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.