals. The Smith Act did not restrict the constitutional principles of free speech and political assembly, Hook insisted; merely the doctrines and activities of those who functioned as incipient quislings of a foreign power.
Richard H. Pells, The Liberal Mind in a Conservative Age: American Intellectuals in the 1940s and 1950s (1985), 284.
