McCarthyism: When history is just a vibe

When journalists talk about the McCarthy era they rarely cite nonfiction books. After smugly declaring that "McCarthy never caught a spy", they name drop Arthur Miller and his play The Crucible.

Although it is ostensibly about the Salem witch trials, we all know [nudge, nudge, wink, wink] that it is about a different, more recent witch hunt.

Though highly lauded, the play is really nothing more than competent agitprop. Like all such works it blends facts with plausible lies to obscure the truth and promote a Big Lie. It is a case study in mendacity and self-glorification.

It is a mark of our low, dishonest age that The Crucible is treated as a serious study of the "Red Scare" and that Miller is held up as some sort of moral guide.

ii

A litany of lies and evasions

Robert Warshow eviscerated the play and Miller's pretensions when it was first staged. As he pointed out, the playwright seems to say much while he actually understands very little of the events he is mining for his little exercise in propaganda.

The 'universality' of Mr. Miller's play belongs neither to literature nor to history, but to that journalism of limp erudition which assumes that events are to be understood by referring them to categories, and which is therefore never at a loss for a comment. Just as in Death of a Salesman Mr. Miller sought to present 'the American' by eliminating so far as possible the 'non-essential' facts which might have made his protagonist a particular American, so in The Crucible he reveals at every turn his almost contemptuous lack of interest in the particularities -- which is to say, the reality -- of the Salem trials.

OK, so The Crucible has nothing to tell us about the Salem witch trials. All the smart people know Miller wasn't really writing about 1692 Massachusetts -- his concerns were more contemporary.

Unfortunately, Miller is no better at addressing those concerns.

For let us indeed not be misled. Mr. Miller has nothing to say about the Salem trials and makes only the flimsiest pretense that he has. The Crucible was written to say something about Alger Hiss and Owen Lattimore, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, Senator McCarthy, the actors who have lost their jobs on radio and television, in short the whole complex that is spoken of, with a certain lowering of the voice, as 'the present atmosphere.' And yet not say anything about that either.

This transmutation -- to write about "McCarthyism" by writing about Salem -- represents the foundational deceit of Miller's play. Leave aside the vast differences between a tiny 17th century frontier village and a giant 20th century superpower. All the smart people in 1953 knew witches did not exist. Miller wants us to think the same is true of the communists. Yet he, himself, had spent years in the movement, had seen their methods, and had even wrote for their publications.

Miller wrote The Crucible after the conviction of the Rosenbergs. He believed them innocent; we now know they were guilty. So, on that account alone, we have to acknowledge that the play was born out of literal disinformation. That is not entirely Miller's fault.* This misperception on his part may have been understandable in 1953.

But what should we say of the teachers and journalists who continue to promote the play as a window into the world of the "Red Scare"? They know -- or should know -- that there really were communist spies in Washington and communist cells in Hollywood.

Nicholas von Hoffman:

Point by point, Joe McCarthy got it all wrong and yet was still closer to the truth than those who ridiculed him.

"The present atmosphere" that was Miller's target had less to do with "popular hysteria" and much more to do with serious threats to our nation and culture.

*It must be noted, however, that until his last days, Miller always minimized Stalinist crimes and downplayed the Party's influence in Hollywood and New York's theater scene.

McCarthyism: "The indefinable "ism" (2)

Another charge against McCarthy is that he somehow unleashed a reign of terror that stifled dissent and unleashed a wave of conformity across America. In its most dramatic retelling, Arthur Miller's The Crucible (1953), all of America had turned into Salem Massachusetts circa 1692.

In McCarthy and his Enemies, Buckley and Bozell have great fun reciting all the pronouncements by proud liberals who filled newspapers and journals with their lamentations over McCarthy's "silencing" of his opposition. The simple fact of the matter is that the best papers and most prestigious magazines were always, loudly and prolifically, anti-McCarthy and anti-anti-communist. The senator's influence has been dramatically exaggerated:

Yet the Grand Sachem of McCarthyism, McCarthy himself, is meanwhile unable to inflict his reign of terror in his own bailiwick: in a period of 18 months, the University of Wisconsin invited Eleanor Roosevelt, Norman Cousins, Owen Lattimore and James Carey to complain about McCarthy's reign of terror to the student body.

The absurdity of the narrative is made clear by The Crucible itself. Miller's little piece of agitprop was staged at the height of McCarthy's popularity and influence. It was not shut down; the author was not jailed. Instead, he was showered with laurels.

Even that old Stalinist Richard Rovere conceded that attacking McCarthy "is just about as dangerous as drinking my morning cup of coffee".

It is worth noting that Arthur Miller, in public the fierce defender of individual conscience, was, in private, a slavish follower and sometime enforcer of the party line set down by Moscow.

In his testimony before the HUAC, Miller stated that he “had never been under Communist discipline.” But his behavior as Wayne and then as Miller shows otherwise. As Wayne, he followed the Browder phase of perestrokia in literature. When the tide shifted away, Miller followed the Fosterite policy that the only good literature was the politically correct kind. Miller was not only a party member, he was also an obedient one, who was willing to submerge his own ideas of good literature and politics to the shifting vagaries of the party line.
Ron Capshaw

Moreover, even as he (publicly) railed against witch-hunts and defended free thought, he was so subservient to the Party that he let it choose his psychiatrists for him. (During their marriage, he forced Marilyn Monroe to switch to Party-approved shrinks. The results speak for themselves.)

ii

In the current retelling of the narrative the goal posts have shifted. McCarthy is no longer an existential threat but he is still bad, bad, very bad.

He was not a would-be dictator. He did not threaten our constitutional system, but he did hurt many who lived under it.

At his best, he produced evidence that the government's security procedures were sometimes remiss. But his critics were right: he never uncovered a Communist. He spent his days searching for the new Julius Rosenberg, the new Alger Hiss. He wound up settling for Owen Lattimore and Annie Lee Moss.

David Oshinsky, A Conspiracy so Immense

This recalls Richard Rovere's "argument" when he was covering McCarthy for The New Yorker:

Richard Rovere, formerly an editor of the Communist New Masses, later The New Yorker’s Washington correspondent, at the National Press Club bar, holding forth on the hundreds of lives Joe McCarthy had destroyed. “Name one,” I ask. Silence, then, “Well, he’s shacking up with Roy Cohn, isn’t he? And how many spies has he caught?”

Here we see a writer for the illustrious New Yorker playing by the same rules as the gutter-dwelling Drew Pearson as even Oshinsky would have to admit:

Drew Pearson had collected a file on the subject, filled with dubious affidavits from men who claimed to have had sexual relations with McCarthy. Pearson said nothing in print, preferring the cocktail grapevine instead.

A Conspiracy so Immense

Any honest historian has to acknowledge that Oshinsky's "never caught a spy" trope is also out of date. The list of Soviet assets who came across McCarthy's radar is remarkable. That they managed to hide for decades has less to do with McCarthy's failings than it does with unnecessary governmental secrecy and executive branch coverups.

McCarthyism: The indefinable "ism"

In his interview with Leo Cherne, WFB pressed his guest to define what made McCarthy uniquely evil. That is, why are McCarthy's methods or McCarthy's rhetoric out of bounds when they appear indistinguishable from those of other politicians and public figures.

Cherne, to his credit, addresses the question head-on. For him, McCarthy is detestable because he made reckless charges of treason. against men like George Marhsall.

It is a telling point. For six decades McCarthy's reckless attacks on Marshall stood as the worst example of his excesses and a reason to treat him as especially dangerous.

Then a really strange thing happened: Donald Trump was elected. More importantly, Hillary Clinton lost. Suddenly, baseless accusations of treason became the highest form of patriotism. Adam Schiff turbocharged his political career by making them against Trump and many of his aides. Rachel Maddow banked millions of dollars by trafficking in them.

This makes WFB's main point. Everyone is expected to be horrified by "McCarthyism" but no one can define it nor explain why it is singularly evil.

ii

It is still rewarding to read Buckley and Bozell's McCarthy and His Enemies* because that is a main theme the authors address. McCarthy's rhetoric and methods are condemned while other politicians are celebrated for "fiery speeches" and "dogged investigations".

Take publc congressional hearings. When McCarthy confronts witnesses, it is the return of the Spanish Inquisition, a replay of the Salem witch trials. Yet the Left loves those sort of hearings in the right context.

The inquisitorial method is "understandable" or "indispensable" or even "desirable" if it is used to uncover or embarrass Wall Street racketeers (the Nye committee), the anti-union practices of management (the LaFollette committee), or the financial angels of right-wing organizations (the Buchanan committee). But the same method even if more restrained and equitable in its application is outrageous and fascist when used to lay bare the activities of American fellow travelers (the Committee on Un-American Activities), to expose the ideological impact of the Institute of Pacific relations (the McCarran committee), or to look into pro communism in the Voice of America (the McCarthy committee). 

Buckley and Bozell are scathing in their handling of the putative anti-communists who professed themselves shocked by McCarthy's methods while professing to support his aims. Since those critics rarely condemned other investigations, the authors doubt their sincerity.

For it is McCarthy's aims that demonstrably disconcert and frighten so many of his critics. They disapprove of McCarthy's method when it is used to further McCarthy's aims but like it fine when it is used to further their own.

There may be a few intellectually honest critics of McCarthy who also denounced the televised hearings into organized crime and labor racketeering. The vast bulk of the punditry class adopted the Leninist approach of "Who/whom" when assessing those investigations. Robert F. Kennedy was good and noble when he was investigating the Teamsters and Jimmy Hoffa; it was a blot on his character when he worked for McCarthy investigating Stalin's American minions. Senator Sam Ervin supported segregation and opposed the civil rights movement for decades; he became a liberal folk hero when he chaired the Watergate hearing that helped "get Nixon"

iii

Another mark of the elastic nature of the term "McCarthyism" is the way it is applied to activities where the senator had zero involvement. McCarthy had nothing to with Hollywood screenwriters or the Hollywood blacklist. The deaths of Laurence Duggan and Harry Dexter White which so vexed Drew Pearson and Edward R. Murrow had no connection to his investigations.

Yet, somehow, hearings which ocurred before the Wheeling speech or which took place in the House of Representatives still get the "McCarthyism" label.

Hard to ignore the fact that the only points of commonality we find here is: 1) the investagations targeted communist subversion and espionage and 2) liberals attacked the investigators and covered up for the guilty.

Few people know that the House Committee on Un-American Activities was created at the instigation of liberal congressman Samuel Dickstein in order to fight the Nazi threat and its fifth column in America. Dickstein promised that he could "name you one hundred spies" and claimed that there were 50,000 fascists in just Connecticut. The congressman was willing, even eager to "name names" and put them in the Congressional Record. (He refused to include their denials.)

Far from condeming Dickstein, progressive groups supported him and the congressional investigations. He even went on to become a justice on the New York Supreme Court.

Decades later Clio finally delivered her punchline.

There in the Soviet archives was the codename CROOK -- assigned to none other that Rep. Samuel Dickstein (D-NY). The UnAmerican Activities committee owed its birth to a paid agent of Soviet intelligence.

*Some daring publisher should bring this book back in print with a new introduction to bring [syn] it up to date with what we now know about Soviet penetrations of the New Deal.