Declarations of Independence: Cross-Examining American Ideology

by Howard Zinn

  they believed were Communists. Actor, sailor, and adventurer Sterling Hayden, who played

  tough roles on the screen, was bul ied into informing on fel ow leftists by the committee and

  later he was angry at himself and at his interrogators. His autobiography Wanderer was

  published in 1963, dedicated to Rockwel Kent and Warwick M. Tomkins, "Sailormen, Artists,

  Radicals." In his book, Hayden addresses his former psychoanalyst, who apparently had

  advised him to cooperate with the committee; "I'l say this too, that if it hadn't been for you I wouldn't have turned into a stoolie for J. Edgar Hoover. I don't think you have the foggiest

  notion of the contempt I have had for myself since the day I did that thing… . Fuck it! And

  fuck you too."6

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  The famous "Hol ywood Ten," including some of the most important directors and writers in the motion picture industry, refused to give names or to discuss their political affiliations,

  citing the First Amendment. They were sent to prison.

  Joseph Papp, producer of Shakespeare-in-the-Park in New York City, was cal ed before the

  committee, and there was this exchange:

  Arens [staff director for the committee]: Do you have the opportunity to

  inject into your plays … any propaganda … which would influence others to be

  sympathetic with the communist philosophy?

  Papp: Sir, the plays we do are Shakespeare's plays. Shakespeare said, "To

  thine own self, be true.

  Arens: There is no suggestion here by this chairman or anyone else that

  Shakespeare was a Communist. That is ludicrous and absurd. That is the

  Commie line.7

  Playwright Arthur Mil er defied the committee. Questioned about whether "a Communist

  who is a poet" should have the right to advocate revolutionary ideas, he said; "I tel you frankly, sir, I think, if you are talking about a poem, I would say that a man should have the

  right to write a poem just about anything." Mil er refused to give names, was cited for

  contempt, convicted, but won on appeal.

  Some of the chairmen of the House Un-American Activities Committee ended up in prison

  for fraudulent activities of various kinds. The screenwriter Ring Lardner, Jr., one of the

  Hol ywood Ten, recal ed this encounter of his prison days:

  The blue prison fatigues hung loosely on the weary, perspiring man whose

  path across the quadrangle was about to meet mine… . He was custodian of

  the chicken yard at the Federal Correctional Institution, Danbury,

  Connecticut, and his name was J. Parnel Thomas, formerly chairman of the

  Committee on Un-American Activities of the House of Representatives.

  Thomas had been convicted of defrauding the government by padding his payrol .8

  Novelist Howard Fast was a member of the Communist party, who left it in anger at its

  support of the Soviet Union's invasion of Hungary. In his memoir, The Naked God, he

  recal ed what had happened to him in the United States because of his support of

  communism:

  During this period I found my own destruction as a writer who had ful and

  normal access to the American public. Bit by bit, that access was pared away;

  reviewers began to read Communist propaganda into things I had written;

  bookstores were reluctant to order my books; "public-spirited" individuals

  undertook movements to have my books banned; and Citizen Tom Paine, of

  al things, was thrown out of the New York City school system on the excuse

  of "purple passages."9

  Fast was indignant at his own treatment, but contrasted it with the fate of dissident writers

  in the Soviet Union and elsewhere (silenced, tortured, put to death):

  In the United States, I was crippled in my function as writer. At great cost

  and financial loss, I had to publish my own books. From comparative wealth

  and success, I was reduced to a struggle for literary existence; and gradual y

  my continuing work became less and less known. But beyond deprivation,

  these facts are important:

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  1. I continued to write.

  2. I continued to live.

  3. I continued to fight for my inalienable privilege of writing as I pleased.10

  No doubt the punishment of radical intel ectuals in the United States was mild compared to

  what happened to them in the Soviet Union. But it was not mild in human terms for the

  people involved, and not tolerable at al in a country claiming to be the home of liberty. The

  nation was deprived for years of the talents of some of its most extraordinary artists.

  Paul Robeson, for instance, the black singer and actor, became a nonperson because of his

  sympathy with communism. His banishment reached the point where the 1950 edition of

  Col ege Footbal , in listing the Al -American footbal team for 1918, omitted his name.

  Robeson had been Al -American that year, and so the book had to list a ten-man footbal

  team.11

  The scientist Albert Einstein received a letter in 1953 from a New York school teacher

  (teachers were being dismissed for radical or Communist activities) who asked him for

  advice on dealing with congressional investigations. Einstein replied,

  What ought the minority of intel ectuals to do against this evil? Frankly, I can

  only see the revolutionary way of noncooperation in the sense of Gandhi's.

  Every intel ectual who is cal ed before one of the committees ought to refuse

  to testify, i.e., he must be prepared for jail and economic ruin, in short, for

  the sacrifice of his personal welfare in the interest of the cultural welfare of

  his country.

  Perhaps an example of this "noncooperation" was given by the German playwright Bertolt

  Brecht, who came to work in Hol ywood for a while and was cal ed before the House

  Committee on Un-American Activities. Brecht kept the committee off-guard and confused by

  his replies. To questions about the plays he had written, in which the committee saw sinister

  Communist ideas, Brecht asked his interrogator if he had read it in the original German. The

  committee, perhaps embarrassed, certainly baffled, let Brecht go. Someone later described

  the questioning of Brecht this way: "It was as if a zoologist were being cross-examined by

  apes."12

  Despite al the absurdities, the congressional appropriations for the committee grew in the

  postwar period from $50,000 in 1945, to $800,000 in 1970. By then it had 754,000 names

  on three-by-five cards in its files.

  No president, liberal or conservative, Republican or Democrat, ever cal ed for the abolition

  of the committee. And the Supreme Court, even at its most liberal (the Warren Court of the

  1960s) never used its opportunities to declare the committee unconstitutional on the

  obvious ground that its very purpose (to investigate "un-American propaganda activities") violated the First Amendment. The committee, therefore, was not simply a creature of the

  paranoid right in America; it was sustained and supported by liberals and conservatives of

  our two-party system, in al three branches of government.

  In other words, anti-communism was as American as apple pie. It was a bipartisan policy.

  Democrat Harry Truman himself issued Executive Order #9835, requiring the Department of

  Justice to prepare a list of organizations it determined to be "fascist, communist, or

  subversive" or "seeking to alter the form of government of the United States by

  unconstitutional me
ans." Not only membership in, but "sympathetic association" with any organization on this list was to be considered in determining disloyalty for government

  employees.13

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  That list of "subversive" groups grew longer and longer. By 1954, it counted in the hundreds, including, besides the Communist party and the Ku Klux Klan, the Chopin Cultural

  Center, the Committee for the Negro in the Arts, the Committee for the Protection of the Bil

  of Rights, the League of American Writers, and the Nature Friends of America.

  Until the 1960s, the committee towered frighteningly over its witnesses. The strategy of the

  left in refusing to answer questions, counting on the First or the Fifth Amendment, may wel

  have been wrong. It led many people to think they had something to hide. The movements

  of the sixties brought a new kind of witness, the brazen radical wil ing to answer al

  questions, seizing the initiative, and using the committee room as a forum for political

  declamations.

  Dagmar Wilson, of "Women Strike for Peace" gave the committee a taste of the new

  defiance in 1962. Six years later, in December 1968, Tom Hayden and Rennie Davis of the

  Students for a Democratic Society, and Dave Del inger, long-time radical pacifist, appeared

  before the committee. They were al involved in the movement to stop the war in Vietnam.

  They answered al the questions, and then took the offensive. As in this encounter between

  the Committee and Tom Hayden:

  Mr. Conley (a staff member of the committee): Mr. Hayden, is it your present

  aim to seek the destruction of the present American democratic system?

  Mr. Hayden: Wel , I don't believe the present American democratic system

  exists. That is why we can't get together to straighten things out. You have

  destroyed the American democratic system by the existence of a committee

  of this kind.14

  By 1970 the committee was losing its standing. It was being overwhelmed by the events of

  the sixties: the civil rights movement, the antiwar movement. It changed its name to the

  House Internal Security Committee and was not heard from very much.

  Behind the absurdities, something serious had been taking place and was stil going on—the

  attempt to shape the American mind so that people would react with automatic anger when

  they heard the word communism, so they would accept the huge military budgets (which

  doubled from 1950 to 1970 and then tripled from 1970 to 1980, going from $40 bil ion in

  1950 to over $250 bil ion in 1980) and so they would accept wars and covert actions

  overseas if they were aimed at "communism."

  In the history of the human race, we have often seen certain words used to stop thinking,

  to end rational discourse, to arouse hatred, words which are murderous. The words few and

  nigger have led to mass murder, lynchings, and enslavement. The words Catholic,

  Protestant, and Moslem have been used to inflame religious wars.

  The word Communist in this country has been such a word. It has been used to justify the

  support by the United States of military dictatorships in Chile, the Philippines, Iran, El

  Salvador, and other places. When Ferdinand Marcos and his wife Imelda, who ran the

  Philippines ruthlessly and accumulated a huge fortune, were final y overthrown in 1988 and

  fled the islands with enormous sums of money, their American friend, Doris Duke, the

  tobacco heiress, praised them as "my country's vital outpost in combating Communism."15

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  In Guatemala, when the newly elected President Arbenz decided to confiscate large

  amounts of land owned by the United Fruit Company, the CIA and United Fruit both began

  preparing for the overthrow of the Arbenz government. Tom McCann, who was a Public

  Relations officer for United Fruit, wrote later about his orders: "Get out the word, a

  Communist beachhead has been established in the Western Hemisphere."16 United Fruit

  created a book, Report on Guatemala, which said the new government was a Moscow-

  directed conspiracy. The book was sent to every congressman. And in 1954 a ClA-backed

  invasion overthrew Arbenz and set up a right-wing dictatorship that murdered tens of

  thousands of people.

  Chile was the victim of a military coup in 1973, overthrowing its elected president, Salvador

  Al ende. The United States had been working secretly against Al ende, a moderate Socialist,

  since 1964. A staff member of the Senate Select Committee investigating the CIA, Karl

  Inderfurth, testified in 1975 that the CIA had set up a special group to carry on a massive

  propaganda campaign against Al ende. It was, he said, "a scare campaign … it relied heavily

  on images of Soviet tanks and Cuban firing squads."

  Another staff member of the Senate committee, Gregory Treverton, testified that, despite

  the public propaganda, the United States government knew through the National

  Intel igence Estimate (NIE) that there was no significant threat of a Soviet military presence

  in Chile. But the campaign went forward.17

  The need to "stop communism" was used to justify the invasion of Vietnam and to carry on

  there a ful -scale war in which over a mil ion people died. It was used to justify the bombing

  of peasant vil ages, the chemical poisoning of crops, the "search and destroy missions," the laying waste of an entire country. GI Charles Hutto, who participated in the massacre of

  Vietnamese peasants at My Lai, told army investigators: "I remember the unit's combat

  assault on My Lai 4. The night before the mission we had a briefing by Captain Medina. He

  said everything in the vil age was communist. So we shot men, women, and children."

  The Vietnam War may have been a turning point, when more and more Americans, seeing

  where anticommunism had led us, began to be suspicious of government propaganda.

  Charles Hutto, speaking years after the war, by then married with two children, said, "I was

  19 years old and I was always told to do what the Government … told me to do. But now I'l

  tel my son, if the Government cal s, use your own judgment. Now I don't think there should

  even be a thing cal ed war, because it messes up a person's mind."18

  In the sixties, leaders of the civil rights movement—Martin Luther King and the young

  blacks in SNCC—refused to be bul ied by accusations of Communist influence that appeared

  in the press. They knew it was fraudulent, designed to weaken the movement. Charles

  Sherrod, a SNCC activist in Albany, Georgia, reacted to journalists who spoke vaguely,

  ignorantly, of "Communist infiltration" of the civil rights movement. Sherrod said, "I don't care who the heck it is—if he's wil ing to come down in the front lines and bring his body

  along with me to die—then he's welcome."

  Communism: A Rational Critique

  We have been dealing with an irrational, hysterical anti-communism, which has had terrible

  consequences for human rights in this country and abroad. There is, however, a rational

  critique of communism that requires thoughtful discussion.

  I would start such a critique with two statements that I have come to believe over the

  years.

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  1. The ideal of communism—a classless society of equal abundance for al , based on highly developed technology, a very short workday, and, therefore, the possibility of real freedom

  for individuals to develop their aesthetic and personal interests as they like; a society free of

&n
bsp; the coercive apparatus of the state, organized by associated col ectives, based on

  workplaces and neighborhoods, repudiating racial or sexual supremacy; a genuine

  participatory democracy, with ful opportunity for free expression of al ideas, devoid of

  national hatreds, national boundaries, and war—this remains a wonderful goal. Karl Marx, I

  believe, envisioned such a society. Mil ions of people in the world have been inspired by that

  ideal and have been wil ing to sacrifice and risk al for it.

  2. The Soviet Union, transforming Marx's transitional dictatorship of the proletariat into a

  deeply entrenched dictatorship of party bureaucrats, has repeatedly betrayed the

  communist ideal. While it has achieved a certain amount of economic progress and

  instituted social programs—child care, universal health care, free education, retirement

  benefits, ful employment—it has been brutal in its treatment of its own citizens, murdering

  peasants in large numbers during the process of col ectivization; imprisoning, torturing, and

  executing those it considered dissidents, whether ordinary people, intel ectuals, artists, or

  distinguished leaders of the 1917 Revolution. The term police state fits it very wel , and this is intolerable to anyone who believes in democratic socialism. It has imitated the imperialist

  powers in invading other countries—Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Afghanistan, kil ing

  thousands of people.

  When I was a young shipyard worker, I read the Communist Manifesto and understood why

  this essay, written in 1848 by Karl Marx, age thirty, and Friedrich Engels, age twenty-eight,

  had excited mil ions of people al over the world for a hundred years. It analyzed society in

  a way immediately verifiable by our own experience. "The history of al hitherto existing

  society is the history of class struggle."

  Even knowing only a little history of the United States, who could deny the truth of that?

  Wasn't money, yes, class, behind al the political conflicts in the country, however hidden, however "class" was glossed over in the United States? Didn't we have a long history of

  strikes, struggles between capital and labor, and even if workers didn't see this as "class

  struggle," wasn't it just that, and might they not one day understand it and try to defeat not just one employer, but the entire capitalist class?

  It made great sense, the way Marx and Engels traced the history of human society. How