How this vaudevillelike absurdity could have been taken in dead seriousness by vast numbers of Americans is hard to explain in retrospect. The Fifties’ Red hunt not only terrified people but drove some few to suicide. It is not easy to conceive of Harry Truman, ex-artilleryman and quintessential small-town American, being labeled a traitor to his country, yet Senator Joe McCarthy and his fellow Republican leaders blithely went about pronouncing Truman’s and Roosevelt’s administrations “twenty years of treason.” Never was this greeted with scorn or laughter. How to explain it?
Of course, an outrageous mixture of viciousness and naïve provincialism is endemic to the political extremes. Stalin awoke one morning and decided that all the Jewish doctors were in a plot to poison the party leadership, and nobody laughed then either. I had known an outlandish tap dancer who in desperation was touring Europe in the Thirties with his little troupe; in Berlin he found himself to his amazement the idol of the newly risen Nazi establishment, and soon of Hitler himself. Tap dancing so delighted Hitler that he spoke of ordaining it the echt German dance, which all the Volk must begin learning at once—a veritable nation of tap dancers was to spring forth, with my friend to be the head teacher. One morning a uniformed “race expert” showed up at his hotel prepared to measure his cranium, nose, mouth, and the spatial relationships of his face to make sure he was the Aryan type. My friend, a Jew, explained that he had an urgent appointment and took the next train out of the country.
By 1953 it was common talk in Europe that America had at last met her own native dictator in Joe McCarthy; but if a great many Americans agreed, they were in no position to say so safely, especially if they worked in government, or as teachers, or in the larger corporations. Another dreamlike element, moreover, was that McCarthy’s Senate investigating subcommittee, whose claimed intent was the rooting out of communists hidden in the government, never seemed to find any actual Reds, let alone one who might be guilty of betraying the United States. To his critics, however, McCarthy would reply, “It isn’t the number of communists that is important; it’s the general effect on our government,” one of his more candid statements.
He rose like a rocket to his power in a matter of weeks once he had stood on a podium waving a piece of paper and declaring, “I hold in my hand the names of . . .” I have since forgotten whether it was sixty-two or thirty-nine “card-carrying communists” inside the State Department, but it hardly matters because in subsequent months he himself kept changing the count and of course could never produce one name of an actual person. Yet his fraudulence, which had perhaps seemed so obvious to me because I had uncles like him who shot off their mouths in argument and said anything that came into their heads, was frighteningly persuasive to a lot of Americans, including some important newsmen. One half understood why the country was still in shock at having “lost” China to Mao, whose revolution had swept into Peking in 1949. How could this mucky peasant horde have won fairly and squarely against a real general like Chiang Kai-shek, whose wife, moreover, was the graduate of an American college and so beautiful besides? It could only be that worming their ways through our State Department were concealed traitors who had “given” the country to the Reds. In the light of Vietnam, we have perhaps come to understand the limits of our power, but in the early Fifties any such concept was unimaginable. Henry Luce, for example, was confidently propagating “the American century,” when we would lead the grateful human race into baseball, private enterprise, eight-cylinder Buicks, and, of course, Christianity; and for a fact, the Swiss franc aside, the American dollar was truly the only nonfunny money in the world. Before he had finished, Joe McCarthy would have “named” the revered ex-general of the U.S. Army, George Catlett Marshall, as a communist.
McCarthy had struck gold with the point of a syllogism; since he was totally and furiously against communism, anyone who opposed him had therefore to be in favor of communism, if only by that much. This simply numbed the opposition or backed them into futile defensive postures. For example, when Senator Millard Tydings, having investigated McCarthy’s charges that the State Department was full of Reds, reported that they were “a fraud and a hoax perpetrated on the Senate of the United States and on the American people,” McCarthy, for revenge, then went into Maryland and, charging Tydings with being “soft” on communism, helped defeat him for reelection! His was a power blessed by Cardinal Spellman, a power that the young John F. Kennedy would not bring himself to oppose any more than did Eisenhower until 1954, near the end of McCarthy’s career. For myself, I believed McCarthy might well be on his way to the presidency, and if that happened an awful lot of Americans would literally have to take to the boats.
When it was announced in 1953 that Edward R. Murrow would be devoting the entire half hour of his prestigious weekly TV commentary to an analysis of McCarthy, my own joy was great but it was mixed with some skepticism. Murrow had been the brightest star at CBS for more than a decade and remains to this day the patron saint of anchormen for his judiciousness and devotion to the truth. It was during the London blitz that he had seared our minds with the unique sound of his voice, a gravelly baritone that had rolled out to us across the Atlantic each night from the fog and blast of London under bombardment, his quiet toughness a reassurance that the great beleaguered city was still alive.
But all that anti-Nazi wartime gemütlichkeit was long gone now; indeed, CBS in the past couple of years had cooperated with the unacknowledged blacklisting of radio and TV writers, actors, and directors who had or were accused of having too much enthusiasm for the Left by newly sprouted self-appointed guardians of the airwaves like Red Channels, a broadsheet listing the names of purported subversives. In true private-enterprise style they were always ready to “clear” you for a fee plus your signed anticommunist declaration, or preferably an ad in Variety, which you paid for, with some similarly edifying and spontaneous patriotic locution. Still, it would be fascinating to see how far Murrow and CBS would want to go against the snarling senator from Wisconsin whose totally missing scruples had made him murderously effective as a debater. I was not at all sure it would be far enough.
There was such a widespread feeling of helpless paralysis before the McCarthy movement by this time that one questioned whether any mere journalist, whatever his wit and courage, could stay on his feet with him.
In such apocalyptic gloom, very nearly convinced that my days as an American playwright were numbered even as I was generally thought to be a great success, I adapted Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People with the hope of illuminating what can happen when a righteous mob starts marching. But despite a brilliant performance by Fredric March as Dr. Stockmann, the critics batted the play right back at my feet. For one thing, it was a post-Odets and pre-Brecht time, when things artistic were supposed to deal with sentiments and aspirations, but never with society.
The failure of that production only deepened the sense of a mass mythic shadow dance, a ritualized, endlessly repeated consent to a primitive anticommunism that could end only with demagogues in power over the country. In the Salem witch hunts of 1692, a story I had known since college, I thought I saw nakedly unveiled something like the immemorial psychic principles of what we were once again living through. There too people had been at odds with a reality that indeed was sawing straight across their conception of themselves and nullifying the omnipotent powers of their society. There too men had been seized with paranoid terrors of dark forces ranged against them. It is hardly accidental that apart from The Crucible our theater would mount no other reply to a movement that surely meant to destroy its freedom. So feverish, so angry, so fearful had people become that any mention of the senator’s name on a stage, or even an allusion to his antics, would have generated an impacted silence in the majority, and open rage in his partisans.
In The Crucible a public hysteria, based upon economic, sexual, and personal frustrations, gathers the folds of the sublime about itself and destroys more than twenty li
ves in the village of Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692. Between its heroes and villains stands a timeless hunger for mythic solutions to intractable moral and social dilemmas—particularly the myth of a hidden plot by subterranean evil forces to overwhelm the good. But The Crucible, too, would fail; either mistrusted as a “false analogy”—there had never been witches but there certainly were Reds, quite as though McCarthy had really uncovered a Soviet plot utilizing highly placed Americans—or regarded as a “cold” play, a charge partially justified by its direction as a disinterred classic. Interestingly, within two years, a new Off-Broadway production would succeed, judged hot stuff now by many of the same critics who theorized that I had more warmly revised the script. But the only revision had been the relaxation of society after McCarthy’s quick decline and death—which, I suppose, permitted a longer view of the issues raised in the drama.
Shortly before Murrow’s broadcast was announced, I had had my own personal little brush with a McCarthyite State Department. The Belgo-American Association, a business group, had invited me to come over to Brussels for the European premiere of The Crucible in the National Theatre, and I applied for a renewal of my outdated passport. A new passport was quickly denied me. “Not in the best interests of the United States,” they said. So at the end of the opening performance, the audience, believing I was in the house, the papers having reported I had accepted to attend, began calling for the author, who, of course, was still in Brooklyn. The roar of the audience would not cease—to Europeans The Crucible at the time was reassurance that fascism had not yet overwhelmed Americans—and the United States ambassador had finally to stand and take my bow for me, a scandal in the papers the next morning when the imposture was revealed. (But who knows if he had stood up in sympathy for me or in silent protest at his department’s stupidity in denying me a passport?)
All in all, by the time of Murrow’s broadcast, I had only a small capacity left to believe that he would really do more than remonstratively tap McCarthy’s shoulder. The broadcast was coming somewhat late in the game, now that an occasional soft murmuring of common sense was being heard in the press—although that, too, was still in danger of being suppressed once the senator got around to blasting its authors. For me, there was little reason anymore to expect a meaningful resistance to McCarthyism when I knew that, myself not altogether excepted, people were learning to keep a politic silence toward idiocies that a few short years before they’d have derided or laughed at.
An unsettling experience at a cocktail party shortly before the broadcast had stayed with me. I had overheard a TV producer assuring a circle of guests that he was free to hire any actor or produce any script he chose to and that no blacklist ever existed. Since I had friends who had not been hired in over a year despite long careers in TV and radio, and two or three who had suffered mental illness as a result, and I knew of at least two suicides attributable to the despair generated by blacklisting, I walked over to the producer and offered him the television rights to The Crucible. He laughed, assuring me and his listeners that he would of course be honored but his budget would never stand for what such rights would doubtless cost. So I offered them to him for a dollar. He went on laughing and I went on persisting, growing aware, however, that our little audience, many of them in television and the theater, was turning against me for a display of bad manners.
Leaving that party, I exchanged glances with people who I was certain shared my knowledge and views but who showed nothing in their faces. It was an experience that would be useful to me in future years when writing about the life of the artist in the Soviet Union, China, and Eastern Europe, where what might be called a permanent state of McCarthyism reigns, at times more virulently than others, but always warning artists—who, after all, are the eyes and voices of the society—that their souls ultimately belong to Daddy.
Edward R. Murrow appeared on the screen that night of the much-anticipated broadcast, as usual a picture of classy Bogartian straightforwardness, the cigarette between the fingers with the lethal smoke coiling up around the peaked eyebrows and the straight black hair, unsmiling as ever, his voice nasal and direct. I did not yet own a set, so I was watching this at my poet-friend Leroy’s house a couple of blocks from my own in Brooklyn Heights. Leroy believed he was blacklisted in TV and radio, but a few producers occasionally gave him scriptwriting work because they loved him. People also gave him old but usable cars, trips to Florida, and more or less shared a mystic belief that Leroy must not die of want, with which Leroy agreed. He had once found a new can of anchovies on the sidewalk and a month later, on a different street, the key. Leroy had even graver doubts than I about what Murrow would be able to do.
Murrow could often affect an airy confidence and even sentimentality, rather like Cronkite talking about Vermont farmers, but not tonight; tonight he had his chin tucked in like a boxer and apprehension tightened the corners of his eyes with the knowledge, no doubt, that if some back talk against McCarthy had squeaked up recently in the press, his partisans were still passionate, religiously devoted to him, and numerous. Watching Murrow appear on the tube we were all aware of those millions out there who must hate him now for spoiling their god, or trying to; and even in that poet’s snug and remote living room with its in-laws’ cast-off furniture, the American violence charged the air. Tina, Leroy’s wide-cheekboned blonde wife, who usually could never see a TV set switched on without turning away and launching a new topic of conversation, now stared in silence at Murrow’s familiar face blossoming on the black and white tube.
To her and Leroy this broadcast was of far more than academic or abstract interest. Two of Leroy’s closest relatives had gained some fame as American volunteers fighting for the Spanish loyalists against Franco. This, combined with his having the usual Left views of a Thirties survivor, was enough of a taint on Leroy to damage his right to sign his own name on the occasional radio script he was able to sell. On the slim proceeds of such fitful commerce he pressed on with writing his poems. And Tina pressed on with her winsome complaints that Leroy was stubbornly immune to the American Dream of wealth and fame. Thus she stared at Murrow like a woman in love with a fighter climbing into a ring.
I think it only dawned on us as he started to speak that Murrow was the first man to challenge McCarthy out in public rather than into his sleeve, and I think we were scared for him now, although we were still pretty sure that establishment politesse would gentle his confrontation with the senator. And indeed, Murrow’s introduction was not at all belligerent. But this was television, not print, and it quickly became clear what his strategy was going to be—McCarthy was going to hang himself before the whole country by reruns of his own filmed performances. And there now unwound pictures of him hectoring witnesses before his Senate subcommittee, railing against a bespectacled author of an obscure college textbook with the accusation that this man was a member of the American Civil Liberties Union, “listed as a front doing the work of the Communist party.” But the stinger was the speech before a mass rally during the recent Eisenhower–Adlai Stevenson contention for the presidency.
A cold and windy day, and McCarthy behind the podium, hatless, a burly and handsome man in a saturnine way, quick to laugh through a clamped jaw—more of a tight-assed snicker really, as though not to overly warm his icy ironies. Watching him again in these reruns was even scarier than seeing him the first time, in the previous months, for now somehow he was there to be studied and he was indeed villainous, almost laughably so. Now one saw that his great wish was for a high style, his models might well have been Oscar Wilde or Bernard Shaw, epigrammatists of the cutting Irish persuasion who could lay the opponent low with a jibe impossible ever to erase. Oddly, though, it was hardly ten minutes into the program when one knew it was the end of McCarthy, not altogether for reasons of content but more because he was so obviously handling subjects of great moment with mere quips, empty-sounding jibes, lumpy witticisms; it had not seemed quite as flat and ill-acted be
fore.
At one point, as the applause of his audience died down he gave them his little knowing grin and said, “Strangely, Alger . . . I mean Adlai . . .” and a sweep of appreciative roaring laughter sent him into a helpless giggling spell and redoubled his audience’s big-decibeled recognition for this association of Adlai Stevenson with Alger Hiss, an accused communist with whom Stevenson had no connection whatsoever. Now, with the election over and settled and its passions gone, the sheer vileness of this man and his crummy tactic was abstracted from its original moment and there he stood in all his mendacity, appearing joyfully immune to all moral censure or the most minimal claims of decency.
The Murrow broadcast was a deep, if not mortal, wound for McCarthy. At least it seemed so to me at the time. By the end of the half hour all our debt to Murrow came clear and my skepticism toward him had gone. But McCarthy was given his own half-hour rebuttal period three weeks later, and we gathered again to hear what he would have to say. Now live in the studio, a subdued McCarthy seemed to know he had been badly hurt by the Murrow broadcast. A plaintive tenor line lifted his voice into the doubtlessly authentic plaint of a persecuted man. “If there had been no communists in our government, we would not have given China to the communists!” This was one of his standards, but under attack now he knew he had to get more specific, and so maps appeared on the screen, showing how the dark stain of communism had spread from Russia over China, engineered by a tiny secret group of schemers, their agents, and their dupes like—yes, like Edward R. Murrow. In his rebuttal, McCarthy, left to himself, undid himself. Unaccustomed to anyone confronting him with his lies, he seemed unable to use elementary caution. Murrow, he blithely said, was a member of the terrorist organization the Industrial Workers of the World; Harold Laski, “the greatest communist propagandist in England,” had dedicated his last book to Murrow. Now snarling, he attempted the ultimate unmasking of Murrow with his by-then familiar horror words: “Edward R. Murrow, the cleverest of the jackal pack which is always found at the throat of anyone who dares to expose individual communists and traitors; Murrow, who served the communist cause as part of the transmission belt from the Russian secret police into the American home.” McCarthy’s desperate appeal ended something like “The Communist Party opposes me; Murrow opposes me; Murrow is a transmission belt of communist propaganda.” Such was his counterattack.
Collected Essays Page 42