I NEVER got to explain to Joe why the meeting I hadn’t attended meant so much to me. It was because I saw that what my guild brothers were defending was the middle road. The men who beat De Mille, an extremist of the right, were not from the left. Many were “reactionaries” like John Farrow or Jack Ford. But all were for the way of fairness and decency. What they were defending was classic Americanism, our basic way of living with each other in this country. And they’d succeeded.

But if part of me believed that forces of good had won a lasting victory, some Old World instinct warned me that despite the guild’s triumph, I should now be especially wary, that my enemies were not scattered in defeat but regrouping in the shadows, and that their next show of strength might come from a totally different direction. It was not over; it was beginning.