{"id":78680,"date":"2000-09-01T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2000-09-01T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/newcriterion.com\/article\/we-now-know\/"},"modified":"2024-03-22T08:33:42","modified_gmt":"2024-03-22T12:33:42","slug":"we-now-know","status":"publish","type":"article","link":"https:\/\/newcriterion.com\/article\/we-now-know\/","title":{"rendered":"We Now Know"},"content":{"rendered":"

S<\/font>ome myths die hard. One of the most recalcitrant in recent times has been the myth of McCarthyism\u2014the myth that America in the late 1940s and early 1950s was in the grip of a fearsome, paranoid \u201cwitch-hunt\u201d against supposed Communists and other alleged traitors. According to this myth, the assault was fearsome because it blighted thousands of careers and lives, and it was paranoid because it was essentially groundless. Senator Joseph McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee ranted on about Communist spies, but really, the myth of McCarthyism maintains, there were no spies to speak of, only liberals like \u2026 well, like Alger Hiss.<\/p>\n

Y<\/font>ou might think that by now liberals would have given up on this one. After all, with the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the subsequent opening of many Soviet archives, there is indisputable evidence\u2014a mountain of it\u2014for what had long been alleged by cold warriors. The liberal line had always been that the American Communist Party was basically an expression of home-grown radical sentiment; in fact, it had from the beginning been a tool of Moscow; moreover, many of the radical \u201cmartyrs\u201d of the period were hard-core Stalinists and KGB<\/font> operatives. This is not speculation: it is hard and fast historical fact. As the historian John Gaddis put it in the title of his 1997 history of the Cold War: We Now Know<\/em>.<\/p>\n

O<\/font>r so we would have thought. But what is evidence in the face of self-righteous political animus? Not much, if Arthur Miller\u2019s breathtaking expostulation about the origins of his play The Crucible<\/em> is any guide. Entitled \u201cAre You Now or Were You Ever \u2026 ?,\u201d Mr. Miller\u2019s latest exercise in self-congratulation appeared in\u2014it is almost too good to be true, but is is<\/em> true\u2014The Guardian<\/em>, the most predictable left-wing \u201cquality\u201d paper in London. There had, of course, long been speculation that the activities of Sen. McCarthy and HUAC<\/font> had been the chief inspiration for The Crucible<\/em>; no one, we think, will accuse Mr. Miller of having been overly subtle in his deployment of symbolism. But he has now for the first time cleared up any remaining doubts: \u201cIt would probably never have occurred to me to write a play about the Salem witch trials of 1692 had I not seen some astonishing correspondences with that calamity in the America of the late 40s and early 50s. \u2026 I refer to the anti-communist rage that threatened to reach hysterical proportions and sometimes did.\u201d<\/p>\n

M<\/font>r. Miller has always been a reliable source of radical-chic clich\u00e9s and he does not disappoint in this new recollection. We can well believe him when he remarks that \u201cPractically everyone I knew stood within the conventions of the political left of centre; one or two were Communist party members, some were fellow-travellers, and most had had a brush with Marxist ideas or organisations.\u201d But is it na\u00efvet\u00e9 or something else when he goes on to declare that \u201cI have never been able to believe in the reality of these people being actual or putative traitors any more than I could be, yet others like them were being fired from teaching or jobs in government or large corporations.\u201d Mr. Miller is especially incredulous that any of his fellow artists could have engaged in traitorous activities: \u201cThe unwelcome truth denied by the right was that the Hollywood writers accused of subversion were not a menace to the country, or even bearers of meaningful change. They wrote not propaganda but entertainment, some of it of a mildly liberal cast, but most of it mindless, or when it was political, as with Preston Sturges or Frank Capra, entirely and exuberantly un-Marxist.\u201d<\/p>\n

Really? Mr. Miller concludes his piece by speaking of the black singer Paul Robeson, whose \u201cdeclaration of faith in socialism as a cure for racism,\u201d he says, \u201cwas a rocket that lit up the sky.\u201d Robeson is widely considered a martyr of HUAC<\/font>. In fact, he was a doctrinaire Stalinist who believed that only in the Soviet Union were blacks really free. At the World Peace Congress in 1949, Robeson publicly declared that American blacks would not fight for the American flag, least of all against Moscow: \u201cIt is unthinkable,\u201d he said, that his race \u201cwould go to war on behalf of those who oppressed us for generations.\u201d Russia he described as \u201ca country which in one generation has raised our people to the full dignity of mankind.\u201d In the same year, like many other artists under Stalinist \u201cdiscipline,\u201d he voluntarily gave up acting and singing, explaining that \u201cI have no time in the political struggle of today to entertain people.\u201d Robeson received the Stalin Prize in 1953, the year of the dictator\u2019s death, and he signed a eulogy that contained the benediction \u201cGlory to Stalin. Forever will his name be honored and beloved in all lands.\u201d<\/p>\n

T<\/font>he most devastating anatomy that we have seen of Mr. Miller\u2019s latest paean to \u201cideals of socialism\u201d is Ronald Radosh\u2019s on-line column in Frontpage Magazine<\/em> ( www.frontpagemag.com<\/a>). Mr. Radosh begins by noting that, contrary to Mr. Miller\u2019s assertions,<\/p>\n

\n

scores of anti-Communist liberals and defenders of civil liberties rallied around the right of Communists and Socialists to be heard, although they despised their propaganda. Without \u201cMcCarthyism,\u201d the left-wing would actually have had less of a shield to hide behind: the attacks on their links to the Soviet Union allowed them to claim that anyone accused\u2014such as Alger Hiss\u2014was completely innocent, even when in fact they were guilty.<\/small><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Quoting from an article by the espionage expert Thomas Powers that appeared in The New York Review of Books<\/em> last May, Mr. Radosh proceeds to shred Mr. Miller\u2019s entire account of the relation between the Soviet-controlled Communist threat and the anti-Communist crusade. Soviet spies, Powers wrote in his article,<\/p>\n

\n

were of the left generally, they supported liberal causes, they defended the Soviet Union in all circumstances, they were often secret members of the Communist Party, they were uniformly suspicious of American initiatives throughout the world, they could be contemptuous of American democracy, society and culture, and above all, their offenses were often minimized or explained away by apologists who felt that no man should be called traitor who did what he did for the cause of humanity.<\/small><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

If even The New York Review<\/em> has faced up to the historical evidence about the threat of Communist propaganda and espionage in the late 1940s and 1950s, where does that leave Mr. Miller? As Mr. Radosh observes, \u201cThe importance of Powers\u2019 essay is that it reveals the truths which generations of liberals have refused to acknowledge; that the crisis which propelled Miller to write The Crucible<\/em> was caused \u2018not only by the discovery of spies but by the denial of spies.\u2019 The Soviet Union was in fact running major spy networks, infiltrating the United States government, and the implications of this operation were not faced squarely by the United States until late in the game.\u201d To deal with the era as a \u201cwitch-hunt,\u201d as Mr. Miller does, is to ignore a crucial fact. \u201cOne cannot,\u201d Mr. Radosh concludes, \u201cwrite about McCarthyism without first admitting that there were spies; the spies claimed idealism as a defense.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mr. Miller refers to \u201cHarry Bridges, the idol of west coast longshoremen\u201d as an \u201cunadmitted communist\u201d who he claims was unfairly persecuted. But recent research has shown that Bridges was in fact not only a member of the Communist Party but also \u201csecretly a member of its Central Committee.\u201d Mr. Miller writes that \u201cit is impossible to convey properly the fears that marked that period. Nobody was shot, to be sure, although some were going to jail, where at least one, William Remington, was murdered by an inmate hoping to shorten his sentence by having killed a communist.\u201d It is true that Remington was murderd in jail. But, Mr. Radosh points out, Remington was a spy who met secretly with Communist operatives and \u201cwillingly handed over classified War Production Board material pertaining to aircraft production.\u201d<\/p>\n

M<\/font>r. Miller writes that \u201cThe heart of the darkness was the belief that a massive, profoundly organised conspiracy was in place and carried forward mainly by a concealed phalanx of intellectuals, including labour activists, teachers, professionals, sworn to undermine the American government.\u201d But what he describes as a paranoid fantasy we now know to be the historical truth.<\/p>\n

The real witch hunt<\/h2>\n

S<\/font>peaking of witch-hunts, we cannot forebear to share with our readers a document sent to us by a friend from Naperville, Illinois, a suburb west of Chicago. Entitled \u201cTen Quick Ways to Analyze Childrens Books for Racism and Sexism,\u201d this preposterous little guide, originally devised by the Illinois School Library Media Conference in 1997, was distributed for the guidance of teachers in Naperville as part of their new \u201cDiversity Plan.\u201d Among other things, \u201cTen Quick Ways\u201d advises readers to \u201cCheck the Illustrations\u201d of children\u2019s books for stereotypes and tokenism, to \u201cCheck the Story Line\u201d: \u201cIs \u2018making it\u2019 in the dominant white society projected as the only ideal? The standard for success?\u201d (As opposed to what, becoming a welfare mother or crack addict?) \u201cAre the achievements of girls and women based on their own initiative and intelligence? Could the story be told if the sex roles were reversed?\u201d Hmm, could it? What if Briseis were pouting in her tent because Andromache took Achilles for herself? Readers are further admonished to \u201cWatch for Loaded Words\u201d\u2014for example, \u201csavage,\u201d \u201cprimitive,\u201d \u201clazy,\u201d and \u201cbackward.\u201d Finally, we are told to \u201cLook for the copyright date\u201d because \u201cNonsexist books, with rare exceptions, were not published before 1973.\u201d<\/p>\n

So, farewell to Aesop\u2019s fables (how unfair to suggest that the grasshopper might have been lazy!), farewell to Huckleberry Finn<\/em>, to Othello<\/em> (talk about \u201ctokenism\u201d!), to Robinson Crusoe<\/em> (my man Friday, indeed), farewell to Grimm\u2019s fairy tales, to Peter Pan<\/em>, to Pride and Prejudice<\/em>, to the stories of Rudyard Kipling. Farewell, in short, to imaginative literature from the world over and hello to the PC police who speak everywhere about \u201cdiversity\u201d but whose actions assure the promulgation of a stultifying intellectual conformity. Here is a real witch-hunt in progress. A pity, isn\u2019t it, that left-wing crusaders like Arthur Miller will not be picking up their pens to expose it?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":2188,"featured_media":0,"template":"","tags":[635],"department_id":[553],"issue":[3107],"section":[],"acf":{"participants":{"simple_value_formatted":"","value_formatted":null,"value":null,"field":{"ID":0,"key":"field_65fd9fbaa0408","label":"Authors","name":"participants","aria-label":"","prefix":"acf","type":"user","value":null,"menu_order":0,"instructions":"","required":0,"id":"","class":"","conditional_logic":0,"parent":"group_647e2b3c6941d","wrapper":{"width":"","class":"","id":""},"role":"","return_format":"array","multiple":1,"allow_null":0,"bidirectional":0,"bidirectional_target":[],"_name":"participants","_valid":1}},"page_number":{"simple_value_formatted":1,"value_formatted":1,"value":"1","field":{"ID":0,"key":"field_647e2bc0c860c","label":"Page 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