(New York:
The Viking Press, 1980)
Back to Naming Names contents
page.
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Chapter
10, Degradation
Ceremonies
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On
only one issue did the House Un-American Activities Committee and its
most
visible victims, Kazan and Polonsky, the blacklisters and the Hollywood
Ten,
Sokolsky and the Daily Worker, all agree: the test for friend or foe
was the
willingness to inform. Why did such a consensus develop on the
meaning of the
names test? Why did the Committee insist on it?
Suspend the search for
individual motives and consider the under-reported
testimony of one William
Ward Kimple. On June 30, 1955, Kimple appeared as a
witness before the
Committee and told a story whose significance may have
been lost at the time.
He was not a star witness. The hearings had stopped
making news. The dozen or
so names he read into the record were those of
mostly anonymous Party
functionaries. In other words, who cared...
--that he had been a
member of the intelligence unit of the Los Angeles
Police Department from
1924 to 1944;
--that from 1928 until September 1939 he was a member of the
Communist Party
under the name William Wallace;
--that he served the
Party as unit literary agent, unit educational
director, unit organizer,
alternate on the county-level disciplinary
committee, and, last but not
least, assistant to the L.A. County membership
director;
--that in
this latter capacity he had all the membership records;
--that during the
years 1936, 1937, 1938, and 1939--years of the Popular
Front, when Party
membership skyrocketed--he had charge of the membership
lists and kept them
in his own possession;
--that there had been 100 members of the Communist
Party in Los Angeles when
he joined, and 2880 when he left in September
1939;
--that it was his extracurricular duty "to keep the police
department inform
ed . . . of the 'who and what and when' and the 'where and
the why' of the
Communist movement and activities."
As he put it
in his testimony before the Committee:
My duties . . . were to keep the
membership records of the Communist Party
in order to assist in the annual
registration of Communist Party members, to
assist in the mid-year control of
the Communist Party membership books. That
was an activity taken about the
first of July--to check on all Communist
Party members, to see to it that
they were paid up in dues and when.... When
their books were inspected and
[they were] found to be paid-up members, then
a control card was detached
from the membership book and sent back to the
membership commission.
Then
I, as assistant membership director, would check against the records
and show
that they were Communist Party members in good standing. I would
also assist
in the transfer of Communist Party members from one unit to
another, one
section to another; see to it that their Communist Party cards
were kept in
place so that at all times we knew where each CP member was and
where he was
functioning and what his duty was supposed to be.
The following dialogue
then took place with Frank Tavenner, counsel to the
Committee:
MR.
TAVENNER: Then it would be correct to say that you had in your custody
or
under your control at one time or another the record of memberships in
the
Communist Party in the Los Angeles area?
MR. KIMPLE: Yes, sir.... I furnished
[my police superior] copies of the CP
membership records and, where possible,
I furnished him copies of the
Communist Party membership registration and,
where possible, I turned in to
him the Communist Party membership books which
were picked up at the end of
the year when the new books were issued, and the
old books I turned over to
him.... My instructions were to destroy the old
books and the method I used
was to turn them over to the police
department.
MR. TAVENNER: Did you follow that practice with regard to the
entire
membership of the Communist Party during this period that you
were
membership director? I mean, did you furnish the department with the
records
of membership of all the members?
MR. KIMPLE: Yes,
sir....
MR. TAVENNER: . . . You said you had some assistance in this work
from
another person employed by the police department. In what way did she
assist
you in that work?
MR. KIMPLE: Well, sir, we worked as a team
all the time and she was the Los
Angeles County dues secretary for the
Hollywood subsection, dues secretary
at the time she was in the new unit. She
was also secretary of the Los
Angeles County disciplinary committee of the
Communist Party. And working
together we kept the police department pretty
well informed.
MR. TAVENNER: Have you recently been in a position to
review the reports and
records which you and the person whom you later
married turned over to the
police department?
MR. KIMPLE: I have, yes,
sir; many of them, not all of them.
At the close of Kimple's testimony,
Congressman Donald Jackson thanked him.
and observed:
It is by virtue of
informed testimony such as this that it has been possible
to piece together
across the years the nature and the extent and the
objectives of the
Communist Party in the United States. Of course, anyone
who serves on this
Committee is automatically a heel in the eyes of the
comrades. Your future
will be that of a stool pigeon.
MR. KIMPLE: I have been so labeled many
times.
MR. JACKSON: However I feel that that will reflect a very small
vocal
minority viewpoint and that by and large the people of the city of
Los
Angeles, California in general, and of the Nation owe to you and
other
people who have been willing to take on assignments of this kind in the
line
of official duty, separating yourself in large part, as I know you
must
have, from family associations, social things you would very much
have
preferred to do, a debt of gratitude.
Jackson then asked
whether the witness was in a position to give the
Committee additional names.
"I am in the position, sir," said Kimple, "to
positively identify the
Communist Party membership of close to a thousand
people."
MR.
JACKSON: A thousand people?
MR. KIMPLE: In Los Angeles, yes, sir.
MR.
JACKSON: Is the Committee in possession of that information?
MR. KIMPLE:
They are.
MR. JACKSON: Thank you very much.
Three years before
Kimple testified, in 1952, the Committee had heard from
one Max Silver, who
had been the paid full-time organizational secretary for
the Southern
California Communist Party from 1938 to 1945. In other words,
Silver's West
Coast duties commenced the year before Kimple had retired.
Silver guessed
that there were four thousand members in the Los Angeles
County Party. So
between Silver and Kimple alone, the Committee had access
to all of the
Party's local names from 1936 through 1945. And then, to bring
the Committee
up-to-date on the postwar period, it had witnesses such as Roy
Erwin, a
Hollywood radio worker who had joined the Party in 1945 and who
doubled as an
FBI informant and Party member from 1947 to 1949. The
testimony of Kimple,
Silver, and Erwin, combined with intelligence from the
FBI and countless
other government sources in the business of trading
information (with such as
the good-natured investigator Bill Wheeler and his
colleagues on HUAC), meant
that the last thing the Committee needed to do
its job was to accumulate more
names. Moreover, almost all the witnesses who
named names publicly preceded
their public testimony with a private,
executive-session rehearsal, which
means that the public hearings were
indeed largely ceremonial. Why did they
agree to participate in the
ceremony? Lest there remain any doubt about the
informational irrelevance of
the public naming, let us remember Wheeler's own
injunction to the penitent
Martin Berkeley: "When Berkeley came down with his
list of 154 people, I
told him, I said, Don't name that many. You're just
going to get yourself in
big, deep trouble." I said, 'We don't need all this.
Put the rest of it in
executive testimony." Names were turned on and off like
water by the
Committee's counsel and investigator, depending on the symbolic
goal of the
day. Thus, on January 21, 1952, Wheeler reined in
Max Silver:
"I advised him not to identify too many people because I told
him I wanted
from him the theory of Communism, the story of the way the
Hollywood section
of the Party was divorced from the Los Angeles section and
how they got their
directives from New York, and the fight about how New
York picked up all the
money. I wanted the hearings to focus on the big
argument about whether under
the Hollywood tithing system they got ten
percent of the gross or ten percent
of the net. Well, I think he still named
about thirty people or something
like that, and there were the usual big
headlines in all the Los Angeles
papers--you know, EX COMMUNIST IDENTIFIES
THIRTY, and they left out all the
theory, they just skipped it."
And the Committee's critics are further
confirmed in one of their several
indictments of its activities: The purpose
of the public hearing was not, as
HUAC and its defenders insisted it was, to
gather information for
legislation. The information it demanded in public it
already had, and other
information that might have been useful to it was
rejected. (When Lillian
Hellman, Arthur Miller, Robert Rossen, Larry Parks,
Sidney Buchman, and
others offered to tell all about themselves as long as
they weren't required
to name others, the Committee said no.) Its "official"
reason for demanding
the naming of names was perhaps most forcefully stated
by Congressman
Jackson, who believed that only the naming of names was the
final proof that
a witness had broken with his past. He said: "I personally
will place no
credence in the testimony of any witness who is not prepared to
come before
this Committee and fully cooperate with respect to activities
within the
Communist Party." And naming names was "the ultimate test" of a
witness's
cooperation. In theory the failure to name names left open the
possibility
that one was still in the business of protecting one's old
comrades.
Jackson's test may help to explain why the practice was
inaugurated but not
why it persisted. Nor are we given much guidance in the
histories, political
analyses, or legal briefs of the period, which concern
themselves primarily
with matters of the separation and abuse of powers, and
the reputation of
various constitutional amendments.
One turns instead
to the sociologists and anthropologists, students of
ritual, ceremony, and
symbolism, of the meaning of deviance, the visiting of
stigma, and the
persistence of social evil. For the lesson of Kimple,
Silver, et al. is
surely that whatever the practical consequences of the
naming of names, the
ritual's real significance was symbolic. That this was
sensed by many
participants in the process may be gathered from the quality
of the calculus
which the informer Richard Collins reports he undertook with
the informer
Meta Rosenberg. When they limited the names they would turn
over to the
Committee into three categories--the dead, the already called,
and the
long-time ex-Communists--they persuaded themselves they would do
minimal
damage. Yet if Collins was under no illusion that he was supplying
the
Committee with important information, did it occur to him that he
was
supplying it with something more central to its purposes--a body,
an
instrument without which it could not have carried out its ritual,
its
degradation ceremony?
The HUAC hearings were degradation
ceremonies. Their job was not to
legislate or even to discover subversives
(that had already been done by the
intelligence agencies and their
informants) so much as it was to stigmatize.
For a degradation ceremony
to work it needs a denouncer. And the most
credible denouncer, with the most
impeccable credentials, is the one who has
been there himself. The
ex-Communists constituted a steady supply of
denouncers.
A successful
status-degradation ceremony must be fueled by moral
indignation. The
anti-Communist hysteria of the cold war provided an
ideal
environment.
What makes the degradation ceremony so serious an
occasion is the nature of
the public denunciation. As Harold Garfinkel, a
UCLA sociologist who has
written an important article on degradation rites,
describes the process,
the public, through its agent, delivers a curse which
says in effect, "I
call upon all men to bear witness that he [the denounced
person] is not as
he appears but is otherwise and in essence of a lower
species." The target
becomes in the eyes of his condemners literally
"different," "a new person."
It is not that new attributes are added to the
old identity. He is not
changed; he is, rather, reconstituted, transformed.
"The man at whose hands
a neighbor suffered death becomes a 'murderer.'" The
former identity, at
best, is seen as something of a sham appearance. The new
identity is the
"basic reality."
Scholars who undertook to challenge
the work of the congressional committees
during the cold war years focused
for the most part on rights rather than
rites. But of course most scholarship
of the period divorced itself from
concern with the content of actions. In
literature the New Critics focused
on form over contents in philosophy the
positivists were preoccupied with
the verifiable rather than the meaningful,
in psychology the behaviorists
rejected Gestalt analysis in favor of
stimulus-response studies. Even in the
relatively new discipline of
sociology, whose subject was largely
contemporary society, confrontation with
McCarthy, the man or the ism, took
the form of esoteric studies in
conformity. But perhaps there is some sort
of unwritten law on the
inevitability of relevance, which says that
contemporary moral, political,
and social issues are inescapable. At any
rate, one of the more obscure
developments in the sociology of the 1950s
turns out to offer perhaps the
most useful framework for understanding the
politics of that time--namely,
the study of "the deviant," by which was
usually meant a juvenile delinquent,
a mental patient, or a religious
fanatic. Thus the sociologist Kai Erikson's
description of a community's
decision to bring what he calls "deviant
sanctions" against one of its
members turns out to be a description of the
elements of the sort of
status-degradation ceremony I have been talking
about:
To begin with, the community's decision to bring deviant sanctions
against
one of its members is not a simple act of censure. It is an intricate
rite
of transition, at once moving the individual out of his ordinary place
in
society and transferring him into a special deviant position. The
ceremonies
which mark this change of status generally have a number of
related phases.
They supply a formal stage on which the deviant and his
community can
confront one another [as in a HUAC hearing]; they make an
announcement about
the nature of his deviancy [the witness is named as a
Communist or former
Communist]; and they place him in a particular role which
is thought to
neutralize the harmful effects of his misconduct [he is put on
a blacklist
which renders him unemployable]. These commitment ceremonies tend
to be
occasions of wide public interest and ordinarily take place in a
highly
dramatic setting [the HUAC hearings, frequently televised, often made
page
one]....
Now an important feature of these ceremonies in our own
culture is that they
are almost irreversible. Most provisional roles
conferred by society--those
of the student or conscripted soldier, for
example--include some kind of
terminal ceremony to mark the individual's
movement back out of the role
once its temporary advantages have been
exhausted. But the roles allotted
the deviant seldom make allowance for this
type of passage. He is ushered
into the deviant position by a decisive and
often dramatic ceremony, yet is
retired from it with scarcely a word of
public notice. And as a result, the
deviant often returns home with no proper
license to resume a normal life in
the community. Nothing has happened to
cancel out the stigmas imposed upon
him by earlier commitment ceremonies;
nothing has happened to revoke the
verdict or diagnosis pronounced upon him
at that time. It should not be
surprising, then, that the people of the
community are apt to greet the
returning deviant with a considerable degree
of apprehension and distrust,
for in a very real sense they are not at all
sure who he is.
The congressional degradation ceremonies served the
purposes of too many
constituencies to be easily discarded. From the
perspective of the state, it
functioned to reinforce group solidarity. The
apparent willingness of former
Communists to engage in wholesale
denunciations of their former comrades
confirmed the state in its conviction
that the ceremonies were warranted.
The process of stigmatizing individuals
as subversives, as agents of a
foreign power, as conspirators, as having
rejected the American heritage,
reassured middle Americans of their own
patriotism.
Americans have always defined themselves largely by what they
are against:
America is for Americans; go back to where you came from; the
foreign, the
different, the strange, the subversive should get out of town.
From the
perspective of the Committee, the ceremonies not only brought
publicity but
alerted the freelance blacklisters, who functioned as the
enforcement arm.
Those who were denounced at HUAC had broken no law, and
under the American
system where there is no crime the state visits no
punishment. But the
ceremonies enabled the Committee to perpetrate the
fiction that the mere
publicizing and publication of names--in the form of
testimony, indexes,
supplements, and cumulative indexes, in effect blacklist
deskbooks--was no
punishment. No one asked, "Why are you turning out these
interminable lists
with the taxpayers' money?" The ritual masked the fact
that these lists were
never intended to help Congress pass any
laws.
From the perspective of the free-lance enforcers, the degradation
ceremonies
promised a continuous generation and supply of the raw material of
their
trade. The hearings were free advertising, a preview of coming
attractions,
and an identification of the next round of targets.
From
the perspective of the informers, the hearings insulated them from
direct
contact with the moral dilemmas of betrayal. The anthropologist
Ernest Becker
has described the age-old dynamic of sacrificial scapegoating
as "the
sadistic formula par excellence: break the bones and spill the blood
of the
victim in service of some 'higher truth' that the sacrificers alone
possess."
But the ceremonies shielded the informers from the consequences of
their
action. By pronouncing a particular set of former friends as
Communists (or
unrepentant ex-Communists), as deviants, unclean, foreign,
they were by
definition absolving themselves of moral responsibility: The
"subversives"
had the same opportunity as the informers did to "come clean,"
to "purge"
themselves; if they chose not to do so, that was not the
informer's
responsibility. And of course on a more mundane level the
hearings generally
provided the informers with a ticket back to employment,
simultaneously
exonerating the witness who wished to go back to work and the
employer who
wished to employ him. It was a form of stigma transfer--from
namer to namee.
For some, the very act of denouncing was a form of
assimilation, of status
elevation. Some critics called Lillian Hellman a
snob for speculating in her
memoir, Scoundrel Time, that "The children of
timid immigrants are often
remarkable people: energetic, intelligent,
hardworking; and often they make
it so good that they are determined to keep
it at any cost." But the truth
was that by denouncing fellow immigrants (or
children of immigrants) before
HUAC, one consolidated one's identification
with the dominant society. The
practice came with the prestige of the state
conferred upon it; it
legitimated betrayal.
The degradation ceremonies satisfied the needs of
the mass media, which were
either incapable of, or uninterested in, exposing
the ways in which the
ritual distorted truth when it lent itself so elegantly
to reproduction on
radio and television. And the degradation ceremonies
exploited the peculiar
vulnerability of mass media to the pseudo-event. The
phrase "pseudo-event"
was, appropriately enough, introduced into the language
by Daniel J.
Boorstin, now Librarian of Congress, distinguished historian,
and
participant in the degradation ceremonies of 1953, when he named five of
his
former Harvard colleagues before the Committee. In his elegantly
written
book called The Image, or What Happened to the American Dream
(1961),
Boorstin offered a four-part definition of the term
"pseudo-event":
1. It is not spontaneous, but comes about because someone
has planned,
planted, or incited it. Typically, it is not a train wreck or an
earthquake,
but an interview.
2. It is planted primarily (not always
exclusively) for the immediate
purpose of being reported or reproduced.
Therefore, its occurrence is
arranged for the convenience of the reporting or
reproducing media. Its
success is measured by how widely it is reported....
The question "Is it
real?" is less important than, "Is it
newsworthy?"
3. Its relation to the underlying reality of the situation
is ambiguous. Its
interest arises largely from this very ambiguity.... While
the news interest
in a train wreck is in what happened and in the real
consequences, the
interest in an interview is always, in a sense, in whether
it really
happened and in what might have been the motives. Did the statement
really
mean what it said?
4. Usually it is intended to be a
self-fulfilling prophecy.
Pseudo-events are staged to give people
something to talk about. They become
a test for being informed. "Once we have
tasted the charm of pseudo-events,"
Boorstin observed, "we are tempted to
believe they are the only important
events. Our progress poisons the sources
of our experience. And the poison
tastes so sweet that it spoils our appetite
for plain fact."
The degradation ceremony used the press to promote the
ritual, the message,
the Committee, the myth, the image of the Communist as
conspirator. It
repackaged for home entertainment the trivial and sometimes
dull, boring,
and meaningless experiences of misspent youth into melodramatic
morality
plays for a national audience. Yet one cannot but believe that,
consciously
or otherwise, Boorstin's formulation was informed by his own
experience as a
public denouncer.
The degradation ceremony
complemented the status needs of certain former
Communists, socialists, and
others of the liberal left who were, as we have
already seen, caught in the
net of the red hunters of the day. To the extent
that the ritual public
denunciations succeeded in stigmatizing Communists
and unrepentant former
Communists, by implication they exonerated from
intimations of guilt other
members of the anti-Communist left. The degree of
trahison of these
particular clercs may be measured in terms of their
willingness to
participate in the degradation ceremonies of the day. It is
true that there
was a small minority of non-Communist liberals who saw
McCarthyism and
domestic repression as the enemy and thought it
counterproductive to
participate in any way. For their troubles they were
dismissed by cold war
liberals as fellow travelers. There was also a tiny
minority of
anti-Stalinist socialists who fought the persecution of
Communists at every
step. Their journal was Dissent, and their message was
that while Stalinism
was an unqualified social evil, domestic Communists
were entitled to the same
rights and presumptions as the rest of our
citizens. They denounced the
congressional hearings and their adjuncts as
intrusions on individual
liberty.
But the majority of center-liberals lived in the penumbra of the
degradation
ceremony and reinforced it by playing its game. McCarthy and
McCarthyism
were to be feared not because they represented a threat to
individual rights
so much as because they represented an interference in the
fight against
Communism. The degradation ceremony was deficient only to the
extent that it
confused an occasional "innocent" (anti-Stalinist) with the
"guilty" (those
unwilling to denounce Communism). But as long as it succeeded
in delivering
up bona fide reds the ceremony was to be supported.
The
extent to which the center liberal had internalized the
assumptions
underlying and the myths advanced by the degradation ceremonies
may be
gathered from an article written in 1954 in Commentary by Alan Westin,
later
editor of the Civil Liberties Review. In assessing the effect of
the
Army-McCarthy hearings on American opinion, Westin considered the message
of
a 25--pamphlet called "McCarthy on Trial," which itself used the
degradation
ceremony as a device by "trying" McCarthy in "the court of public
opinion."
By this time most readers will have recognized "McCarthy on
Trial" for what
it is--a full-strength dose of Communist propaganda peddled
under the label
of anti-McCarthyism. It is probably unnecessary to name the
booklet's editor
as Albert E. Kahn (The Great Conspiracy against Russia); to
note that the
"jury" had such tradeunion affiliations as the Fur and Leather
Workers, the
Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers, and the United Electrical,
Radio, and
Machine Workers; to learn that the chief prosecution counsel was
president
of the New York City chapter of the National Lawyers Guild; or to
go deeply
into the political character of witnesses like Howard Fast, Mrs.
Paul
Robeson, and James Aronson (the executive editor of the National
Guardian).
Actually, the reader can get his bearings simply by looking at the
books
advertised by the same publisher (Cameron & Kahn) on the back cover
of the
pamphlet: Eyewitness in Indochina by Joseph Starobin, "the only
American
newspaperman yet to travel behind the Viet Minh lines, to interview
Ho Chi
Minh . . ." (and who just happens to be foreign correspondent for the
Daily
Worker); or The Truth about Julius and Ethel Rosenberg by John Wexley
(also
author of They Shall Not Die and The Last Mile). Nor is it difficult to
see
the book's conclusion for what it really is--an attempt by the
Communists
and Communist collaborators to slip back into respectability
through the
door of a new "popular front" against McCarthyism, and to exploit
the fight
against that unsavory and sinister politician solely in their own
equally
unsavory and sinister interest.
What is at issue here is not
the accuracy of Westin's analysis, but the
genesis of his standards and
assumptions. His assumptions about the National
Lawyers Guild were informed
by the attorney general's list, which although
arbitrarily assembled had been
legitimized partly through incessant
invocation at countless investigative
sessions as evidence that the deviant
witnesses belonged to deviant
organizations, Communist fronts. (Eventually
the Lawyers Guild fought its way
off the lists.) His assumptions about Angus
Cameron (of Cameron & Kahn),
one of America's most distinguished book
editors, were informed by the fact
that he was forced out of his job as
editor-in-chief of Little, Brown less
because of the undeniable political
coloration of his list, than because of
his well-known leftist politics and
his refusal to ratify the rituals of the
various committees which subpoenaed
him. Where Westin is not assuming, he is
playing the Committee's own game of
intimation, as in his references to James
Aronson and John Wexley. Thus did
a committed libertarian, accepting the
labels and definitions and symbols of
the cold war, use them to degrade those
men whose rights one would have
thought he would defend. Even when taking
action against the cold war
ceremonies, liberals could not always resist
imitating them, so deeply had
the rituals been internalized. We have already
seen how James Wechsler chose
to try to beat McCarthy at his own game,
attempting to use his ritual
against him and to play the unfriendly informer.
The extraordinarily
perceptive and talented journalist Richard Rovere,
himself a former Young
Communist Leaguer, provides a more poignant example of
the same tactic.
Rovere was sitting in the press gallery one day when he
heard Senator
McCarthy begin to describe his latest case. A good listener
with a better
memory, Rovere quickly recognized that the suspect was someone
whom he had
reason to believe was actually an unconfessed former Communist.
"I had the
feeling, sitting there and listening to McCarthy harangue a
practically
nonexistent audience, that he might be on the point of enjoying
his first
real success."
Rovere saw a way of depriving the senator of
his victory. As he wrote about
it:
Reluctantly--for it involved an
intervention in politics which is something
that, as a correspondent, I had
always sought to avoid--I took it upon
myself to go to an official of X's
agency and tell him my story.... I made
my point. And it turned out that X,
in the course of the various security
and loyalty checks he had been through,
had chosen to conceal his Communist
past--a choice that might allow any one
of several moral judgments, but one
that, to his misfortune, exposed him to
charges of perjury. He was advised
that it would be necessary to reopen the
case. Within a few days, he quit
the government."
As John Caughey of UCLA
later asked: "How does one explain a man, much
opposed to McCarthy, acting to
deny the senator a possible triumph but
taking in stride that the means
employed were pure McCarthyism? The king was
dead, but his kingdom was well
institutionalized on the conscious and
unconscious levels. McCarthyism
marched on."'
With the years the blacklist passed. Its death was symbolized
in
publications, credits, prizes, honors, speeches, ceremonies. In 1952
the
ACLU sponsored Merle Miller's The Judges and the Judged, an expose
of
blacklisting in television, although his unhappy findings caused, as we
have
seen, a split in the ACLU's board of directors and a criticism by one
ACLU
board member for failing to give equal time to blacklisting by the left.
In
1954 Frontier magazine published its blacklist expose, "The Hollywood
Story"
by Elizabeth Poe Kerby, and in 1956 the Fund for the Republic's
two-volume
Report on Blacklisting appeared (which confirmed the earlier
findings of
Miller and Frontier); this prompted Congress to investigate not
blacklisting
but the fund and the authors of the report on what Chairman
Walter called
"so-called blacklisting."
In 1955 at the Cannes Film
Festival, the blacklisted director Jules Dassin
won an award for Rififi as a
French entry. When an interviewer commented,
"Quelle belle revanche," Dassin
said, "The truth is, it made me sad." In
1956 the Academy Award for the best
motion-picture story went to one "Robert
Rich" for The Brave One, and when he
failed to show up to accept it (those
in attendance were told he was at the
bedside of his wife who was about to
give birth to their first baby), rumors
spread that Rich also traveled under
the name of Dalton Trumbo. (See an essay
about blacklisting for frequent
references to Trumbo.)
In 1957 the
Oscar for best screenplay went to Pierre Boulle for The Bridge
On the River
Kwai, even though it was an open secret that the true
screenwriters were the
blacklisted Carl Foreman and Michael Wilson.
In 1958 an Academy Award was
won by "Nathan E. Douglas" and Harold Jacob
Smith for their joint screenplay
of The Defiant Ones. Douglas turned out to
be the blacklisted Ned Young (who,
in an inside joke, appeared on the screen
while the Douglas credit
appeared).
In 1959 the Motion Picture Academy rescinded its bylaw
prohibiting awards to
those who refused to cooperate with HUAC. In 1960 Otto
Preminger announced
(and The New York Times reported on its front page) that
Dalton Trumbo had
written his upcoming United Artists release Exodus. Later
in the same year
Frank Sinatra declared in an ad in Variety that he had hired
the blacklisted
Albert Maltz to write the screenplay for The Execution of
Private Slovik,
although public pressure from the American Legion, the
Catholic War
Veterans, and the Hearst press (plus, it was rumored, a private
request from
presidential candidate John F. Kennedy's father) caused Sinatra
to reneg.
And shortly after his election, the president-elect and his brother
Robert
crossed American Legion picket lines to see Spartacus, whose
screenplay was
openly credited to Trumbo. (For more on Kennedy and the cold
war, see this
and this.)
In 1962 John Henry Faulk was awarded $3.5
million (later reduced to
$550,000) in his six-year libel suit against his
blacklisters--the fanatical
Lawrence A. Johnson, owner of a chain of
supermarkets in Syracuse, New York,
who had mounted a campaign based largely
on material from Counterattack and
aimed directly at sponsors, agencies, and
networks to prevent them from
employing Faulk and other of "Stalin's little
agents." Since about 60
percent of television advertising revenue came from
goods sold in
supermarkets, Johnson's campaign was effective. Other
defendants in Faulk's
suit were the professional anti-Communist Vincent
Hartnett and his Aware,
Inc., the organization which cleared for a fee the
performers it exposed.
In 1963 CBS Television presented a special drama
entitled "Blacklist" on its
long-running series The Defenders, by Ernest
Kinoy, about a blacklisted
actor in the 1950s. In 1965, Inquisition in Eden,
Alvah Bessie's combative
memoir on life under the blacklist and in prison was
published by Macmillan.
That same year Millard Lampell, accepting an Emmy for
his Hallmark
television drama "Eagle in a Cage," said simply, "I think I
ought to mention
I was blacklisted for ten years," and received a roaring
ovation. In 1968
the blacklisted writer Waldo Salt won an Oscar for the
screenplay of
Midnight Cowboy, and the next year Ring Lardner, Jr., won for
M.A.S.H. In
1969 the winner of Hollywood's coveted Laurel Award (given by the
Screen
Writers Guild) was the blacklisted director Carl Foreman, of whom
his
introducer said, "Those of us who lived through the era of fear in
Hollywood
have some slight conception of the guts it took for one man to
stand up and
risk his livelihood and his future in defense of a principle; to
face exile
from the country of his birth rather than compromise what he felt
was his
honor. It was six long and troubled years after he won the guild's
award for
his screenplay of High Noon before his name again appeared
officially among
the screen credits of a motion picture . . . and unlike the
rest of us, he
couldn't blame his agent." The next year the Laurel Award went
to Dalton
Trumbo.
By 1975 CBS-TV and Xerox had won nationwide press
coverage for David
Rintels' special dramatization of "Fear on Trial," the
story of how CBS
Radio and Aware, Inc., ganged up on John Henry Faulk. And
then there was
that evening in 1976 when the Screen Writers Guild chose
Foreman to present
the Laurel Award to Michael Wilson, and he proposed that
they jointly send a
letter to Pierre Boulle, the French author of Bridge over
the River Kwai,
credited with the screenplay they had written: "Dear Pierre.
Hello there,
how are you? We are fine, and hope you are the same. Say, by the
way, do you
think you might send us our Oscar, COD, and we will work out the
custody for
same between us. Thanking you in advance, yours truly, Mike and
Carl."'
That same year saw the release of The Front, starring Woody
Allen. The film
was written by the blacklisted Walter Bernstein, produced and
directed by
the blacklisted Martin Ritt, and in the credits after each
actor's
name--Zero Mostel, John Randolph, Lloyd Gough, Joshua Shelley,
Herschel
Bernardi--appeared the date on which he was blacklisted. And the
Motion
Picture Academy amidst cheers and tears honored Lillian Hellman, whose
just
published memoir, Scoundrel Time--entitled partly for the informers whom
the
author felt should have known better--was a best-seller.
The
sociologists of deviance, then, proved only partially correct prophets.
These
particular deviants, the blacklistees, reversed the "irreversible."
They
returned home and eventually resumed a "normal" life in their
abnormal
Hollywood. They invented their own rituals of return. They turned
the
tables. Events conspired to make having been a blacklistee something of
a
status symbol. They shed their stigma, transformed it into a badge of
honor.
But the degradation ceremony had done its work too well. Even as
the
blacklistees reentered polite society, the myth of the informer as hero,
the
informer as patriot, passed from our culture. And when that happened,
the
denouncers themselves became victims of the ceremonies they had
made
possible. Now society at large began to see them the way their victims
saw
them--not as heroes but as villains, not as patriots but as betrayers.
The
stigmatizers became the stigmatized. If it was no longer possible to
regard
a Trumbo or a Lardner as an agent of a foreign power, it was all too
easy to
regard Parks or Kazan or Collins as informers "in essence." The
denouncers
rather than the denounced were stuck with their new identity. It
was the
informer who was now seen as "what he was all along." The sociologist
Harold
Garfinkel has explained that the paradigm of moral indignation is
public
denunciation. Remember the curse: "I call upon all men to bear witness
that
he is not as he appears but is otherwise and in essence of a lower
species."
As he elaborates in a footnote, "The person who passes on
information to
enemies is really, i.e. 'in essence,' 'in the first place,'
'all along,' 'in
the final analysis,' 'originally,' an
informer."'
They named the names because they thought nobody would
remember, but it
turned out to be the one thing that nobody can
forget.