McCarthyism: Naming names

In the morality play that serves as the history of the "Red Scare" few crimes rank higher than ex-communists who named their former associates in the Communist Party.

Elia Kazan was never forgiven for testifying before HUAC about his former communist associates. For a time, Lillian Hellman became a lesft-wing icon based on her defiance of HUAC. McCarthy compelling James Wechsler to do the same is one of the great crimes chalked up against him. Cooperative witnesses were labelled "squealers", "stool pigeons", "informers".

Edward Dmytryk, one of the Hollywood 10 who eventually testified before HUAC made an interesting point to David Caute. By adopting the language of the gangsters, he said, the Communists were "in effect admitting they were engaged in criminal activity. I never heard of anyone informing on the Boy Scouts."

We are expected to affirm that the communists were pure as the driven snow -- sincere, patriotic, humane -- even as those innocent lambs adopt the secrecy and lingo of the criminal underworld.

These so-called victims of the "Red Scare" were not just asking for privacy. As William Phillips wrote: "First of all, some were Communists and what one was asked to defend was their right to lie about it."

In her autobiographical legend Hellman defied HUAC because she could not "cut my conscience to fit this year's fashion." Yet, for decades, right up until her death in 1984, Hellman had done everything in her power to hide her Stalinized conscience from the public and, chameleon-like, conceal it with poses and cover stories.

WFB:

What Lillian Hellman specialized in, during almost two bloody decades, was precisely in cutting her conscience to fit the whims of Joseph Stalin.

The public hearings could be an unpleasant performance: politicians grandstanding, contrite witnesses seeking absolution from the inquisitors, photographers angling for the photographs that would make the front page.

The spectacle is not the main reason critics find "naming names" distasteful. As Dymtryk said, their language betrays them; they are opposed to "informers" in principle. They do not want even the most sincere ex-communist to tell all that they knew. In their hierarchy of values "squealing" is worse than being a Stalinist.

When putative ex-communists refused to reveal their past associates in the underground, they were implicitly echoing E. M. Forster:

If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.

Stalinism is bad, they say, but not as bad as embarrassing a friend-- even if that friend is working for Stalin.

It is anti-communism of the very softest sort.

In a very real sense, those who condemn the naming of names want the US government to adopt the security protocols that allowed the Cambridge spies to flourish in Great Britain. Information is not to be collected. Backgrounds are not to be scrutinized. No one is ever a suspect because every man can assert his innocence and there is nothing to contradict his assertion.

Anti-anti-communists are quick to downplay the value of the information that the witnesses could provide. In some cases, their argument is dishonest. Take, for example, New Republic publisher Michael Straight.

Nevertheless, when the issue of Soviet espionage became a heated public issue in 1948 and 1949, Straight, who knew from his personal experience that their stories were credible, published numerous articles harshly disparaging Elizabeth Bentley and Whittaker Chambers.

Haynes and Klehr, Spies

In other cases, this argument is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of how effective intelligence and counterintelligence works. It is not a question of unearthing a single, big secret. Instead it is a matter of collecting and collating a vast number of individual bits of information. Information that may appear benign or innocuous to the individual can be incredibly valuable to the agency collecting and analyzing it.

Related:

Understanding intelligence
The real Bletchley Park

The parade of public witnesses had an additional salutary effect. The key whistle-blowers -- Elizabeth Bentley and Whittaker Chambers chief among them -- were derided as mentally ill, mendacious, and as "professional witnesses". The attacks aimed to destroy their character and credibility. Hence, public testimony by other witnesses served to offset the calumnies hurled against them.

To oppose such testimony is to choose the vicious lie over the honest truth.

McCarthyism: Gatekeeping the narrative (2)

Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., unlike these other reviewers, was never part of the Marxist or Stalinist left. He was a liberal -- a Democrat in the vein of Woodrow Wilson and FDR. He was an anti-communist: he helped found Americans for Democratic Action to oppose the fellow-traveling progressives who were effectively pro-Stalin. In 1948 he worked tirelessly for Harry S. Truman and against Henry Wallace and his Progressive party.

And yet he described McCarthy and His Enemies as a "sick book".

Schlesinger, like his ADL colleagues, was naïve about the extent of Soviet penetration of the New Deal. They were solicitous of those accused by Bentley and Chambers. In 1948 the ADL called for the abolition of HUAC just as that committee was unmasking Alger Hiss and Harry Dexter White.

At the end of his life Schlesinger was still defending Laurence Duggan despite new evidence that he was part of the Soviet network in DC. He still described Duggan as "a man whom many knew as an able public servant.”

Schlesinger served as a court historian for FDR and JFK. His loyalty to the Democratic party was deep. His anti-communism became muted and "nuanced" when investigations threated to embarrass the Roosevelt and Truman administrations. Truman and his Attorney General had vouched for Duggan. The AG even declared he was "a loyal employee of the United States Government".

If Schlesinger had admitted that Duggan was part of a spy ring, then he would have had to admit the truth to McCarthy's charges that the Roosevelt and Truman administrations were lax on security issues.

That was a bridge too far for the Democrats' favorite historian.

Schlesinger also had personal reasons to oppose a thorough search for Stalin's agents. During WWII he worked for the Office of War Information (OWI) and the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). Both organizations were deeply penetrated by Soviet spies .

In 1949, Arthur Schlesinger confidently announced that “we are changing from a market society to an administrative society.” For twenty years urban progressivism was in the driver's seat. FDR had won four elections while he expanded the federal government and staffed his alphabet agencies with intellectuals and the graduates of the best universities. Then unsuitable men like McCarthy and Nixon had garnered public support by attacking the competence, honesty, and loyalty of these same progressive avatars. (Here)

He clearly saw himself as a natural leader in that administrative class. The spy scandals threatened to call into question both the legitimacy of that regime and Schlesinger's own powers of perception.

The rise of Joe McCarthy was propelled, in large part, by the refusal of progressives and New Dealers to admit to any mistakes. Having claimed that social scientists and academic experts were better guides than the Founding Fathers, they were now revealed to be inept at the most important obligations of government. (here)

Hugh Trevor-Roper announced that he had been "convulsed with mirth" at the buffoonish investigation of the Voice of America by Roy Cohn in Europe in 1953. Recalling that episode he had no interest in looking at the evidence laid out by Buckley and Bozell. As Trevor-Roper was a historian, this refusal to take a look at the evidence is puzzling.

Trevor-Roper was a historian but he was also a former intelligence officer who served alongside Kim Philby in MI6. His most famous book, The Last Days of Hitler, was the result of research undertaken at the behest of British intelligence. He enjoyed a close and cordial relationship with those intelligence agencies.

Like his former colleagues in MI6, he was more worried that a former communist might be unfairly accused of disloyalty than that a spy would betray his nation's vital secrets.

My own view, like that of most of my contemporaries, was that our superiors were lunatic in their anti-communism. Many of our friends had been, or had thought themselves, communists in the 1930s; and we were shocked that such persons should be debarred from public service on account of mere juvenile illusions which anyway they had now shed: for such illusions could not survive the shattering impact of Stalin’s Pact with Hitler in 1939. We were therefore pleased that at least one ex-communist should have broken through the net and that the social prejudices of our superiors had, on this one occasion, triumphed over their political prejudices. (Here)

British intelligence had good reason to fear and disparage McCarthy and other investigators. Not only had they placed spies in sensitive positions in Washington, they lied to their allies about their investigations. A thorough inquiry had the potential to destroy the "special relationship" ("special" to the US; absolutely vital to the UK if it wanted to remain a Great Power).

Dick White, now Chief of SIS, suggested that Trevor-Roper should write about the notorious spy himself. Once again it was White, the moving force behind The Last Days of Hitler, who appreciated that Trevor-Roper possessed both special insight into a topical problem and the literary skill to do it justice. Trevor-Roper’s The Philby Affair first appeared in a cultural magazine and then as an independent book. Like The Last Days of Hitler, The Philby Affair would never have been written without White’s prompting. His suggestion was part of a wider effort by British intelligence to deploy historians to offset the damage caused to the intelligence services by the media spotlight on security failures. (Here)

Even as Trevor Roper was downplaying the importance of the Cambridge spies and railing against unsophisticated American and their "malevolent" politicians, he was falling prey to Soviet disinformation. He was one of the first serious scholars to fall for the conspiracy theories swirling around the JFK assassination. His long exposure to the world of intelligence and traitors left him as naive as he was when he was a young don under the spell of Kim Philby.

Clio's final revenge was stunning. The man who first came to public attention for a book on Hitler, became a joke when he was conned into "authenticating" the forged Hitler Diaries in 1983.

McCarthyism: Gatekeeping the narrative

The frozen narrative of McCarthy's unique evil was not built solely with books like Richard Rovere's and Jack Anderson's. It also required the exclusion and dismissal of books which provided inconvenient research and perspectives.

In 1954 William F. Buckley and Brent Bozell published McCarthy and His Enemies. The bulk of the book is a deep dive into McCarthy's "public cases". The authors also have an incisive analysis of the trade-offs between individual rights and the need to protect government security and operations. Anti-McCarthy arguements usually, explicitly or implicitly, presume that government bureaucrats have a right to their job unless they can be proven guilty as in a court of law. For a variety of reasons, this standard is neither realistic nor desirable.

McCarthy and His Enemies also addresses the central point about the narrative which is now the most interesting question about the historiography of McCarthyism: What makes Sen. Joseph McCarthy uniquely evil? Why is his name a universal "malediction" among respectable pundits and historians? They provide plenty of examples of harsh rhetoric from esteemed liberals that rival McCarthy's "irredeemable" methods. <>

Seven decades later we still do not have an answer to those questions.

The introduction to the 1961 editions provides some clues as to how that narrative was formed and defended.

McCarthy and His Enemies was not ignored. It could not be-- it was a best-seller. Instead it was bushed off and mocked.

The Distributed Idea Suppression Complex (DISC) brought out the big guns to knock down the idea that there any rational case to be made for McCarthy and his investigations. Elmer Davies, Richard Rovere, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Dwight Macdonald, and Hugh Trevor-Roper were among the marquee names chosen to delivers the message.

At the time that line up of critics seemed impressive. Knowing what we know now, they illustrate the intellectual dishonesty which marked the opposition to McCarthy and right-wing anti-communism.

Elmer Davies was an early and vehement critic of McCarthy. He also ran the Office of War Information during World War II. Under his watch Stalin's agents had free run to spread lies such as their cover-up of the Soviet's massacre of Polish officers at Katyn. When he returned to journalism after the war, he became an advocate for the innocence of Alger Hiss.

In short, Davies was stubbornly blind to the dangers of Soviet infiltration. To concede that McCarthy and his allies had a point was also to admit that he himself had failed as both a bureaucrat and journalist.

Richard Rovere worked for Stalinist publications before being reborn as a "respectable" journalist at the New Yorker. Like Cambridge spies Kim Philby and Guy Burgess he brushed aside his professional association with communism as a youthful foiable. No one questioned his suitability as a Washington reporter or biographer of McCarthy because he was backed by the towering prestige of the New Yorker.

Macdonald, like Rovere, was a man of the far-left. His anti-Stalinist credentials, unlike Rovere's, were beyond question. He backed Trotsky and denounced the Moscow Trials when the Popular Fronters were defending Soviet "justice".

His distaste for Stalinism did not translate into support for the US. He was a pacifist and deeply suspicious of all governments. If his worldview had a lodestar it was a commitment to high culture and a loathing for mass culture-- both communist and bourgeois.

Any movement with popular appeal, including McCarthy's was bound to draw his ire.

Macdonald did not address the evidence amassed by Buckley and Bozell nor did he counter their arguments. Instead, he mocked the book with a quip: ­McCarthy and His Enemies, he wrote, had "the general effect of a brief by Codwalder Wickersham and Taft on behalf of a picklpocket".

The jest is ironic coming from Macdonald. In a few years he would pen a ponderous 2-part "rebuttal" to a Tom Wolfe article mocking William Shawn and the New Yorker. The honor of his boss engaged Dwight Macdonald's interest; a factual record of the Tydings Committee he treated as a joke.

No wonder he is considered the perfect "New York Intellectual".

His review prefigured a common line of attack on anti-communism as new information emerged about the Stalinist penetration of the West-- VENONA, the Soviet documents, Mitrokhin's archives -- leftwing journalists and professors treated them as unimportant. They were only of "antiquarian interest". Only obsessives and spy hobbyists cared about them.

Mockery and disdain are powerful tools to keep unwelcome ideas out of the Gated Institutional Narrative (GIN). Just ask Elizabeth Bentley.

As Buckley wrote in 1961, "documentation that tends to prove uncongenial points is not documentation, it is effrontery".

The New York intellectuals -- communist, former communist, and anti-communist -- were consciously gatekeeping the narrative around the issue of Soviet spies and and Stalinist subversion. Commonweal magazine asked Hannah Arendt to review Whittaker Chambers's Witness. Her friend Mary McCarthy wrote to her to make sure she understood what was at stake:

[Witness] can't be treated simply as a book. The great effort of this new Right is to get itself accepted as normal, and its publications as a normal part of publishing... and this, it seems to me, must be scotched if it's not already too late. What do you think? I know you agree with me about the fact, the question is how it's to be done.

Arendt's review gave Mary McCarthy no reason to complain. She denounced Chambers as an "informer" who "properly belonged in a police state."

John Dos Passos, who knew something about such things, described the reaction to Witness as a "moral lynching of Whittaker Chambers by the right-minded people of this country."

The lines were drawn. Anti-Stainism was OK as long as one remained on the left and was largely limited to words and manifestoes. Hard anti-communism was off-limits, especially if the anti-communist was on the right.

We can see how these lines still largely define the debate around the McCarthy era. In their book on the Amerasia case Klehr and radosh detailed how the Truman administration torpedoed on of the first post-WWII spy cases. Yet there were the obligatory denunciation of McCarthy in the book's conclusion. Similarly, Radosh (an ex-communist) was highly critical of M. Stanton Evans's biography and dismissive of any attempt to rehabilitate the senator's reputation.

What was odd was that review ran in National Review -- a journal founded by William F. Buckley -- a supporter of McCarthy (obviously) and a friend of Whitaker Chambers.

McCarthyism: Here at the New Yorker

The first serious biography of Sen. Joseph McCarthy was written by Richard Rovere of the New Yorker magazine. It was immediately hailed as authoritaive, even definitive. As the Washington correspondent (although he spent most of his time in New York) for the magazine, Rovere had "covered" McCarthy from the Wheeling speech until his death in 1957. Backed by the presige of the New Yorker, Rovere was one of those select few who set the journalistc narrative. When he put that narrative between hard covers he made the first draft of history the only one we see.

At first glance, the New Yorker and Rovere seem an odd fit. The magazine was the most prestigious in the United States, renowned for both its meticulous fact-checking and its profitability. (For decades the New Yorker practically printed money as its pages swelled with expensive ads for luxury goods.) Rovere, of course, was a former communist who wrote for The New Masses and The Nation-- both Stalinist-controlled outlets.

Rovere was not the only Stalinist or fellow-traveller scribbling away for the magazine dedicated to getting and spending. Dorothy Parker, Ring Lardner, A. J. Liebling, and David Ogden Stewart were all there doing their part as Stalin's willing (if sometimes unwitting) drones.

Painting the Algonquin Round Table red represents one of Willi Munzenberg's signal triumphs. It serves as a textbook example of the means and ends of the Stalinist manipulation of the Popular Front.

The New Yorker famously billed itself as a magazine "not edited for the old lady in Dubuque." * It was the glossy magazine for what Lionel Trilling termed "the adversary culture" -- that part of the middle class that hated the middle class. Like Bloomsbury, the New Yorker was produced and consumed by people convinced that they were superior to their neighbors.

In the 1920s and 1930s Munzenberg made Stalinism integral to the adversary culture of the US and Great Britain. He managed to "instill the feeling, like a truth of nature, that seriously to criticize or challenge Soviet policy was the unfailing mark of a bad, bigoted, and probably stupid person, while support was equally infallible proof of a forward-looking mind committed to all that was best for humanity and marked by an uplifting refinement of sensibility." The New Yorker was especially vulnerable to this ideological takeover.

Robert Warshow:

The New Yorker has always dealt with experience not by trying to understand it but by prescribing the attitude to be adopted toward it. This makes it possible to feel intelligent without thinking, and it is a way of making everything tolerable, for the assumption of a suitable attitude toward experience can give one the illusion of having dealt with it adequately."Munzenberg was a master at "prescribing the attitude to be adopted" for intellectual wannabees.

Munzenberg's second coup was to change the image of the Righteous. Virtuous poverty was out; glamour and the High Life marked the Popular Front activism of the 1930s. The righteous could keep their furs and jewelry -- as long as they kept supporting the Moscow line. The appeal was obvious and well nigh irresistible. Dorothy Parker was emblematic:

Parker's union of style and Stalinist attitudes was a natural fit. Through the chic of her hard-left commitments, Parker could both validate her love of glamour and mask it with an appropriate look of disdain for all vanities.
Stephen Koch, Double Lives: Spies and Writers in the Secret Soviet War of Ideas against the West

When Ernest Hemingway went to Spain in 1937, he took along his soon to be third wife-- Martha Gellhorn. A soon to be famous war correspondent, Gellhorn was a Popular Front dupe until the day she died. True to form she made sure that her sojourn was not wasted on mere politics and journalism. She made time for shopping. She returned from the frontlines with several pairs of handmade shoes and a beautiful fur coat of silver fox fur.

Radical chic was not invented in the 1960s.

The ménage a trois of glamor culture, the adversary culture, and Stalinism conferred a striking benefit to Moscow's propaganda efforts. It gave them prestige--" that magical aura which captures the minds of the young in advance of argument and establishes compelling fashions'". (James McAuley)

Related:

Persuasion and the Prestige Paradox: Are High Status People More Likely to Lie?

The Munzenberg apparatus, unlike the formal Communist parties, did not demand that every member sing in unison from the same songbook. In fact, it was essential that Willi's innocents should think of themselves as fiercely independent intellectuals. That was the genius of the Popular Front: to turn a flock of "independent minds" into reliable drones while allowing the sheep to see themselves as heroic, independent lions.

Dorothy Parker was an ideal target for the Munzenberg system. She had just enough self-awareness to see through the glib "wit" of the Algonquin Round Table and her own limitations as a writer. (Like Lillian Hellman, Parker's style was a cheap imitation of Dashiell Hammett's which itself was little more than an imitation of Hemingway.) Beneath her cynical façade lay a moralistic streak just looking for a righteous cause.

The Popular Front served up one such cause after another. Even better, she could be a leader in those causes -- rub shoulders with luminaries like Hemingway and Andre Malraux, sit at the head table at the glittering fundraisers, speak at all the important conferences.

Munzenberg's widow, Babette Gross, explained the propaganda style to Stephen Koch. Because he wanted the appearance of independence, the perfect righteous sheep never declared themselves a communist, pro-Soviet, or pro-Stalin. Instead, they were to focus their attention only on the cause du jour and the designated enemy.

One day the cause might be the Spanish Republic, the next it could be China in its war with Japan. No matter, tha apparatus pulled a few levers and the glamourous messengers found a brand new cause. (Martha Gellhorn, for example, had an uncanny knack of reporting about whatever issue Moscow deemed most urgent at any particular time in the 1930s.)

When an asset became dangerous or inconvenient, all the of sheep denounced the new enemy without hesitation. When John Dos Passos voiced his concerns about the Stalinists' actions in Spain, Hemingway warned him:

You do that and you'll be finished, destroyed. The reviewers in New York will absolutely crucify you. These people know how to turn you into a back number. I've seen them do it. What they did once they can do again.

Hemingway was absolutely correct but Dos Passos was not a sheep. He refused to ignore what was happening nor would he be silent about his doubts. The Righteous NPCs proceeded to attack his work, character and courage. The "literary execution" of John Dos Passos did not muzzle that writer, but it did diminish his prestige among the righteous. It also served as a useful reminder to weaker artists about the dangers of straying from the flock.

At the New Yorker, A. J. Liebling wore many hats. He was a food writer, a war correspondent, a chronicler of the demi-monde of Broadway and boxing. He was also one of our first professional "press critic". His "The Wayward Press" column scrutinized the way newspapers handled or mishandled the stories of the day. His analysis alternated between lofty disdain for and sly mockery of the grubby reporters and editors chasing headlines and getting it all wrong. He was particularly vexed by the post-war spy-scandals: the Hiss-Chambers confrontation and the revelations of Elizabeth Bentley. Liebling knew that Hiss was innocent and worked behind the scenes to aid his attorneys.

His depiction of Bentley was mocking and cruel. He dubbed her "the nutmeg Mata Hari" and portrayed her as a frustrated, middle-aged spinster: attention-seeking, given over to fantasies, even delusional.

In short, a woman no one should trust.

Of course, we now know that Hiss was guilty and that Chambers and Bentley were telling the truth.

Haynes and Klehr sum it up best:

The single most disastrous event in the history of Soviet intelligence in America was Elizabeth Bentley’s decision to turn herself in to the FBI in 1945 and tell all she knew.

Yet the consensus of several generations of American historians (backed by many journalists and other opinion leaders) routinely mocked, ridiculed, and dismissed her as a fraud and mountebank.

It is not surprising that his collection of columns on these events  have not been reprinted or included in the many anthologies of his writing.

In 1982 Susan Sontag shocked an audience of New York intellectuals when she declared:

Imagine, if you will, someone who read only the Reader's Digest between 1950 and 1970, and someone in the same period who read only The Nation or the New Statesman. Which reader would have been better informed about the realities of Communism? The answer, I think, should give us pause. Can it be that our enemies were right?

It can rightly be said that in 1950 the readers of the Hearst newspapers were better informed about Soviet spies and subversion than the sophisticated readers of the New Yorker. Munzenberg's work outlived him. It lives on even until the present.

*Tom Wolfe puckishly called the New Yorker the most successful "women's magazine" in history precisely because it appealed to a certain type of "lady in Dubuque". Shop girls read True Romance. Faculty wives who went to Smith, Vasser women married to assistant regional managers read the New Yorker. Or at least subscribed to it so guests could see it on the coffee table.

McCarthyism: When history is just a vibe (2)

When Robert Warshow reviewed The Crucible in 1953 he noted that Arthur Miller had shown an "almost contemptuous lack of interest in the particularities -- which is to say, the reality -- of the Salem trials." This is indisputably true. At every turn, the playwright flaunts his proud, willful ignorance of the historical reality of 1692 Salem. But Miller was not unconcerned about all "particularities". He saw fit to invent one crucial bit of back story and place it at the heart of his drama.

In 1996 Miller explained his "Eureka!" moment in The New Yorker:

Elizabeth Proctor had been the orphaned Abigail’s mistress, and they had lived together in the same small house until Elizabeth fired the girl. By this time, I was sure, John Proctor had bedded Abigail, who had to be dismissed most likely to appease Elizabeth. There was bad blood between the two women now.

Miller's "discovery" was a work of pure imagination. There is no evidence for it (and much against it). But the man had his reasons.

My own marriage of twelve years was teetering and I knew more than I wished to know about where the blame lay. That John Proctor the sinner might overturn his paralyzing personal guilt and become the most forthright voice against the madness around him was a reassurance to me, and, I suppose, an inspiration: it demonstrated that a clear moral outcry could still spring even from an ambiguously unblemished soul.

Our sainted author is praising himself with faint damns here. His marriage was failing because he was having an affair with Marilyn Monroe. He was getting ready to jettison the wife who supported him when he was a struggling critic and playwright so he could take up with a rich, famous, and beautiful film star.

William Styron described Miller as "strangely and fanatically opportunistic." This is certainly true when it comes to writing The Crucible. The adulterous husband invented an adulterous hero. The doctrinaire communist wants to pretend that real communists are as rare as witches. The slinking propagandist now dons the mantle of a fearless truth-teller.

Miller had to invent his "history" out of whole cloth. Not only is there no evidence of an affair between John Procter and Abigail Williams, there is no evidence the two ever met. Even more telling is the fact that the John Procter of The Crucible is a man in his 30s while Miller makes Abigail Williams a young woman of 16 or 17.

The real John Procter was 59. Abigail Williams was 11 or 12.

If Miller had kept to the facts, his flawed hero would have been much worse than a man who gave in to a moment of weakness. He would have ben a child rapist. Even a leftwing New York audience would have trouble taking that kind of man as a hero in 1953.

Carol Iannone:

the single animus that has long driven Miller's work-the willed resentment toward American society, the overwrought, obdurate sense of condemnation and outrage. In Miller's hands, tragedy consists not in the individual's encounter with solemn powers greater than himself. Rather, tragedy is the failure to stand against patent corruption and foolishness, in the form of such life-crushing American villains as demanding fathers, witless salesmen, and witch-hunting anti-Communists.

In his apologia for The Crucible, Miller shows just how deeply he was enmeshed in the mental world created by Willi Munzenberg.

Stephen Koch:

Munzenberg provided two generations of people on the left with what we might call the forum of righteousness. More than any other person of his era, he developed what may well be the leading moral illusion of the twentieth century: the notion that in the modern age the principal arena of the moral life, the true realm of good and evil, is politics.

Miller created a wholly fictional John Procter as his hero: a flawed man who achieved nobility by denouncing witch-hunters. In The Crucible private frailty is redeemed via public words. It is hard not to suspect that that Miller was hoping to do just that for himself. His oblique attack on Joseph McCarthy serves as a counter-weight to his failings as a husband.

Roger Scruton described this mindset perfectly:

For what matters is what people say, not what they do, and what they say is redeemed by their theories, however stupidly or carelessly pursued, and with whatever disregard for real people.

It seems to have worked. Despite his manifest cruelty as a husband and father, Miller still serves as a sort of ersatz-Orwell for the American Left.

Related:

Arthur Miller’s Missing Act
For all the public drama of Arthur Miller’s career—his celebrated plays (including Death of a Salesman and The Crucible), his marriage to Marilyn Monroe, his social activism—one character was absent: the Down-syndrome child he deleted from his life.

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.)

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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"

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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.

McCarthyism: When zeal is no substitute for strategy

Even anti-communists are subject to Conquest's Law.

William F. Buckley discussing McCarthyism on Firing Line in 1966.

The discussion is quite good- courteous, logical, and free of the pointless pyrotechnics we see on cable TV today.

I am struck by WFB's admission that "Joe McCarthy discovered anti-Communism in 1950".

One can grant the sincerity of McCarthy's commitment to the cause while, at the same time, recognizing that the zeal of a new convert is no substitute for careful research or clear-eyed strategy. In fact, naive enthusiasm can be dangerous as the case of Sir Robert Peel illustrates.

Andre Maurois:

Like all intelligent men who are not in any way creative, Sir Robert Peel was dangerously sympathetic towards the creations of others. Incapable of formulating a system, he threw himself voraciously on those he came across, and applied them more vigorously than would their inventors.

Cherne notes that McCarthy was supported by the communists in his 1946 race against Robert LaFollet. So that seems to confirm what Robert Conquest wrote in Reflections on a Ravaged Century.

Safe to say that the communists miscalculated slightly in backing Joe McCarthy. But that is politics.

McCarthyism: Seeds of Destruction

For three years after the Wheeling speech, Sen. Joseph McCarthy gained power and influence despite the strident opposition of journalists, academics, the White House, and Democrats in the Senate. After the 1952 election he should have been poised for even bigger and better things. The Republicans controlled the Senate and Eisenhower was president. Yet Ike succeeded where Truman and Tydings had failed: he put an end to "McCarthyism".

Thomas Reeves:

In his State of the Union message of February 2 [1953] Eisenhower repeated a controversial statement he made in Green Bay during the campaign: the primary responsibility for rooting subversion the federal government, he said, rested squarely upon the executive branch.

In one sense, Ike was just stating the obvious: in our constitutional system the executive branch is responsible for the security measures in the federal agencies. Congress had neither the power nor the resources to hunt spies and security risks. It also seems clear that the president was sending a message to his party in congress -- a veiled order to stand down on the subversion issue.

Republicans were in charge and the last thing Eisenhower wanted was the distraction of intramural squabbling. After all, he had rose to prominence within George Marshall's army where the man in charge was left alone to get on with the job.

Not a message McCarthy was open to.

Ralph de Toledano:

With the election of General Eisenhower, for which Joe could take some credit, and the Republican control of the Senate, Joe became rash. As chairman of the Senate Government Operations Committee and its powerful Permanent Investigation subcommittee, he was in the catbird seat. He had the authority and the subpoena power to get at the evidence that had been previously withheld. But against the advice of his strongest and most savvy allies, he passed up as counsel Robert Morris—highly knowledgeable, formerly of the Office of Naval Intelligence, thorough, and respected. McCarthy instead chose Roy Cohn—brash, unprincipled, and inexperienced.

Reeves:

With the arrival of Cohn, a new chapter in McCarthy's life began, one that would see him elevated to even greater heights of international notoriety and plunged to the lowest depths of political ruin and personal despair.

Ike posed a far more dangerous threat than Truman. He was not just president, he was also the head of the Republican party. Up to now McCarthy enjoyed solid support from his party in the Senate. He could not count on that if he decided to battle the Eisenhower administration.

Here again Roy Cohn represented a problem for McCarthy. He had no loyalty to the GOP and no experience on Capital Hill. As M. Stanton Evans notes, Cohn was "a liberal Democrat by upbringing and affiliation".

Before joining McCarthy Cohn had come to public's attention as a prosecutor within the Truman justice department .

McCarthyism: The long shadow of a false narrative

Sen. Joseph McCarthy's anti-communist crusade lasted only four short years. Seven years after the Wheeling speech he was dead. The caricature of the man embedded in the historical narrative has persisted for decades. (Every one knows McCarthy is bad even if they do not know what he actually did.

Long after his fall, McCarthy and his supporters haunted the nightmares of the leading public intellectuals in the U.S. His brief ascendency upended their once rosy view of democracy.

In 1949, Arthur Schlesinger confidently announced that “we are changing from a market society to an administrative society.” For twenty years urban progressivism was in the driver's seat. FDR had won four elections while he expanded the federal government and staffed his alphabet agencies with intellectuals and the graduates of the best universities. Then unsuitable men like McCarthy and Nixon had garnered public support by attacking the competence, honesty, and loyalty of these same progressive avatars.

This demanded an explanation.

One explanation had the now obvious advantage of being true:

There is no mystery about Joe McCarthy. He just doesn't like Communists. What is so peculiar about this point of view that it calls for an explanation.
John T. Flynn

For there is one thing that the American people know about Senator McCarthy: he, like them, is unequivocally anti-Communist. About the spokesmen for American liberalism, they feel they know no such thing. And with some justification.
Irving Kristol

For young, ambitious intellectuals in the 1950s, this viewpoint was a nonstarter. It was an article of faith that the internal communist threat was nonexistent and that McCarthy was a liar. The key question, then, was why did millions of Americans believe his absurd lies?

One influential group of scholars and pundits thought they found the answer in psychology and sociology.

In The New American Right (1955) seven contributors set out to explain the McCarthy phenomenon and the nature of post- New Deal conservatism. It is a classic example of the Left diagnosing conservatives instead of debating them. (Here again we see ostensible liberals adopting the methods of LeninThink.

The editor, future neocon Daniel Bell, found McCarthy puzzling and in need of explanation because he had done the unthinkable: he attacked “intellecuals, Harvard, Anglophiles, internationalists, and the Army”. Bell could only conclude that the movement was not a rational reaction to real issues:
“The theme of conspiracy haunts the mind of the new rightists.”

These “new conservatives” fell victim to conspiracy theories because they were uneducated, close-minded, losing ground economically, or anxious about their social status.

The net message was clear. The new, post-McCarthy right was not a legitimate political movement. It was symptomatic of social and psychological pathologies. There was no reason to engage its arguments or care about its issue. Better to ignore and marginalize them.

As I said, classic Lenintink:

Don't argue with them, Make them stink in the nose of the world. Make people curse and abominate them, Make them shudder with horror.
Willi Munzenberg

This line of thinking also underlies much of Richard Hofstadter's work – especially Anti-intellectualism in American Life and The Paranoid Style in American Politics. Hofstadter took to calling this new right wing “pseudo-conservative” – a term he borrowed from Marxist thinker Theodor Adorno of the Frankfurt School.

James Pierson:

According to liberal writers like Richard Hofstadter and, Daniel Bell, and others, the far right were disconnected from reality, its followers semi-delusional in their belief that communism represented a domestic threat to the United States.

In short, a multi-decade academic industry took root that was based on an egregious fallacy. “Commie subversion” was not a paranoid delusion; it was a central feature of Soviet statecraft and a prime function of the CPUSA. Once again, McCarthy was directionally correct while his critics were wildly wrong.

It is also worth noting that while Bell, Hofstadter, et. al. were sorely vexed by rightwing conspiracy theories, they ignored the popular leftwing conspiracy theories such as those which posited grovernmental frame-ups of Alger Hiss, Judith Coplon, and the Rosenbergs.