Collected Essays

by Arthur Miller

  The sweep went not only very wide but deep. By 1950 or thereabouts there were subjects one would do better to avoid and even words that were best left unspoken. The Spanish Civil War, for example, had quickly become a hot button. That war, as some of you may not recall, resulted from an attack in 1936 by the Spanish army upon the democratically elected Spanish government. After almost three years of terrible fighting, in which Nazi air force planes and Mussolini’s troops helped him, the fascist Generalissimo Franco took power. Spain would become the very symbol of the struggle against fascism; but more and more one heard, after about 1950, that Franco’s victory was actually a not unworthy triumph of anticommunists. This despite the common belief through the Thirties and Forties that had Franco been thrown back, opening Hitler’s Atlantic flank to hostile democrats rather than allied fascists, his war against Europe might well have had to be postponed if not aborted.

  Again, it was the swiftness of this change that made it so fictional to me. Occasionally these quick changes were rather comical, which didn’t help one’s sense of reality.

  One day in 1950 or thereabouts a stranger called, asking to come and see me about some matter he would prefer not to talk about on the phone and dropping as one of his bona fides that he had fought in Spain. I figured he was in trouble politically and must be really desperate if he imagined that I could help him. (A few ill-informed people still imagined I had some clout of this kind.) He arrived at my Brooklyn Heights house, a bright, youngish fellow carrying a briefcase. We chatted for a few minutes and then got down to business. Opening his briefcase, he took out a large map of a Texas oil field, rolled it out on my desk, and pointing at various black dots explained that these were oil wells in which he was selling stock. When I confessed surprise that an idealistic antifascist fighter should be ending up as an oil stock salesman, he asked, “Why not?” and with a touch of noble sincerity added, “Once the workers take over they’re going to need oil!” This was a harbinger of the wondrous rationalizations that I would have cause to recall as our future arrived.

  I should add that my uneasy fictional view of things turned out not to be entirely unwarranted; some six or seven years later, I would be cited for contempt of Congress for refusing to identify writers I had met at one of the two communist writers’ meetings I had attended many years before. Normally, these citations resulted in a trial in federal court that took half an hour to lead to inevitable convictions. But my lawyer, Joseph Rauh Jr., brought in a former senator, Harry M. Cain, who had been head of the loyalty board under Eisenhower, to testify as an expert witness that my plays showed no signs of having been written under communist discipline. Cain had a curious history; a decorated Korean War veteran and fierce anticommunist, he had been a sidekick of McCarthy’s and a weekly poker partner of his. But disillusionment had worn him down when, as head of the loyalty board, he had had to deal with the hundreds of letters a week from people suspecting neighbors, friends, and relatives of communist sympathies. The idea of the whole country spying on itself began to depress him, and he came to feel that from his Washington window he was looking out at a terrified nation and worse—some substantial fraction of it was quite literally crazed. The climax for him came with a series of relentlessly persistent letters from a Baltimore postman complaining of having been fired for disloyalty. What bothered him was the handwriting, which was barely literate. Communists were bad people, but they were rarely illiterate. Finally Cain invited the man to his office and realized that the accusations were not credible; this led him to wonder about the hundreds of other accusations he had with little or no examination been regularly forwarding to the FBI. At last he went directly to Eisenhower and told him he was convinced that the loyalty board itself was incompatible with political liberty. The next morning he found that he himself had been fired.

  But that was still six or seven years on. My brushes with the fictional world in which I lived went back to 1947, when All My Sons, as the result of protests by the Catholic War Veterans, was removed from the Army’s theatrical repertoire in Europe as a threat to soldiers’ morale—since it told the story of a manufacturer selling defective parts to the Air Force. In a few years a former officer in that theatrical troop wrote to inform me that not only had All My Sons been banned but an order was given that no other play written by me was to be produced by the Army. As far as the Army was concerned, I had simply disappeared as an American writer. But this would be a useful experience when, in the late Sixties, as president of International PEN, I would find myself commiserating with Soviet writers and those in other communist countries who had seen their names obliterated from the rosters of living authors.

  But it is impossible, certainly not in this short time, to properly convey the fears that mark the period. Nobody was being shot, to be sure, although some were going to jail, where at least one, a man named William Remington, was murdered, by an inmate hoping to shorten his sentence for having killed a communist. Rather than physical fear it was the sense of impotence, which seemed to deepen with each passing week, of being unable to speak simply and accurately of the very recent past when being Left in America, and for that matter in Europe, was simply to be alive to the dilemmas of the day. To be sure, I had counted myself a radical since my years in college and had tried and failed to read Das Kapital; but the Marxist formulations had certainly given shape to my views of politics—which in fact meant that to understand a political phenomenon you had to look for the money. It also meant that you believed capitalism was quite possibly doomed, but between 1929 and around 1936 there were moments when not to believe that would put you in a political minority. I may have dreamed of a socialism where people no longer lived off another’s labor, but I had never met a spy. As for the very idea of willingly subjecting my work not only to some party’s discipline but to anyone’s control, my repugnance was such that as a very young and indigent writer I had turned down fairly lucrative offers to work for Hollywood studios because of a helpless revulsion at the thought of someone other than myself literally owning the paper I was typing on. It would not be long, perhaps four or five years, before the fraudulence of Soviet cultural claims was as clear to me as they should have been earlier, but I would never find it believable, either in the Fifties or later, that with their thuggish self-righteousness and callous contempt for artists’ freedoms, the unabashed Soviet way of controlling culture could be successfully exported to America, except, perhaps, in Madison Avenue advertising agencies. In any case, to believe in that danger I would have to share a bed with the Republican Right.

  Which is not to say that there was not much sincerity in the fears people felt in the Fifties, and, as in most things human, much cynicism as well, if not corruption. The moral high ground, as in most things human, was wreathed in fog. But the fact remained that some greatly talented people were being driven out of the country to live and work in England, screenwriters like Carl Foreman and Donald Ogden Stewart, actors like Charlie Chaplin and Sam Wanamaker (who, incidentally, in his last years, led the campaign to build a copy of Shakespeare’s theater on the Thames). I no longer recall the number of our political exiles, but there were more than too many.

  My subpoena before the House committee came some four years after The Crucible was produced, but I had been shot at more than once as a result of that play. Shortly after its production, the renewal of my outdated passport had been denied when I applied in order to go to Belgium, at the invitation of the Belgo-American Association, to attend the first European performance of the play. The stated grounds for confiscating my passport were that my presence abroad was not in the best interests of the United States. A rather farcical situation soon developed—and I should say that farce was always a step away from all the tragedies of the period. Since the play was the first and practically the only artistic evidence Europe had of resistance to what was considered a fascistic McCarthyism, the applause at the final curtain was intense and insistent, and since the newspapers had announced
that I had accepted the invitation to be present, there were calls for the author. These went on and on until the American ambassador felt compelled to stand and take a bow. A species of insanity was spreading everywhere. Here was the ambassador, an officer of the State Department, acknowledging the applause for someone deemed by that department too dangerous to be present. It must surely have struck some of the audience as strange, however, that an author would be wearing a wide diplomatic sash diagonally across his chest; and the next morning’s papers had loads of fun with the scene, which, of course, could hardly have advanced the best interests of the United States.

  I should explain what I meant by the cynicism and corruption of the Red hunt. By 1956, when HUAC subpoenaed me, the tide was going out, and the committee was finding it difficult to make the front pages anymore. However, the news of my forthcoming marriage to Marilyn Monroe was too tempting to be passed up. That it had some connections with my being subpoenaed was confirmed when Chairman Walter of HUAC sent word to Joseph Rauh, my lawyer, that he would be inclined to cancel my hearing altogether if Miss Monroe would consent to have a picture taken with him. The offer having been declined, the good chairman, as my hearing came to an end, proceeded to entreat me to write less tragically about our country. This lecture cost me some $40,000 in lawyer’s fees, a year’s suspended sentence for contempt of Congress, and a five-hundred-dollar fine. Not to mention about a year of inanition in my creative life.

  But back to the late Forties and early Fifties; my fictional view of the period, my sense of its unreality was, like any impotence, a psychologically painful experience. A very similar paralysis at a certain point descended on Salem.

  A new cautionary diction was swiftly ensconced in our way of talking to one another. In a country that a bit more than a quarter of a century earlier had given three million votes to Eugene Debs, the Socialist presidential candidate, the very word “socialism” was all but taboo. Words had gotten fearsome. As I would learn directly from students and faculty in Ann Arbor on a 1953 reporting visit for Holiday magazine, students were actually avoiding renting rooms in the houses run by the housing cooperative for fear of being labeled communist, so darkly suggestive was the word “cooperative.” On hearing this, even I was amazed. But there was more—the head of orientation at the university told me that the FBI had enlisted professors to report on students voicing left-wing opinions and—some more comedy—they had also engaged students to report on professors with the same views. When I published these facts in Holiday, the Pontiac division of General Motors threatened to withdraw all advertising from the magazine if I ever appeared in it again; Ted Patrick, its editor, promptly badgered me for another piece, but I didn’t know the reason why for some years.

  It was a time—as I would learn only decades later from my FBI record, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act—when the FBI shadowed a guest of mine from a dinner party in my Brooklyn Heights house. The guest’s name was blacked out, and I have been puzzling ever since about his identity. The point is that reading my FBI record in the Seventies I was not really surprised to learn this. In the Fifties everybody over forty believed that his phone was being tapped by the FBI, and they were probably right.

  What is important here is that none of this was secret; everybody had a good idea of what was happening but, like me, felt helpless to reverse it. And to this moment I don’t think I can adequately communicate the sheer density of the atmosphere of the time, for the outrageous had so suddenly become the accepted norm.

  In the early Fifties, for example, with Elia Kazan, who had directed All My Sons and Death of a Salesman, I submitted a film script to Harry Cohn, the head of Columbia Pictures. It described the murderous corruption in the gangster-ridden Brooklyn longshoremen’s union, whose leadership a group of rebel workers was trying to overthrow. Cohn read the script and called us to Hollywood, where he simply and casually informed us that, incredibly enough, he had first had the script vetted by the FBI and that they had seen nothing subversive in it; on the other hand, however, the head of the AFL motion picture unions in Hollywood, Roy Brewer, had condemned it outright as totally untrue communist propaganda, since, quite simply, there were no gangsters on the Brooklyn waterfront. Cohn, no stranger to the ways of gangsterism, having survived an upbringing in the tough, famously crime-ridden Five Points area of Manhattan, opined that Brewer was quite naturally only trying to protect Joe Ryan, his brother AFL union leader, the head of the AFL Brooklyn longshoremen. Brewer also threatened to call a strike of projectionists in any theater daring to show the film, no idle threat since he controlled their union. (Ryan, incidentally, would shortly go to Sing Sing prison for gangsterism. But that was not yet.) Meanwhile Cohn offered his solution to our problem with Brewer; he would produce the film if I would agree to make one simple change—the gangsters in the union were to be changed to communists. This would not be easy; for one thing, I knew all the communists on the waterfront; there was a total of two of them (both of whom, incidentally, in the following decade became millionaire businessmen).

  And so I had to withdraw the script, which prompted an indignant telegram from Cohn: “As soon as we try to make the script pro-American you pull out.” One understood not only the threat in those words but the cynicism; he certainly knew that it was the Mafia that controlled waterfront labor. Nevertheless, had I been a screenwriter in Hollywood, my career would have ended with this refusal to perform this patriotic idiocy. I have to say that there were days when I wondered if we would end in an unacknowledged, perhaps even comfortable American fascism.

  But the theater had no such complications, no blacklist, not yet anyway; and I longed to respond to this climate of fear if only to protect my sanity. But where to find a transcendent concept? As I saw it, the difficulty was that we had grown so detached from any hard reality I knew about. It had become a world of signals, gestures, loaded symbolic words, and of rites and rituals. After all, the accusations of Party membership of film writers, actors, and directors never mentioned treasonous acts of any sort; what was in their brains was the question, and this created a kind of gestural phantom land. I did not yet think of it this way at the time, but looking back I think we had entered an ideological war, as I have said, and in such wars it was ideas and not necessarily actions that arouse anger and fear. And this was the heart of the darkness—that it had come rather quickly to be believed that a massive, profoundly organized conspiracy was in place and being carried forward mainly by a concealed phalanx of intellectuals, including labor people, teachers, professionals of all sorts, sworn to undermine the American government. And it was precisely the invisibility of ideas that was helping to frighten so many people. How could a play deal with this mirage world?

  There was a fundamental absurdity in the Salem witch-hunt, of course, since witches don’t exist, but this only helped relate it more to what we were going through. I can’t recall the date anymore, but to one of the Un-American Activities Committee hearings, several Hollywood writers brought piles of their film scripts for the committee to parse for any sign of Marxist propaganda. Of course there would hardly be anything that provocative in a Hollywood movie of the time, but in any case the committee refused to read the scripts, which I imagined was a further humiliation for the writers. But what a cruel irony, that these terribly serious Party members or sympathizers, in the attempt to prove themselves patriotic Americans, should feel compelled to demonstrate that their work was totally innocuous!

  Paranoia breeds paranoia, of course, but below paranoia there lies a bristling, unwelcome truth, a truth so repugnant as to produce fantasies of persecution in order to conceal its existence. For example, the unwelcome truth denied by the Right was that the Hollywood writers accused of subversion were not a menace to the country or even the bearers of meaningful change. They wrote not propaganda but entertainment, some of it of a mildly liberal cast, to be sure, but most of it mindless; or when it was political, as with Preston Sturges or Frank
Capra, entirely un-Marxist. In any real assessment, the worst they could do was contribute some money to Party coffers. But most Hollywood writers were only occasionally employed, and one doubted that their contributions could have made any difference to a party so completely disregarded by the American public and, in the bargain, so thoroughly impregnated by the FBI. Yet they had to be portrayed as an imminent danger to the republic.

  As for the Left, its unacknowledged truth was more important for me. If nobody was being shot in our ideological war but merely vivisected by a headline or two, it struck me as odd, if understandable, that the accused were largely unable to passionately cry out their faith in the ideals of socialism. Attacks on the committees’ right to demand that a citizen reveal his political beliefs, yes; but as for the idealistic canon of their own convictions, the accused were largely mute. It was a silence, incidentally, that in the public mind probably tended to confirm the committees’ characterization of them as conspirators wrapping themselves in darkness. In their defense, the committees instantly shut down as irrelevant any attempts to explicate their ideas, any idealistic displays; but even outside, in public statements beyond the hearings, they relied almost wholly on legalistic defenses rather than the articles of the faith in which they unquestionably believed. The rare exception, like Paul Robeson’s forthright declaration of faith in socialism as a cure for racism, was a rocket that momentarily lit up the sky, but even this, it must be said, was dimmed by his adamant refusal to recognize, at least publicly, what he knew to be the murder of two Soviet Jewish artists, his good friends, under Stalin’s anti-Semitic decrees. It was one of the cruel twists of the time that while he would not in Washington display his outrage at the murders of his friends, he could in Moscow choose to sing a song in Yiddish that the whole public knew was his protest against Soviet anti-Semitism.