MEMORIES OF THE WITCHHUNTS
Dennis, Peggy
MEMORIES OF THE WITCHHUNTS A survivor sifts through the rubble and finds the ashes still smoldering BY PEGGY DENNIS It happened some thirty-five years ago and lasted, in its virulent form, for...
...But we are being hurled into circumstances dangerously similar to those that gave birth to that earlier Frankenstein...
...be labeled as "Communist-controlled"—especially with the Communist Party prostrate after a decade of the Government's pummelling...
...Sublimation made each day bearable...
...11 We had made a swing toward sectarianism which isolated us not only from the country's mainstream but also from the center-liberal-labor-left, which should have been nudged into organized opposition despite the sellout by many leaders...
...At one moment, 212 separate pieces of repressive legislation were pending in Congress, some aimed directly at Communists, the majority arrogantly abrogating many of labor's basic rights to organize, join unions, strike...
...Why did those on the Left, natural catalysts for struggle, fail to organize a groundswell of opposition...
...Organizationally, each committee remained a narrowly-based Left committee...
...San Francisco, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia...
...however, the similarities between then and now are surely disturbing...
...The Communist Party went underground...
...True, it was an odd moment...
...But it is not axiomatic that this will happen, and those on the Left who claim that the Reagan two-prong offensive cannot succeed are undercutting the urgent need to organize and fight so that it will not succeed...
...If I battled more effectively...
...Both Communist and anti-Communist fell victim to the Government's trap...
...The activists of the 1960s had to start over from point zero, a new breed with little support from the old...
...Much depends On the ability of the Left, as catalyst for that struggle, to understand and avoid the pitfalls and mistakes of the 1950s—and some of the pitfalls and mistakes of the 1960s, as well...
...He had refused to recognize the constitutional right of that committee to probe political beliefs...
...Too few are feeling enough grass-roots pressure to find the strength to stand and fight...
...Every slightest approach we do make is most gratifying in response...
...The party declared the old liberalism dead and our coalition relations voided...
...Separately and together, our mettle was again being tested...
...And he had charged that the committee was illegally constituted because one of its members, John Rankin of Mississippi, was elected in a district in which more than 700.000 black persons had been denied their voting rights...
...Unlike Humpty Dumpty, we did put our lives together again...
...The accused had minimal choices: confess to imaginary sins as defined by the accuser, repent, and cooperate, or be convicted for the crime of defying the accuser, or be convicted of "perjury" for denying the charges...
...Some became uneasy only when McCarthyism overstepped "acceptable" bounds and threatened to engulf them...
...They were propelled by the same sentiment expressed by Royal W. France, a constitutional lawyer in Florida, who said he joined the amnesty movement "not because I believe in what you [Communists] say, but because I believe you have the right to say it...
...I feel most strongly that our limitations are self-imposed...
...And I was confident we would weather this storm, too...
...There were, however, throughout the decade of McCarthyism, other pulls, away from isolation and self-destruction...
...The current Cold War revival and the economic war offensive need to be made as untenable for the Reagan Administration as the Vietnam war and the centuries-long denial of black civil rights were made untenable for the Johnson and Nixon Administrations...
...Tens of thousands each year in towns and cities responded to our direct-mail brochures appealing for practical aid to the prisoners and their children...
...Some 160 of its leading activists in nineteen areas—Los Angeles...
...We often resorted to fumblingcliches in an effort to replace fear with pride in parents victimized for their social beliefs and political activism...
...only a few local groups, particularly in California, resisted...
...1950...
...That's what democracy is all about...
...If I were more capable...
...11 We had succumbed to abstract concentration on divisive ideological issues instead of translating the Cold War and the witchhunts into terms that would relate to the everyday concerns of most Americans...
...By 1950...
...Guilt at being "free" on the outside...
...I found myself grappling with two sets of conflicting emotions—one familiar and strength-giving, the other unfamiliar and frightening...
...We fought a losing, isolating confrontation on the turf selected by the Government and the Cold Warriors...
...Some have already climbed aboard the Reagan bandwagon...
...Eleven national unions, with a total of more than one million members, were expelled from the CIO labor federation in fights over the Cold War and communism...
...Liberals passed the ammunition to fire the guns of McCarthyism Unfortunately, after I960 the party leadership, rescinding the basic changes made by two national conventions in the 1950s, quickly returned to old shibboleths...
...Aborn-again McCarthyism in the 1980s will not be an exact replica of the 1950s...
...In all probability the code words, the targets, the victims, the methodology, will differ...
...The acrimonious debates among liberal intellectuals make titillating reading now as they argue in print over who among them had been a name-naming scoundrel, who a courageous challenger of the inquisitors...
...shift to a more subtle "carrot" diplomacy...
...But fighting...
...the other part floundered in fatalism and paralysis...
...As handmaiden to the Cold War, McCarthyism receded by 1956 and 1957 only after it was no longer useful to the Government...
...he told a testimonial audience that he was going "with supreme confidence in our people and our party...
...Those positive experiences should have demonstrated the need of the hour...
...The farther we activists moved away from the,leadership centers of both, the more we found the untapped resource we sought...
...Scores of national and state legislative bodies were simultaneously probing "Communist influences" in the unions, the churches, educational institutions, peace groups, the organizations of farmers, veterans, youth...
...The speed with which the Reagan Administration has put the country onto a bellicose Cold War course recalls Truman's abrupt shift during the first weeks of his Presidency...
...By the time McCarthyism had outlived its usefulness to the Government, American liberalism and radicalism had been permanently weakened, never fully to regain the organized strength they displayed between 1935 and 1945...
...Their prejudices blinded them to the distinction between ideological differences and criminal offenses, and blinded them, also, to their own self-proclaimed principles of liberalism...
...all that followed was a repetitious replay on an ever enlarging field...
...We were caught in a fishbowl existence...
...However, in activity the committees became catalysts for outreach efforts...
...In 1950, with the anti-Communist mania escalating, two well-known Communist Party candidates received 64,213 votes in Cleveland and 613,670 in California in campaigns that identified McCarthyism in terms of practical, local issues...
...While influential anti-Communist liberals actively helped pass repressive laws, hundreds of non-Communist and anti-Communist civil libertarians singly and in group telegrams and petitions spoke out in behalf of amnesty for Communists...
...From Philip Murray, head of the national CIO, to Hubert Humphrey, the Great Liberal, to Roger Baldwin, nationafhead of the ACLU, they adopted the ideological premises of repression...
...For ten years the democratic process was under siege, and those movements and organizations most vitally affected were in retreat, immobilized, almost destroyed, as much by their own compounded errors as by the repressive assaults...
...President Truman's Executive Order 9835 had set the tone for "loyalty" screenings around the country...
...But while numerically weaker, with less organized clout than was available in the 1950s, the Left today (I use the term in its broadest sense) is more inclined toward resistance—calling up the 1960s rather than the 1950s...
...The struggle for human and economic survival, classically, will then merge with the struggle for democratic survival, and the elementary constitutional and legal right to fight, to protest, to petition will have to be defended...
...What was intended originally as a minimal step to save a skeletal core from the sweep of arrests became a rout, an eclipse...
...Meanwhile, a significant sector of the anti-communist labor and liberal leadership, at best always a reluctant participant in the old coalitions, eagerly embraced the Cold War and the witchhunts...
...Notes attached to both small and sizable contributions indicated that we had so placed the issue that individuals and organizations could protest the costs of McCarthyism in ways that transcended ideological differences between those imprisoned and those coming to their aid...
...Now there is a renewed interest in how it all happened...
...They bought and circulated among their members thousands of copies of our booklet, Vengeance on the Young, which exposed FBI harassment of our children...
...We adopted an ideological litmus test closely similar to that of the Government...
...His words were applauded, and they were quoted often in the months that followed...
...They supported the guilt-by-association process which entrapped all dissent...
...A new balance of power struck by the Soviet Union's nuclear capacity suddenly made coexistence a more judicious course for U.S...
...On the offensive, the people's movements wrested victories over strong right-wing opposition...
...If one believes that problems of immediate survival can only be tackled by the basic transformation of society, one then negates a struggle to wrest from a resistant Government a changed direction now...
...we sought to evade the ideological shoals and shore up coalitions to stop the immediate repressions...
...From the 1920s through the 1940s, working in southern California, in Wisconsin, New York, and Washington, in the underground movements abroad, we had confronted, organized, cajoled, coerced, demanded...
...The Rosenbergs were executed...
...Eleanor Roosevelt wrote in McCall's magazine that the Smith Act "was from many points of view a dangerous Act...
...The party's isolation, its retreat from effective mass action, had its logical end late in 1951 and early in 1952, when the party organization went underground...
...In a four-year open and public debate, the majority consensus sharply defined the mistakes: H We had adopted too negative a political analysis in the heat of the national crisis—an analysis that conceded too much to the Government's assaults and evoked an unjustified retreat...
...Although some prefer to remember otherwise, neither our courage nor our struggle played any significant part in bringing about the end of McCarthyism...
...One may well be repelled by that party's blinkered and uncritical fealty to the concept of the Soviet Union and its leaders as the fount of infallible wisdom...
...As our amnesty activity developed, France expressed to me his shock that his "old friend" Roger Baldwin of the ACLU refused to join that effort, although France did convince Norman Thomas to speak out belatedly on the Communists' behalf, "in the interests of democracy...
...Guilt at one's own inadequacies...
...Most important is the realization that out here one is talking to people who can and are doing things—Negro and white, women and men, workers in auto and leather plants, recently elected shop stewards, persons in local and state politics...
...Why were the Government's repressions successful...
...invaded by the media...
...Too many liberals at that time betrayed this precept of their liberalism and too many Communists were afraid to exercise that right...
...And none of its component parts and participants could, by the wildest stretch of dema-goguery...
...We often found it easier to comfort the nightmare-invoked sobbing than to verbalize a response to a child's tearful plea: "Why can't you and daddy be just plain, ordinary people...
...One may view as incredibly stupid the rigidities and fallacies that govern internal party life...
...In the third year of the repressions one part of the former progressive spectrum had climbed on the Government's bandwagon...
...The governor of Texas proposed the death sentence for Communists For years, we lived each day in fear— personal fear for self and family, the even greater fear of what the political madness portended for the country...
...On the streets, in the factories, in the unions and the organizations, in state and national legislative bodies, we had built bridges not only among all sectors of the movement but also into the mainstream...
...Despite the intimidating atmosphere created by the Taft-Hartley "loyalty" purges and the red-baiting engaged in by labor leaders, local unions in New England, Chicago, Detroit, Denver, Washington state, and San Francisco responsed to our solicitations with resolutions calling for amnesty for the Communist prisoners and for repeal of all repressive laws...
...The faces of our puzzled, frightened children, caught in a maelstrom they could only vaguely comprehend, troubled us...
...We chose to take our stand on what at that moment was the most difficult issue—that of the constitutional and legal rights of Communists...
...Backs were turned against us, some in fear of guilt by association...
...If I knew better how to seize the hour...
...All this testifies to the psychology of fear, the power of intimidation, the pitfalls of rationalization, the quality of courage...
...The anger I felt at the political enemy was a good, vitalizing feeling...
...If the catalysts for struggle show indications of becoming an effective brake, they will face a new era of repression, especially from a President who as governor of California sent armed troops to occupy the city of Berkeley in outraged overreaction to the student demonstrations of the 1960s...
...Now, in 1950, all that was dissipated...
...They agree with the Reagan assumption that capitalism can no longer provide for the needs of the people, that social reforms are relics of an old liberal past...
...Over the years, thousands were hounded out of jobs and professions, not in Hollywood alone but in factories, on campuses, in government...
...We were into the third year of the Cold War and witchhunt offensive...
...But that's another story...
...one can elicit and get realistic responses as to what they think should and, most important, what can be done...
...One may well reject the Communist Party's mechanistic adherence to the methodology and ideological precepts of the Russian Communist experience...
...However, these are questions of political, theoretical, ideological opinion, subjects for debate in the marketplace of ideas...
...the challenges of the accused went practically unreported...
...The aggressor fought the war in the media, in Congressional hearings, in courtroom trials before judges and juries already conditioned by the intimidating political atmosphere...
...It was the most difficult because Communist was the core buzzword on which the entire structure of McCarthyism was built...
...If you don't approve of a law, then you don't feel that anyone is rightfully convicted under that law...
...They turned against each other over ideological differences, rejecting almost two decades of positive experiences of working together toward common goals, despite ideological differences...
...violated by FBI sleuths who followed our children into the classroom and onto the playground, tapped our phones and bugged our homes, visited our neighbors, threatened our relatives, coerced our employers...
...What were their errors in judgment and tactics...
...The newly independent Third World countries with their natural resources and their strongly nationalist, anti-imperialist, and simplistic socialist ideologies now made expedient a U.S...
...As they did three decades ago, core sectors of liberal leadership are floundering...
...If...
...Together with others, I strongly believed that the most direct and dramatic way to defang the ideological anti-communist Big Lie on which the repressions were based was to vindicate the social ideas and activism of those imprisoned, but to do so within the broader context of constitutional, democratic, and legal rights...
...Hesitant...
...Also, for the first time in my then thirty-three years in the party, we officially confronted the relationship between our inadequacies and our rigid and uncritical ties with the ideological and theoretical precepts of the Soviet experience...
...The Government had enforced upon the land an arbitrary litmus test in which such code words as "Communist," "Communist dupe," "Communist fellow-traveler" were declared synonymous with "criminal" and "traitor" and were used to detect dissent...
...The Taft-Hartley Act introduced the compulsory anti-Communist oath into the labor movement...
...Even as the Communist Party vanished into the underground, giving up its activities and defenses, and even as others insisted "now is not a good time to fight," a foolhardy few set out to prove there was an untapped resistance out there somewhere...
...the time, went into prison on May 12...
...I became a spokeswoman for that ad hoc group...
...Although wary of the threats of retaliation made by local and Federal prison authorities, we publicly defended the political status and constitutional rights of the Smith Act prisoners, and we aggressively guarded their physical well-being...
...Thousands of Communist activists in the unions and mass organizations were committed by this new party policy to make the ideological war paramount...
...Living each day with a deep, inner-core personal aloneness engendered especially by the years of separation from loved ones who were either in prison or vanished into an uncharted underground, we clung to the bigger political meaning of our individual circumstances...
...Many are quibbling only over the degree to which they will support the revived Cold War and the economic war at home...
...This challenge was made long before the civil rights movement and the 1965 Voting Rights Act...
...Fearful...
...Others are wait-and-seeing, saying "now is not a good time to fight," even as the budget, tax, and programs cuts are being put into effect...
...We alienated those who could have been allies if the issues had been framed differently...
...Others, too...
...So on that morning when he left, the time ahead stretched far beyond the one-year sentence...
...Muste, Dorothy Day, Quakers in Philadelphia, black ministers from their pulpits in San Francisco, a white Catholic priest in his parish house in New York City, mid-ranking union officials in the Midwest, artists, scientists, educators around the country...
...In 1947 and 1948, with the Cold War and the witchhunts and the breakup of the old coalitions already well launched, a last hurrah did defeat the Mundt-Nixon Bill, a particularly vicious anti-labor, antidemocratic, anti-Communist piece of legislation...
...In 1952, we convened a national conference to form the National Committee for Amnesty to Smith Act Victims...
...Both the man and the ism were discarded...
...Attitudes toward the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, the Soviet Union, took precedence over united actions on everyday bread-and-butter issues...
...There were no focal barricades to mount, no police lines to charge...
...we are uncomfortably aware that the United States in the 1980s faces a possible replay of the 1950s...
...Both turned against the coalitions when these were the main target of the repressions...
...But there was no antidote for the feelings of guilt...
...The governor of Texas proposed the death sentence for Communists...
...The spy mania was at high pitch, engineered by the calculated arrests of Alger Hiss, Morton Sobell, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, Judith Cope-land...
...Wary politicians and reluctant labor leaders were pushed by grass-roots pressures into directions they originally had no intention of exploring...
...My activism became centered on the growing number of McCarthyism's victims, especially those in prison...
...we moved on to new barricades of social struggle...
...the vicious game was familiar...
...His charges and probes of "Communist infiltration" into the highest echelons of the military hit at the very foundations of bipartisan state power...
...To the best of my recollection, only the Communist Party emerged from the nightmare of McCarthyism determined to confront its own inadequacies and errors...
...My lifetime conditioning as a born-into-the-movement child and a full-time Communist activist since age sixteen made me proud that, as on so many occasions in our twenty-two years together, Gene and I were again in the front lines, serving The Cause...
...They provided the liberal sanction badly needed by the head hunters...
...In the present-day Left there are those who choose to place primary emphasis on ideological questions...
...These are not criminal felonies, nor reasons for persecution and imprisonment, nor cause for blacklists and witchhunts...
...On the domestic front, just as Truman and McCarthy cloaked their assault on people's movements in legal maneuvers, so the Reagan Administration moves through Congress for its economic attack on the people and is also moving through the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Security and Terrorism to link domestic dissent with "international terrorism," to resurrect the House Internal Security Committee, to revive an arbitrary assault on the more than 750,000 organizations and individual activists on whom dossiers have already been compiled...
...These leftists maintain that a basic transformation of the system is the only answer now...
...We all clung to that confidence in the long view, for the immediate moment did not offer much reason for hope...
...The official charge against Gene had been "contempt of Congress" for failing to respond to a subpoena to appear before the House Committee on Un-American Activities...
...Despite the shrill spy mania, hundreds of thousands in our country and in foreign countries, motivated by varied reasons, expressed anger and anguish...
...So there is a new urgency in the effort to seek lessons from the past...
...They conceived the 1950 Internal Security Act and the 1954 Communist Control Act...
...Gene was joining a number already in prison, all of them challengers and victims of various Government inquisitions...
...MEMORIES OF THE WITCHHUNTS A survivor sifts through the rubble and finds the ashes still smoldering BY PEGGY DENNIS It happened some thirty-five years ago and lasted, in its virulent form, for only a decade—a brief moment when measured by history's clock...
...Careers and lives were destroyed...
...When he went into prison for one year on May 12, 1950, it appeared likely that the awaited Supreme Court decision on the Smith Act conviction might mean he would start serving that five-year sentence without even coming out after the year's time...
...The sheer defensive need to fight for that survival may compel formation of an opposition within the mainstream...
...They passed the ammunition to fire the guns of McCarthyism...
...The once influential coalitions had been destroyed, never fully to recover...
...Then there was also a six-month "contempt of court" sentence imposed on the defense attorneys and Gene, who had defended himself in the Smith Act trial...
...foreign policy...
...Survivors are encouraged to sift through the rubble of memories, and they are often surprised to find the ashes still smoldering...
...Tenaciously we sought to protect them, yet hesitated at overprotection...
...There were hate letters and politically obscene telephone calls...
...Personal courage and some political struggle were, of course, evident in the McCarthy decade, but these were not the dominant features of that time, as some nostalgic reminiscences imply...
...The Progressive Party was formed by the former New Deal forces as an electoral vehicle to challenge the rightward shift of President Truman...
...The accuser postured and shouted before the nation's cooperative cameras...
...Yet the vividness with which we recall those years of Mc-Carthyism bears witness to the fact that the old wounds only surface-healed...
...If one places prime emphasis on an ideological "only alternative" (whether it be in the electoral, economic, or social areas) as a precondition for alliances and coalitions, one cuts the Left off from the mainstream of our country, from the majority who are not ready to buy an "only alternative" but who are being propelled by their own circumstances to join an immediate struggle for survival...
...From the beginning we Communists reacted to the onslaught of the Cold War with a sharp pendulum swing into isolationist sectarianism...
...The Government was successfully using ideological differences to split established, long-time coalitions based on those rights...
...I was its chairwoman...
...The reasons for his refusal, stated in a document sent to that committee, were not allowed as evidence in the trial...
...The top eleven national leaders of the Communist Party had been convicted under the Smith Act for "conspiracy" to teach and advocate the forcible overthrow of the Government...
...A few days before my husband Gene, national head of the Communist Party at Peggy Dennis is the author of "Autobiography of an American Communist: A Personal View of a Political Life...
...She has written for The Nation, In These Times, The Progressive, Socialist Review, and the San Francisco Review of Books, and is now working on a memoir of the McCarthy years...
...It was this reality that was harder to cope with than the assaults of the enemy...
...A number of states and counties enacted laws forbidding Communists to enter their territories—proposals and laws that could not be enforced, of course, but that intensified, by their mere mention, the national atmosphere of intimidation and fear...
...With the sudden fading of a "communist menace" abroad, the need to sustain one at home abruptly dissipated...
...The Frankenstein was out of control...
...But they were not heeded...
...Baltimore...
...But too often forgotten in the telling is the politics: the true character and motives of the Government's repressions, which went far beyond Hollywood and liberal intellectuals...
...In September 1951, we organized the National Committee of Families of Smith Act Victims...
...who a duped fellow-traveler of the Communists, who a victim of the headhunters' lethal game...
...And current indications are that many liberals, for their part, learned little from their role and experience in the McCarthy years...
...supported our efforts— A.J...
...Even while I was sustained by this activity and the anger that fed it, I lived with a constant demoralizing and frightened sensation of being betrayed and forsaken for the first time in my twenty-seven years of adult activism...
...Then, too, by the mid-1950s the Senator from Wisconsin had over-extended his ism...
...Also by the late 1950s, a volatile black civil rights movement in the South shattered the years of intimidated silence...
...In the late summer of 1952, while on the first of what were to become periodic national speaking tours for the Families and Amnesty committees, I wrote to Gene in Atlanta penitentiary: "I am happiest and most confident when I am out here in the field away from the chaotic doomsday gloom of the center in N. Y...
...Detroit...
...Louis, Chicago, Seattle, Denver, New York, Buffalo, Boston, New Haven, Cleveland, Butte, South Carolina, Hawaii, Puerto Rico—were either in prison or involved in litigation...
...We had lost skirmishes and won battles...
...By 1952 and 1953, belatedly, an impressive if ineffectual protest was mounted against the Rosenbergs' death sentence...
...Truman's "containment of communism" offensive has become Reagan's equation of "international terrorism" with guerrilla freedom fighters and his equation of guerrillas with the Soviet Union...
...More than did the Truman offensive, the Reagan Administration has created a direct threat to simple economic and social survival—a threat that immediately affects everyone's daily life...
Vol. 45 • October 1981 • No. 10
