The American gulf is widening
The truth under assault
“Truth made you a traitor,” wrote Lillian Hellman, “as it often does in a time of scoundrels. But there were very few who stood up to say so…”
The playwright told the story of her encounter with the federal government’s spell of anti-Communist paranoia in the late 1940s and early ‘50s in a brief memoir (her third) entitled Scoundrel Time.
Her quote about the truth specifically referred to the experts who were fired from the State Department and falsely accused of engaging in a pro-Communist conspiracy by politicians like Richard Nixon and Joseph McCarthy for doing no more than “to recognize that Chiang Kai-shek was losing” to the Communist forces in China.
The hysteria of what became known as the “McCarthy era” eventually passed, but not before greatly harming the careers of hundreds of actors, directors and authors including Hellman herself.
The history of the “blacklist” makes for particularly uncomfortable reading right now when the Trump administration is purging federal employees and contractors, some blindly in the name of cost-cutting and others intentionally for their involvement in such policy areas as DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion), the environment, public health and foreign aid.
On Friday, President Donald Trump fired Gen. C.Q. Brown, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who recorded a video about his experiences as a Black man in the military after the killing of George Floyd. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth fired Adm. Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to serve as chief of naval operations.
The effects ripple out beyond the agencies themselves. As the New York Times reported last week, the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library and Museum in Atlanta cancelled three book events — on the topics of climate change, homelessness and civil rights — without explanation. The publisher of one of the books said it was told the library “which was facing staff cuts, now needs approval from Washington for all programming.” The book in question was Spell Freedom: The Underground Schools that Built the Civil Rights Movement, by Elaine Weiss.
At a time when the federal government may no longer be counted on to tell the truth about such fundamental questions as who started the Ukraine war, the safety of vaccines or what happened on January 6, 2021, the role of media organizations, NGOs, state governments and other arms of civil society becomes that much more vital.
And when a respected news organization is punished for refusing to rename the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America at the whim of a president, everyone who cares about constitutional freedoms should take notice.
The original blacklist
The “McCarthy era” is a bit of a misnomer, since the basic elements of the postwar scare coalesced before Sen. Joseph McCarthy came to dominate the nation’s attention.
Writing in 2006 for the National Archives’ Prologue Magazine, Robert Justin Goldstein told the story of the “blacklist.”
It originated after the Soviet Union, which had been an ally of the United States in fighting Hitler’s Germany, seized control of Eastern Europe in the war’s closing days. That set off a Cold War with the west.
It was a time of economic strain, suspicion about Soviet spying, and “deliberate attempts to ignite a domestic Red Scare by a powerful coalition of American conservatives, notably the FBI, significant elements in the business community, the Catholic Church, and, especially, an increasingly politically desperate Republican Party,” Goldstein noted.
The Republicans had lost four presidential elections to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Democrats. But they finally landed on a winning message in the 1946 midterm elections, which awarded them control of both houses of Congress for the first time in 14 years.
In addition to criticizing the Democrats’ handling of the economy, Republicans charged that Communists had infiltrated the federal government. As Goldstein noted, the party’s national chairman Carroll Reece “referred to the ‘pink puppets in control of the federal bureaucracy,’ while House Republican leader Joe Martin pledged to give priority to ‘cleaning out the Communists, their fellow travelers and parlor pinks from high positions in our Government.’"
Truman’s turn
President Harry S Truman, Roosevelt’s successor, paid prompt attention to the election results, knowing that he would be facing the voters in 1948. Two weeks after the midterm elections, Truman launched a commission on “Employee Loyalty” with an eye to pushing “any disloyal or subversive person” out of the government.
Truman signed an executive order in March 1947 that specified that one method of determining an employee’s disloyalty would be membership or an association with any organization viewed by the attorney general as “totalitarian, Fascist, Communist or subversive.” The order was soon followed by the release of the “Attorney General’s List of Subversive Organizations.” Its implications were far-reaching.
As Goldstein wrote:
The publication of the list transformed what was supposedly a tool solely designed to help screen federal employees for loyalty into what effectively became an official government proscription blacklist, whose influence spread across American society, severely damaged or destroyed the listed organizations, and cast a general pall over freedom of association and speech in the United States.
The secretive process of compiling the blacklist was hurried, and the criteria used to select organizations was unclear. The government didn’t permit any hearings or appeals from the listed organizations, despite objections from liberals including New York City Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, who wrote a column headlined, “Even a Dog Gets a Hearing.”
The list eventually grew to nearly 300 organizations. The House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and McCarthy’s Senate subcommittee would routinely subpoena prominent Americans who had some association with one of the blacklisted groups to not only testify about their involvement, but also “name names” of others who were involved.
McCarthy claimed to have a list of 205 Communists in the State Department, but was unable to provide proof.
When he held hearings designed to expose alleged subversion in the US Army during the administration of a Republican, President Dwight Eisenhower, McCarthy came across as a bully who couldn’t back up his charges. The McCarthy subcommittee’s chief counsel was Roy Cohn, who later became a powerful New York lawyer and something of a mentor to Donald Trump.
After widespread disgust over the Army hearings, McCarthy’s career was in tatters. He was censured by the Senate in 1954.
Hellman and HUAC
Lillian Hellman, author of plays including The Little Foxes, Watch on the Rhine and Toys in the Attic, was a polarizing figure. She had a famous on-and-off romance with detective story pioneer Dashiell Hammett, who went to jail rather than reveal who provided money for an organization associated with the Communist Party in the U.S. Hellman had briefly been a party member and joined other Americans who signed a letter in support of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin’s Moscow show trials.
She wielded her pen adroitly and sometime viciously as a way to belittle former friends and rivals. Hellman’s multi-decade-long feud with writer Mary McCarthy led the latter to say on Dick Cavett’s television show, “Every word she writes is a lie—including ‘and’ and ‘the.’ ” Hellman sued McCarthy for libel but died before the case came to trial.
Still, Hellman’s behavior in the Joseph McCarthy era drew praise from observers such as journalist Murray Kempton. Hellman had been called to testify before HUAC in 1952 about having allegedly associated with Communist-dominated groups — and was asked to “name names,” as others in the entertainment business had done.
She said she would testify fully about her own activities but wouldn’t speak negatively about other people. Hellman wrote to the committee that, “to hurt innocent people whom I knew many years ago in order to save myself is, to me, inhuman and indecent and dishonorable. I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year's fashions…”
The committee spurned her offer, and she responded to key questions by invoking the Fifth Amendment’s protections against self-incrimination. Hellman wrote that the reaction to the ordeal — in a movie industry that shamefully cooperated with the blacklist — greatly reduced her income for years.
In Scoundrel Time, she reflected on the Red mania. She said she wasn’t surprised by what McCarthy and his associates did: “A theme is always necessary, a plain, simple, unadorned theme to confuse the ignorant. The anti-Red theme was easily chosen from the grab bag, not alone because we were frightened of socialism, but chiefly, I think, to destroy the remains of Roosevelt and his sometimes advanced work.”
But she directed her fury toward “what I thought had been the people of my world…I had, up to the late 1940s, believed that the educated, the intellectual, lived by what they claimed to believe: freedom of thought and speech, the right of each man to his own convictions, a more than implied promise, therefore, of aid to those who might be persecuted. But only a very few raised a finger when McCarthy and the boys appeared.”
Almost all of them, she wrote, through action or inaction, “contributed to McCarthyism, running after a bandwagon which hadn’t bothered to stop to pick them up.”
Another enlightening piece, Rich. I wonder these days if "even a dog would get a hearing?"