The View from the Ground

by Martha Gellhorn

  The Un-American Activities Committee never unearthed a single victim guilty of any criminal act. It was formed as a temporary group in 1938 to search out extremists in government posts but ignored American Nazis or Fascists. After the war, the Committee concentrated on trying to destroy the liberal spirit of the Roosevelt years, the New Deal. Their ill-begotten offspring, Senator Joseph McCarthy, succeeded beyond belief. America was entering its own particular Dark Ages when lives and livelihoods were ruined because a few Congressmen and later the heinous Senator denounced people as Communists or communistic, security risks. Proof was not needed; accusation did the job. The American reign of terror; no concentration camps, no gulags, no executions; just cowardly ostracism and unemployment, and it was enough.

  About a month after the Eisler hearing, the Hollywood contingent arrived in Washington. Later famous as the Hollywood Ten, the chosen victims of the Un-American Activities Committee were a producer, two directors and seven scriptwriters, talented men employed in the making of commercial Hollywood films. They were accused of inserting communistic ideas in their work. I knew one of them, Alvah Bessie, who had fought in the Abraham Lincoln Battalion, and though I do not remember the hearings I visited them often in their hotel. I was relieved to share my anger. Sometime in those three days I made a broadcast on local radio, denouncing the Committee. My page-a-day diary describes this as a poor effort, too quickly written and not improved by the way my voice rose in rage. A feeble blow struck for freedom.

  Ten decent citizens went to jail for contempt of Congress, refusing to answer questions, to “name names” that would implicate and destroy others. Their careers were finished. The only way to save yourself was to toady to those ignorant inquisitors, the Un-Americans, elected representatives of the people. The only way those Congressmen could stay in business was to find more victims, thus justifying their charade of protecting the nation from Red enemies.

  If this kind of contemptible and dangerous blackmail was an accepted part of the American system, I wanted no part in it. I burrowed into my work until I had used up the lease of the Georgetown house, about four months in all; then moved to a cabin in a rural motel in Florida, the handiest sunshine area. There I lived in solitude until the book was done. I have always felt antipathy to it because Max Perkins, the great Scribner's editor, had talked me out of my working title, Point of No Return, saying it was too bleak. Overtired, as one is at the end of the job, I caved in to his remembered authority, for he was by then dead. I leafed through a Gideon Bible in the motel and came up with a senseless title that I abhor, The Wine of Astonishment. Since then, I will not budge on so much as a comma. But at any rate the work was finished, I mailed it to the publisher, I was free; and departed for Mexico, back to enchanting Cuernavaca.

  I had been a patriate for less than a year. I would now revert to being a writer and an American; nothing changed that. Besides, I was a foreign correspondent; logically foreign correspondents lived in foreign countries. The world was wide and much of it very lovely; I intended to suit myself from now on and if that made me an expatriate, see if I cared. Not my problem. America was big, rich and safe and could look after itself.

  The editor of Collier's, my splendid boss since 1937, died before the Second World War ended. Disliking his successor, I resigned and never again had a solid abode as a journalist. I decided I would use journalism, as a free lance, to pay for a fun trip or a chance to see whatever interested me. Not much journalism either, a few months in the summer, in Europe. My own work, fiction, came first; but my own work did not reap sheaves of gold and, though I knew that small is beautiful before it became a fashionable idea, still I had to earn enough to support a modest life behind high garden walls. The solution scared me, I was afraid that I would corrupt my mind and my writing, but thought that if I only wrote three short stories, fakes with happy endings, for popular American magazines, in three weeks each year, my immortal soul would not be irremediably tarnished. I called these stories “bilgers” and having found some of them lately, I am delighted by them; they are stylish junk and I marvel that I was once so clever.

  The four sweet years in Mexico were my private golden age. I lived in one of the most beautiful places on earth before it was spoiled—and this is a a permanent good fortune in my life, to have reached the wonder places in time—and every summer I wrote my way to Europe and to London. “The Children Pay” came from one of those early summer trips, a serious subject. Usually I chose unserious subjects—Capri, Eton—that amused me. I was taking a long leave of absence from the troubled world, except for a quick exciting visit to brand-new Israel.

  A friend in Cuernavaca asked me how I could live without ever reading a newspaper. I said no doubt someone would telephone me if war was declared. Someone did: the Korean War. I know nothing whatever about the Korean War, never read about it in the papers, never read a book about it. If the people who ran the world could not run it without wars and if the people who lived in the world did not rebel against such deadly incompetence, I personally declared a separate peace. I was more contented than I had ever been, but still too young for contentment.

  THE FIFTIES

  The Most Unheard-of Thing

  THE SUNDAY TIMES, September 1954

  The Senate Caucus Room, a large vague imitation of Roman baths, tends to echo and boom, and there are gong and wind sounds high up in the four marbled corners. The American public knows this room well, having seen it daily on television while Senator McCarthy and the U.S. Army disputed each other's veracity. The room, however, looked quite different then, and so did Senator McCarthy. Now the Senate Select Committee, which in fact is the House Committee of the Club, is sitting in judgment on Senator McCarthy, and there are no TV cameras and no agile photographers and no radio engineers, and the procedure is stria and orderly and quiet and fair.

  The chairman of the Select Committee is a thin white-haired man of 60 years, a Mormon from Utah, who speaks in a dry, stubborn voice and has suddenly, not by his wish, become St. George. The other five Senators match him. They are the Senators no one ever hears of, who do the work, who are steady, serious, not brilliant men; and here they are, called to this unpleasant task, and behaving in a way which restores considerable credit to the Senate and to universal suffrage.

  When these six men have written their report, all 96 Senators will return to Washington, and sit down and decide in a special session whether or not to censure Joseph McCarthy, or whether to censure him a lot or a little. No one knows what the Senators will say; but the hearings of the Select Committee have already harmed Joe McCarthy, seriously and for the first time. He could not afford to have the country know that his Club suspects him of being unrespectable.

  McCarthy is charged with contempt for the Senate or a Senatorial committee, with encouraging government employees to violate their oaths of office or Executive orders, with receiving and using confidential or “classified” information from Executive files, with abusing his Senatorial colleagues, with abusing General Ralph Zwicker of the U.S. Army.

  The testimony against McCarthy is not new but it never fails to startle. There are the letters McCarthy wrote to Senator Gillette, chairman of another committee which was investigating Mc-Carthy's activities in a Senatorial election in 1950. This was the famous election in which Tydings of Maryland was defeated after a picture, proved fraudulent, was circulated showing him in cozy converse with the American Communist leader, Earl Browder. McCarthy was held to be connected with that skulduggery; he would never appear before the Gillette committee to answer questions. Instead he accused the committee of stealing tens of thousands of the taxpayers’ money in order to investigate his. McCarthy's, past, without proper authority. The entire episode-sounded most unseemly, as it was read out before this quiet, dignified group of Senators.

  The incidents which illustrated the first three charges against McCarthy were all noisy, scandalous, and megalomaniac; they are all well known; and the main feeling they produce now is one o
f great embarrassment. The offending Senator, who used to throw his weight around in such a successful and terrifying way, was obliged to sit quietly and listen, or testify in a strange metal-clanging monotone (with muted flashes of defiance. “I said it then, I will say it now,” etc.) or retreat awkwardly through his cross-examination. The committee saw to it that the hearings on the first three charges were thorough and dull.

  The fourth charge against McCarthy was that he abused his colleagues in the Senate. Senator McCarthy has always spoken with remarkable force about anyone who disagrees with him. One of the men he abused is Senator Flanders, who is over seventy years old, and a Republican from Vermont. Of Senator Flanders, McCarthy remarked, “I think they should get a man with a net and take him to a good quiet place,” having previously accused the Vermont Senator of “senility or viciousness.” But it is because of this “senile” old man that McCarthy found himself in the witness chair, a changed McCarthy, who insults no one.

  It is hard and heavy work for Joe McCarthy to be this careful new man. Once, when the chairman silenced him, McCarthy rose from his place at the witness table and walked slowly away across the room. He was taking deep breaths and he seemed to be holding his body rigid. The chairman watched, not moving, as one would watch a wild animal which is out of its cage. The public was quiet in the back of the room. McCarthy returned to his place and the hearing went on.

  Even in the hall, where the familiar brilliant TV lights awaited him, and chummy commentators stood with ready microphones, McCarthy was no longer the one they used to know. He could here, with perfect freedom, be as loud, disdainful or threatening as he had been in the first few days of the hearing. But he was careful, careful, even refusing to comment on his prospects but only saying, “I would rather the committee spoke about that.” And when his admirers, most often ladies of fifty and upwards, seized his hand and murmured praise, he was diffident, shyly smiling, and always careful.

  When Senator Johnson said to his colleagues on the Select Committee, “The Senator's political life is at stake in the question before this committee,” neither McCarthy nor anyone else objected to the dramatic and final sound of those words. McCarthy hurried through a feeble defense of his manners towards his colleagues, claiming simply that when he was charged with being abusive he was enjoying his right to free expression. But his voice grew heavy with anger when he testified about General Zwicker, for the General was a needless and perhaps fatal mistake.

  The case in which General Zwicker was involved is one of the most grotesque of all the McCarthy cases. The Army had a dentist and they thought the dentist was perhaps a Communist or had been, but they had no way of forcing him to tell, and they decided the best thing to do was to get him out of the service. They had no grounds for a court martial, and the only way to rid themselves of this perilous dentist was to give him an honorable discharge. Which they did. The dentist was not a threat to national security by any standards; except by McCarthy's.

  McCarthy heard about this dentist as he hears of everything, through his private network of informers, and he moved in to attack. General Zwicker was the dentist's commanding officer. McCarthy called the General to explain why the dentist had been honorably discharged, and asked questions which were as silly as they were malicious; and Zwicker would not be bullied. Finally McCarthy, who considers people who are not to be bullied “arrogant” and “evasive,” told General Zwicker he was not fit to wear his uniform. Since the General had been wearing an Army uniform ever since his graduation from West Point, about thirty years ago, and had been decorated for gallantry in action, this treatment by McCarthy caused a general outcry and above all infuriated the Army. The mistake of mistreating Zwicker led to the Army-McCarthy hearings, and that long, disorderly and alarming show led to this last hearing, the quiet hearing, the one McCarthy cannot afford.

  The only new piece of evidence which appeared was that McCarthy's famous spontaneous denunciation of General Zwicker had been pure theater. Under cross-examination, McCarthy admitted that he had known, before he saw Zwicker, that the perilous dentist was going to be honorably discharged, so he could hardly have been shocked or surprised into blaming the General. McCarthy had put on his rage for the day, for the Press, for television, inventing the day's sensation as if he were writing a radio script. The story looked very mad indeed, spread out there before the Select Committee: mad and meaningless. It served only as a reminder that, in four years of Communist scourging, McCarthy has not brought one single Communist to trial by law, for any offense whatsoever.

  On the first day of these hearings, McCarthy tried one of his usual harassing tactics. This is the technique of the irrelevant fact given irrational importance; and it can be a way to drive people dotty with helpless anger. McCarthy insisted that he had a right to know whether a sentence Senator Johnson, a Democratic member of the Select Committee, had allegedly spoken in an interview with the “Denver Post” on March 12 was or was not correctly quoted. Chairman Watkins would not stand for this nonsense. He ruled McCarthy out of order three times; then he said, “We are not going to be interrupted by these diversions . . . the committee will be in recess.” And banged his gavel and cleared the room.

  McCarthy had never been treated in this way. He rushed into the hall where the TV cameras and microphones waited, and he stepped into the spotlight and said furiously into the amplifiers: “This is the most unheard-of thing I ever heard of!” That made people laugh. They have not laughed at Joe McCarthy before. Of course, if they ever really start laughing, that will be that.

  On the other hand, McCarthyism is alive and flourishes, and there are many able exponents, or even rivals, to take it over should some mishap befall the Senator from Wisconsin. No one has yet suggested censuring McCarthyism.

  It Don't Matter Who Gets in, Dear

  THE NEW REPUBLIC, June 1955

  If we dare believe what we read, the eyes of the world, you know, those eyes, were fixed upon England, at the end of the second week of the great General Election campaign. This magnificent nation allows 20 days for electioneering, thus presenting us, the efficient Americans, with the finest possible example of a time-and-sanity-saving device. Six hundred and thirty men and women are elected as Members of Parliament. During the first week of the campaign it was hardly obvious that anyone wanted to be elected at all. In the second week it was very tepidly “hotted up,” a slang expression much in favor hereabouts. They are calling this the Dull Election. Nobody minds the dullness a bit.

  At the beginning, if you wanted to know what was happening you telephoned the Central Office of the Labour Party and asked where election meetings would be held. Where indeed? Who knows? Try the London Office. The London Office said you better try the agents (the permanent party organizers) in the various London constituencies; they probably know. You telephoned to a few of them; they are not having many meetings, perhaps three in Battersea, one or two in Clapham, anyhow not until the very end. People don't want to go to meetings any more, now they can sit at home in comfort (the nights are unduly cold this May, also often quite wet) and listen to the radio or look at TV. After many polite, friendly telephone calls, you are sent a mimeographed list of constituencies, with the addresses of local party headquarters: anyone with gumption can do his own work by telephoning to all 42 of them.

  The Conservative Party was a lot sharper and brisker than this. Yes, of course, they say, and the next day you get a mimeographed list of speakers, and the date, hour and place of the meetings. This superior organization is evident throughout; the papers note it with a sort of admiring wonder. The Conservatives are out to get the vote. They have neglected none of the traditional aids; the roaming car with loud-speaker, the street-corner or village pump meetings, the house-to-house canvassing, complete with party handbills (so useful for starting the household fires), the small discreet window posters, the indoor meetings, the transport arrangements for getting voters to the polls.

  The important point about this election is:
everyone wants the same thing—peace and prosperity; it only depends how you mean to get the one and keep the other, and who you want to do the job. The fiercest election controversy for a time was an argument as to which side has been misquoting the prices of bacon and tea and cheese. But then the deplored, unofficial dock and railway strikes obliterated tea, bacon and cheese. Meantime talk of food well overshadowed talk of the H-bomb. One thing can be safely said about the H-bomb: it hardly fits into daily life, does it? And their own private daily lives are the main concern of the people in this country. What is the use of winning a war and slogging through austerity for long years after the victory if, at last, you cannot think about chintz curtains and football pools and wage raises, summer holidays and schools for young Timothy?

  I managed to find three meetings. They resembled nothing we do and nothing anyone does, except the English. The first I found was in Peckham, one of the many Londons, a solid brick wilderness along the edge of the vast city. It was a Conservative meeting in a permanently Labour constituency. The young Conservative candidate was making his campaign purely as a matter of sport, or for experience, or to keep the blue Conservative rosette flying in enemy territory. The meeting took place in the chilled brick basement of a local school. (Tacked to the wall a homemade crayon flower drawing, labeled helpfully, “Tulip.”) There was a Union Jack on the Speaker's table and above it the election poster of Eden, looking handsome, bland, boneless, with the slogan, “Working for Peace.” This is a patently true statement, calm and sincere in tone, which is the Tory style for this campaign.