BOOKS

Team spirit

Geoffrey Wheatcroft

e was a so-called Pink, who believed in what so-called Pinks believe in (Progressive Education, the Integrity of anyone spying for Russia, Fall-outs occa- sioned only by US-made bombs, the ex- istence in the near past of a McCarthy Era . . .)'. Or so Kinbote had it in Pale Fire. Thirty years on the Era still haunts America and is the subject of countless books. Some of these, like Mr Reeves's, are more or less colourless; most, like Mr Navasky's, have a Pinkish hue. The American Right once tried to rewrite history. Maybe the Left can- not be blamed for trying to do the same thing now, with good and bad works of historical revisionism, not to say with such bizarre epiphenomena as The Book of Daniel, Mr E. L. Doctorow's agitprop novel about the Rosenbergs. A generation ago the American Left got a terrible pasting. Now it is getting its revenge.

As Mr Reeves's book shows, the McCar- thy Era properly speaking did not last long: less than five years, from the speech which the Junior Senator from Wisconsin made at Wheeling on 9 February 1950 — 'I have here in my hand a list of 205 — a list of names that were made known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping policy in the State Department' — until his censure by the Senate on 2 December 1954. He had already destroyed himself politically with the televised Army hearings that summer. Soon afterwards he destroyed himself physically, dying of drink — his only endearing quality — in 1957, at the age of 48.

Mr Reeves is level-headed to the point of banality, but the subject is too gripping for any book on it to be dull. He pitches even- handedness rather high when he writes of the 'many personal qualities that bio- graphers and others have chosen to ignore'. Any effort to whitewash McCarthy is doomed to failure. In fact what is so dismal about the episode is the light which McCar- thy's success shed on American politics and society: how could a man of his appalling vulgarity, utter recklessness and obvious mendacity ever have been taken seriously?

Naming Names does not pretend to even- handedness. It is a bill of indictment against those who gave evidence before the Com- mittee on Un-American Activities of the House of Representatives (HUAC) and not only testified penitently about their own

Communist past but volunteered the names of their former comrades in the clandestine Communist movement. It is not a good book: rambling, ill-written, self-indulgent and too long. (That it should have received one of the 1982 American Book Awards is a significant comment on what's. called a climate of opinion.) But it is an interesting book. It 'has a Message.

The second American Red Scare began long before McCarthy's Wheeling speech. (The first and much more violent Scare was in the years immediately following the Oc- tober RevolutiOn.) HUAC was instituted in 1938 and its anti-Communist investigations began shortly after the war. In 1947 when McCarthy had barely entered the Senate — HUAC started its purge of Hollywood. The 'Hollywood Ten' refused to answer the Committee's questions and were imprisoned for contempt.

Why Hollywood? There were concurrent purges in the universities but those were mostly — and shamefully — conducted by the universities themselves. Intellectual Communism was numerically far stronger in the New York literary world than in Hollywood, but that world was of course more diffuse. Hollywood — which is to say screen-writers, directors and actors — was a comparatively small, homogeneous com- munity where everyone knew everyone and worked for one of half a dozen studios (which made it easier to put political unreliables on a black-list and thus out of work). It was at the same time a national in- dustry, and one which has uniquely shaped the consciousness of half the world.

It is not clear why the Party was so keen to organise Hollywood. Show-business has always been full of self-important and gulli- ble people, certainly. But despite their best efforts the red-baiters could find no evidence of Commie propaganda in movies. One screen-writer is quoted as saying that he and his comrades did their best to keep overt anti-Soviet propaganda out of their films. This was surely delusion on both sides, exaggerating the seriousness of the medium. Dorothy Parker had the last word: the only 'ism' Hollywood understands is plagiarism. - There is a great subject here; the smaller dream world of the 'weird Hollywood red subculture of the 1930s and 1940s' (Mr Navasky's phrase) within the larger dream factory. What the old Hollywood leftists say about themselves is fascinating and also risible. Even they can see the paradox, if not the joke. Here was the Parnassus Of drawing-room Bolshevism, script-writers earning enormous salaries by day and attending Party meetings by night. At the studio 'you did what you were told to do making between two hundred and fifty dollars and one thousand dollars a week' — `one of the Ten, Dalton Trumbo, was earn- ing $3,000 a week in 1947; work it out — and everyone else was starving to death ... we were making films that were cheesy and awful and appalling, but my God, what did you do? Leave five hundred and one thou- sand dollars a week and go back to New York and not make anything a week? Not that we were conscious of it at the time, but we became lefter and lefter to help those who were not so fortunate.'

Part of Mr Navasky's purpose, it will be seen, is to make a case for the Hollywood Communists — to defend the Integrity of everyone working for the Party, if not spy- ing for Russia. Connoisseurs of a certain kind of leftist apologetics will find this book a treasure-trove. They `originally joined the Communist Party out of motives of social conscience at a time when it was in the business of fighting racism and depres- sion'; a magazine was 'generally believed to reflect the Communist Party line' (well, did it or didn't it?); 'Some of the Marxist aestheticians, undoubtedly sensitve to party-line directives from New York or fur- ther East, were nevertheless grappling with the peculiar task of analysing truth and beauty in a class context.' And one par- ticularly fine specimen: 'that Party members, acting on behalf of Soviet defini- tions of American interest, often distorted the goals of the non-Party organisations they joined may or may not be true.' I was about to emphasise the last six words but italics fail me. Mr Navasky is not the Editor of the Nation for nothing.

He puts in a ritual disclaimer of the misdeeds of 'Stalinism' and anticipates the riposte that Russian purges have been somewhat worse than American ones in our time. (Whenever I hear the story I have I have always felt that I was sorry for the Hollywood Ten but even sorrier for the Russian Twenty Million — the twenty million human beings killed by Stalin while fashionable opinion in the West applauded or looked the other way.) But running through the book is the assumption that those who joined the Party did so from the highest motives and that 'Stalinism' aside there is no essential incompatibility between Communism and liberty. Martin Popper, 'a Marxist and militant and articulate New York lawyer', is quoted presumably with approval: 'Is it not possible to be a Marxist, a Communist, and be for the First Amend- ment?' No, of course it isn't you poor booby, but let it pass.

Another purpose of the book is to de- nounce the denouncers. It is certainly hard to portray those who named names in 0 worthy light. Their subsequent defence of what they had done — that they were acting out of conscience, that informing is sometimes a civic duty — is not impressive. For one thing, if men wanted to repudiate their former attachment to Communism there were other and better ways of doing it than before a Congressional Committee; confessions or palinodes made under duress

are morally and legally worthless. For another, the name-namers were engaged in a ritual, or charade. The Communist Party had been heavily penetrated by the FBI who had an accurate list of all Party members for many years. The naming of names was designed not so much to identify the named as to humble the namers. So it did, and they cut a sorry figure. All the same, there is something unattractive about Mr Navasky's vindictiveness towards people who behaved badly at the end of their tether, especially when compared with the forgiveness shown by Dalton Trumbo towards those who in- formed on him.

But there is a further purpose still to the book. Mr Navasky's real target is not Mc- Carthy or HUAC — condemning whom is an otiose task from his point of view, as it should be from others' — or even the name- namers. It is the anti-Communist liberal Left, which did too little to help Com- munist victims of the purge. A small Minority of non-Communist liberals 'saw McCarthyism and domestic repression as the enemy and thought it counter- productive to participate in any way . .. but the majority of center liberals lived in the Penumbra of the degradation ceremony and reinforced it by playing its game'.

Other ex-Communist liberals, by 'speak- ing the language of conspiracy, were major Contributors to the Cultural context and the Moral environment'. And in pouring scorn on those liberals who saw themselves as standing between the totalitarianisms of Left and Right Mr Navasky says, 'The very Phrase Vital Center may be seen as a kiss goodbye to the left, an attempt at trouble- avoidance through strategic labelling' (a fair example of his style, by the way).

Now there is an important point here. It is quite true that the American non- Communist Left was conspicuous by its silence when the anti-Comm purges were underway. The motives were various, from Plain fear to a sincere horror of Com- munism, both of the terror in Soviet Russia and of the brutality and untrustworthiness of Communists nearer home. This was wrong, although sometimes understan- dable. Mr Navasky assumes that former Communists had ignoble motives for their Penitence; it may be that they had genuinely had their fill of the sterility and dogmatism of the Party. And the New York Trotskyists (who displayed much more intellectual vigour than their London counterparts in the Thirties and Forties) also stood aside While- the Stalinists were purged. They should not have done so, but in the past they had had an awful lot to put up with from the comrades.

Of course the Left and indeed American libertarians of all kinds should have attack- ed the demagoguery of McCarthyism and stood up for the constitutional rights of free speech and free association of all their fellow citizens. But this is not what Mr Navasky has in mind. His is not the Voltairean (attrib.) line about free speech for those whose views one dislikes. It is Possible not to ask again and again while

reading Naming Names, would he say the same if it was Fascists and racists who were being purged?

One answer to that question is given in the book: Marxists 'identified with the weak and spoke the language of social justice' (never mind how that relates to the actuality of life in Soviet Russia), while Fascists 'identified with an elite and spoke the language of racism and violence', which no doubt deprives them of protection under the First Amendment. Another answer could be inferred from a symposium in New York last summer. In the course of an argu- ment with Mr Floyd Abrams Mr Navasky attacked him thus: `Do you think it is useful every time you are commenting on the con- stitutional rights of someone who is basical- ly under attack in our republic today to disassociate yourself from their positions ...?' He went on to say that 'disassociation' was 'one of the things in the past [ie. the 1940s and '50s] that has weakened and fragmented the ability of people who were targets to resist the repression that occur- red'.

Again, does Mr Navasky defend the con- stitutional rights of Fascists, and if he does (or if he ever did) does he at the same time (or would he) disassociate himself from their views? The questions answer themselves. What Mr Navasky admires is not the First Amendment and uncondi- tional free speech. It is team spirit. He sometimes, rather irritatingly, uses the word 'libertarian'. But his heart is not with anything that .could truly be called liber- tarianism; it is with the Broad Left. The Left mast stick together: that is the message of the McCarthy Era.

There are several interesting contrasts in The Meaning of Treason, the classic ac- count of several trials for (or untried cases of) treason and espionage, now reissued in an updated edition. It began as a report of the post war trial of William Joyce, 'Lord Haw Haw', but most of the traitors it con- siders were working for Soviet Russia. Like Mr Navasky, Dame Rebecca is a stern moralist. She is as savage about Burgess and Maclean as he is about the name- namers, or more so. Indeed the tone is• fiercely censorious throughout. She not on- ly has no time for any of the apologies-made for her traitors; she refused and still refuses to see the case against the execution of Joyce.

This is a dialogue of the deaf but, briefly, Joyce was judicially murdered after trial on a trumped-up charge. Unlike murder, rape or theft, treason is the one crime for which citizenship is by definition a precondition of guilt. A French citizen can be guilty of murder in London. He cannot be guilty of treason against the British crown. Joyce, born in New York, the son of a naturalised American citizen, was never a British citizen, though he untruthfully claimed to be one. In the end, as Mr A. J. P. Taylor has said, Joyce was hanged for making a false statement when applying for a passport, the usual penalty for which is a small fine. But for Dame Rebecca, Joyce was guilty of a 'particularly odious form of treachery, which invaded the ears of frightened people'.

Although his counsel argued that the passport he had obtained by his false state- ment gave him no protection, 'it was hard to see how it could fail to protect him until the fraud was discovered'. In any case the defence was absurdly technical, as though society had advanced no further than primitive times when a man who had betrayed a tribe might `go free because he had not undergone the right ceremonies which would have made him a member of that tribe'.

Altogether, she has a magnificent way with those who disagree with her: 'A number of people were saying, "William Joyce was a vile man but he should not have been hanged," and smiled as they said it, claiming to speak in the name of mercy. But they were hypocrites. They were moved by hostility to the law, being destructive by nature.' Later she says that Stephen Ward's suicide during his trial in 1963 'shocked into protest everyone who in his heart of hearts would have liked to be a pander.' Well, that's that, I suppose.

For all that it is a brilliant book — to say that it is better written than Naming Names

would be an extremity of understatement - with many remarkable insights. At times Dame Rebecca might be directly addressing Mr Navasky. A pollution of the intellectual and moral atmosphere is 'a natural conse- quence of Communist activity. Once a secret society establishes itself within an open society there is no end to the hideous mistrust it must cause'. Communism is anyway no more than 'Fascism with a glan- dular and geographical difference'.

It is a brilliant book but a wrong-headed one, and its title is a misnomer. The mean- ing of treason is just what isn't satisfactori-

ly discussed; Dame Rebecca nowhere defines her subject. 'If a state gives a citizen protection it has a claim to his allegiance' and those who repudiate that allegiance are traitors. But traitors to whom or what? All Dame Rebecca's traitors betrayed England, a more or less free and civilised country, in favour of National Socialist Germany or Soviet Russia. But what of Herr Willi Brandt, who was undoubtedly a citizen of the German Reich and who spent the war with the Norwegian resistance? What of Fritz Eberhard, who died a few weeks ago, a man who certainly enjoyed the protection of his native Germany until he fled to England and spent the war broadcasting in German for the BBC? (Does that count as invading the ears of frightened people?)

Solzhenitsyn and Kuznetsov are traitors in the terms of Pravda and the Literary Gazette; not, I take it, in ours.

This leads to disturbing conclusions. Like most other things 'treason' can vary qualitatively. There are times when it is a form of moral treason not to commit for- mal treason. Mr Navasky inevitably quotes Forster's well-worn phrase about having the guts to betray one's country rather than one's friend. I have not the time or the

space, as the man said who was put in a sack and drowned, to explain what is wrong with that neat formulation but at least it suggests that there is a real problem here. The traitors were real men living in the real world, who had to make real choices. Pace Mr Navasky, some of the name-namers may have sincerely believed that they were doing the right thing. Pace Dame Rebecca, the traitors too were men who believed in something. It is not enough to say that Joyce was 'tiny, alien and ineradicably odd', that Burgess was drunk and homosex- ual (two big boo words in Dame Rebecca's vocabulary). Even with such as they it is

necessary to make a leap of imagination and enter their minds to see why they made conscious choices for which, in the cases of Joyce and of John Amery, they paid with their lives.

Oddly enough, although they seem to stand poles apart, Mr Navasky and Dame Rebecca have something in common. They both believe in unconditional loyalty, the most dangerous of all prescriptions. They both say, rally round the flag, repeat the slogan. Dame Rebecca's slogan is, My country right or wrong. Mr Navasky's is, Pas d'ennemi a gauche. They both believe in team spirit.