Postwar McCarthyism existed long before Joe came on the scene in 1950. Joe was what Lenin called a “tailist,” latching on to a spontaneous grassroots movement, born out of the dimly understood reality of America’s postwar global role. The postwar equation consisted of two inimical great powers, one of which had a subversive group in the other’s midst, masquerading as a political party. No one yet knew about Soviet espionage. Russia did not have the bomb. But the threat of another nuclear power was alarming, particularly in the light of Soviet expansion in Eastern Europe.
The veterans, many of whom had fought on the same side as their Russian allies in Europe, were among the first to express their anxiety about the changing balance of power. In St. Louis in January 1946, American War Dads issued a pamphlet called The Communist Cancer, which stated that “there is no such thing as an American Communist.” The Communist Party in Missouri at that time counted fewer than five hundred card-carrying members.
Missouri State Senator Horace C. Williams, a Republican from the Ozarks, rose on the Senate floor in January 1947 and fanned the air with the Christmas issue of Towertime, the University of Missouri campus publication. He objected to the cover, which showed Stalin dressed as Santa Claus going down a chimney, to illustrate an article about politicians exploiting the Red Scare.1
In Peoria, Illinois, in 1947, a Paul Robeson concert was canceled and the city council passed a resolution barring the appearance of “any artist or speaker who is an avowed propagandist for un-American ideologies.”2
Early in 1947, one of the first state imitators of the House Un-American Activities Committee was formed in Washington State, where the Democratic Party had veered to the left, electing the secret Communist Hugh DeLacy to the House from 1944 to 1946. The seven-man Joint Legislative Fact-Finding Committee on Un-American Activities was chaired by State Senator Albert F. Canwell, a onetime deputy sheriff. Another senator on the committee, Thomas Bienz, said in March 1947 that “probably not less than 150 on the University of Washington faculty are Communists or sympathizers.” The university’s Board of Regents promised to fire all subversives, and the Canwell Committee held hearings in July 1948. In September, the university filed charges against three professors who had refused to testify and three others who admitted past membership, but declined to discuss their colleagues. Raymond Allen, the university president, recommended dismissal for all six.
On January 8, 1949, the tenure committee voted 7 to 4 to fire the first three as “agents of Communism,” and to place the other three on two-year probation. On January 22, the Board of Regents affirmed the ruling. The rationale was that a Communist teacher must believe and teach what the party line decrees. Even if he taught a nonsensitive subject such as home economics, a Communist teacher could not be trusted. Nor would one want a member of the Ku Klux Klan teaching anthropology.3
Each university was a small fiefdom that settled the problem in its own way. There was no uniform, standardized policy. But the premise that Communists should be excluded from government and from American political life was often extended to the universities. Even a liberal college such as Antioch in Yellow Springs, Ohio, fired a math professor, Robert Rempfer, for distributing a clemency petition for the Rosenbergs. It became a common practice for universities to fire faculty who took the Fifth before congressional committees. The committees then brought them in deliberately for that reason.
By 1949, twenty-two states had adopted oaths of allegiance for teachers.4 By then, the anti-Communist rhetoric had been notched up following the Hiss-Chambers-Bentley spy revelations of 1948. The Truman loyalty program also shaped public awareness, as the loyalty oath fad spread to radio stations and other private establishments.
In Sunfield, Michigan, in July 1949, the Congregationalist minister, Albert W. Kauffman, who also taught high school Latin and English, wrote a letter to the magazine Soviet Russia Today, saying: “I oppose the capitalist ideology that is promoting war against Russia.” The Michigan American Legion picketed Kauffman’s church. On December 4, the Sunfield Board of Education fired him for bringing “unfavorable publicity” to the school. One board member said, “It’s pretty bad when our basketball team comes out on the floor and the opponents say, ‘Here come the Commies.’ ”5
In 1947, lagging behind the Midwest, Harvard had a John Reed Society sponsoring lectures on Marxism. One of the speakers was John Gates, the legislative director of the Communist Party (who quit the party in 1958). This was the last stand of the united front at Harvard. By 1950, Harvard had an unnamed faculty member (probably McGeorge Bundy), who was listed by the FBI as a Confidential National Defense Informant. There were two sound reasons for Harvard’s cooperation with the FBI. One was that it kept congressional committees at bay. The other was that Harvard’s Russian Research Center did classified work for the Air Force’s Air Targets Division. Clyde Kluckhohn, the director of the center, agreed to brief the FBI on its work. The assistant director, H. Stuart Hughes, who had been active in the Wallace campaign, was dropped. Once the universities became involved in classified government work, national security preempted academic freedom.6
Aside from organized groups with a voice in society, such as the universities, the veterans, and the churches, there were anti-Red freelancers. Anyone with a letterhead could jump in. In 1949 in Norwalk, Connecticut, Suzanne Silvercruys Stevenson launched the Minute Women of the U.S.A. She was a Belgian-born sculptress married to an Army colonel. The Minute Women were anti-labor, anti–income tax, and pro-segregation. They wore on their starched bosoms red, white, and blue pins with the slogan “Guarding the Land We Love.” By May 1952, they claimed to have half a million members in 104 chapters in forty-six states. Calling herself “the Paul Revere of the Fair Sex,” Mrs. Stevenson traveled from chapter to chapter giving set speeches, such as “The Public Schools Are Honeycombed with Communists.”
No chapter of the Minute Women was more ardent than the one in Houston, Texas. There, members enrolled in classes at the University of Houston to ferret out subversive teachers. They managed to get several prominent educators fired.7
In October 1947, three years before McCarthy got started, HUAC investigated Reds in the film industry. Hollywood was a world of its own, confined, stratified, and self-absorbed. It was a glittering, money-grubbing, ego-driven town. John Bright, who co-wrote five James Cagney movies, including Public Enemy, recalled that when he arrived in 1929 “there was no left-wing movement at all.” He was one of the original four secret Communists in the Hollywood section of the party, which in the thirties grew to three hundred. John Howard Lawson, the voluble Cyrano-nosed playwright, became the commissar of the Hollywood Communists. He lectured to young actors, telling them that their performances had to advance the class struggle. “If you are merely an extra playing a member of a country club,” he said, “play it in a way that will invite prejudice against the class represented. If you are an extra in a street scene of a tenement district or in any poor surroundings, play your part to excite sympathy.”8
Communists were instrumental in the founding of the Screen Writers Guild, which won certification from the National Labor Relations Board in 1938. Aside from obtaining financial advantages, the Guild took away from the studios the right to designate the screenwriter on the credits. Through its ability to place members on the board, the party controlled the Screen Writers Guild until the fifties.
There was a period of radical chic in Hollywood from the mid-thirties to the mid-forties, when women in evening dresses joined longshoremen on the San Diego docks to picket a ship bound for Japan with scrap iron, and when Norma Shearer in a sequined gown toasted the victors of Stalingrad.
This was the period when being a Communist could help your career. Nathan Benoff, a comedy writer for the radio program Duffy’s Tavern, came to Paramount in 1943 to break into films and met the writer and director Robert Rossen (All the King’s Men). Rossen asked Benoff to “come out to a meeting of the party and meet a lot of big writers.” Benoff joined as a form of social promotion, but stayed in only a few months. “I dipped my toe, I dunked it, and I ran,” he recalled.9
Another writer, Bart Lytton, had joined the party in New York in 1935, but dropped out when he moved to Hollywood. In 1944, he was approached by the RKO writer George Beck, considered by some to be an opportunistic Communist (he later cooperated with HUAC).
“Say, what is this about you?” Beck asked. “I understand you were expelled. You’d better get it cleared up, because if you don’t, your name is mud in this town.”10
Concerned about Beck’s warning, Bart Lytton got in touch with the party organizer, Elizabeth Glenn, who told him that charges had been filed against him. “Apparently I had done everything but set fire to my mother,” he said. As the months went by, or dissolved, in movie parlance, friends dropped him, dinner dates were canceled at the last minute, and when he came into Guild meetings, backs were turned. “A very competent rumor factory was at work…. The smear tactics they later accused the HUAC committee of were tactics they were masters at.” Lytton lost jobs. He was astonished at the party’s influence. He had been a prolific and successful writer, but now he couldn’t find work, he was red-listed. He had a nervous breakdown.11
One way that the Communist writers justified the hack work they did for the studios was to claim that they could influence the content of films. This dogged effort to infiltrate the party line into scripts could reach ludicrous levels. Bernice Fleury, who worked on animated cartoons for Warner Bros., recalled cell meetings where they discussed how to have more socially conscious cartoons. (Bugs Bunny panhandling for carrots?) She left the party in disgust.12
Many of those in the industry, whether Communist or not, scoffed at the idea. In the production process, films passed through too many hands, and political messages would be weeded out. As the director Edward Dmytryk said, “You would have to go through the line, and you would have to have a chain of Communists from beginning to end.”13
One of the more talented screenwriters, Dalton Trumbo, who survived the blacklist, argued that if content had not changed, HUAC would not have come to Hollywood. At the same time he admitted that the accomplishments were puny. Even the anti-fascist films had cheap sentiment and shallow characterizations.14
At the core of the content conundrum were the Communist writers’ low feelings of self-worth. They worked in an industry that catered to the bourgeois consumer society they professed to scorn. As they tanned themselves by their pools in Beverly Hills, they reflected on their quandary. They had been co-opted by the capitalist society they were supposed to be combating, and were prostituting their talent as hired hands for the studios. To reclaim their integrity, they became more strident in their party activities.
Edward Dmytryk, who testified before HUAC on April 25, 1951, gave what was perhaps the most probing analysis of the Hollywood Communist mentality. “In Hollywood more than anywhere else in the world you hear the word ‘break,’ ” he said. “A successful person in Hollywood will never say ‘I got there by hard work and personality.’ He will say ‘I got the breaks.’ So there is a lingering feeling that their success is not deserved. They make so much money that they look around for some organization that will validate them. The party lays very clever flytraps.”15
Such was the context for the October 1947 confrontation between HUAC and the Hollywood Ten. The wealthy but self-despising Hollywood hacks finally had a chance to prove their radical mettle. Since seven of the ten were writers, they could play at being heroes by writing scripts for themselves. When the U.S. marshal came to the RKO studios and handed subpoenas to Dmytryk and writer Adrian Scott, they got in touch with the liberal lawyer Bartley Crum. But the others retained the Communist lawyer Ben Margolis, who devised a strategy that would follow the party line rather than help the witnesses. Margolis brought in the CIO counsel and longtime Communist Lee Pressman to tell them they were on the barricades of the battle for freedom and must stick to their guns.16
Margolis turned the hearings into a show trial abounding in disruption and confrontation. On the five-day train ride to Washington, he coached the Ten for twelve hours a day, conducting mock cross-examinations and drilling them in the techniques of agitprop.
Alvah Bessie, the only one of the Ten to have served in the International Brigades, later said: “Mr. Parnell Thomas [the HUAC chairman] was correct in that there was a strong party organization in Hollywood. There must have been 200 or 300 people in the talent and craft sections alone, not counting the backlots and so forth.”17 All the Ten later admitted or were shown to be party members.
When the hearings opened in Washington, screenwriter John Howard Lawson testified on October 27 and started yelling: “I am not on trial here…this committee is on trial.”
Thomas (mildly): “We don’t want you to be on trial.”
Lawson kept yelling and Thomas said, “You are just making a big scene for yourself and getting all ‘het up.’ ”
Lawson kept it up until he was removed and held in contempt. He was described as having written for the Daily Worker since 1934 and having defended the purge trials. His party card, No. 47275, obtained from the FBI, was read into the record.
The next day, Trumbo testified and said he understood they had his membership card. “I would like to see what you have,” he said.
Thomas: “Oh you would! Well you will pretty soon.”
Trumbo: “This is the beginning of an American concentration camp.” (Disturbances in the audience.)
Trumbo made so much noise he was cited for contempt like Lawson, which seemed to be the goal.
And so it went. Albert Maltz had written Pride of the Marines, starring John Garfield as a Jewish soldier wounded at Guadalcanal. In a hospital scene, he gave what was known among party screenwriters as “the ya-ya speech,” which condemned America as the home of inequality and racial discrimination. “My name isn’t Jones, so I can’t get a job,” and so on. To protect himself, the screenwriter had another character respond with the “I love these rocks and rills” speech. Before the committee, Maltz made his brave little speech: “I would rather die than be a shabby American, groveling before men whose names are Thomas and Rankin, but who carry out activities in America like those carried out in Germany by Himmler.” This was the same man who had groveled before the cultural commissar V. J. Jerome to recant an article saying that writers should sometimes pursue artistic rather than political goals. Maltz then threw a little tantrum and called HUAC staff member Robert Stripling a “Quisling.” His party card was read into the record as were his fifty-eight party affiliations.18
Bartley Crum later said that as the histrionics mounted, he could feel the audience in the hearing room lose sympathy for the witnesses. The HUAC committee members kept their composure while the Ten ranted. These frustrated showoffs, so conniving and secretive in their party activities, and so clamorous in their denunciations of the committee, made complete fools of themselves. But that was what Margolis intended, as he wrote his fellow defense lawyer Robert W. Kenny: “We shall undoubtedly receive many setbacks. Only by proper utilization of each stage of the proceedings, and of setbacks themselves, can a case like ours achieve the necessary public support…. Then the public can understand what the fight is about…. The presentation of these issues will advance our objectives even though the court rules against us.”19 It could not have been said more clearly. The true purpose of the hearings was to create sympathy for the party rather than to defend the Ten charged with contempt. The more setbacks the better!
The Ten didn’t realize that they had been thrown to the wolves to improve the party’s image. They were found guilty of contempt on May 5, 1948. The Court of Appeals upheld in June 1949, saying: “It is absurd to argue…that questions asked men, who, by the authorship of the scripts, vitally influence the ultimate production of motion pictures seen by millions, which questions require disclosure of whether or not they are or ever have been Communists, are not pertinent questions.” In April 1950, the Supreme Court declined to review the case. The flaw in the argument was “vital influence.” Trumbo may have thought, as he put it, that he was “using art as a weapon for the future of mankind,” but nine times out of ten the studio system blocked out the message. As Samuel Goldwyn said, “If you want to send messages, use Western Union.”
To take Trumbo as an example, by December 1947 the producers had decreed a blacklist of the Ten. Trumbo was getting letters addressed to “Traitor Trumbo,” “Jew-lover Trumbo,” and “Red Rat Trumbo.” Suspended by MGM, he had to mortgage his home. He asked his agent, George Willner, who pioneered the use of fronts and pseudonyms for blacklisted writers, for “a polish job.”20
In June 1950, his appeals exhausted, Trumbo went to jail at the federal pen in Ashland, Kentucky. It wasn’t such a bad place, he wrote his wife, Cleo, with fresh vegetable salad daily from the prison farm, and newspapers and magazines.
By 1952, Trumbo had sold his ranch and moved to Mexico, where there was quite a colony of blacklisted screenwriters, including John Bright and Albert Maltz. Trumbo wrote a script about a boy and a bullfight, called The Brave One, under the name Robert Rich. In March 1956, when the Oscars were handed out, Robert Rich was nowhere to be found. By this time, the black market was flourishing like a green bay tree, which led to the collapse of the blacklist in films. Trumbo was returned to his prior eminence. On May 26, 1957, he wrote Murray Kempton that “having made no public announcement when I joined the Communist Party, I naturally made none when I departed from it [in 1956]…. Why did I leave?…The XXth Congress furnished the opportunity [though] I never believed in the perfection of the Soviet Union…. So I don’t feel impelled to penitential cries.”
The question was, how did Trumbo reconcile his many years in the party with his love of money? He said that he had lost an estimated $1 million because of the blacklist. His friend John Bright told him it was deeply immoral to mourn the loss and accused him of “ideological corruption.” The Hollywood blacklistees had subverted art and honesty by selling the status quo through mass hypnotism, Bright said. Their political activity derived in large part from a recognition of their guilt. And then they wept when they were deprived, not of bread and milk, but of Cadillacs and minks.21
Trumbo saw America as a nation of money-grubbers, but he was one himself, with a veneer of militancy.
Another question was, between those who took the Fifth and those who named names, where was personal honor? The privilege stated that no one is bound to accuse himself. Thus, taking the Fifth meant you had something to hide. Why else would answering incriminate you? As Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black put it, “If there is nothing to conceal, then why conceal it?” Taking the Fifth naturally produced an assumption of guilt, to the extent that it could not be introduced in a subsequent court proceeding as evidence. In congressional hearings, Communist witnesses routinely used the Fifth to avoid perjury on the one hand and telling the truth on the other. As Carl Beck wrote in Contempt of Congress, taking the Fifth promiscuously “makes a mockery of a constitutional privilege established for the protection of the individual from the arbitrary exercise of power. By subverting this privilege, these witnesses eroded its efficacy and contributed to the rejection by the public of the worthwhileness of the self-incrimination plea.”
And what of non-Communist witnesses taking the Fifth out of principle, or to defy the committee? As the “friendly” witness Abe Burrows, co-author of Guys and Dolls, told HUAC on November 12, 1952, “Communist Party members, in the Fifth Amendment, discovered a way to refuse to answer the questions of the committee without being cited for contempt, and they would like everyone who is called, and that includes non-Communists, to refuse to answer this committee.”
The spectacle of literally hundreds of witnesses taking the Fifth with robotlike regularity made a poor impression. When they invoked the founding fathers, there was something unclean about it. Will Lee (aka William Lubovsky) of the American Theater Wing told HUAC: “I stand on the right as given to us by James Madison and his associates.”
Why could they not tell the truth? The answer was that if you admitted membership, you would have to name others, which made you a stool pigeon. But between the posturing cardboard heroes who took the Fifth and those who named names, the former were cowards afraid of admitting their allegiance, while the latter were doing their duty as citizens under oath before a congressional committee. Some of the latter were opportunists trying to avoid the blacklist, but others had left the party and felt it was proper to expose its underhandedness.
Frank Tuttle, a well-bred Yale graduate of the thirties, was the veteran director of seventy pictures when he testified before HUAC on May 24, 1951. He was one of the early joiners, from 1937 to 1947, and part of the cell in the Directors Guild. He named names, and when he was asked why he had turned informant, he said, “All decent people, who share this dislike for informers, if they think about this carefully, will agree with me that at this particular moment [of the war in Korea] it is absolutely vital [to inform]…with ruthless aggression abroad in the world, the aggressors are as ruthless with their own people as they are with those they consider their enemies.”22
Another reason for informing was that it was the lesser of two evils. The choreographer Jerome Robbins was a compliant witness when he testified on May 5, 1953, hoping perhaps to skirt the issue of his homosexuality. He was also disillusioned with the party, which he had been a member of from 1943 to 1947, in the “theatrical transient group.” Robbins recalled that at one of the early meetings someone asked him in what way dialectical materialism had helped him create his ballet Fancy Free. “I found the question a little ridiculous…. The ballet is about three sailors on shore leave in New York…. The purpose was to show how American material and American spirit and American warmth…could be used as an art form.” But in the party, “you are constantly told to make your art carry a political message.” He attended another meeting where Martha Graham was called “the face of fascism.” “I have the highest respect for this woman,” he said. “This floored me…this procedure to label things fascistic, bourgeois, decadent.” Robbins named those in his cell and was congratulated by the committee, one of whose members, Clyde Doyle, said: “Use that great talent that God blessed you with to promote Americanism.”
Robbins: “Sir, all my works have been acclaimed for their American quality particularly.”
Doyle: “I realize that, but let me urge you to even put more of that in it where you can appropriately.” Robbins did, in West Side Story.23
The actor Sterling Hayden, who had a contract with Paramount, said he joined the party as a reaction to his dislike of Hollywood. He felt “kind of lost, not being an actor by inclination,” and he was introduced to Isaac “Pop” Folkoff, whom Hayden thought of as “an old warrior in the class struggle,” and who was actually the West Coast liaison man for the KGB, and a senior leader of the California Communist Party, born in 1881 in Latvia. Hayden joined the party after the war and was given the assignment of swinging the Screen Actors Guild behind a strike. “It was the stupidest, most ignorant thing I have ever done,” he recalled. He was dismayed by the Communist belief “that they have the key, by some occult power, to know what is best for people.” He got out in 1946 and gave the committee quite a few names, including that of the actor Will Geer, who was married to Hal Ware’s niece Herta, making her the granddaughter of Mother Bloor.24
Jerome Robbins and Sterling Hayden were not subjected to a campaign of vilification for naming names. The one emblematic informer, dragged through the mud for half a century, was Elia Kazan. It could only have been the revenge of mediocrity on talent.
When he first appeared before the committee in executive session on January 14, 1952, Kazan refused to name names. But HUAC leaked his refusal to the Hollywood Reporter, and the pressure began to mount. Spyros Skouras, the president of Twentieth Century Fox, implied that if he didn’t name names, he wouldn’t work. Darryl Zanuck, the producer of Viva Zapata!, which Kazan directed, told him, “Name the names for Chrissake, who the hell are you going to jail for?”25
Kazan thought of Albert Maltz, who had never shaken off the party shackles, and Budd Schulberg, who had been attacked by the party for writing What Makes Sammy Run?, which was viewed as anti-Semitic. When they were shooting Zapata in Mexico, the Film Technicians union was Communist, and its president, Gabriel Figueroa, showed the script to the comrades, who said it needed work. Kazan began to think of all the times he had been bullied by the party—maybe it should be driven out of its hiding places.
Part of Kazan did not like giving names, but another part asked, “Why should I be in the cold?” He finally did it as an act of cleansing, to wipe out seventeen years of posturing. Not to forget the practical side. Why should he give up his right to work to protect a party he now despised?26
On April 10, 1952, Kazan testified before HUAC after writing the committee a letter that said: “I have come to the conclusion that secrecy serves the Communists…. The American people need the facts and all the facts…. It is my obligation as a citizen to tell everything I know.”
Kazan said that he had been a party member for nineteen months in a Group Theater unit that included Morris Carnovsky, Clifford Odets, J. Edward Bromberg, and three or four others. Kazan quit the party when he saw that the cell was trying to take over Group Theater as a mouthpiece for “socially conscious” plays. A Communist organizer was brought in from the automobile workers in Detroit to show him the error of his ways. “My fellow members looked at him as if he were an oracle,” Kazan recalled. “That was the night I quit.”27
After his testimony, Kazan got hate calls and hate mail. “I became an easy mark for every self-righteous prick in New York and Hollywood,” Kazan recalled. When he was snubbed by his former colleagues, he thought, “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.”28
In the year 2000, at the age of eighty-nine, Kazan was finally awarded an honorary Oscar, but remained a magnet for controversy. Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro applauded him, but Nick Nolte and Ed Harris, who were babes in arms at the time of HUAC, sat on their hands. Sean Penn, who was not yet born at the time, signed a full-page ad in Variety saying that Kazan had “validated the blacklist,” which had begun in 1947, four years before Kazan’s testimony, and which required no validation.
Anti-Kazan demonstrators picketed the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in Los Angeles, where the Oscar ceremony was held. Among them were two blacklisted writers: Bernard Gordon, a journeyman who wrote such screenplays as Earth vs. the Flying Saucers (1956) and Zombies of Mora Tau (1957). He had been blacklisted in 1947 and wrote scripts under the name Raymond T. Marcus. Gordon thought Kazan had “damaged the Hollywood community.” Another demonstrator, Robert Lees, had joined the party in 1939 and scripted Pete Smith shorts, as well as Juke Box Jenny and Bachelor Daddy. He had been named by Sterling Hayden and was summoned before HUAC on April 11, 1951. On the train trip east, he was coached by his lawyers, Ben Margolis and Robert Kenny, and rehearsed his answers. He was so learned in the techniques of the Fifth that he took it when asked the name of his collaborator of seventeen years, Fred Rinaldo. His testimony, which lasted for an hour and a half, was a veritable deluge of Fifth Amendment responses. And now he was demonstrating against Kazan, whom he thought should apologize. But apologize for what? For telling the truth and giving seven or eight names that were already known, or for being the director of Gentleman’s Agreement, A Streetcar Named Desire, A Face in the Crowd, and On the Waterfront?
In the HUAC hearings, the confrontational style pioneered by the Ten in 1947 persisted in the fifties. While the committee was pilloried for its witch-hunts, the conduct of some of the witnesses was overlooked. The soapbox style was still evident on April 8, 1953, when the blacklisted actor and writer Ned Young testified. “Do you seriously think you can pound the truth in the dust with that gavel,” he asked the committee chairman, Donald L. Jackson.
Jackson: “If you don’t think I resent sitting here day after day and being abused by men of your stripe, you are in error.”
Young: “How low can you get? I think you are a contemptible man.”
Jackson: “I am proud to be called contemptible by people like you, sir.”
Young: “This is costing me my livelihood. I will never work again…. I think this is just rotten.”
Not only did Young work again, he won the Oscar for best screenplay in 1958 for The Defiant Ones, directed by Stanley Kramer, which he wrote as Nathan E. Douglas. It was the story of two escaped convicts, one black, one white, chained to each other.29
Young was followed by Sol Kaplan, a composer who had adapted Tchaikovsky into songs for a TV special called The Magic Nutcracker, and who said every member of the committee was “a bigot, a perverter, and a devil on earth.”
Jackson: “This is entirely aside from the question.”
Kaplan: “I am not your Charlie McCarthy…. Your ventriloquism does not work for me.”
Jackson: “No. I would pick another dummy.”
Kaplan: “You are very strong with blackjacks in your hand.”
Blacklisted, Kaplan wrote ditties for television commercials. One of his clients was the Ford Motor Company. Despite his convictions, Kaplan ended up as a capitalist tool, writing “Got it made, got it made, with the ’62 Fords on parade.”30
By the time Joe came on the scene with his Wheeling speech in February 1950, McCarthyism was in full swing. To blame it all on McCarthy, said the Ohio newspaper publisher Edward Lamb, “is like blaming the temperature on the thermometer.” McCarthy, who concentrated on Communists in government, became an enabler for the others, a cheerleader who sanctioned grassroots anti-Communist activism. The political component, as Hubert Humphrey explained it in The Education of a Public Man, was that “the Republicans had been out of the presidency since 1933 and they were desperate to regain political power…. They used the anguish and distress of the Korean war and fed the irrationality of Senator McCarthy.”
In the Washington Post, the cartoonist Herblock showed Joe climbing out of a sewer dripping mud, but in many parts of the country he was hailed as a hero. The oil millionaire Hugh Roy Cullen called him “the greatest man in America.”31
The period to which McCarthy gave his name sanctioned the blacklist racket, although that too was launched before he came on the scene. For it was in 1947 that three former FBI men started American Business Consultants (ABC), which put out a newsletter called Counterattack, listing entertainers and union officials with alleged party connections. Counterattack charged $24-a-year subscriptions as well as clearance fees for those who wanted them. This was private enterprise at its worst, trading in reputations, and fostering the principle that people should be fired because of a rumored affiliation, or some trivial act such as sending Mother Bloor a card on her seventy-fifth birthday. Entertainers on radio and television were easy targets because the sponsors could be intimidated and could in turn intimidate the networks.
In June 1950, only months after McCarthy’s Wheeling speech, American Business Consultants published a 213-page book called Red Channels, which listed 151 supposedly Red-tinged actors, writers, producers, and directors. The cover showed a red hand seizing a microphone. The Hearst press jumped in—“Red Infiltration of TV, Radio Bared”—and Counterattack plugged its product: “A copy of Red Channels should be in every American home…next to the radio or TV set.” Many of those named were blacklisted.32
It was a dirty little business, exposing people, often on flimsy grounds, and getting paid to expose them by the ad agencies and networks who subscribed to your publication, and then getting paid again to help clear those who were named.
One casualty of Red Channels was Philip Loeb, the short, doleful actor who played the suffering father on The Goldbergs, a sitcom about a middle-class Jewish family in the Bronx. He had seventeen front group listings in Red Channels and was dropped from the show. Loeb was a widower with a schizophrenic son, whom he had to move from a private to a state hospital. On September 11, 1955, at the age of sixty-one, he checked into the Hotel Taft, took some pills, and never woke up.
The blacklist racket was booming, with room for expansion. Vincent Hartnett, a graduate of Notre Dame who had served in Naval Intelligence, was at American Business Consultants, compiling material for Red Channels, but left in 1952 to launch his own publication, Aware. He worked closely with the grocer Laurence Johnson, who owned five supermarkets in upstate New York, decorated with cracker barrels, old piggy banks, and campaign buttons. Hartnett fed names to Johnson, who then called the networks to say he would boycott the products of their sponsors.
One of Hartnett’s techniques was to study old photographs of May Day parades with a magnifying glass, to see who he could spot. A letter would follow, “Have you changed your views?” If you had, he could clear you for a fee. If you hadn’t, you would be listed in Aware. His treatment of the actress Kim Hunter was typical. When he named her in 1952, she was blacklisted. Her press agent then asked Hartnett what she should do. He said he could review her entire record for a fee of $200. He also helped her write her mea culpa, in which she said: “It was only after I had made several errors in judgment that I was finally alerted to a clearer and more intelligent understanding of the insidious working of the Communist conspiracy.”33
One of the by-products of the McCarthy era was the rise of the undercover witness. Undercover FBI agents were extremely effective in identifying Communists in the Smith Act trials and in HUAC hearings, though this had little to do with espionage. It was part of the sometimes overzealous effort to dismantle the Communist leadership under the Truman and Eisenhower administrations. In the period from 1952 to 1954, the Justice Department had eighty-three informers on its payroll, thirty of whom were regularly used as witnesses in congressional hearings and Smith Act trials.34 The “professional witness,” who made a living informing on the party affiliations of those he had known, was prone to stretch the truth and behave inappropriately in order to stay in business.
Armando Penha, an undercover FBI man in New Bedford, Massachusetts, apparently seduced a young woman, enticed her into joining the party, where he was a section organizer, and then named her as a Communist. Olga Garczynski, a punch press operator at the Royal Brand Cutlery company, was a member of the party from 1953 to 1956. At the time, Penha, a married man with children, was courting her. On March 19, 1958, she testified at a HUAC hearing that “whatever Mr. Penha told me to go to, I went. He dragged me into this mess. If it wasn’t for him, I wouldn’t be in this mess…. In 1957, he didn’t come up to the house any more, so that was the end of whatever dirty work that he wanted me to do.” As a farewell gift, Olga sent a birthday card to Penha’s two-year-old daughter, Susan, with a note enclosed for his wife. Penha made a pro forma denial: “I did not court her or any other female Communist sympathizer or dupe.”35
In Cleveland in 1948, a black woman who had joined the party decided to go undercover for the FBI when she discovered that the local cells were segregated. Julia Clarice Brown had thought the party furthered civil rights, but when she was assigned to the southeast section, she found that she could not attend meetings there because it was all white. On paper, she was a member of the southeast section, but she attended meetings at the northeast section.
When she testified before HUAC in June 1962, the committee counsel, Alfred M. Nittle, said: “This is an astounding assertion…. You say there was segregation practiced by the Communist Party?”
Brown: “I complained to Benjamin Davis when he came to Cleveland…. He didn’t like it and one day he spoke on it, but it didn’t do any good. They still didn’t allow me in the south-east section.”
Her first assignment was to be the chauffeur for Freida Katz, the head of the Civil Rights Congress, a front group. Brown went to plants and passed out leaflets on police brutality and lynching. In 1948, she helped collect the 75,000 signatures Wallace needed to get on the ballot in Ohio. She got to know a lot of Cleveland Communists, and she was happy to turn them in once she realized that while giving lip service to civil rights they practiced segregation.36
Mary Stalcup Markward, who operated the Rainbow Beauty Shop in Washington, and who went undercover in 1943, recalled at a hearing in June 1951 that her work in the party ostracized her husband. “He was facing all the hardships of lack of association with friends, and the gossip and so forth.”
Mrs. Markward made the point that undercover agents often rose quickly in party ranks, thanks to their simulated motivation. She was elected chairman of the Northeast Club in 1944, then to the city committee, then city treasurer, then to the Maryland District Committee, before quitting in 1949. She testified in McCarthy’s 1953 hearing on the Government Printing Office. The party hierarchy was studded with FBI informants, whose ability to gain information depended on their performance as promotable Communists.37
The freelance ex-Communist professional witnesses included all manner of dubious characters, but none so bewilderingly eccentric as Harvey Matusow. Born in the Bronx in 1926, the son of a cigar store owner and a Russian-born mother, Matusow joined the Army at the age of eighteen, in 1944, serving in France and Germany. It was in the Army that his propensity for not telling the truth was first exposed. He said he could speak French, Spanish, Italian, and German. But when he was handed a passage from a book in German, he couldn’t translate it.38
Mustered out of the Army in 1946, Matusow was back in New York and drifted into the party, which gave him “a feeling of belonging.” Soon he became a paid employee, working in party bookstores and as a switchboard operator at party headquarters. In the summer he went to Camp Unity in Wingdale, New York: lectures in the morning and hootenannies in the evening with party songbooks. On the grounds, a boulder with Lenin’s face sculpted into it, a Communist Mount Rushmore. Matusow was in the youth group, which in 1948 morphed into Youth for Wallace. He worked for People’s Songs, which ran the cultural part of the campaign. Short, stocky, dark-haired, brash, and garrulous, Matusow was the salesman type. In 1948, he won a trip to Puerto Rico for selling the most subscriptions to the Sunday Worker.39
In 1950, he was living with an African-American divorcee and took a job with a Harlem collection agency. The party accused him of “white chauvinism” and demoted him. In a fit of pique, Matusow went to the New York office of the FBI in late March and said he was a disillusioned Communist who wanted to be an undercover informant. He was paid $75 a month to cover expenses and named several hundred persons he knew in the party. Assistant Attorney General William F. Tomkins later said that corroboration had been found for 90 percent of those he named.
In the summer of 1950, Matusow met Craig Vincent at a party affair at the Hotel Albert in New York City. Vincent operated a dude ranch for comrades in the mountains of New Mexico and was recruiting guests. Matusow was invited and went in July. The San Cristóbal ranch was eighteen miles north of Taos. Vincent, a Communist lawyer who had run the Wallace campaign in Colorado in 1948, had opened the place in 1949. On March 17, 1950, in Denver, according to congressional testimony, Communist leaders decided that the ranch would be operated for the party. When he testified before the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee in June 1953, Vincent took the Fifth when asked if the ranch was an adjunct of the party.40
With its 160 acres at 7,900 feet, and its unspoiled mountain scenery, San Cristóbal was a place where stressed-out party functionaries could unwind in the company of their own kind, sing Spanish Civil War songs, and visit Indian pueblos. One of the regulars was Clinton Jencks, an organizer with Mine, Mill, and Smelter, a Communist-controlled union that was ousted by the CIO in 1950, after a trial that ruled “the Communist Party is in direct control of the union’s leadership and dictates to that leadership the policies it shall adopt.”41
Tall, rangy, and flaxen-haired, Clinton Jencks was sent to southwestern New Mexico in 1947, where he was known by the Mexicans who worked the copper and silver mines as “El Palomino.” Jencks merged the scattered Mine, Mill locals into one big local, 890.42
At the San Cristóbal ranch in the summer of 1950, Jencks met Harvey Matusow, who was trying hard to be the life of the party, calling square dances and singing his repertoire of people’s songs. He also turned over the names of the guests to the FBI office in Albuquerque. Matusow chatted up Jencks, telling him he was thinking of moving to New Mexico. “It is a good idea,” Jencks said (according to Matusow). “We can use more Communists out here.” Matusow said that Jencks told him he was in touch with Mexican Communist organizers, with whom he was plotting to curtail the production of copper for the Korean War effort. At that time, the party line was “let’s stop war production.”43
After Matusow’s stay at the ranch, the party caught on to his undercover work and expelled him in January 1951 as “an enemy agent.” At loose ends, Matusow, who was in the Air Force Reserve, asked to be called to active duty as a staff sergeant. He was sent to Wright-Patterson base near Dayton, Ohio, where he remained from April to December 1951. Always strapped for cash, he sewed chevrons on the uniforms of the NCOs, at two bits a chevron.44
Matusow didn’t fit in at Wright-Patterson. His fellow airmen shunned him because he was bumptious. He was treated for manic depression. In August, he spent two weeks at the base hospital with a nervous breakdown. He was diagnosed as a “schizoid personality…manifested by nomadism, eccentricity, seclusiveness, moderate stress of a break with Communist party.”
In September, he went to the chaplain, William Coolidge Hart, and said he wanted to clear his name and expose the Communists in New York. The chaplain sent him to the public information officer on the base, Martha Edmiston, a youthful forty, with cropped hair and a fresh complexion. Martha and her husband, John, a reporter on the Dayton Journal Herald, had been undercover FBI agents who had infiltrated the Ohio party in 1940 and 1941 and testified before HUAC in July 1950.
Matusow came across to Martha as humble and sincere. She and her husband decided to show him the ropes. An effective witness had to abide by a number of rules:
Don’t name anyone unless you can substantiate it.
If you mention a name and that person is in the room, turn around to face the person.
Play your big cards one at a time.
In each appearance, open up areas for further questioning to assure continuity of employment.
The Edmistons tried to help Matusow overcome his crude mannerisms, which they believed he had picked up in the party—his terrible table manners, his overbearing treatment of waiters, his interrupting the conversation of others, and his insistence on being the center of attention.
Martha Edmiston put Matusow in touch with the Dayton FBI and with the Ohio HUAC in Columbus. Word went out to HUAC in Washington, who sent a veteran investigator, Don Appell, to debrief him. By October 1951, Matusow had completed a seventy-one-page affidavit, which Martha Edmiston later said was “probably the first and only time he told the truth.”45
In November 1951, the Edmistons shepherded Matusow to Washington to appear in a closed session of HUAC. They shared a suite at the Congressional Hotel. The day before the hearing, John Edmiston saw Matusow primping and asked, “Where are you going now, Buster?”
“I think I will drop over and see if I can get in touch with Senator McCarthy,” Matusow said.
“Hold it a minute,” John said. “You are here on subpoena from the House Un-American Activities Committee. You have no business going around dabbling with other congressional committees…. If you do that it is going to be the kiss of death.”
That was good advice. For although McCarthy had made his name as a Red-hunter by the end of 1951, he had yet to conduct a single investigation. All he had done was make speeches, usually on the floor of the Senate, where he was protected from libel. He was the ranking Republican on the Committee on Expenditures in the Executive Departments, which had a subcommittee on investigations, and which was renamed Committee on Government Operations in 1952. Only in 1953 did he launch his first investigation.
The House Un-American Activities Committee, on the other hand, had a long track record as the leading instrument of unbridled anti-Communism in Congress. It pioneered the Communists in government issue, which McCarthy later exploited. HUAC also directed its fire at the New Deal liberals, labor leaders, intellectuals, and artists. One of its members, John Rankin, was an outspoken racist who once called Walter Winchell “a little slime-mongering kike.” Another, J. Parnell Thomas, went to prison in 1949 for padding his payroll with nonexistent employees. But HUAC also broke some big cases with Elizabeth Bentley and the Hiss-Chambers confrontation. HUAC made the reputation of the future President Richard Nixon, who maintained a covert liaison with the FBI. As he wrote in his memoirs: “We had some informal contacts with a lower-level agent that proved helpful to our investigations.” “Lower-level” was unduly modest, for the help came directly from J. Edgar Hoover, who provided reports on upcoming witnesses and the party cards of the Hollywood Ten. With its sensational hearings and its popular booklets, such as Spotlight on Spies and 100 Things You Should Know About Communism, HUAC helped to create the climate in which McCarthy prospered. Starting in 1950, Joe drove HUAC from the headlines, and after his censure in 1954, HUAC suffered collateral damage, fading into obsolescence until its discontinuance in 1975.
On November 26 and 27, 1951, Matusow, in a new Air Force uniform, testified on Communist youth groups in a closed session of HUAC, which was a dress rehearsal for the public hearing. After that first visit to Washington, the Edmistons saw Matusow transformed from the unassuming airman who wanted to clear his name into an overbearing egomaniac convinced of his own importance. Back at the base, he threw his weight around and already saw a movie in the works, in which he would star. On December 17, he was released from active duty.
Matusow returned to Washington to testify in an open hearing on Communist youth groups on February 6 and 7, 1952. On the first day, when the hearings recessed at noon, he learned that King George VI of England had died. “What a hell of a break for me,” he told the Edmistons. “The king had to die on my day of triumph. Pushed me right off the front page.”46
Prior to testifying, Matusow had sold his story to the New York Journal-American, a paper in the Hearst chain, splitting the $750 fee with the Edmistons. He went to New York to confer with the Hearst reporter Howard Rushmore, who wrote the story as an “as told to” four-parter. Rushmore was an ex-Communist who had quit his job as movie reporter for the Daily Worker after refusing to pan Gone with the Wind. He committed suicide in January 1958 after murdering his estranged wife.
In the meantime, the Justice Department decided to use Matusow as a witness in the Smith Act prosecution of sixteen second-string Communists in New York City. Roy Cohn, the prosecutor, questioned Matusow, who knew most of the defendants, in New York on December 21, 1951. Could Matusow link any of them to statements advocating the forceful overthrow of the government?
On July 21, 1952, Matusow took the stand for five days of testimony. One of the defendants was Alexander Trachtenberg, the head of the party’s publishing arm, whom Matusow had met when he worked in the bookstores. Cohn wanted to connect Trachtenberg to a book by the prosecutor in the purge trials, Andrei Vyshinsky, The Law of the Soviet State. Matusow told Cohn that he had discussed the price of the book with Trachtenberg. Cohn said that wasn’t good enough. Roy then pointed to a passage that would help his case and asked Matusow to tie Trachtenberg in. When Matusow testified on July 22, he said that Trachtenberg had told him the Vyshinsky book dealt with “the establishment of socialism, how the diametrically opposed classes could be eliminated.”47
To prove Trachtenberg’s intent, a passage in Vyshinsky’s book was read to the jury, stating that “violent seizure of authority by the proletariat…is the most important thesis of Marxist-Leninist doctrine.” Matusow quoted another defendant, George Black Charney, as saying that “Puerto Rico is being used as a military base for the United States and an independent Puerto Rico would help destroy those bases and cripple the Caribbean defense.” The Smith Act defendants were convicted. Judge Edward J. Dimock gave Matusow credit for providing the crucial evidence that convicted Trachtenberg and Charney.48
It was also in July 1952 that McCarthy, who was up for reelection, was operated on for a stomach hernia, which removed him from the campaign trail. Joe asked Matusow to pinch-hit for him and make some speeches in Wisconsin. He sent Matusow to the McCarthy club in Milwaukee, where he was astounded by the cash that was pouring in, thousands of letters with bills in them. Joe came home to Appleton and Matusow saw him at Van Susteren’s, going heavy on the bourbon. Whenever he was asked if he wanted another, Joe said: “Well, you can put it this way—Yes.” At 4:00 A.M., having drunk “a sea of bourbon,” Joe in his undershirt said, “I’ll show you my scar for a quarter,” displaying a slash like a railroad track dividing his torso in two. He stumbled to bed just before sunup.49
In September, McCarthy sent Matusow on a western tour in states like Montana and Washington, where he wanted to defeat the Senate incumbents Mike Mansfield and Scoop Jackson. Harvey followed the Edmistons’ advice of playing his big cards one at a time, and when he ran out of big cards he pulled them from the bottom of the deck. In Great Falls, Montana, he made headlines with the claim that “the Sunday section of the New York Times alone has 126 dues-paying Communists. On the editorial and research staffs of Time and Life magazines are 76 hard-core Reds. The New York Bureau of the Associated Press has 25.” Matusow seemed to be following Joe in the numbers racket.
Matusow had now found his calling, as a professional witness. If he was not subpoenaed, he volunteered. In July 1952, Don Connors, an ex-FBI agent on the staff of Senator McCarran’s Internal Security Subcommittee, proposed that an investigation of the Mine, Mill, and Smelter union would “lend itself to a particularly good hearing in a western state this fall.” If the hearings were timed with the November elections, they would help conservative candidates in the Rocky Mountain states. Hearings were scheduled for October in Salt Lake City.
When Matusow heard that his pal Jencks from San Cristóbal was due to testify at the Salt Lake City hearings, he volunteered to testify against him. The issue for Jencks boiled down to his signing of a Taft-Hartley affidavit in 1949. Union officials who refused to sign affidavits stating that they were not Communists were denied the services of the National Labor Relations Board for certification and collective bargaining. To get around the problem, the party adopted a “resign and sign” strategy, telling the members to quit the party and sign the affidavits, though in some cases they remained secretly in the party. Jencks had signed the affidavit on August 17, 1949, which meant that if he had remained in the party, he had committed perjury.
Matusow arrived in Salt Lake City to testify on October 6, 1952, thinking: “I have to make this good…I have to hit the headlines.” He identified Jencks as a Communist on the basis of their conversations in San Cristóbal in the summer of 1950, after Jencks had signed the affidavit. Matusow said Jencks was planning a strike to “cut down production for the Korean War effort.”
Jencks admitted to being at the ranch, but took the Fifth when asked if he had met Matusow and conversed with him. In the committee report, Chairman McCarran recommended that the Justice Department prosecute Jencks and other Mine, Mill officials for perjury. Only Harvey and one other witness had placed Jencks in the party in 1950, after he had signed the affidavit.50
With his Jencks testimony, Matusow reached the upper strata of professional witnesses. He was asked to a party at the New York home of Doc Matthews, who had also testified at the Salt Lake City hearings and who lived in a penthouse on West 24th Street. He was invited to the Washington home of Arvilla “Billie” Bentley, who lived on Fox Hall Road, next door to Averell Harriman. Arvilla was divorced from the Texas millionaire Alvin Bentley, a major donor to McCarthy’s campaigns. Matusow was annoyed because Billie had refused a “Life Goes to a Party” offer. He might have gotten his picture in Life in this regular feature of the magazine.51
In November 1952, the Hennings Committee was investigating McCarthy’s finances. Arvilla Bentley had been subpoenaed to answer questions about the $7,000 she had loaned McCarthy. If she was under oath, she would have to tell about the money she’d given Joe in the anti-Tydings campaign in Maryland in 1950. Matusow took Bentley to Nassau in November to duck the subpoena. Although she was quite a bit older than Matusow, and although he was a self-described “mess” at five foot six and 230 pounds, a romance blossomed. She gave him a $300 set of golf clubs.
When Matusow got back to Washington, he sold the story of Bentley’s flight to Drew Pearson for $250, which did not stop him from marrying her in March 1953. Harvey and Arvilla shared a love of gambling, and made Las Vegas their second home. “We were partners at the dice table,” he recalled. He once ran eight passes in a row, making eight and six the hard way.
Arvilla wanted him to give up testifying, thinking it was undignified. But Harvey had some unfinished business: in April 1953, he testified before a federal grand jury convened in El Paso, Texas, which indicted Jencks for perjury.
The marriage quickly unraveled. Harvey and Arvilla fought constantly and in August 1953 went to Reno to get a divorce. Harvey did not contest it, and in the property settlement he got to keep the Buick station wagon. On the day they were divorced, Harvey struck Arvilla in the face in a Reno garage. “She hollered for somebody to call a cop,” he recalled, “but then got up and walked away.” The marriage had lasted four months. Harvey bummed around the Southwest in his Buick, working at odd jobs.52
On August 24, 1953, Matusow wrote McCarthy from Reno: “When I testified at the trial of the 16 Communist leaders in New York, the defense said, ‘You’d do anything for a buck.’ I denied it, but he was right. My testimony was honest but that was about the only thing that was.” Matusow thought of writing a book and began to work on it that fall. The working title was Blacklisting Is My Business. In his outline, chapter eight was described as “Dude ranch for comrades. In New Mexico near Los Alamos.”
At the Jencks trial in El Paso in January 1954, Matusow was the star witness. He repeated the testimony he had already given twice, at the Salt Lake SISS hearings and before the federal grand jury in Texas. Jencks did not take the stand and the jury took twenty-two minutes to find him guilty of perjury for swearing falsely to a Taft-Hartley affidavit. He was sentenced to five years and appealed. His lawyer was Nathan Witt, a member of the Ware group of the thirties, who did the work of the party when he was on the National Labor Relations Board. At the trial, Witt demanded that the FBI submit the reports that Matusow had made regarding Jencks, to see if they jibed with his testimony. But the prosecutor said they were confidential, and the trial judge, Robert E. Thomason, denied Witt’s motion. Then Witt filed a motion for a new trial, upon which Judge Thomason ordered him to take the stand and asked him if he was a Communist. Witt took the Fifth, as he had done previously before HUAC. Judge Thomason said: “No lawyer who claims the privilege can practice in my court.”53
Matusow was trying to work on his book, but he didn’t have any money. None of the publishers he contacted would give him an advance. On April 27, 1954, he was in Peacock Alley of the Waldorf-Astoria appearing on a radio program, when he spotted the fellow-traveling Methodist Bishop G. Bromley Oxnam, executive secretary of the Methodist Federation for Social Action, a front group disowned by the Methodist Church that had been investigated by HUAC. Matusow approached Bishop Oxnam as a sinner wanting to confess and told him, “I have lied again and again to these committees and I want to ask for forgiveness.” That June in a speech in Westminster, Maryland, Oxnam mentioned that Matusow “sought me out twice to say he had a religious experience and wished someone would undo ‘all the lies I have told about so many people.’ ”54
Bishop Oxnam’s remarks came to the attention of Angus Cameron, who had been let go as editor-in-chief of Little, Brown in September 1951 after taking the Fifth before HUAC. Cameron had been chairman of the Progressive Party in Massachusetts in 1948, and treasurer of the National Wallace for President Committee. He was a trustee of the Samuel Adams School in Boston, identified by the Attorney General as a party front. As an editor, he was known for having turned down George Orwell’s satire of the Soviet Union, Animal Farm.
After leaving Little, Brown, Cameron teamed up with the Communist writer Albert E. Kahn to found Cameron & Kahn, a firm that published pro-Soviet and anti-American books, which were sometimes subsidized by such Communist-controlled unions as the furriers.
It happened that Cameron knew Bishop Oxnam, having attended De Pauw University in Greencastle, Indiana, of which Oxnam was president. Cameron alerted Nat Witt, the general counsel of Mine, Mill since 1941, to Bishop Oxnam’s remarks that Matusow had lied in his testimony. When Witt was given a copy of Oxnam’s remarks that August, he saw opportunity knocking.55
From February to June 1955, the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee held hearings on “The Significance of the Matusow Case.” Nathan Witt testified that “I followed closely any developments relating to a possible recantation on Mr. Matusow’s part.” On September 13 or 14, 1954, Witt said, he discussed the possibility of a subsidy for Matusow’s book with his fellow Mine, Mill lawyer John T. McTernan.
Jay Sourwine, the staff director for SISS, asked: “Was it then Mr. McTernan’s suggestion that by doing such you might eventually facilitate the securing of an affidavit from Mr. Matusow to support your motion for a new trial [for Jencks]?”
Witt: “We didn’t spell it out that way, but that was clearly the thinking of both of us.” They had already drafted the affidavit, based on Bishop Oxnam’s statement that Matusow had admitted lying. Witt presented his plan on September 20 to the Mine, Mill leadership, which agreed to subsidize the book. Then Witt conferred with Albert Kahn, who agreed to publish it. Thus, Witt, Kahn, and Cameron agreed to make an author out of Matusow. The money would come from the pockets of the Mine, Mill rank and file, and from the cash in the Jencks defense fund.
In October 1954, Matusow was drifting around the Southwest, knowing nothing of these plans. He was, as usual, broke, and living by his wits. He was in Taos when Albert Kahn reached him on October 20 and offered to publish his book. Kahn proposed a $900 advance in weekly installments of $50. Aware of Matusow’s instability, Kahn kept him on a short leash. Kahn sent him a plane ticket to New York, where the contract was signed on October 26.56
Cameron & Kahn came to Matusow when he was destitute, and after his book had been rejected by mainstream publishers. They had already made a deal with Mine, Mill to subsidize it. Mine, Mill agreed to buy six thousand copies of the book, and Canadian Mine, Mill pledged to buy another five thousand. A first payment of $1,250 was sent to Cameron & Kahn in October. In January 1955, Mine, Mill sent another $2,000.
The book was written in three months, or rather it was extracted by Witt in taped conversations at his home in Croton-on-Hudson. Several chapters in Matusow’s original outline were omitted, such as “My Red Marriage” and “Communist Arms Smuggling Ring Within the U.S. Army.” The aim of the book was to have Matusow recant his testimony and obtain new trials for Jencks and the Smith Act Sixteen. In key instances, the material in the book was at variance with Matusow’s taped comments, which were introduced at the 1955 SISS hearings.
On a tape dated December 14, 1954, Kahn said: “Now let me ask you this example—’cause I think this could come in well. You say in your testimony you met one of the Vincents at a Communist party at the Albert Hotel.”
Matusow: “…I knew Vincent was a party member and I said so. I knew Jencks was a party member and I said so. I can’t say here that Jencks wasn’t a party member after he signed the [Taft-Hartley] affidavit because I know that he was.”
Kahn: “Why do you say you know he was?”
Matusow: “…Jencks officially resigned from the party…. But to my mind it made him no less a Communist because he put a piece of paper down and said I’m no longer a member…. Jencks was still under Communist party discipline…. He didn’t change his thinking because he issued that scrap of paper.”57
A certain alchemy was at work that transformed what Matusow said into its opposite. Matusow turned in his drafts, which were rewritten by Kahn and Cameron, who had the power to withhold his weekly payments if he did not behave.
In January 1955, while the book, retitled False Witness, was being printed for publication the following month, Matusow signed two affidavits. In one, he recanted his testimony on Jencks, saying: “There was no basis for my stating that Clinton E. Jencks was a member of the Communist Party at the time I stated so in court…. I testified falsely when I appeared in Salt Lake City on Oct. 8, 1952, before Sen. McCarran.” In fact, he had by his own admission on the tapes testified truthfully, but was now lying to satisfy his employers.
Matusow also provided an affidavit on his Smith Act testimony, saying that Roy Cohn had asked him to fabricate remarks made by Trachtenberg and others. This affidavit was closer to the truth, for Matusow had been coached by Cohn.58
At the end of February, False Witness was published, with a helping hand from the columnist Stewart Alsop. Cameron shrewdly picked him because he and his brother Joe had written articles denouncing the use of paid government informants. Alsop’s syndicated column of January 28, 1955, said that “legal lying by such professional informers as Matusow…has been tolerated by all three branches of the American government.” Alsop found False Witness “inherently credible” and called the witness business “a profitable one, courtesy of the American taxpayer.” This imprimatur from a leading establishment columnist launched the book.
Publication was synchronized with a campaign for new trials, which might be seen as the party’s Last Hurrah, at a time when 134 Communist leaders had been indicted under the Smith Act, with eighty-three convictions. Thanks to Matusow, the party could claim that all Smith Act trials were rigged. Party leader William Z. Foster wrote Eisenhower on February 25, calling for the suspension of Hoover and Brownell for using perjured informants. People’s World, the Communist newspaper in Los Angeles, launched a petition drive on February 10 calling for an end to the use of paid informers. Matusow gave a press conference at the Biltmore under the auspices of Friends of the Soviet Union. There he was in his gray suit recanting, with his éminence grise Nat Witt behind him. It seemed as if the party’s fortunes were riding on his book.59
When Matusow appeared on February 21, 1955, in the klieg-lit room 318 of the Senate Office Building, before the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, he swore that what was in the book was true. He had kept diary entries, though he did not have his diary with him. Perhaps it was at his parents’ home.
In the tapes with Kahn, Matusow was asked: “When you named these 200 individuals…as members of the Communist Party, were you sure of your own knowledge?”
Matusow: “I believed at the time that all of the people who I testified about were actually dues-paying members…. I identified people, and 15 percent fit into the category of hearsay.”
But now, at the SISS hearing on February 21, Matusow perused the list of the 244 he had named and said “some aspect of my testimony regarding each of these individuals is false.”
As for the Vincents, whom he had told Kahn were Communists, he now said, “I didn’t know them as Communists.” In his outline, he had called San Cristóbal “a dude ranch for comrades,” but now he said he did not know it was operated by the party.
Matusow told the committee that he now had a comedy act, which he performed at the Champagne Room on MacDougal Street in Greenwich Village, calling himself Dimitri. His act was to recount the Army-McCarthy hearings as if calling a baseball game.60 On March 7, Albert Kahn testified, modestly calling himself “the most widely read non-fiction writer in the United States, abroad.” He also made repeated professions of devotion to the Fifth Amendment.
Kahn was the author of The Great Conspiracy, which was required reading for American POWs in North Korean prison camps. Igor Bogolepov, a onetime division chief in the Soviet Foreign Office, had testified on April 17, 1952, at the Institute of Pacific Relations hearings that the material in Kahn’s book had been prepared for him by the Soviet Foreign Office and was essentially a rewrite of the prosecution’s case in the Moscow purge trials. Kahn was a specialist in hoaxes, and in his introduction to False Witness, he said: “I am completely convinced of the veracity of the revelations in this book.”
The committee report on April 6, 1955, said that the publication of False Witness was part of an organized campaign by the Communists to demand new Smith Act trials. The evidence showed that False Witness contained numerous falsehoods and that Communist lawyers had manipulated Matusow to pervert the legal process, from the moment he was picked up destitute in Taos.61
As for Matusow’s two affidavits, he got a split decision. In El Paso on March 15, 1955, Judge Robert Thomason heard Matusow’s recantation, but he also had the tape in which Matusow told Kahn, “I knew Jencks was a party member and said so.” Judge Thomason said in his charge: “Matusow alone or with others willfully and nefariously and for the purpose of defrauding this court…schemed and actually used this court of law as a forum for the purpose of calling attention to a book…entitled False Witness…. Officials of Mine, Mill…persuaded Matusow to lend himself to the perpetration of a fraud by means of his recanting his testimony. Matusow willfully lent himself to this evil scheme for money.” The motion for a new trial for Jencks was denied.62
In New York on April 22, 1955, however, Judge Edward J. Dimock overturned the convictions of two of the thirteen Smith Act defendants, Alexander Trachtenberg and George Charney. Dimock ruled that Matusow’s recantation was probably no more truthful than his original testimony, which only proved his complete lack of credibility.
In July 1955, a grand jury in New York indicted Harvey Matusow for scheming to obstruct justice. He was convicted and sentenced to five years, lost his appeal, and spent three and a half years in the federal prison in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. Released in 1960, at the age of thirty-three, he moved to England and became a music impresario. Back in the States in 1973, he joined a Massachusetts commune, where he took the first name Job, sampled LSD, and flirted with Buddhism. In the eighties, he moved to Tucson, where he had a clown act on children’s television, The Magic Mouse Show. In 1995 he joined a Mormon community in Glenwood, Utah. In 2001, he moved to Claremont, New Hampshire, where he worked in public access TV. On January 17, 2002, he died at home as the result of injuries suffered in a car accident.
After Matusow’s SISS testimony in February 1955, John Steinbeck wrote in the April 2 issue of the Saturday Review: “I suspect that government informers, even if they had told the truth, can’t survive Matusow’s testimony. He has said that it was a good racket. It will never be so good again.” Steinbeck was right. The Justice Department shut down its team of paid informants in 1955.63
As for the Jencks conviction, it was upheld on appeal by the Fifth Circuit Court in New Orleans in October 1955. Mine, Mill’s compliance status with the Taft-Hartley Act was removed by the National Labor Relations Board. In 1956, Jencks was summoned to Denver by the Mine, Mill board and asked to resign from the union.64
On June 11, 1957, the Supreme Court reversed his conviction and ordered a new trial by a 7 to 1 majority. Justice William Brennan’s opinion ruled that the defense had a right to look at Matusow’s FBI reports, a blow to the restrictions that the FBI placed upon its information. The Justice Department decided to drop the case, not wanting to disclose the reports.65
On September 8, 1953, the sixty-three-year-old Kentucky-born Chief Justice, Fred Vinson, a three-pack-a-day smoker, died of a heart attack. Eisenhower named Earl Warren to replace him. Warren, the son of a railroad worker, had served three terms as governor of California, and in 1948 he was Dewey’s running mate. In 1952, Warren, who was considered a middle-of-the-road Republican, campaigned for Ike in fourteen states. But he was not a legal scholar and had no prior experience on the bench.
To everyone’s surprise, including the President’s, Warren transformed the Supreme Court from a national security court into a civil liberties court. Three years later, Ike named William J. Brennan Jr., the son of Catholic Irish immigrants, a New Jersey judge, and a Democrat, to the court. By Ike’s reckoning, Brennan was the second biggest mistake he made as President, Warren being the first. For both men joined the dissenters Hugo Black and William Douglas to form a liberal core that dominated the court for a decade and a half. Two other Eisenhower appointees were John Marshall Harlan, a Republican corporate lawyer and Rhodes scholar, in 1954, and Charles Evans Whittaker, a Kansas-born federal judge, in 1957. The holdovers were Felix Frankfurter, Tom Clark, and Harold Burton, onetime mayor of Cleveland.66
In case after case, the Warren court demolished the legal underpinnings that sustained McCarthyism. The court’s first principle was that it must meet the changing needs of society. In upholding the Smith Act convictions of 1951, the Vinson court had invoked a clear and present danger, in the midst of the Korean War. But by the mid-fifties, with the war over, Stalin dead, Eisenhower at the helm, and McCarthy no longer a factor, the mood had changed. The curtailment of civil liberties in order to suppress the Communist Party was no longer necessary. The party was in crisis, having been crippled by the Vinson court, and by its slavish obedience to Moscow.
The removal of the Cold War judicial scaffolding began in earnest in 1956, with two decisions in swift succession in April. After serving as liaison with the San Francisco KGB in 1943, Steve Nelson was back in Pittsburgh in 1950. The Pittsburgh Press described him, not inaccurately, as “an inspector general for the Soviet underground.” He was arrested under the Pennsylvania Sedition Act, which dated back to 1919, and went on trial in January 1951. Found guilty of sedition, he was sentenced to twenty years. He appealed, and in the meantime he was indicted by the federal government under the Smith Act. In 1952, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court reversed his 1951 conviction on the ground that the Smith Act indictment preempted state sedition laws. Saved from imprisonment by the state, Nelson went on trial in federal court in Pittsburgh and was found guilty in mid-August 1953. He was sentenced to five years and a $10,000 fine.
In November 1955, the Supreme Court heard arguments on Nelson’s Pennsylvania case. Chief Justice Warren said in conference that it would be “no loss to the United States if these [state] acts are stricken.” In April 1956, the court upheld the Pennsylvania Supreme Court’s reversal in a 6 to 3 ruling. Warren wrote the decision. “Sedition against the United States is not a local offense,” he wrote. “It is a crime against the Nation. As such, it should be prosecuted and punished in federal courts.” The decision nullified the Pennsylvania Sedition Act of 1919, and, indirectly, those of thirty-two other states. All those state laws penalizing persons who refused to sign loyalty oaths or were charged with Communism were wiped from the books.
Nelson was off the hook on the twenty-year sentence, but still had the five-year Smith Act sentence to contend with. In October 1956, that conviction was also reversed in another 6 to 3 ruling, which threw out the Supreme Court verdict because the government had admitted that one of its key witnesses was a perjurer. Nelson was released.67
On the heels of the Pennsylvania case came another stunning decision on April 9, 1956, in Slochower v. Board of Education. Harry Slochower was a professor of philosophy and literature at Brooklyn College who appeared before the McCarthy Committee on Investigations in 1953. When asked about past membership in the Communist Party, he took the Fifth and lost his job. The 7 to 2 decision held that due process was required before the Board of Regents could fire Slochower, and that he should have been granted a hearing.
The ruling by Tom Clark, who had approved the Smith Act prosecutions as Truman’s Attorney General, said: “At the outset, we must condemn the practice of imputing a sinister meaning to the exercise of a person’s constitutional right under the 5th Amendment…. The privilege against self-incrimination would be reduced to a hollow mockery if its exercise could be taken as the equivalent either to a confession of guilt or a conclusive presumption of perjury…. A witness may have a reasonable fear of prosecution and yet be innocent of any wrongdoing.”68
McCarthy, whom censure had not completely muzzled, took umbrage at the Nelson and Slochower decisions. “We made a mistake,” he said, “in confirming as Chief Justice a man who had no judicial experience, who had practically no legal experience, except as a District Attorney, for a short time, and whose entire experience was as a politician.”69 Although discredited in the Senate, McCarthy found anti-Warren allies among Southern congressmen upset over the Supreme Court’s civil rights decisions. As the Alabama Governor George Wallace put it: “Earl Warren does not have enough brains to try a chicken thief in my home county.”
Undeterred, the Warren court on June 11, 1956, in Cole v. Young, made a ruling that limited the scope of the federal loyalty program. Kendrick M. Cole, a food and drug inspector employed in the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, was charged with membership in Nature Friends of America, supposedly a hiking club, but in effect a full-service front group, with political lectures and classes, and a youth section for those under the age of twenty. Before the loyalty board, Cole refused to answer questions, saying it was an invasion of privacy. He was suspended in November 1953 and terminated soon after.
The argument was over whether loyalty programs should apply only to sensitive agencies and whether Health, Education, and Welfare was such an agency. The court ruled that it was not, and that the act was intended to dismiss only those in sensitive positions. Cole’s termination was reversed. Tom Clark in his dissent said the ruling invalidated the President’s executive order. The court struck down “the most effective weapon against subversive activity available to the government…. One never knows which job is sensitive. The janitor might be important, security-wise.”70
One of the Southern senators who saw the Warren court as a menace to states’ rights was James Eastland of Mississippi, the chairman of the Internal Security Subcommittee. On June 26, 1956, he invited McCarthy to testify in his capacity as an expert on Communism.
Eastland: “Is it the Communist line to say the Communist Party is just another party?”
McCarthy: “That is strictly the Communist line.”
Eastland: “Is that not the line that the Chief Justice of the United States takes?”
McCarthy: “Unfortunately yes, Mr. Chairman. And I may say that I follow their line rather closely. And the Communist Daily Worker applauded this decision, the Nelson decision, and other decisions of the Supreme Court. In their book, Earl Warren is a hero.”71
Warren, while outwardly maintaining his judicial impassiveness, was stung. In chambers he called McCarthy a “querulous, disreputable liar.” Few went so far as to claim that he was a crypto-Communist, but many wondered over the change in Warren since he had joined the High Court. Was it the magnetic duo of Black and Douglas that had pulled him leftward? Or was it an affinity for the underdog that could be traced to his background? Raised in the parched, hardscrabble setting of Bakersfield, California, Warren was the son of a Norwegian-born foreman of the Southern Pacific Railroad who had prospered by fixing up shacks that he rented to itinerant laborers. At the age of seventeen, while still in high school, Earl Warren worked as a callboy, rounding up the crews to man the trains. He saw men laid off without notice, or mutilated in accidents, without compensation. His father had enough money to send him to college and law school, after which he made his name in public service, as district attorney, attorney general, and governor of California. Perhaps his ascent to the Supreme Court gave him the immunity and latitude to express a social conscience developed at an early age.
McCarthy died in May 1957, just as the Warren court struck again to disassemble the foundations of McCarthyism, in Schware v. Bar Examiners. Rudolph Schware wanted to take the bar exam in New Mexico, but the Board of Bar Examiners refused his application. In 1940, Schware had recruited volunteers to help refugees from Loyalist Spain. The New Mexico Supreme Court ruled that Schware was a Communist from 1932 to 1940 and that “one who had knowingly given his loyalty to such a program and belief for six to seven years…is a person of questionable character.”
In a 5 to 4 decision, Justice Hugo Black found that the New Mexico court’s “questionable character” ruling was “so dogmatic an inference as to be wholly unwarranted.” Black noted that “many persons in this country actively supported the Spanish Loyalists” and that this alone did not indicate “moral turpitude.” Schware in addition had used a false name as a labor organizer and had been arrested in the California strikes of the thirties. Black ruled that “the mere fact that a man was arrested has very little, if any, probative value in showing that he has engaged in any misconduct.” In the 1934 strike in San Pedro, “great numbers of strikers were picked up by police in a series of arrests.” Schware must be allowed to take the bar exam. Another precept of McCarthyism, “once a Commie always a Commie,” went by the board.72
On June 11, 1957, came the decision reversing Clinton Jencks’s conviction. Warren felt that Jencks and his lawyers had the right to see the FBI reports. Since he had been denied that right, his conviction could not stand. The decision triggered an uproar in Congress, where the anti-Warren coalition of Southern Democrats and conservative Republicans muttered that he had put the FBI “out of business.”
Then, on June 17, 1957, came what became known as Red Monday, a cluster of three decisions, all striking at McCarthyism. In Watkins v. United States, the labor organizer John T. Watkins was cited for contempt when he appeared before HUAC in 1954 and agreed to discuss his own activities but not those of others.
In a 6 to 1 decision, the court reversed the contempt charge. Warren argued that HUAC had to show why Watkins’s testimony was relevant to the proposal of further legislation. The purpose of congressional investigations was to write new laws. But too often committees exposed for the sake of exposing, or for headlines, or to sway an election. The legitimate need of Congress to pass new laws, Warren wrote, “cannot be inflated into a general power to expose where the predominant result can only be an invasion of the private rights of the individual.”
Thus Warren limited the power of committees in two crucial ways: the questions they asked had to be pertinent to the development of new legislation; and there was to be no prying into the personal affairs of witnesses for the sake of prying.
The Watkins case placed strict limits on the obligation to name names and blunted the committees’ routine use of contempt followed by jail, which it held over the heads of witnesses who refused to talk.73
In another Red Monday case, the court reinstated the China hand John Stewart Service. Investigated five times by the State Department loyalty board, Service was cleared four times. But on the fifth try, on December 13, 1951, the Loyalty Review Board found “a reasonable doubt as to his loyalty.” Secretary of State Dean Acheson fired him. The Warren court ruled 8 to 0 on procedural grounds that Acheson had ignored his department’s rules, but did not take up the security aspects of the case. Service was reinstated on July 3, 1957, and a position was created for him, that of special assistant to the deputy assistant secretary of operations. This lengthy title could be summed up in the one word clerk. Service’s job was arranging for the shipment of the household and personal effects of Foreign Service employees to and from American missions abroad. Later, he was assigned to an obscure posting at the Liverpool consulate. He resigned in 1962 and died in 1999, after writing several books on China.74
In what was perhaps the most far-reaching of the Red Monday decisions, the court reversed a Smith Act conviction, that of fourteen California Communists who in August 1951 had been arrested, tried, and convicted. It was pure good luck that their appeal took two years to arrive before a completely different court than the one that had upheld the first Smith Act convictions. In October 1956, the Warren court agreed to hear the case of one of the fourteen, Oleta Yates. Unlike Vinson, Warren was critical of the government’s case. At the October 12 conference, he argued that the only overt acts in the indictment were attendance at meetings. It had not been established “that the Communist Party is force and violence. The government has not made clear proof of the purpose of the party.” Warren wanted to reverse, as did Bill Douglas and Hugo Black, who said the Yates trial “was a political trial—what the First Amendment was supposed to prevent.”
Of the six remaining brethren, four wanted to affirm the convictions (Reed, Burton, Minton, and Clark), while two were undecided (Frankfurter and Harlan). Unsure of a majority, Warren set the case aside for a few weeks. When it was discussed again, Frankfurter and Harlan agreed to reverse on the narrow procedural ground that the instructions given to the jury were inadequate, and Warren mustered a majority of five.
Harlan, who wrote the majority opinion, had no intention of striking down the Smith Act on constitutional grounds. Instead, he stated that the government must provide a more precise definition of advocacy in trying Communists under the act. Released on June 17, 1957, Harlan’s opinion ordered that five of the fourteen California Communists be acquitted, while the remaining nine should be given new trials. The Smith Act still stood, but very shakily, for the government had to prove more than vague advocacy. The government not only gave up on a retrial of the nine, but dropped all charges against other Smith Act defendants.75
In Congress, there was talk of impeaching Warren, and Representative Francis Walter of HUAC promised “to pass the type of legislation that even the Supreme Court will understand.” The John Birch Society, which then claimed a membership of 100,000, took up the cause, complete with picket lines, leaflets, and radio programs clamoring that Warren should be hanged, not impeached. The clamor did not subside until the mid-sixties. Through it all, Warren kept his sense of humor. On the wall of his apartment he hung a New Yorker cartoon that showed Whistler’s mother embroidering “Impeach Earl Warren” on a pillow cover.76
In a memo to the White House on June 26, 1957, J. Edgar Hoover said that “the Supreme Court decisions have been greeted with jubilation in all echelons of the Communist Party. Waning confidence of rank and file members in their leaders has been restored…. Unafraid of prosecution, Communist leaders have been stimulated to take a bold approach to building a stronger party.”77 In fact, the party was in disarray. The Smith Act convictions had done their work in dismantling the leadership and driving it underground, and the Warren court decisions did little to mend a party that was agonizing over the 1956 Khrushchev speech on Stalin’s crimes and the Hungarian rebellion.
A more realistic appraisal was made by John Gates, a member of the national board, when he wrote in Party Affairs, the party’s theoretical organ, in November 1956: “We have suffered great losses in membership and even more in influence…. Why…is our party at such a low point?…We are isolated almost entirely from the labor movement, the Negro people, and the farmers…. Even the confidence of our own members in the party and its leadership has been severely shaken…. We are still compelled to function largely as an illegal or semi-legal organization.”
The fear of Communism in America went back to the Bolshevik Revolution, and expressed itself in various ways, from the deportation of aliens to the blacklisting of actors. But during those years, there was also a secret undermining of our institutions by the Soviets and their American surrogates, which was revealed to the public in bits and pieces, so that no one knew quite what to believe. It was in this climate of uncertainty that McCarthyism in all its forms thrived, as an exaggerated reaction to a real threat. By the time McCarthy came on the scene in 1950, the threat was a mirage, but a mirage to be exploited, by the blacklist agencies for profit, by the Republicans in Congress for political gain, and by the self-appointed super-patriots to vent and focus their muddled rage.
McCarthyism was not an epidemic, but a series of scattered outbreaks. There was never a wholesale purge, either in universities or in the entertainment world. Instead of the “reign of terror” described by certain writers, there was a “reign of doubt,” which demagogues like McCarthy took advantage of. His accusations, often but not always inaccurate, were believed precisely because the American party was an adjunct for espionage. McCarthy and the American party were mirror images, both employing falsehood and deceit, both using heated rhetoric and hidden informants, and both making unfounded charges against their government. They expressed two pathologies in a democratic society, one of the misguided or fanatical radical, the other of the anti-Red zealot. American institutions were tested and were not found wanting. The Senate did censure one of its own. The Warren court did reverse the decisions of its predecessor. Truman and Eisenhower did combat both Communism and McCarthyism.
Crippled by the measures of both administrations, the American party found in McCarthy an excuse to shout fascism. The treatment of the Hollywood Ten, those posturing beneficiaries of bourgeois entertainment, was called “Torture by Inquisition.” There was a case of authentic torture by inquisition, in Moscow, not Hollywood. Vsevolod Meyerhold, one of the great innovators of the Russian theater, with his stylized and abstract productions, was accused of mysticism and neglect of socialist realism. In 1938, his theater was “liquidated” as “alien to Soviet art.” On June 15, 1939, he was invited to criticize himself at a convention of theater directors presided over by the prosecutor of the purges, Andrei Vyshinsky. Meyerhold said: “The pitiful and wretched thing that pretends to the title of the theater of socialist realism has nothing in common with art…. Everything is gloomily well regulated…and murderous in its lack of talent…. You have done something monstrous…. In hunting down formalism, you have eliminated art!” Meyerhold, a man of sixty-five, was arrested and tortured. His interrogator, B. V. Rodus, broke his left arm and urinated in his mouth. Meyerhold wrote Vyshinsky that though one arm was broken, he could still use a pen with the other. On February 2, 1940, he was shot.78