they believed were Communists. Actor, sailor, and adventurer Sterling Hayden, who played
tough roles on the screen, was bul ied into informing on fel ow leftists by the committee and
later he was angry at himself and at his interrogators. His autobiography Wanderer was
published in 1963, dedicated to Rockwel Kent and Warwick M. Tomkins, "Sailormen, Artists,
Radicals." In his book, Hayden addresses his former psychoanalyst, who apparently had
advised him to cooperate with the committee; "I'l say this too, that if it hadn't been for you I wouldn't have turned into a stoolie for J. Edgar Hoover. I don't think you have the foggiest
notion of the contempt I have had for myself since the day I did that thing… . Fuck it! And
fuck you too."6
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The famous "Hol ywood Ten," including some of the most important directors and writers in the motion picture industry, refused to give names or to discuss their political affiliations,
citing the First Amendment. They were sent to prison.
Joseph Papp, producer of Shakespeare-in-the-Park in New York City, was cal ed before the
committee, and there was this exchange:
Arens [staff director for the committee]: Do you have the opportunity to
inject into your plays … any propaganda … which would influence others to be
sympathetic with the communist philosophy?
Papp: Sir, the plays we do are Shakespeare's plays. Shakespeare said, "To
thine own self, be true.
Arens: There is no suggestion here by this chairman or anyone else that
Shakespeare was a Communist. That is ludicrous and absurd. That is the
Commie line.7
Playwright Arthur Mil er defied the committee. Questioned about whether "a Communist
who is a poet" should have the right to advocate revolutionary ideas, he said; "I tel you frankly, sir, I think, if you are talking about a poem, I would say that a man should have the
right to write a poem just about anything." Mil er refused to give names, was cited for
contempt, convicted, but won on appeal.
Some of the chairmen of the House Un-American Activities Committee ended up in prison
for fraudulent activities of various kinds. The screenwriter Ring Lardner, Jr., one of the
Hol ywood Ten, recal ed this encounter of his prison days:
The blue prison fatigues hung loosely on the weary, perspiring man whose
path across the quadrangle was about to meet mine… . He was custodian of
the chicken yard at the Federal Correctional Institution, Danbury,
Connecticut, and his name was J. Parnel Thomas, formerly chairman of the
Committee on Un-American Activities of the House of Representatives.
Thomas had been convicted of defrauding the government by padding his payrol .8
Novelist Howard Fast was a member of the Communist party, who left it in anger at its
support of the Soviet Union's invasion of Hungary. In his memoir, The Naked God, he
recal ed what had happened to him in the United States because of his support of
communism:
During this period I found my own destruction as a writer who had ful and
normal access to the American public. Bit by bit, that access was pared away;
reviewers began to read Communist propaganda into things I had written;
bookstores were reluctant to order my books; "public-spirited" individuals
undertook movements to have my books banned; and Citizen Tom Paine, of
al things, was thrown out of the New York City school system on the excuse
of "purple passages."9
Fast was indignant at his own treatment, but contrasted it with the fate of dissident writers
in the Soviet Union and elsewhere (silenced, tortured, put to death):
In the United States, I was crippled in my function as writer. At great cost
and financial loss, I had to publish my own books. From comparative wealth
and success, I was reduced to a struggle for literary existence; and gradual y
my continuing work became less and less known. But beyond deprivation,
these facts are important:
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1. I continued to write.
2. I continued to live.
3. I continued to fight for my inalienable privilege of writing as I pleased.10
No doubt the punishment of radical intel ectuals in the United States was mild compared to
what happened to them in the Soviet Union. But it was not mild in human terms for the
people involved, and not tolerable at al in a country claiming to be the home of liberty. The
nation was deprived for years of the talents of some of its most extraordinary artists.
Paul Robeson, for instance, the black singer and actor, became a nonperson because of his
sympathy with communism. His banishment reached the point where the 1950 edition of
Col ege Footbal , in listing the Al -American footbal team for 1918, omitted his name.
Robeson had been Al -American that year, and so the book had to list a ten-man footbal
team.11
The scientist Albert Einstein received a letter in 1953 from a New York school teacher
(teachers were being dismissed for radical or Communist activities) who asked him for
advice on dealing with congressional investigations. Einstein replied,
What ought the minority of intel ectuals to do against this evil? Frankly, I can
only see the revolutionary way of noncooperation in the sense of Gandhi's.
Every intel ectual who is cal ed before one of the committees ought to refuse
to testify, i.e., he must be prepared for jail and economic ruin, in short, for
the sacrifice of his personal welfare in the interest of the cultural welfare of
his country.
Perhaps an example of this "noncooperation" was given by the German playwright Bertolt
Brecht, who came to work in Hol ywood for a while and was cal ed before the House
Committee on Un-American Activities. Brecht kept the committee off-guard and confused by
his replies. To questions about the plays he had written, in which the committee saw sinister
Communist ideas, Brecht asked his interrogator if he had read it in the original German. The
committee, perhaps embarrassed, certainly baffled, let Brecht go. Someone later described
the questioning of Brecht this way: "It was as if a zoologist were being cross-examined by
apes."12
Despite al the absurdities, the congressional appropriations for the committee grew in the
postwar period from $50,000 in 1945, to $800,000 in 1970. By then it had 754,000 names
on three-by-five cards in its files.
No president, liberal or conservative, Republican or Democrat, ever cal ed for the abolition
of the committee. And the Supreme Court, even at its most liberal (the Warren Court of the
1960s) never used its opportunities to declare the committee unconstitutional on the
obvious ground that its very purpose (to investigate "un-American propaganda activities") violated the First Amendment. The committee, therefore, was not simply a creature of the
paranoid right in America; it was sustained and supported by liberals and conservatives of
our two-party system, in al three branches of government.
In other words, anti-communism was as American as apple pie. It was a bipartisan policy.
Democrat Harry Truman himself issued Executive Order #9835, requiring the Department of
Justice to prepare a list of organizations it determined to be "fascist, communist, or
subversive" or "seeking to alter the form of government of the United States by
unconstitutional me
ans." Not only membership in, but "sympathetic association" with any organization on this list was to be considered in determining disloyalty for government
employees.13
213
That list of "subversive" groups grew longer and longer. By 1954, it counted in the hundreds, including, besides the Communist party and the Ku Klux Klan, the Chopin Cultural
Center, the Committee for the Negro in the Arts, the Committee for the Protection of the Bil
of Rights, the League of American Writers, and the Nature Friends of America.
Until the 1960s, the committee towered frighteningly over its witnesses. The strategy of the
left in refusing to answer questions, counting on the First or the Fifth Amendment, may wel
have been wrong. It led many people to think they had something to hide. The movements
of the sixties brought a new kind of witness, the brazen radical wil ing to answer al
questions, seizing the initiative, and using the committee room as a forum for political
declamations.
Dagmar Wilson, of "Women Strike for Peace" gave the committee a taste of the new
defiance in 1962. Six years later, in December 1968, Tom Hayden and Rennie Davis of the
Students for a Democratic Society, and Dave Del inger, long-time radical pacifist, appeared
before the committee. They were al involved in the movement to stop the war in Vietnam.
They answered al the questions, and then took the offensive. As in this encounter between
the Committee and Tom Hayden:
Mr. Conley (a staff member of the committee): Mr. Hayden, is it your present
aim to seek the destruction of the present American democratic system?
Mr. Hayden: Wel , I don't believe the present American democratic system
exists. That is why we can't get together to straighten things out. You have
destroyed the American democratic system by the existence of a committee
of this kind.14
By 1970 the committee was losing its standing. It was being overwhelmed by the events of
the sixties: the civil rights movement, the antiwar movement. It changed its name to the
House Internal Security Committee and was not heard from very much.
Behind the absurdities, something serious had been taking place and was stil going on—the
attempt to shape the American mind so that people would react with automatic anger when
they heard the word communism, so they would accept the huge military budgets (which
doubled from 1950 to 1970 and then tripled from 1970 to 1980, going from $40 bil ion in
1950 to over $250 bil ion in 1980) and so they would accept wars and covert actions
overseas if they were aimed at "communism."
In the history of the human race, we have often seen certain words used to stop thinking,
to end rational discourse, to arouse hatred, words which are murderous. The words few and
nigger have led to mass murder, lynchings, and enslavement. The words Catholic,
Protestant, and Moslem have been used to inflame religious wars.
The word Communist in this country has been such a word. It has been used to justify the
support by the United States of military dictatorships in Chile, the Philippines, Iran, El
Salvador, and other places. When Ferdinand Marcos and his wife Imelda, who ran the
Philippines ruthlessly and accumulated a huge fortune, were final y overthrown in 1988 and
fled the islands with enormous sums of money, their American friend, Doris Duke, the
tobacco heiress, praised them as "my country's vital outpost in combating Communism."15
214
In Guatemala, when the newly elected President Arbenz decided to confiscate large
amounts of land owned by the United Fruit Company, the CIA and United Fruit both began
preparing for the overthrow of the Arbenz government. Tom McCann, who was a Public
Relations officer for United Fruit, wrote later about his orders: "Get out the word, a
Communist beachhead has been established in the Western Hemisphere."16 United Fruit
created a book, Report on Guatemala, which said the new government was a Moscow-
directed conspiracy. The book was sent to every congressman. And in 1954 a ClA-backed
invasion overthrew Arbenz and set up a right-wing dictatorship that murdered tens of
thousands of people.
Chile was the victim of a military coup in 1973, overthrowing its elected president, Salvador
Al ende. The United States had been working secretly against Al ende, a moderate Socialist,
since 1964. A staff member of the Senate Select Committee investigating the CIA, Karl
Inderfurth, testified in 1975 that the CIA had set up a special group to carry on a massive
propaganda campaign against Al ende. It was, he said, "a scare campaign … it relied heavily
on images of Soviet tanks and Cuban firing squads."
Another staff member of the Senate committee, Gregory Treverton, testified that, despite
the public propaganda, the United States government knew through the National
Intel igence Estimate (NIE) that there was no significant threat of a Soviet military presence
in Chile. But the campaign went forward.17
The need to "stop communism" was used to justify the invasion of Vietnam and to carry on
there a ful -scale war in which over a mil ion people died. It was used to justify the bombing
of peasant vil ages, the chemical poisoning of crops, the "search and destroy missions," the laying waste of an entire country. GI Charles Hutto, who participated in the massacre of
Vietnamese peasants at My Lai, told army investigators: "I remember the unit's combat
assault on My Lai 4. The night before the mission we had a briefing by Captain Medina. He
said everything in the vil age was communist. So we shot men, women, and children."
The Vietnam War may have been a turning point, when more and more Americans, seeing
where anticommunism had led us, began to be suspicious of government propaganda.
Charles Hutto, speaking years after the war, by then married with two children, said, "I was
19 years old and I was always told to do what the Government … told me to do. But now I'l
tel my son, if the Government cal s, use your own judgment. Now I don't think there should
even be a thing cal ed war, because it messes up a person's mind."18
In the sixties, leaders of the civil rights movement—Martin Luther King and the young
blacks in SNCC—refused to be bul ied by accusations of Communist influence that appeared
in the press. They knew it was fraudulent, designed to weaken the movement. Charles
Sherrod, a SNCC activist in Albany, Georgia, reacted to journalists who spoke vaguely,
ignorantly, of "Communist infiltration" of the civil rights movement. Sherrod said, "I don't care who the heck it is—if he's wil ing to come down in the front lines and bring his body
along with me to die—then he's welcome."
Communism: A Rational Critique
We have been dealing with an irrational, hysterical anti-communism, which has had terrible
consequences for human rights in this country and abroad. There is, however, a rational
critique of communism that requires thoughtful discussion.
I would start such a critique with two statements that I have come to believe over the
years.
215
1. The ideal of communism—a classless society of equal abundance for al , based on highly developed technology, a very short workday, and, therefore, the possibility of real freedom
for individuals to develop their aesthetic and personal interests as they like; a society free of
&n
bsp; the coercive apparatus of the state, organized by associated col ectives, based on
workplaces and neighborhoods, repudiating racial or sexual supremacy; a genuine
participatory democracy, with ful opportunity for free expression of al ideas, devoid of
national hatreds, national boundaries, and war—this remains a wonderful goal. Karl Marx, I
believe, envisioned such a society. Mil ions of people in the world have been inspired by that
ideal and have been wil ing to sacrifice and risk al for it.
2. The Soviet Union, transforming Marx's transitional dictatorship of the proletariat into a
deeply entrenched dictatorship of party bureaucrats, has repeatedly betrayed the
communist ideal. While it has achieved a certain amount of economic progress and
instituted social programs—child care, universal health care, free education, retirement
benefits, ful employment—it has been brutal in its treatment of its own citizens, murdering
peasants in large numbers during the process of col ectivization; imprisoning, torturing, and
executing those it considered dissidents, whether ordinary people, intel ectuals, artists, or
distinguished leaders of the 1917 Revolution. The term police state fits it very wel , and this is intolerable to anyone who believes in democratic socialism. It has imitated the imperialist
powers in invading other countries—Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Afghanistan, kil ing
thousands of people.
When I was a young shipyard worker, I read the Communist Manifesto and understood why
this essay, written in 1848 by Karl Marx, age thirty, and Friedrich Engels, age twenty-eight,
had excited mil ions of people al over the world for a hundred years. It analyzed society in
a way immediately verifiable by our own experience. "The history of al hitherto existing
society is the history of class struggle."
Even knowing only a little history of the United States, who could deny the truth of that?
Wasn't money, yes, class, behind al the political conflicts in the country, however hidden, however "class" was glossed over in the United States? Didn't we have a long history of
strikes, struggles between capital and labor, and even if workers didn't see this as "class
struggle," wasn't it just that, and might they not one day understand it and try to defeat not just one employer, but the entire capitalist class?
It made great sense, the way Marx and Engels traced the history of human society. How