June 17, 1957
In its first decade, The New Republic assisted the birth of the modern ideal of free speech. But it doesn’t follow that a civil libertarian magazine must endorse every dissident who invokes the Founding Fathers. When Richard Rovere wrote this essay, he was at work on his devastating biography of Joseph McCarthy. His animus toward the accuser didn’t lead him toward total sympathy for the accused. Arthur Miller had achieved the status of martyr on the basis of his refusal to “name names.” Rovere shows the hollowness of this principle and the great flaw at the center of Miller’s work. His essay is a case study in the construction of fine distinctions and their necessity.
“I will protect my sense of myself,” Arthur Miller told the House Committee on Un-American Activities when he refused to identify some writers who had once been Communists. “I could not use the name of another person and bring trouble on him.” The refusal brought Miller a conviction for contempt of Congress from a judge who found his motives “commendable” but his action legally indefensible.
A writer’s sense of himself is to be projected as well as protected. It becomes, through publication and production, a rather public affair. For this and other reasons, it is fitting that what Miller saw as the testing of his integrity—the challenge to his sense of himself—was a question involving not himself but others. Of himself, he had talked freely, not to say garrulously. He chatted, almost gaily, about his views in the Thirties, his views in the Forties, his views in the Fifties, about Ezra Pound and Elia Kazan and other notables, about the Smith Act and Congressional investigations and all manner of things. When he was asked why he wrote “so morbidly, so sadly,” he responded patiently and courteously, rather as if it were the “question period” following a paid lecture to a ladies club. His self-esteem was offended only when he was asked to identify others.
Thus, one might say, it was really a social or political ethic that he was defending, while of his sense of himself he gave freely. In legal terms, this might be a quibble, for there is no reason why a man should not have a right to his own definition of self-respect. In a literary sense, it is not a quibble, for Miller is a writer of a particular sort, and it was in character for him to see things this way. He is, basically, a political, or “socially conscious” writer. He is a distinguished survivor of the Thirties, and his values derive mostly from that decade. He is not much of a hand at exploring or exploiting his own consciousness. He is not inward. He writes at times with what may be a matchless power in the American theatre today, but not with a style of his own, and those who see his plays can leave them with little or no sense of the author as a character. He is not, in fact, much concerned with individuality of any sort. This is not an adverse judgment; it is a distinction, or an attempt at one. What interests Miller and what he can often convey with force is the crushing impact of society upon its members. His human beings are always on the anvil, awaiting the hammer, and the act that landed him in his present trouble was an attempt to shield two or three of them from the blow. (It was, of course, a symbolic act, a gesture, for Miller knew very well that the committee knew all about the men he was asked to identify. He could not really shield; he could only assert the shielding principle.) What he was protecting was, in any case, a self-esteem that rested upon a social rule or principle or ethic.
One could almost say that Miller’s sense of himself is the principle that holds “informing” to be the ultimate in human wickedness. It is certainly a recurrent theme in his writing. In The Crucible, his play about the Salem witchcraft trials, his own case is so strikingly paralleled as to lend color—though doubtless not truth—to the view that his performance in Washington was a case of life paying art the sincere flattery of imitation. To save his life, John Proctor, the hero, makes a compromise with the truth. He confesses, falsely, to having trafficked with Satan. “Did you see the Devil?” the prosecutor asks him. “I did,” Proctor says. He recognizes the character of his act, but this affects him little. “Good, then—it is evil, and I do it,” he says to his wife, who is shocked. He has reasoned that a few more years on earth are worth this betrayal of his sense of himself. (It is not to be concluded that Proctor’s concession to the mad conformity of the time parallels Miller’s testimony, for Proctor had never in fact seen the devil, whereas Miller had in fact seen Communists.) The prosecutor will not let him off with mere self-incrimination. He wants names; the names of those Proctor has seen with the Devil. Proctor refuses; does not balk at a self-serving lie, but a self-serving lie that involves others will not cross his lips. “I speak my own sins,” he says, either metaphorically or hypocritically, since the sins in question are a fiction. “I cannot judge another. I have no tongue for it.” He is hanged, a martyr.
In his latest play, A View from the Bridge, Miller returns to the theme, this time with immense wrath. He holds that the conscience—indeed humanity itself—is put to the final test when a man is asked to “inform.” Eddie, a longshoreman in the grip of a terrible passion for his teen-age niece, receives generous amounts of love and sympathy from those around him until his monstrous desire goads him into tipping off the Immigration officers to the illegal presence in his home of a pair of aliens. His lust for the child has had dreadful consequences for the girl herself, for the youth she wishes to marry, and for Eddie’s wife. It has destroyed Eddie’s sense of himself and made a brute of him. Yet up to the moment he “informs” he gets the therapy of affection and understanding from those he has hurt the most. But once he turns in the aliens, he is lost; he crosses the last threshold of iniquity. “In the garbage can he belongs,” his wife says. “Nobody is gonna talk to him again if he lives to a hundred.”
A View from the Bridge is not a very lucid play, and it may be that Miller, for all of his wrath, takes a somewhat less simple view of the problem of the informer than he does in The Crucible. There is a closing scene in which he appears to be saying that even this terrible transgression may be understood and dealt with in terms other than those employed by Murder, Incorporated. I think, though, that the basic principle for which Miller speaks is far commoner in Eddie’s and our world than it could have been in John Proctor’s. The morality that supports it is post-Darwinian. It is more available to those not bound by the Christian view of the soul’s infinite preciousness or of the body as a temple than it could have been to pre-Darwinian society. Today, in most Western countries, ethics derive mainly from society and almost all values are social. What we do to and with ourselves is thought to be our own affair and thus not, in most circumstances, a matter that involves morality at all. People will be found to say that suicide, for a man or woman with few obligations to others, should not be judged harshly, while the old sanctions on murder remain. Masochism is in one moral category, sadism in another. Masturbation receives a tolerance that fornication does not quite receive. A man’s person and his “sense of himself” are disposable assets, provided he chooses to see them that way; sin is only possible when we involve others. Thus, Arthur Miller’s John Proctor was a modern man when, after lying about his relations with the Devil, he said, “God in heaven, what is John Proctor, what is John Proctor? I think it is honest, I think so. I am no saint.” It is doubtful if anyone in the 17th Century could have spoken that way. The real John Proctor surely thought he had an immortal soul, and if he had used the word “honest” at all, it would not have been in the sophisticated way in which Miller had him use it. He might have weakened sufficiently to lie about himself and the Devil, but he would surely not have said it was “honest” to do so or reasoned that it didn’t really matter because he was only a speck of dust. He was speaking for the social ethic which is Arthur Miller’s—and he resisted just where Miller did, at “informing.”
It is, I think, useful to look rather closely at Miller’s social ethic and at what he has been saying about the problems of conscience, for circumstances have conspired to make him the leading symbol of the militant, risk-taking conscience in this period. I do not wish to quarrel with the whole of his morality, for much of it I share—as do, I suppose, most people who have not found it possible to accept any of the revealed religions. Moreover, I believe, as Judge McLaughlin did, that the action Miller took before the committee was a courageous one. Nevertheless, I think that behind the action and behind Miller’s defense of it there is a certain amount of moral and political confusion. If I am right, then we ought to set about examining it, lest conscience and political morality come to be seen entirely in terms of “naming names”—a simplification which the House Un-American Activities Committee seems eager to foist upon us and which Miller, too, evidently accepts.
A healthy conscience, Miller seems to be saying, can stand anything but “informing.” On the other hand, it makes little political sense and not a great deal of moral sense. Not all “informing” is bad, and not all of it is despised by the people who invariably speak of it as despicable. The question of guilt is relevant. My wife and I, for example, instruct our children not to tattle on one another. I am fairly certain, though, that if either of us saw a hit-and-run driver knock over a child or even a dog, we would, if we could, take down the man’s license number and turn him in to the police. Even in the case of children, we have found it necessary to modify the rule so that we may be quickly advised if anyone is in serious danger of hurting himself or another. (The social principle again.) Proctor, I think, was not stating a fact when he said, “I cannot judge another”—nor was Miller when he said substantially the same thing. For the decision not to inform involves judging others. “They think to go like saints,” Proctor said of those he claimed he could not judge, and Miller must have had something of the sort in mind about the writers he refused to discuss. He reasoned, no doubt, that their impulses were noble and that they had sought to do good in the world. We refuse to inform, I believe, either when we decide that those whose names we are asked to reveal are guilty of no wrong or when we perceive that what they have done is no worse than what we ourselves have often done. Wherever their offenses are clearly worse—as in the case of a hit-and-run driver or a spy or a thief—we drop the ban.
If the position taken by Miller were in all cases right, then it would seem wise to supplement the Fifth Amendment with one holding that no man could be required to incriminate another. If this were done, the whole machinery of law enforcement would collapse; it would be simply impossible to determine the facts about a crime. Of course, Congressional committees are not courts, and it might be held that such a rule would be useful in their proceedings. It would be useful only if we wished to destroy the investigative power. For we live, after all, in a community, in the midst of other people, and all of our problems—certainly all of those with which Congress has a legitimate concern—involve others. It is rarely possible to conduct a serious inquiry of any sort without talking about other people and without running the risk of saying something that would hurt them. We can honor the conscience that says, “I speak my own sins. I cannot judge another,” but those of us who accept any principle of social organization and certainly those of us who believe that our present social order, whatever changes it may stand in need of, is worth preserving cannot make a universal principle of refusing to inform. If any agency of the community is authorized to undertake a serious investigation of any of our common problems, then the identities of others—names—are of great importance. What would be the point of investigating, say, industrial espionage if the labor spies subpoenaed refused to identify their employers? What would be the point of investigating the Dixon-Yates contract if it were impossible to learn the identity of the businessmen and government officials involved?
The joker, the source of much present confusion, lies in the matter of seriousness. Miller and his attorneys have argued that the names of the writers Miller had known were not relevant to the legislation on passports the Committee was supposed to be studying. This would certainly seem to be the case, and one may regret that Judge McLaughlin did not accept this argument and acquit Miller on the strength of it. Nevertheless, the argument really fudges the central issue, which is that the Committee wasn’t really investigating passport abuses at all when it called Miller before it. It was only pretending to do so. The rambling talk of its members with Miller was basically frivolous, and the Un-American Activities Committee has almost always lacked seriousness. In this case, as Mary McCarthy has pointed out, the most that it wanted from Miller was to have him agree to its procedure of testing the good faith of witnesses by their willingness to produce names. It was on this that Miller was morally justified in his refusal.
Still, Miller’s principle, the social ethic he was defending, cannot be made a universal rule or a political right. For it is one thing to say in The New Republic that a committee is frivolous or mischievous and another to assert before the law that such a judgment gives a witness the right to stand mute without being held in contempt. As matters stand today, Miller was plainly in contempt. At one point in The Crucible, John Proctor is called upon to justify his failure to attend the church of the Reverend Mr. Parris and to have his children baptized by that divine. He replies that he disapproves of the clergyman. “I see no light of God in that man,” he says. “That is not for you to decide,” he is told. “The man is ordained, therefore the light of God is in him.” And this, of course, is the way the world is. In a free society, any one of us may arrive at and freely express a judgment about the competence of duly constituted authority. But in an orderly society, no one of us can expect the protection of the law whenever we decide that a particular authority is unworthy of our cooperation. We may stand by the decision, and we may seek the law’s protection, but we cannot expect it as a matter of right. There are many courses of action that may have a sanction in morality and none whatever in law.
Yet the law is intended to be, among other things, a codification of morality, and we cannot be pleased with the thought that a man should be penalized for an act of conscience—even when his conscience may seem not as fully informed by reason as it ought to be. In a much more serious matter, war, we excuse from participation those who say their consciences will permit them no part in it. One of the reasons the order of American society seems worth preserving is that it allows, on the whole, a free play to the individual’s moral judgments. In recent years, Congressional committees have posed the largest single threat to this freedom. The issues have often been confused by the bad faith of witnesses on the one hand and committee members on the other. Still and all, the problem is a real one, as the Miller case shows. If there is not sufficient latitude for conscience in the law, then there ought to be. It would be unrealistic, I think, simply to permit anyone who chooses to withhold whatever information he chooses. The Fifth Amendment seems to go as far as is generally justified in this direction. Changes in committee procedures have often been urged, but it is doubtful if much clarification of a problem such as this can be written into rules and bylaws. The problem is essentially one of discretion and measurement; it is, in other words, the most difficult sort of problem and one of the kind that has, customarily, been dealt with by the establishment of broad and morally informed judicial doctrines. It is surely to be hoped that in the several cases, including Arthur Miller’s, now in one stage or another of review, the courts will find a way of setting forth a realistic and workable charter for the modern conscience.