The Advantage of Irony

...Dies' assurance notwithstanding, he searched for Communists in the labor unions, in the Administration, in civil rights groups, in peace groups...

...Advocating that Congress use its investigative powers to unmask the German-American Bund and other propagators of subversive doctrine, Dickstein, in 1934, became vice-chairman of a committee headed by John McCormick...

...The self-deception that many liberals felt compelled to practice to escape the relevance of this fact was perhaps most pathetically demonstrated by the clergyman Dr...

...Simultaneously, "the hunters of Communists, despising us, have offended our dearest beliefs and attacked our cherished causes...

...Reviewed by MITCHEL LEVITAS Staff Member, New York "Times Magazine" The House Committee on Un-American Activities has been compared to a vaudeville show, a Roman circus (in which victims are equitably chosen without regard to race or religion), a road company Inquisition, and a forerunner of Theater of the Absurd...

...So what is a liberal to do...

...Invariably the nation has recovered, but not without casualties...

...Consider, for example, his description of Elia Kazan's decision to tell the Committee "everything I know" (which was not much): "The new Kazan also published an advertisement which told of his being inveigled into the Party during the depression, emphasized his hatred of Communists and urged all liberals to 'speak out.' Kazan's rhetoric outstripped the substance of his part, and some critics—particularly those on the Left who could credit only uncooperative witnesses with principles—connected his self-imposed mission with the requirements of his career, an idea that may have been suggested by the conclusion of his public statement: 'The main pictures I have made and the plays I have chosen to direct represent my convictions...

...Out of this dismal record, Walter Goodman has written a superb history—perceptive, tough, thorough, engrossing...

...Yet Goodman's use of irony gives him three important advantages...

...Lately, the Committee has been bombing even in the smaller cities?usually playing to sparse, apathetic audiences and receiving perfunctory notices—leading one to suspect that some critics continue to cry havoc more out of a sense of professionalism and habit than a real fear of fascist encirclement...

...For though he was cruel, capricious and ignorant of either ideology or the appeal that attracted droves of innocents into Communist-front organizations, he was, Goodman points out, largely correct on the "single, crucial point of Communist control...

...During 30 years of headlines and headliners the act has remained basically unchanged: a mix of comedy, cruelty, stupidity, innocent irrelevance and, on rare occasion, instructive drama...

...The Communists," despising liberals, writes Goodman, "have exploited our good names for their own interests...

...I am not inclined to look under every bed for a Communist," he declared...

...or today's neglected chief officer, Edwin E. Willis...

...Lincoln Center should have it so good...

...he can step back a few paces from events...

...Richard M. Nixon, achieved real glory on the strength of his generally sober performance...

...Harold H. Velde, the sole Republican chairman...

...As a writer, it enables him to be funny—no small edge, considering the solemn idiocy of many Committee proceedings...

...Harry F. Ward, chairman of the American League for Peace and Democracy...

...Yet how to place the Committee in history in our own distracted times...

...Goodman is not bad at bearing down, either...

...At substantial peril to his sanity he has journeyed through miles of Committee transcript and emerged in good spirits, clutching gems, such as this from Gary Cooper, on Communism: "From what I hear, I don't like it because it isn't on the level...

...A foe of the New Deal, Dies had already proposed the exposure of alleged government interference with the press and radio, the sugar lobby, and America's "60 families...

...There are readers who will regret Goodman's lack of outrage...

...And as a political analyst who makes no secret of his anti-Communist liberalism, it leaves him free to take aim at both prosecutors and witnesses without feeling guilty...

...Two targets are harder to hit than one, but the realization that two legitimate targets exist is critical to understanding the Committee's history and role during the last three decades...

...After all, "this preposterous and often vicious product of American democracy," as Richard Rovere calls the Committee in his excellent introduction, undoubtedly ruined many innocent lives to no apparent purpose...

...Fellow-travelers (a term that has acquired the ring of antiquity) like Ward were the red meat of the Committee, regardless who reigned as chairman: the pallid John S. Wood...

...John Rankin, in whose mind, notes Goodman, "to call a Jew a Communist was a tautology...

...Of course, Goodman's double-barrelled approach will not appeal to those who believe that pleading the Fifth Amendment was a sign of raw courage...

...Egged on by the nation's entire lumpen right . . ." it has been busy "preserving the verities of the small town against adulteration by the big city, shoring up pietist truths against erosion by social gospel, defending the flag from soilage by aliens, intellectuals, crackpots...

...Most chairmen had scored modestly by the time they won the privilege to gavel down defiant witnesses...

...Only one Committee member...

...In 1959, Harry Truman called it the "most un-American thing in the country today...

...Congress has proved beyond doubt that a permanent repertory company can exist with or without stars, new scripts or popular support, and completely free from outside interference...

...Requested to distinguish between the dictatorship of the Kremlin and the dictatorship of the Nazis, he replied that the difference could be found between the "collective dictatorship of the Soviet Union" and the "personal dictatorship of Hitler...

...The Committee's Americanism runs deep," he declares, drawing from the dark heritage of Colonial religious persecution, the Alien and Sedition Laws, the jailing of Socialists and pacifists in World War I, the Nisei roundup of World War II...

...Instead, controlling both his material and his emotions, he manages to sustain a discriminating ironic style that illuminates more than it agitates...

...This law," writes Goodman, with customary neatness, "designed to expose Communists has exposed itself and its makers, slight men who built careers upon the distracted times...

...As a historian, irony gives him distance...

...The precedent was established and on May 26, 1938, the House overwhelmingly approved a resolution introduced by a young Texan named Martin Dies to investigate "subversive and un-American propaganda...

...Francis E. Walter...

...I expect to continue to make the same kind of pictures and to direct the same kind of plays.' Had he not testified, his expectations as regards pictures would surely have been disappointed...

...As for the Committee's sponsors in the House of Representatives, annual subsidies that are climbing toward a total of $1 billion have undone all arguments against a Federal theater...

...J. Parnell Thomas...

...Goodman, I think, argues the contrary with depressing persuasiveness...

...Surviving an even greater danger, predictability, Goodman neither blackens the boobs who often did the questioning, nor whitewashes the boobs who often did the answering...

...Three years later the energetic New Yorker first used the term "un-American" in proposing another Congressional investigation, this time aimed at "everybody" who fit the generous dimensions of the label, not simply homegrown Nazis...

...First on his list is Samuel Dickstein, a Congressman from New York's lower East Side who may be entitled to paternity rights of the Committee...

...It also will not please today's Gueveraistas among the New Left, who storm the barricades of bourgeois democracy in the name of a new totalitarianism...

...We can, it seems to me, do nothing but bear up...

...And he found them...

...These are the Committee's monuments, reminders now that sanity can be a sometime thing...

...Engineer of the Hiss-Chambers confrontation, Nixon was also coauthor of the 1948 proposal requiring the registration of the Communist party and its front groups, which finally was absorbed into the sole piece of legislation ever spawned by the Committee, the Internal Security Act of 1950...