Weird Career of a Weird Committee
Clark, Joseph
THE COMMITTEE, by Walter Goodman. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 495 pp. $10.00. AFTER A WHILE, a long while, there was hardly any distinction attached to a subpoena summoning a...
...So, perhaps at that moment there were some in the counsels of the Committee who decided that anti-Communism might not be served too well by still another contempt citation, But, confronted by the erosion of Communist ideology and its end as a single world movement, the Committee and the chief of the FBI sensed a common danger to them both...
...When Congress set up the Dies Committee in 1938, it gave the Committee authority to investigate "un-American propaganda activities" and attacks on "the principle of the form of government as guaranteed by our Constitution...
...More important, Warren had gone to the very essence of the Congressional authorization of a search for un-American ideas and activities...
...The lawyers found no evidence of Moscow domination over the American Communist party...
...At all times, you mut keep a copy...
...Who can define the meaning of `un-American...
...Warren had written for the majority that "there is no Congressional power to expose for the sake of exposure...
...nor weretheir emotions locked up with the Moscowtrials or the war in Spain...
...But these lawyers went on to instruct Congress about the Communists as follows: "A reasonable construction of language compels the conclusion that the members of the Communist Party of the U.S.A...
...But this is a minor point...
...the policeman Hoover had no inkling ofwhat was really happening...
...Goodman, in his unsentimental history, points out that after the Watkins decision, Warren's ringing declarations notwithstanding, the Court upheld the constitutionality of the Committee in the 1959 Barenblatt decision...
...He accosted me with a pleasant smile and the suggestion that my country needed me as an informer...
...Goodman adds perceptively: Their careers were built on the immutable menace of Communism...
...We have recently had some nnfortunate experiences with manucrlpts lost in the mails...
...We were led by our own convic tions, and we still stand firmly by them...
...Above all, here was a chance to affirm radical and socialist beliefs without naming names and without invoking the Fifth Amendment...
...in a few years they would beholding teach-ins on Vietnam...
...His history is both objective and entertaining because he is never bemused by, and indeed he eschews, totalitarianism whether on the Left or the Right...
...But perhaps Goodman's discussion of the Watkins decision underestimates the value of Chief Justice Earl Warren's prose...
...have the right, power and authority to make their own decisions precisely as members of any other American organization...
...For one thing it was a great advantage to wave a little pamphlet containing the Supreme Court's Watkins decision before the faces of the Committee members, staff, and the inevitable FBI agents...
...In a negative sort of way, the House Committee on un-American Activities played an important part in the transformation of American youth from the "silent" generation of the 50's to the "active" generation of the 60's...
...Walter concluded that "anti-Stalinism is but a political artifice, fraudulent and more dangerous than any other produced by the Kremlin thus far...
...They saw after eightyears of Dwight Eisenhower what the younghave often seen, their destinies in the hands of old, cautious, unimaginative, unfeeling men, and they needed to break out...
...The campus atBerkeley became a testing place of this remarkably non-ideological, even anti-ideologicalmovement, and the arrival of the Un-American Activities Committee, which had been engagedin the harassment of teachers, students, and political non-conformists for twenty years, wasgalvanic...
...This is the land of the demagogue and the Ku Klux Klan, as well as of Lincoln and Jefferson, he reminds us...
...Nobody incited us, nobody misguided us," declared fifty-eight of the arrestedstudents after the charges against them weredismissed...
...Goodman demonstrates that the failure of so many liberals in the Thirties resulted from their inability to identify Communism as a grievous enemy of freedom and progress...
...Another reason why it was possible to refuse to name names without invoking the Fifth Amendment and going to jail was that this was 1957...
...There was a turning point when some 5,000 students dem onstrated against the Committee on the last day of its hearings in San Francisco in May, 1960...
...Thoughthe radicals of the thirties might march alongwith the radicals of the sixties when conditions seemed suitable, their dreams were not the same...
...and, as the name implied, they found that Communism, although now with fewer adherents, and those at odds with one another, was more dangerous than ever before...
...AFTER A WHILE, a long while, there was hardly any distinction attached to a subpoena summoning a witness to the House Committee on Un-Amer ican Activities...
...In the Watkins decision of 1957 Chief Justice Warren wrote: "It would be difficult to imagine a less explicit authorizing resolution...
...But overall one can agree with Richard Rovere who writes in his introduction that those of us who favor Jefferson's America "will find guidance and a fortifying good humor in this admirable book...
...One might point out that the latter are in consonance with the libertarian traditions of the 18th-century founders, while the former are destructive of those traditions...
...It followed upon the revulsion against the sanguinary suppression of the revolt of Hungary's workers and students by Soviet tanks...
...John T. Watkins, an officer of the Farm Equipment Workers Union, had testified in 1954 before the Committee, without pleading the Fifth Amendment...
...Goodman emphasizes the point that the decision upholding Watkins "was merely procedural...
...he also refused "to discuss the political activities of my past associates...
...That enjoyable experience was possible, without paying the penalty of contempt, for various rea sons...
...Besides, the Communists were only pretending to be falling victim to dry rot...
...This was a consequence of the 1956 "revelations" about Stalin and the breakup of the Communist monolith...
...On my first day of freedom after 30 years of self-imposed bondage in the Communist move ment, the inevitable FBI agent was tailing me...
...The Court ruled in 1957 that the Committee could compel witnesses to reply to questions providing they had been made aware of the pertinency of the information the Committee was seeking...
...Communists were doing a far more effective job of demolishing Communism than dedicated antiCommunists of the Committee stripe could ever hope to do...
...Goodman is eminently worth quoting in rebuttal...
...To J. Edgar Hoover (and to the Committee) it was all a Communist plot and a "Communist success in San Francisco...
...Their protestswould take diverse and sometimes puzzlingforms—Caesar is supposed to have remarkedon first hearing Brutus speak in public, "I knownot what this young man intends, but whateverhe intends, he intends vehemently"—but noParty line could accommodate them...
...They produced a report entitled The Great Pretense...
...In my case, as in many others, the summons confirmed what the author of this engrossing history of the Committee terms the "close and mutually rewarding relationship" be tween the Committee and the FBI...
...And please also be sure to enclose a stamped, self-addressed envelope...
...Above all, it followed upon the belated discovery by so many Communists in so many countries that it wasn't Marx they were abetting but a 20th-century Caligula, and that the "ism" they were defending could more correctly be defined as totalitarianism than socialism...
...In 1960 studentshad already been moved to action by the civil rights struggle...
...The new activists spared no particularaffection for the Soviet paradise...
...A world of diverse and differing ideologies and systems, living in peace, was not the kind of world which anti-Communists of the Right were ready to accept...
...Here was a chance (which I seized) to tell the Committee members what I thought of them as promoters of subversion, not its oppo nents...
...Goodman's study is effective, balanced, and commands interest not just because he did painstaking research and because he happens to be a very good writer...
...THE OPPOSITION of many liberals to the UnAmerican Activities Committee was weak and ineffective because they understood so little about Communism...
...In some ways it was a very pleasant experi ence...
...These warriors included James Burnham, Clarence Manion, William Randolph Hearst, Jr., Whittaker Chambers, Louis Budenz, Francis McNamara, and the national commander of the American Legion...
...For example, Goodman cites a group of prominent lawyers who in 1939 petitioned the House of Representatives to abolish the Dies Committee...
...The Committee's reports and declarations during this period," Goodman writes, "had one overriding message: `the menace of Communism remains unabated.' " After Khrushchev's attack on Stalin, Chairman Walter of the Committee brought together "a group tilted heavily to the Right," as Goodman puts it...
...One might carp about Goodman's argument that The Committee is decidedly American...
...Those "experts" who had found and concluded for Walter—and for J. Edgar To Contributor' When sending manuseelpts, please make sure that yon do not send yoUI' only copy...
...BOOKS Hoover—that anti-Stalinism was the most dangerous ism of all, believed "there could be no change in US.-Soviet affairs, barring defeat for one party and victory for the other...
...Goodman notes that J. Edgar Hoover gave this his official blessing...
...Surely, that was an admirable aim...
...having given themselves to one truth, they could tolerate noother, and now nothing that happened in thereal world could shake their belief in the less complicated world whose gates they guarded...
...Their discontent wasformless and pervasive...
...With considerable aid from the police a riot ensued...
...The and-Communism which, for most of them, had begun in honestdisillusion and justified outrage had hardenedinto unquestioning faith...
...And this was 1939---the year of the Party's dizzying summersault from demands for collective security and war against fascism to endorsement of the Nazi Soviet pact and the Nazi-Soviet invasion of Poland which started World War II...
...I told him off and the next day the inevitable marshal was at my door with a sub poena indicating that now the Committee needed me...
...One might also say that in places the great detail palls, and that possibly if the author were not aiming to be definitive, the history might be even more satisfying...
...How many jobs and sinecures would be lost, to mention but a single consequence of the decomposition of American Communism and the breakup of the world Communist organization into differing and often warring national components...
...What is the single, solitary `principle of the form of government as guaranteed by our Constitution...
Vol. 15 • July 1968 • No. 4
