The Fellow-Travellers: Intellectual Friends of Communism by David Caute

The Fellow-Travellers: Intellectual Friends of Communism Reviews

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  Paul O'Leary

  Give me socialism, to paraphrase Augustine, just not here. This is the fellow travelers' condescending? motto. David Caute's book on fellow traveling in Europe and the United States is a pleasure to read. The author's biting wit directed against the travelers, those whom they worship, and those who would persecute them for it makes this quite a fun, though sobering, read. Many of the names, Oh my word there's a lot of them, a cast of hundreds, are forgotten now, like Harry Ward; but many should not be. The frailty, if not folly, of man is the subject of this book, as well as man's daring to hope in circumstances favorable, unfavorable, and absolutely deadly. Caute examination toward the end of the book on the "witch hunts" in the USA contrasts with the English experience during the Cold War. Of course America comes out the worse. Caute offers an interesting explanation: America had very few communists so hysteria was at a pitch unknown to the English and French as communists in these countries made up a much larger percentage of the population. If witches abound, the reasoning goes, you have no need to hunt them.