INFORMERS AND OTHER VILLAINS

...The inherently dramatic quality of the conflict between the opposing pulls of the public and the private, the conventional and the nonconforming, exercises its own fascination, and when these conflicts then are transformed into political struggles they often take shapes that blur the distinction between theater and reality, fiction and life...

...Applying Erikson's perspective we see that it is not that HUAC "reassured middle Americans about their patriotism" but that it sought to define the meaning or substance of American patriotism...

...The one rationale Navasky examines in some detail is, "They deserved what they got...

...took the form of esoteric studies of conformity...

...they require that we ask whether the behavior of HUAC witnesses was affected by their experience in the party and its political environs...

...Many who explaind their behavior this way cited the assault on Albert Maltz as decisive in their change of heart about the CP, and Navasky describes it extensively...

...Navasky's subjects ranged from the witnesses who named names to such odd characters as Ernest Philip Cohen, the lay analyst of choice for many Hollywood Communists, who encouraged his patients to cooperate with the Committee...

...Two months later Maltz publicly recanted his errors in another article and apologized for the comfort his original one gave the party's enemies...

...By the very nature of their persuasion liberals had to attack both HUAC and the Communists, since both were poisoning the political environment...

...Indeed, many of the strengths and defects of Naming Names follow from the controlling metaphor...

...Any one of these rites "sharpens the authority of the violated norms and restates where the boundaries of the group are located...

...The struggles can easily be presented, therefore, in forms inspired by literature and drama, and so provide the same satisfactions as do works of fiction...

...By the end of the book they emerge, if not as major villains in their own right, then as important accomplices—unindicted co-conspirators, so to speak...

...For a considerable number of people HUAC and McCarthy are now part of "history"—the past entombed in textbooks—while others find events and names that once were part of the very stuff of their daily lives now rapidly receding from memory...

...Maltz is wrong again, and this must be seen in the context of his life...

...are creatures of the same culture, inventions of the same imagination...

...To leave was more painful than remaining be176 cause departure meant a disavowal of the significance of a major part of one's life...

...Others, such as the actor Lee J. Cobb, flat broke after resisting the Committee for over two years and with two children and a sick wife, claimed they had no real choice...

...These irruptions are obviously related to the strains existing in the larger world—McCarthyism and HUAC are hardly understandable except by reference to the Cold War...

...Even in the relatively new discipline of sociology confrontation with McCarthy[ ism...

...Artists, scholars, and journalists continually return to these events and we read about them because we sense that the nightmares have something significant to tell us about our political institutions and lives...

...As may be anticipated, the witnesses do not see their appearances before HUAC the way Hellman and Navasky do...

...In his reply to his critics, therefore, he did not restate the ideas he still believed but the reply was not dictated by anyone "holding a gun to my head...

...This means that the "deviant and the conformist...

...To remain "starry-eyed and innocent" was not simple...

...The aim, then, is education but the story is conceived as "less history than a moral detective story...

...Some must have learned the most obvious lesson: when a choice has to be made between one's own beliefs and values and those that authority decrees are important to the group, it is the latter that must take precedence—subordination of self to prevailing opinion is required of all...

...Like many other detective stories, it is particularly good on a specific social milieu, in this case one Navasky calls "the informer subculture...

...I wanted to remain a Communist...

...Among the types of informers Navasky distinguishes is "the liberal informer," such individuals as James Wechsler and such organizations as the American Civil Liberties Union and Americans for Democratic Action...

...The story consists of the discovery 173 and piecing together of evidence so that it unequivocally proves the guilt of the accused...

...all you did was quit...

...For those who know little of HUAC and the personal and political damage it produced, Naming Names should be required reading...

...by stigmatizing witnesses, the Committee was defining the politically acceptable behavior and thought...

...Both groups can benefit from reading Navasky's description of the Committee's Hollywood adventure...

...Navasky quotes Erikson's point that when "deviant sanctions" are imposed upon a person his status within the community undergoes a change...

...This aspect of the problem is obscured by Navasky's implication that liberals reinforced the authority of HUAC and McCarthy by their anti-Communism...

...This question is particularly pertinent to the latest recounting of the HUAC investigations into "subversion" in Hollywood...

...In Victor Navasky's absorbing book Naming Names (Viking, 1980), the central focus is the behavior of "those otherwise decent individuals" who complied with HUAC's demand for the names of others whom they knew to be Communists, though to do so was a betrayal of persons and political morality, This entails, in Navasky's words, such questions as: "What are the conditions under which good men do things they know to be wrong...

...Some claimed they named only those who "deserved" to be named—"deserved everything they got," because the CP was a greater evil than HUAC...

...That is, McCarthyism and Stalinism were in many ways two sides of the same coin, and one perhaps unintended consequence of Navasky's tendentious reading of the evidence is to blur that similarity...

...Navasky's gut reaction suggests a willed attempt to reduce a political life to the simple, unshadowed world of the detective story and the prosecutorial imagination...

...A reader can very easily acquire the impression that by opposing both HUAC and the Communist party with its fellow-travelers, "the liberals" strengthened HUAC's hand...

...Quitting the party meant acknowledging that one's life in it was a betrayal of the "noble ideals" that had attracted one in the first place and that one had willfully shut one's eyes to their violation...

...That episode "provides no rationale for the naming (and possible betrayal) of former comrades in the 1950's...

...He was immediately attacked in the pages of the New Masses and the Daily Worker and also at party meetings that resembled, from the evidence Navasky presents, Chinese "struggle sessions...

...To reflect upon experience—that is, to gain an education—demands that we recognize this...

...There is a certain surface plausibility to the argument, since the liberals' position seems to legitimize HUAC's and McCarthy's actions...

...A democratic political order formally promotes, blesses, and protects the private and the idiosyncratic whether it is heretical thought or particularistic personal commitment...

...When the state applies pressure to its citizens to act in impermissible ways, the reaction to that pressure will be significantly determined by the citizens' previous political education and experience...

...When a person is labeled as a deviant the community is calling him to account and "it is making a statement about the nature and placement of its boundaries...

...The strengths of the book are many and ought not to be overlooked...

...Those who acquiesced reinforced, by their surrender to its pressure, the legitimacy of the party's demands and its definitions of reality...

...It is not surprising that Navasky, a lawyer by training, used the detective story as a frame of reference, since it is a form congruent with a legal orientation...

...One of the functions of criminal trials or excommunication proceedings is to demonstrate "where the line is drawn between behavior that belongs in the special universe of the group and behavior that does not...

...If it enhanced social solidarity it did so because it weakened the legitimacy of political conflict and tried to enforce consensus— conformity to a limited set of ideas...

...If this was true of the Committee it was equally true of the CP, the "witches" HUAC was ostensibly hunting...

...the last great convulsion occurred after World II and was marked by the investigations of the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) and Joe McCarthy...

...The criticism forced him to ask, "Well, now who am I...

...This censure of liberals can be better understood, perhaps, if it is seen in the context of Navasky's characterization of HUAC's treatment of cooperative witnesses as "degradation ceremonies...

...Although he would not be a member of the CP today, at that time he "considered it to be an honor to be a member of the Party, and by the way I haven't changed my mind about it now...

...Toward the conclusion of Naming Names Navasky describes a correspondence between Maltz and Dalton Trumbo...

...it is, therefore, an attractive form of "escape" literature...

...The inarticulate major premise here is that the Communists were devoted democrats, a premise that could only be sustained by a committed avoidance 175 of reality...

...Indeed, although Navasky does not talk of liberals as a totally homogeneous group—he explicitly distinguishes at one point, for example, those around Dissent from "center liberals" like Schlesinger—it will be very hard for even the most careful reader to avoid being impressed by the perfidy of "the liberals...

...Navasky reads the moral of the Maltz case differently, and some of the weaknesses of moral detective stories for the ends of education become apparent...

...But they have other sources...

...The subculture functioned to make cooperation with HUAC as painless as possible and to help individuals get their names off the blacklist...

...After all, it was the "easiest thing in the world to leave the Party...

...reassured middle Americans of their patriotism," and, recalling a remark by Lillian Hellman, for the witnesses themselves "by denouncing fellow immigrants (or children of immigrants) before HUAC, one consolidated one's identification with the dominant society...

...Navasky, sounding very much like a sociologist himself, specifies the diverse functions served by the Committee's ritualistic insistence that witnesses name names: "From the perspective of the state, it functioned to reinforce group solidarity...

...Erikson is cited as one who can provide a "more useful framework...

...Still others "invoked a higher morality whether to their family or to the moral obligation to reveal the dimensions of the Communist evil...

...Many years later Maltz explained his actions to Navasky...

...it is solidly based on other histories of HUAC and its times as well as on archival sources...

...Some caution, though, is advisable...

...As he categorizes them, there are, first, those who claim they gave the Committee only names they already had, and so "didn't hurt anybody...

...What, in other words, is to be learned from this episode in collaboration and betrayal Americanstyle...

...But it is a distortion to say, for example, of the liberals' attitude that "as long as it succeeded in delivering up bona fide reds the [degradation] ceremony was to be supported...

...But the ends of education require something more...

...This is a variation of a classic Popular Front line: since the Soviet Union is fighting Fascism any criticism of it and the Communists aids the Fascists...

...People put up against the wall by those with power and authority and then degraded for their disobedience —that is a definition of victimization...

...Early in 1946 Maltz published an article in the New Masses criticizing the idea that art is merely a weapon in the class struggle and should serve as the sole criterion in judging its worth...

...Navasky's linking of the liberals and McCarthyism serves a similar function...

...It was a life of continuous pressure to conform, and "deviant sanctions" were continually applied as a means of sharpening the party's authority and setting the limits of acceptable behavior and thought...

...the world cannot be neatly divided into innocent victims and guilty villains...

...A degradation ceremony is a ritual in which a person is stigmatized so that he is perceived by others as a different kind of person...

...But the central attraction is the new information that emerges from Navasky's own interviews with over a hundred people who were caught up in the Committee's investigation and the eddies it generated...

...Still, his personal dissatisfaction with the theory of socialist realism grew, and by 1941 "I was in a fury about it...

...Nonetheless, his response to the criticism was determined by "my desire not to be made to become a renegade—my desire not to be expelled from the Party...

...It also meant severing old personal relationships, being cast out as a "renegade" and treated as a pariah for being faithful to one's personal beliefs...

...It contained in addition . to HUAC itself a variety of informers...

...To ignore the effects of life in "the red subculture" is to avoid the ambiguities of political reality, those complex dimensions of life that education helps us recognize and understand...

...life in the party was hardly the "romance" many still conceive it to be...

...Trumbo is right because he is pointing to a political reality...

...They arose early in our history and have reappeared in various guises...

...In everyday life the demands of the idiosyncratic and the particular conflict with the public morality of the majority, and the latter's superiority of numbers is frequently transformed into political power brought to bear in the conflict...

...anything less would be to acknowledge the meaninglessness of his life in the party...

...Wechsler, who bitterly fought the Committee but was outmaneuvered into giving it names, is among those who were "major contributors to the cultural context and moral environment that routinized betrayal...

...Like detectives, lawyers, especially those acting as prosecutors, build a case so that attention remains focused solely on the accused...

...Of this running argument Navasky says, "Trumbo wins on polemics— he is funnier...

...What happens when a state puts pressure on its citizens to betray their fellows...

...The everpresent threat of such transmutations is one of the facts of our political life and helps account for the continuing interest in McCarthyism and HUAC hearings: to know how and why they happened is to be better prepared for the future...

...Maltz wins on biology—viscerally one responds to his sense of outrage...

...His commitment was not shaken by subsequent historical events...

...are arraigned by Navasky not only for supporting and praising Wechsler but because, like him, they were more committed to the anti-Communist cause than to the necessity of fighting HUAC and McCarthyism...

...Yet the remark becomes more odd than nasty when one knows that the monograph from which Navasky quotes, Wayward Puritans, has made the issue of "conformity" one of its major themes, and that Erikson's discussion, ignored by Navasky, does indeed provide a "useful framework" for understanding HUAC...

...It is declaring how much variability and diversity can be tolerated within the group...

...I just knew from my own work that it wasn't right, that it was a straitjacket and I didn't like it...

...It is a judgment that remains true enough even as we recognize it as one that satisfies the need of a prosecutor and a detective-story writer for a verdict of unequivocal guilt...

...Maltz was offended by and vehemently rejected a statement by Trumbo—who like Maltz had gone to jail for resisting HUAC—that both those who named names and those who went to jail were "victims...

...We were starry-eyed and innocent...

...At a later point Erikson writes that in the midst of the witchcraft hysteria "the sociologist in Cotton Mather began to notice that witches who terrorized the countryside were really very similar to the honest men who prosecuted them...

...That genre of fiction involves a heavily plotted story with, typically, at least three fixed and easily distinguishable elements: an innocent victim, a detective hero, and a guilty criminal...

...Maltz's rejection of Trumbo's position is understandable...

...and others who acted as go-betweens helping those summoned by HUAC to negotiate, on the one hand, the perils posed by the Committee and, on the other, the dangers of the blacklist established by the producers...

...The Committee's formal name indicated that it was in the business of drawing and maintaining boundaries by delineating un-American activities...

...entrepreneurs of Americanism who published such "lists" as Red Channels...

...The testing of Albert Maltz, then, was a rehearsal for HUAC, and it is appropriate to ask what lessons could have been learned from it by those caught up in what Navasky calls "the red subculture...

...Maltz's experience was not unique...

...He sees it as a "complex episode in the party's history...

...He had joined the CP in 1935 and for him, as for many others, it represented an attempt to realize the ideals he had absorbed from "the Marxist classics .. the noblest set of ideals ever penned by man...

...Unlike the usual novel, the conventional detective story depicts an unproblematic world in which the evil that sets the story in motion is dealt with in a way that leaves no residue of questions about guilt, innocence, or the nature of evil itself...

...To accept the premise and the reality it created distracted attention from the actual behavior of the CP...

...any virgin can testify that it takes a considerable effort of will to retain one's innocence...

...That story builds to its climax with interviews (questioning) of cooperative witnesses (suspects) and the analysis (crossexamination) of their reasons (alibis) for cooperation...

...Navasky draws upon the 174 work of the sociologists Harold Garfinkel, who introduced the term, and Kai T. Erikson...

...Education is not the sole source of attraction...

...In the course of introducing a longish quotation from Erikson on "deviant sanctions" Navasky makes what appears to be the obligatory snide remark of one who has profited from a reading of scholarly work that "of course most scholarship of the period divorced itself from concern with the content of actions...

...177...

...But are the ends of political education adequately served when history is cast in these forms, or even when a particular literary genre merely serves as a metaphor governing the approach to the task at hand...

...Erikson argues that the integrity and identity of a group depends upon maintaining the boundaries that separate and distinguish it from other groups...

...These are the recurrent nightmares that follow victories over tyranny and unjust social orders...

...He was a victim of the party as much as he was a victim of HUAC: both put him in the impossible position of choosing between principles that defined him as a person—his convictions as a writer in the case of the party and his commitments to comrades in the case of HUACand the demands of authority...

...it is not simply a case of pressure being applied to Maltz to conform to a doctrine...

...This material, under Navasky's intelligent probing of its significance, does much to deepen and extend our understanding of the social-psychological processes involved in such investigations as the Committee's...

...But this complexity of modern political life is one that his story line cannot accommodate...

...those periods in which freedom must be defended but when it is not clear who is friend and who is foe, or, indeed, whether they are separable into such neat categories...

...The ADA and such liberals as Arthur Schlesinger, Jr...

...No excuse at all for acceding to [HUAC's] ritualistic requirement of names...

...Maltz is wrong: it was not at all easy for long-term members like himself to leave...