Add to this one other matter, and the whole story (though oversimplified) of that failure is told. Add patriotism. In some sophisticated Negro circles it is a matter for amused laughter that no Negro has ever been a traitor to the United States. But the laughter does not abrogate the fact. More perhaps than other American minorities, Negroes have had inducements to treachery. Clark expressed it: “What has this country ever done for me?” And of course Negroes before and since have asked the same question. It is purely rhetorical. Clark did not realize it, but America, its ideals, its direction, its basic spirit (for we must again deal with abstractions) had given him a belief in the individual worth and dignity of himself as a man. DuBois, I think, was right when, back in his young, good days, he said, “First, this is our country: we have worked for it, we have suffered for it, we have fought for it ... we have reached in this land our highest modern development and nothing, humanly speaking, can prevent us from eventually reaching here the full stature of our manhood.... Our wrongs are still wrong [but] we will not bargain with our loyalty.” I am just cynical enough to add a sour note. This loyalty comes in part from a fear of expulsion. It is a historic fear, stemming back to the colonization movement in the seventeenth century. Recently Negroes have seen another minority in other countries expelled, and they know it can be done. But American Negroes have no Palestine. I will not say that Negroes saw democracy as the highest, final product of man’s political development, nor that they saw enough differences between Communism and democracy to reassure them of the worth of the latter. They did not come to that stage of intellection—and neither did I until much later. I do not think that even the Negro Communists, so recently in the news, with all their reputation for mental acumen, have thought much about the real differences. For actually, of course, the Communist doctrine, like the dogma of the most fundamental religious sect, does not encourage thought. If it did, there probably would be less than a villageful of Communists in the whole Western world, for it would be seen that Communism is a falling away from the idea that the Western world has lived by since the Middle Ages—the idea that _man_ is the end of all human endeavor, and that mere “survival and security” are not enough for man. But this distinction is only gross enough to explain why Communism is the ideology of crisis; why it must seize its chance to win men’s minds when their highest hope is only to stave off death. No, even the intellectuals seem not to have seen this; and the other distinctions are subtler, finer. But they are also fundamental.