Judge Dennis Davis
Reds Under the Bed: The Witch Hunts and HUAC
Judge Dennis Davis - Reds Under the Bed: The Witch Hunts and HUAC
- Good evening everybody, or good afternoon, whatever time of the day it is there. The lecture tonight as advertised, of course, talking about Reds Under the Bed and in particular, talking about the House Un-American Activities Committee. But of course, one can’t just talk about that, and I’ll explain in a moment why, it was looming large over this entire period of American history, of course, it was called the McCarthy period. And that of course derives from the name of Senator Joseph McCarthy, the Republican senator in Wisconsin and Heath Committee. And in a sense, this entire process of Red Scares and the communist threat ultimately were intertwined by these two committees. And so I’m going to spend some time talking about the HUAC and I’m then going to move on to McCarthy, and I’ve got a couple of clips, particularly I think a very riveting one, which will be at the end of the lecture, which I want to share with you. Let me make a couple of points to start. I don’t think this is merely a period of history which we can simply look at as an historical curiosity, I want to argue in this particular lecture for two particular propositions. One, the extent to which in a world of wokeness and of fake news and of extraordinary disparaging of the other, that is anybody who doesn’t think the way we do, there has been a real closure of the intellectual process in all manner of ways, in all countries, not just the United States of America, but all countries.
And I think there’s quite a lot to learn from this particular episode as we reflect upon it for our contemporary world. There is also a second very interesting implication of the effect that the particular period that I’m talking about in the United States, the period obviously at the high point of the House Anti-American Activities Committee, on the one hand, and the McCarthy Senate hearings on the other. And it’s documented in a new book by Samuel Moyn, the Yale academic, who says that as a result, I think quite rightly, as a result of the so-called Red Scare, as a result of the fear of the communist threat for the Western world at the time, liberalism itself was very, very significantly damaged to the extent that liberalism today has far too little to tell us about how one addresses inequality and deals with profound social questions. Because in effect, what this period of American history did was to pack away the Rooseveltian New Deal, which to a considerable extent did try to address the social question, poverty, inequality, and tried to develop a more egalitarian vision for the world. And once the Reds, as it were, was seen to be under the bed, any form of kind of social democratic initiative, however much it was rooted in a broad liberal philosophy of a kind, which just as Moyn quite rightly suggests, exists throughout, it went wayward, and therefore has had an effect it seems to me, on how we address these particular contemporary problems today. So those are the two, if you wish, take home points that I wanted to think about in relation to the presentation I’m giving, which of course in the main, is a historical account of a whole range of extraordinary trials and hearings that took place during this period. The period of course we are talking about primarily begins at the end of the Second World War. And it is primarily then when the great fear of the Russian Bear, Soviet Bear, that looms largest, not only in the United States of America.
It is interesting in work that I did so many years ago on South African repressive legislation, and in particular, one of the very first pieces of legislation that the National Party government passed, being the Suppression of Communism Act, which was much wider than simply trying to suppress people who were members of the Communist Party, albeit that it was party designed for that purpose. But I found, of course, that the Menzies government in Australia had essentially developed similar forms of legislation, which weirdly enough, compared relatively closely with that in South Africa. So there was a general consensus around this fear, and it resulted in all sorts of attempts to curb a range of thinking, which as I shall argue, extended way beyond any possible communist influence. Perhaps I’m however running ahead of myself. So let me just start off, give you a little potted history of the House Un-American Activities Committee. It doesn’t start in ‘45, it goes back far further than that. But I think it really hits its straps in the 1930s where there was a committee called the McCormack-Dickstein Committee, named after its chair and vice chair, Representatives John W. McCormack, who was the Democratic representative of Massachusetts, and Samuel Dickstein, a Democratic representative of New York. And they were essentially concerned in the main from 1934 onwards, with investigation of Nazi propaganda. But in '38, when it now became its name of the Un-American Activities Committee, it began to focus attention to a far greater extent on communist activities headed by representative Martin Dies, again, a democrat from Texas.
And it was he and under his committee that one had a series of investigations about Communist Party infiltration to the body politic of the United States of America. And as I’ve indicated by reference to Samuel Moyn, an involvement in New Deal agencies, that is agencies that have been set up by Roosevelt, and in which it was suggested even by Democrats themselves, that these, as it were, bore far too much of a communist influence then they were prepared to count. Perhaps the most two central hearings, if you wish, which the House Un-Americans Activities Committee conducted in the 1940s were firstly, the so-called Hollywood 10. In short, in 1947, the House Un-Americans Activities Committee subpoenaed 41 screenwriters, directors, producers, in an effort to investigate subversive elements in the entertainment industry. They asked these people that famous question, are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party? If the answer was a yes, they wanted to know who else was a member. The 10 members of the Hollywood community, the screenwriters, producers, directors, refused to testify on the grounds that the first amendment of the US Constitution granted them freedom of speech and freedom of association. All 10 received prison sentences for their refusal to cooperate, most serving between six to 12 months, beginning in 1950. And the attended entertainment workers who refused to testify before the committee and who became known as I’ve indicated as the Hollywood 10, they ultimately were the ones who suffered. There was an 11th, that was Bertolt Brecht, but he fled the country.
These people were blacklisted for a long time after they left prison. And the work that they managed to find generally went unaccredited or was credited to a pseudonym. Perhaps the person who was most famous of them all, because there was a really fine film about him, was Dalton Trumbo, 1905 to 1976. Many of you might well have seen the film in which Bryan Cranston, that absolutely wonderful actor acts as Trumbo. It’s a 2015 film. Which I think if you watch it gives you a pretty good feel of what was going on at the time. Now, before his blacklisting, Dalton Trumbo was a screenwriter, most famous for “Kitty Foyle” in 1940, earned him an Academy Award nomination, “30 Seconds Over Tokyo” in '44. But then the strange thing was that to a large degree, much of his best work was done under the cloud of that committee. So he was one of the screenwriters behind the 1953 Audrey Hepburn hit film, “Roman Holiday,” which won the Academy Award for best screenplay, but which he could not take credit because he had been blacklisted. He was also, as it were, there was an award in 1956 for his screenplay, “Brave One,” which again won an award and again, to which he couldn’t be credited. Finally, he was given credit for two other really famous films by 1960, when the clouds began to lift. One of course was “Exodus” and the other “Spartacus.” And sadly, he was only given full credit for his hit, “Roman Holiday,” long after he died.
That is in 2011, where full credit was given to him by the Writer’s Guild. He is an example, there are many others, Adrian Scott, Samuel Ornitz, Herbert Biberman, Ring Lardner, Lester Cole, John Howard Lawson, Albert Moltz, et cetera, all of whom suffered as part of that Hollywood 10. The second major focus of this committee, which took place in 1948, was the famous case of Alger Hiss. And what happened there was there was a man called Whitaker Chambers, who was at the time, '48, a journalist. And he was a little known figure really prior to the 1948 hearings. But he came before the committee as a self-professed former member of the Communist Party. He admitted to have served as a spy for the Soviet Union. He said he left the Communist Party in 1938, and that he had offered his services to the FBI as an informant on communist activities in the States. By '48, he was serving as an editor for Time Magazine. And of course, the committee was now engaged in a set of hearings investigating communist machinations in the United States. When he was called as a witness, he dropped a bombshell, and the bombshell was that he accused former State Department official, Alger Hiss, of having been a communist and spy during the 1930s. Now, Hiss was a really influential fellow, in the 1940s during the war, he’d attended the Yalta Conference. That is the conference of course, Stalin, Churchill, and Roosevelt held, in order to work out what was going to happen at the end of the war, he prepared a series of memoranda in relation to that. He was the Secretary General of the United Nations’ Conference on International Organisations, the forerunner to the creation of the United Nations in 1945. Hiss stoutly defended himself and said that Chambers was talking complete nonsense. He sued Chambers for libel.
A whole series of litigation took place, and ultimately, Hiss was indicted for perjury, effectively suggesting that he had lied that he wasn’t a communist. And he spent two, basically sentenced to two terms of five years imprisonment, running concurrently. There’d been a massive debate over the years as to whether in fact Hiss was a spy or not. There are books which have come out subsequently, there were of course disclosures after the fall of the Iron Curtain, but not really great deal of certainty as to where the truth lies. The point I’m making is it ruined his life. And he, as same with the Hollywood 10, were really in serious trouble as a result of being accused of being communists by this committee. Now, I think it’s important to mention a few contextual issues at the same time. I think, well, let me give you a couple. Firstly, at that period, by 1949, round about the time this was all happening, in 1949, of course, the Russians had finally got the atomic bomb, they had finally produced an atomic bomb. It’s also true that at that particular point in time, China had gone communist. It’s also true that round about the same time, there was the trial of the Rosenbergs. You may remember, who were accused and eventually convicted of being Russian spies, effectively providing Russia with, Soviet Union, with a whole lot of information about nuclear and other aspects, weaponry.
And they were, as you know, eventually convicted and sentenced to death in 1953. There was also at the same time, a general feeling that now that Eastern Europe was entirely under the Iron Curtain, we were in, and we being the West, in this dire situation whereby the last thing we needed, for Americans, was to have a whole bunch of Russian infiltrators. So the climate was particularly fraught, and it was that fraught climate that both this committee and Senator McCarthy came to prominence in all manner of ways. And of course, I’m only talking about the Hollywood 10 and give a whole long lecture, and perhaps one should discuss things like the Trumbo film, et cetera, in a separate session. But all sorts of people’s lives were ruined, either because they did disclose about friends of theirs who had been at least aligned to the Communist Party. At a time you might remember when in fact the Soviet Union and the United States of America were allies. But the point I’m making is that at that time, the climate was such that both that committee and Senator McCarthy were able to exploit it for enormous political advantage. So just let me turn then to McCarthy. I should, I will come to the fact, well, let me just complete the chronology. In effect, the House Un-American Activities Committee continued for a long time, right until the 1970s. It essentially weakened substantially as the years went by. And of course you may remember we saw that film, I think we discussed the film, the Chicago group that protested, including Abby Hoffman and Jerry Rubin in the film that was done recently about them. And after that trial, the unpopularity of the HUAC was so massive that it effectively was abolished by ‘75. But let me go back then to Senator McCarthy.
So Joseph McCarthy was the junior senator from Wisconsin, and in 1950 he made a speech to the Woman’s Republican Club of Wheeling, West Virginia. He made the bold accusation that communists had infiltrated the US State Department. At the time, really no one in the Republican Party expected the speech to make headlines. He was basically sent to Wheeling as part of a nationwide celebration of Abraham Lincoln’s birthday. It was an assignment that was sent to lowly status senators. But this particular speech that he made in 1950 within the context that I’m talking about, became the major moment for the so-called Red Scare. So Julia, can I just have the first clip please?
[McCarthy] I think we should keep in mind when we refer to Democrats, we refer to the administration that there are definitely two groups of Democrats as of today. Number one, there are the millions of loyal Americans who have voted the Democratic ticket, individuals who are just as loyal, who hate communism just as much and love America just as much as the average Republican. That’s one group. On the other hand, there is that small closely knit group of administration Democrats who are now the complete prisoners and under the complete domination of the bureaucratic Communistic Frankenstein which they themselves have created. Ladies and gentlemen, they shouldn’t be called that administration Democrat Party. To call them Democrats as an insult to the millions of loyal American Democrats. They shouldn’t be called Democrats, they should be referred to properly as the Commie Party.
There was he, who as it were, was piloted into national significance as a result of that speech, and his biographer in a book called, “Demagogue: The Life and Long shadow of Senator Joe McCarthy,” Larry Tye, talks about the fact that he had a whatever it takes approach to politics, with an eye on attracting attention and maintaining power. In fact, in that book, there’s a quote from his secretary, he said that after the speech, the Senator was quote, “Insane with excitement.” And indeed there’s a lot of evidence in that book that he was looking for as it were a major cause, which was going to secure for him another term as a Wisconsin senator in the 1952 midterm elections. Now, as a result of this, McCarthy is able to chair a permanent subcommittee on investigations which works hand in hand with the House Un-American Activities Committee. It is interesting that his counsel, and I can’t help but mention this, his counsel at the time, was a man called Roy Cohn, C-O-H-N. Some of you will know who Roy Cohn is, he was 1927 to 1986. Cohn first came to prominence by his very effective cross-examination of Ethel Rosenberg’s brother, David Greenglass, in the Rosenberg trial. And he was given a great deal of credit for, as it were, a cross-examination which was devastating to the Rosenberg case. Cohn himself was an extraordinary promoter, whether in fact these claims at any basis in reality, is never certain for obvious reasons, but he claimed credit for Judge Kaufman’s imposing the death sentence on the Rosenbergs. Someone who was particularly impressed by his ability and record in this particular connection was of course the mighty J. Edgar Hoover. And one thing led to another and Cohn then became, and we are going to see a bit about Cohn presently in a clip, Cohn became the legal counsel to the McCarthy Senate Committee, dealing with these very issues of communist influence.
I should just add, which of course fits in with my initial point to you, that Cohn as many of you would know, eventually acted as a young Donald Trump’s lawyer. And many suggest that Cohn was one of Donald Trump’s great mentors, never ever admit anything, said Cohn, a point that Donald Trump has effectively implemented the same view with great tenacity. It is extraordinary that Cohn who was essentially subject to multiple disciplinary inquiries as a lawyer, but who emerged at this time and who really in many ways was an absolutely crooked lawyer, and we will see a little bit about that later, of course, was so centrally linked up to the early history of Donald Trump. A little bit more about that later. I should also say, just to give you further indication of what was going on, that even Harry Truman, who was the Democrat party president, right, again, as we know, took over from Roosevelt, and then was elected in '48, even he was effectively subjected to the influence of the Red Scare. And his administration, because it had been accused of being soft on communism, because of the fact that he had essentially succeeded Roosevelt, and because of the attack that was being made on the New Deal as being soft on communism, he established loyalty boards that evaluated and dismissed federal employees on reasonable grounds for belief and disloyalty. And at the same time, there were US Supreme Court cases, which upheld Red Scare policies, including a law that banned communist teachers from New York Public Schools. To give you an indication of these loyalty boards, there’s the famous case of Mary Keyserling.
She was a feminist, a labour and civil rights activist, she worked in the Department of Commerce. In 1948, she was bought before a loyalty board after, amongst other things, being accused of signing an open letter to American liberals, which appeared in Soviet Russia today in 1937. She was cleared of the charges. But in 1951, in the light of what I’ve been talking about, her case had reopened, and after Truman broadened the grounds for potential dismissal. She was eventually cleared a second time, but forced out of her job in '53 and did not work in government again until 1964. In an article about Keyserling, Professor Landon Storrs notes that she was probably not a communist, but a personal paper suggests occasional socialist leanings and some measure of communist sympathies, albeit pretty understandable during the Second World War. What is interesting about her was after the hearings, her politics became less radical. And what he writes is this, “It’s conceivable that Keyserling’s ideological shift would’ve occurred without her loyalty investigation, but the timing points strongly to the influence of the accusations against her. The fact that we are left guessing is attributable to the loyalty investigations, since it led her to obscure her intellectual evolution.” The point I’m making is that here again, we have an illustration, this was not just one committee, it was two committees plus the executive, all of whom were responding to communist threats, all of which had devastating consequences to all sorts of people. And I think as I try to indicate by reference to Samuel Moyn’s book, a very significant way in which liberalists became hollowed out and in which its social and economic vision for a liberal society was forgotten.
Because of the fact that there was a great deal of scare, that if you pursued, if you wish, liberal policies, which dealt with social and economic justice, you would land up by finding yourself in front of either McCarthy or alternatively in front of the House Committee. And the astonishing feature of all of this was this continued for a very long period of time. Both of these committees, the HUAC and McCarthy subcommittee hearings, were notorious for their biassed, undemocratic tone. The two committees coordinated with the FBI, which maintained files. I mean, Hoover didn’t need invitation concerning everything from suspects’ voter registration history to testimony from friends and employers. The attorney general kept a special list of subversive organisations, including the National Negro Congress and the School of Jewish Studies. So there was a vast canvas of people who came under scrutiny of both of these committees. And no question about it, that as the paranoia trickled down from the top to the American public, all sorts of people faced scrutiny. It has been suggested, for example, that one only needed, and this is evidenced from FBI agents, to go to the head of a college or university, hand them a list of faculty members’ supposed communist connections and that professor could be fired, or even worse, could be hauled before the court. For the more than 5 million federal workers who faced suspicion through loyalty screenings being called the communist had the power to turn them into pariahs, cutting off all pathways to employment.
And of course, as I’ve indicated in an extreme case, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, convicted of conspiracy to commit espionage, was sentenced to the electric chair, paid for their lives. Again, huge dispute about whether they were in fact spies, I think the evidence on balance now is that they were, and that they did in fact provide all sorts of information to the Soviets. Tye in his biography of McCarthy says, “After you’ve been told so many times that there’s a red behind every government agency in Washington, and it seems to be disproven again during those hearings, where it looked like McCarthy had a personal agenda rather than a national security agenda. I think it helped America start raising questions that it hadn’t before about the legitimacy of the whole movement. If you cry wolf enough times, people stop believing there’s a wolf, or there’s a Red Scare there.” I wonder whether that’s true. I’d love to actually engage with you on that particular point. But what I wanted to do was what actually then happened to McCarthy? And in effect, what then happened to the famous initiatives of the House Committee, which of course was exemplified by the Hollywood 10 and the Alger Hiss case was this, McCarthy overreached. And I want to play you a clip which essentially I think, features just in a very luminous way, exactly what happened, why this ended, and then I want to talk a little bit about it. So Julia, can we have our second clip?
[Narrator] Mothers who never watched TV during the day were glued to watching the Army-McCarthy Hearings.
[Thomas] The television moment of the Army-McCarthy Hearings, that is lived in memory ever since is the famous moment on June 9th, 1954 when McCarthy decides to violate an agreement that Cohn and Welch should come to before the hearings.
Roy Cohn, although of perfect draught age, had managed to avoid the Korean War and the draught afterwards. It was kind of astonishing. Joe Welch said, “Fine, I will never bring up your draught status, but we have a problem of our own. We have a young attorney named Fred Fisher who was a member of a communist front group while he was at Harvard Law School, and we brought him down to work on the committee and we decided that because of his past, we would send him home. And I would appreciate it if you would never bring up Fred Fisher”
Throughout most of that afternoon, Roy Cohn and Joseph Welch, had been having your basic nasty lawyerly argument and Cohn’s okay with it,
Mr. Welch, sir, with great respect, I worked for the committee here. They know how we go about handling situations of communist infiltration and failure to act on FBI information about communist infiltration.
And may I add my small voice, sir, and say, whenever you know about a subversive or a communist or a spy, please hurry. Will you remember those words?
Mr. Welch.
But McCarthy gets so angry at Welch’s badgering of Roy Cohn that he blurts out the name of Fred Fisher
At Mr. Welch’s request, I think we should tell him that he has in his law firm a young man named Fisher, who has been for a number of years a member of an organisation which was named oh, years and years ago, as the legal bulwark of the Communist Party. And I have hesitated bringing that up, but I have been rather bored with your phoney request to Mr. Cohn here.
Little did I dream you could be so reckless and so cruel as to do an injury to that lad. It is true, he is still with Hale and Door, it is true that he will continue to be with Hale and Door. It is I regret to say equally true that I fear he shall always bear a scar needlessly inflicted by you.
You’ll look at Roy Cohn’s face and you will see him go, oh my God, no, please, no. But McCarthy won’t stop, he keeps attacking.
I want to say Mr. Welch, that it has been labelled long before he became a member, as early as 1944.
Senator, may we not drop this, I did you I think no personal injury, Mr. Cohn.
No sir.
And if I did, I beg your pardon. Let us not assassinate this lad further, Senator, you’ve done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?
You could see Joe McCarthy going, what did I do? What did I do? Joe Welch literally as a tear in his eye, this was seen as spontaneous. In fact, Welch had been thinking of this for months. Jim Sinclair, who was second in command to Joe Welch said, “We walked out the side door, the door closed behind us. He winked at me and said, how did I do? And they said, great, you did great.”
The fact that McCarthy really didn’t seem to have any sense of decency and the fact that he’d been caught publicly in lies over the course of these six weeks, the public’s capacity to trust him, the belief that he was engaged in this anti-communist crusade as some sort of earnest attempt to protect American society, as opposed to a demagogic bullying spree. At the end of it, I think all the illusions, the comfortable illusions that McCarthy had cultivated by himself had effectively been dispelled.
It was as if the entire country had been waiting for somebody to finally say this line, “Have you no sense of decency?” To Senator McCarthy? That’s the moment where McCarthy incinerates himself on national TV. It’s the moment in which the dragon that is Joseph McCarthy is finally slain.
And it’s very interesting, of course, he was then censured by the Senate. He died in 1957, bad health, I think, probably exacerbate by his alcoholism. And it is probably true that whilst anti-communist suspicion lingered into the 1960s, that extraordinary statement by Welch, “Have you no shame, sir?” That seemed to reverberate right through America, as the clip shows, it almost kind of reflected the views of so many that he’d overreached himself. And if you couple his committee with the HUAC, you find that literally by the end of the ‘50s, the whole system had ultimately run out of steam. Of course, there were all sorts of other activities taking place thanks to J. Edgar Hoover, et cetera. But as two committees that had gripped the United States and had this devastating effect on so many, that was the last straw. And there are series of points that when I prepared for this lecture, I thought to myself, and let me just say, I think there’s some lectures that can be given on this, I think the Alger Hiss, the Chambers story, there’s a book written by Chambers. There’s a series, I think that’s really a lecture we could do, I think there’s also, obviously the Rosenbergs require far greater treatment than what I have just alluded to, but I was alluding to it within the context. But what really interests me is do we not have people who could say that now? And if they do, would anybody listen? If somebody really prominent got up and said to Donald Trump, “Have you no shame sir?”
Would sufficient Americans actually say, yeah, there’s something about that, what’s happened to our level of decency, that we allow the kind of mad attacks that were made, not just on communists, but all sorts of other people by McCarthy and his Trumpian acolyte Roy Cohn, seems to me that in both cases, it really raises a profound question about our contemporary era. What do we learn from this? Do we learn that actually this went on for a period? It essentially turned people against each other, families against each other, destroyed careers, and allowed an alcoholic senator to run rampant through the fabric of American society in circumstances where there appeared to be no accountability for so long a period. Now when you watch that Welch quote, you may say, “Gosh, how did just that statement itself make such a difference?” But it did, that hearing in which there was an overreach by McCarthy, somehow touched people. And of course what was also crucial was the hearings that were taking place at the time, were hearings relating to the army. So effectively, McCarthy had begun to trench into vital territory, which was perhaps slightly more protected than otherwise would be the case. In other words, when McCarthy started to attack the army, its popularity as an institution certainly prompted public questioning of the intentions and the behaviour of this anti-communist movement, which had been headed by these two committees. And ultimately, they fell apart.
And so when we watched this, it’s not surprising to me that today we have strains of a similar kind, not just in the States and elsewhere. And I suppose the question that one wants to take home from this lecture, and from this whole episode is, are we any better equipped to deal with it now than we were then? And I also want to say, going back to Samuel Moyn’s book, that it is so interesting how intellectuals and so many of them were Jewish, such as Hanna Rent, Irving Berlin, Judith Shklar, all of them who were very, very important Cold War liberal intellectuals, who essentially developed a form of liberalism which did very little to address broader social and economic questions. And Moyn’s point is, we suffer from that today, I would argue we suffer from that 'cause of the Cold War, and because of this extraordinary period of fear and the great deal of anxiety caused by the Red Scare at the time. Were there threats from the communists? Absolutely. Were some of these fears justified? Of course. But that’s the point, the point is that ideological constructions do not simply take place without some form of grounding in reality. You take today with Donald Trump, there’s no question that many people feel economically anxious and would perhaps would argue that they were under a better state of affairs under Trump. But from that, a whole ideological framing of society is constructed, which essentially gets you into a disastrous set of anti-democratic consequences.
The truth is, that’s exactly what happened here. Yes, there were anxieties of course, number one, the whole of the Iron curtain had fallen into the most authoritarian rule. China had become a communist country. The Russians now were matching America in relation to the nuclear race. All of that was there to create the kind of framework which allowed people like McCarthy and the HUAC to flourish. What does that tell us for today? That seems to me the question which really we have to ask ourselves and in which this history really has some basis for us to think about. Let me with those provocative remarks, get to the point of questions as we are running into the end of the hour. And I’ll try to do as best I can.
Q&A and Comments:
Very interesting material, but photos of those mentioned, yeah, I’m sorry about that, that’s my, sorry, in fact, my technological deficiencies.
You are quite right, Diane, Diana, being a member of the Communist Party was not illegal at the time these people were harassed, accused, et cetera. That’s absolutely right, but that’s the point. That’s the point of a pernicious discourse that it trenches way beyond the idea of strict law. Even if you’ve got legislation in place, which could put people behind bars, you don’t need to do that. Haul them before a committee, which has got cameras and television, national coverage, everyone’s interested in it, and at the end of the day, people are tainted and they’re tainted in a situation for the rest of their lives, absolutely right.
Q: Simon, we hear a lot about the undoubted inequity of the HUAC hearings and on the other hand, we hear horrors of life under the Soviet Union. Were the Soviet Union generally trying to destabilise the West as ex-KGB Putin does today?
A: Yeah, of course they were spying and of course you’re right, of course they were seeking to destabilise the West, that was true. I mean, there was spying on both sides. It was supposed some ways Western countries would try to destabilise their regimes, but of course their regimes, you can’t find anything more undemocratic than the West. But the question you’ve got to ask yourself is when you get to this level of practise, do you then use such undemocratic means to curb the problem that you become like them, and you ultimately then erode your democratic fabric? I mean, I’m not saying that there shouldn’t be curbs in this, of course lot, but what I’m saying is what happened over that period went way beyond a simple question of actually worrying about whether the Russians were infiltrating, to an extent that it just literally dampened all forms of critical thoughts that I’ve tried to reference by the Moyn book and has ruined a whole lot of people’s lives who quite frankly, had perhaps dabbled in the 1940s, when Russia was in the same side of the war as was the United States and Britain. And thereafter, went on with their lives in a fairly decent sort of way. And that’s why I spent a little bit of time dealing with the Trumbo case, and I would certainly recommend that if you haven’t seen it, to look at the 2015 film with Byian Cranston, which I think is really excellent.
Yes, Monty, you’re quite right, there is a book by Whittaker Chambers called, “Witness,” and it’s not an unimportant book. Thank you for mentioning it. Absolutely, right, and I would recommend it to people. Obviously, it’s his version, and it’s a very, very contested story, often these stories are. There’s no question about it that whatever happened, Hiss’ life was ruined as a result of this.
Then we have, sorry, Simon again. We see and hear a lot about undoubtedly, oh no, I think I’ve done, I’m so sorry. Joan, please pronounce Roy Cohn’s name correctly. I’m so sorry, it’s probably ‘cause he was such an awful, disgusting human being as you rightly say, a monster of a man that I kind of don’t want to bring him into the fold, but I do apologise. Of course, his name is Roy Cohn.
Thank you very much Heather, brilliant TV series, “Angels in America.” I haven’t seen that, but I’m going to look.
Yes, Joel, this is an interesting point. Julius was a spy, Ethel was not. There is a book, I think, as Anne Sebba said, if I remember correctly, reading it some while back, which makes that case out, and it makes out the case in a very tragic fashion, that she was just a loyal wife and she got saddled with this awful trial with her husband, but she was not a spy. And that there was a sort of argument that even if he had said she wasn’t a spy, that is Julius, no one would believe him. It was a catch 22 situation. Perhaps even more troubling about that was of course the brother as Greenglass, who was a really despicable fellow in his own way, was really guilty of perjury. He sunk his sister, I mean, it’s just a monstrous deed, which I find incomprehensible. And the book by Sebba I think sets it out really very well.
Thanks, yes, thanks, Carol, I agree with you entirely there. I think I’ve dealt with that, I didn’t realise. I think it’s been confirmed that yes, yes. So we’ve dealt with that and thank you, Ruth, yes, it is, Anne Sebba, that’s the book I read, thank you very much. And I’d recommend that to everybody. Jewel, the the public schools. It’s very interesting, thank you for raising that. In 1953, I think it was, there was a United States Supreme Court case, which upheld a New York state law that prohibited communists from teaching in public schools, this was of course at the height of the Red Scare. The court split, the statute basically called the Feinberg Law, banned from the teaching profession anyone who called for the overthrow of the government. The law was specifically aimed at communists. Several other states adopted similar measures. In New York, a group of teachers and parents challenged this, and eventually the case went to the United States Supreme Court. Interesting enough, there were dissenting opinions from William O. Douglas, who I mentioned when I was talking about Robert Brandeis, Hugo Black, and of course the person I had also mentioned, Felix Frankfurter, who charged that the New York statute turns the school system into a spying project. But the majority held to the contrary. Perhaps an interesting, sad episode, in the Supreme Court’s history of the '50s. Certainly if you read the Frankfurter et cetera, descent, really is a wonderful illustration of almost replying to the earlier points I was trying to grapple with about how on the one hand you cope with the threat and on the other hand, you preserve democracy. A great illustration of that.
Hindi, Toronto had a large Jewish community in the '30s, till the time that Joe Salzberg went to Russia in the '50s, according to Sidney Newman, the brains behind Dr. Who in his memoir, “The Head of Drama,” he mentions my late uncle as the unofficial artist of the Communist Party in 1930s, to the Communist party, sorry. These two teenagers who were busy designing brochures and pamphlets from a studio where my parents lived. Fortunately, McCarthy did his mischief after my scholarship to study art in New York, he later received the Medal of Honour from General Patton for his bravery in the liberation of France. So proud of both of these commies. Thank you so much for sharing that, that’s really fascinating. And of course it illustrate, a point I make often here, I seem to learn more from you than you do from me, but there we are. Carol, check out the Rosenberg Fund for Children.
I agree, you see, that was the point I was making, somebody on an iPad, wish we had a Joe Welch today to confront Trump and his acolytes this way, sadly it would likely have no, oh, sorry, it’s Judy, Judy. Judy, that’s exactly the point I was posing. Have we got to a society where that kind of statement by somebody who’s not necessarily a politico, it was the lawyer representing in this case, the army, and trying to protect some young member of his law firm. Have we got to the point when Donald Trump can get up and absolutely defame all sorts of people in the most awful ghastly way, that nothing’s done about it? But I would agree with you, I would imagine if somebody said to him, anybody of some credit, have you no shame? His supporters would descend upon that person in the same way that McCarthy did on a whole range of people who were subjected to his activities in the '50s. But it’s a really interesting point, thank you for raising it yet again.
Q: Serena says, what lessons can we learn for today in your opinion, worrying about American government and society to be infiltrated by anti-sematic, anti-Israel Jihadists? Will we tolerate more than we would’ve in a desire to avoid McCarthyism?
A: Well, I think again, it goes back to my earlier point, and I suppose I’m trying to grapple with the problem from a constitutional legal perspective. But here’s the thing, it seems to me that, I’m equally troubled by this, let me try to put it this way. I’m going to talk a lot about this by talking about the ICJ case next week to all of you, I’ve been asked by Trudy to do so. And whilst I don’t want to get into the politics of it, one of the things that’s created real anxiety for me is on the one hand, if you want to sort of support the ICJ hearing, and I’ll argue there are legal reasons why you may want to, that’s fine, but I can’t get out of my mind, all these people who in a sense are not there because of any real concern for loss of life of Palestinians as such, but are there because somewhere along the line there’s a level of prejudice which explains their behaviour, how you deal with it, I do not know. When it comes to Jihadists and when it comes to people who are actually physically or mentally threatening. Well there I think the law has to take its course and I think the authorities have an obligation to protect institutions from that. And perhaps we aren’t doing enough, and I take the point. I agree, we can ask the same question to Bibi Netanyahu, but let me please not get started there, I’ll get into trouble.
Depends who would say it, doesn’t it? George or Laura Bush. Yeah, it’s an interesting question, Jack, I don’t know. I just wish somebody would. Thank you very much. James, the McCarthy period reminds me very strongly OF contemporary hounding of academics at our colleges and universities for daring to question race theory, or speaking up the rights of biological women or being undermined by extreme transgender ideology. You see, that’s exactly what I was trying to talk about, James, thank you for picking up a theme that I was seeking to develop in this lecture and what I wanted people to think about. I agree entirely with you, it’s a very perceptive point that you made, and I think it’s one we have to worry about.
Thank you very much, Marcel. Just watched “The Front,” with Woody Allen, excellent film about banned screenwriters. Yes, you’re right, I need to watch that again.
Thank you very much, Josie. Oh, did Anne Sebba speak about her book? I’m sorry, I didn’t, I might, I might have and I don’t think I did hear it, I am immortal, but not that immortal that I would’ve remembered, that’s a pity. I’d like to, I’m going to try to find the lecture.
Roberta says, I’d like to recommend anyone interested in the topic a recently published book “Red Sapphire: The Woman Who Beat The Blacklist,” by Julia Bricklin, which tells the remarkable life of Hannah Weinstein, the producer of the Tv series, “Robin Hood,” known for employing at great risk many blacklisted writers. At her funeral, Jane Fonda read out a letter from Lenny Helman saying, “My own belief is that she was the only person in the world that Joe McCarthy was afraid of.” Thank you very much, and I think that perhaps a book that one should read in the light thereof. It also may give us some indication how to respond today. Interesting facts, the future Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, father of Trudeau, was blacklisted in 1950 from entering the USA 'cause he’d attended a conference in Moscow. That’s the sort of thing that happened. You may remember, I think, think Nelson Mandela, initially, they had to do all sorts of clearings, the Americans, first time he visited the United States because of his history. Paul says, are you aware of the case of John Henry Volk who was part of a self-appointed group that named communist and communist sympathisers in the entertainment industry. Yeah, Volk was a prominent CBS personality, his career was destroyed, he sued and won. This case also contributed to the end of the Red Scare. Yes, I do know about that, but I would recommend as well the book that you talking about, which is called “Fear,” on Trump. Thank you. I should have mentioned that. And thank you very much for bringing that up.
Q: Why do I think that 70 million people voted for Trump?
A: I’ll need to do a whole lecture on that, Henry, I’m not going to answer that now, but I am trying to say just one thing, it is extraordinary the extent to which ideological framing as I try to indicate, based on some reality and then expanded by populists in this way, can take hold of all sorts of people in all sorts of ways. And at the risk of being incredibly provocative, whilst it’s true that Hitler was an utter dictator, and whilst it’s true that the elections were manipulated, it is also true that a lot of people actually voted for him and that he did have quite considerable support. And it really worried one, doesn’t it? That people could have actually done that, people on their own volition could have actually believed in the Fuhrer. And of course, yes, much of it was repression, much of it was his brutality, but much of it they actually believed, this kind of anti-Semitic awful hatred propaganda that was put out and twisted their minds. And I’ve often thought in the light of the Trump episode, how fragile democracy is. But perhaps that’s for another question.
“The Crucible” is fantastic, yes, absolutely. And it reflects on this in the most magnificent way, anytime you can see that, wonderful. It would take an Edward Murrow, I think you’re quite right.
And thank you very much for telling me Rhoda, that oh dear, I had it and then I lost it. That yes, the movie Trumbo by Dalton Trumbo is available FshareTV.co, FshareTV.co. Great film to watch. Elia Kazan, estranged from Arthur Miller, tried to make up for naming names wrote, “On the Waterfront,” yes, and was shamed by a lot. And if you read some biographies of Miller, the pain that that caused apart from anything else, quite extraordinary. One huge difference between McCarthy, HUAC and now is the spread of information social media. Agreed, agreed. Social media has a massive effect. But the way in which it’s done seems to me not be dissimilar. I immigrated from Canada in '45, married and applied for citizenship. I was in college and I was asked if I’d ever attended a meeting or purchased a bulletin in the left wing club on campus.
Thank you very much for all of your incredibly insightful contributions to a really troubling lecture. And have a good evening.