The 40s: The Story of a Decade
Page 30
Yet Wilson was a marvelous reporter. His reporting has the same quality that we find in his criticism: he simply saw things more clearly than other people did. In 1945, he embarked on a tour of Europe to assess the state of a ruined continent. (The pieces were collected in his book Europe Without Baedeker, published in 1947.) His dispatches from Greece and Crete, in 1946, are masterpieces of the steady, patiently cumulative, slightly understated journalistic style that came to flourish at the magazine under the editorship of William Shawn. The Greeks had been brutalized by the Nazis; they were about to be abandoned by Britain, their Big Power ally; they were facing a civil war involving an indigenous Communist Party—and Wilson begins one report with a long description of the color differences between the Italian and the Greek landscapes.
Yet, in the end, it’s all there: the sharply observed distinction between the Socialist enthusiast and the Communist fellow traveler; the portrait of the deafness and decadence of the British imperial mentality; the sketch of the opportunistic American businessman whose kind will soon replace the British; a verbal picture of the vague, widespread, probably hopeless hope in a democratic and egalitarian future. Not long after Wilson left, fears of the Communist threat in Greece, along with anxieties about Soviet intentions in Turkey, became the justification for the announcement of the Truman Doctrine—in effect, the declaration of the Cold War.
The idea of women reporters made Ross uncomfortable, but, like many people trying to run a business during the war, he was obliged to find women to fill positions that had been vacated by men who left to join the war effort. In 1945, he (or, rather, Shawn, his deputy) hired Lillian Ross. She began as a Talk of the Town reporter, but quickly discovered what became her most famous beat, Hollywood. In common with New Yorker artists like Helen Hokinson and Peter Arno, Ross was brilliant at taking the air out of stuffed shirts, a species of which Hollywood has its share. Her method was just to let self-important people talk. All she usually had to do was write down what they said. Her story on the industry’s reaction to the House Un-American Activities Committee’s investigation into Communist influence is funny and lacerating, as is “Picture,” her celebrated anatomy of the making of a John Huston movie, published in the magazine, in five parts, in 1952.
Lillian Ross’s writing has some of the insouciance that had characterized the tone of the prewar magazine. In 1948, a little insouciance was still possible. As it was in France and even in Russia, the immediate postwar period in America was a giddy time. The world seemed ready to begin anew; anything seemed possible. After a world war, it was hard to take congressional witch-hunting (as in Ross’s piece) or subversive-tracking G-men (as in Richard Rovere’s report on a tour of the F.B.I. headquarters, in Washington) entirely seriously. They must have seemed slightly farcical remnants of wartime anxieties, rather than what they turned out to be: the official face of Cold War America, the dark cloud that accompanied postwar prosperity.
Rovere, too, was a Shawn hire. He joined the magazine in 1944, when he was twenty-nine. Harold Ross had little interest in Washington, D.C.; he thought it was a boring city. Although he ran Janet Flanner’s Letter from Paris and Mollie Panter-Downes’s Letter from London every two weeks, he could bring himself to publish a Letter from Washington only once a month. Rovere began filing his column in December 1948, and he quickly grasped the importance of anti-Communist hysteria. He was one of the first journalists to take on Joseph McCarthy, and he wrote the Letter from Washington until 1978, the year before he died.
The magazine as a whole soon took politics, national and international, seriously enough. But the war also changed national psychology: it deprovincialized the millions of men and women who had gone overseas. A magazine that was identified by its name and its tone with America’s most cosmopolitan city, a place that, more than any other with the possible exception of Hollywood, had flourished thanks to the influx of European artists and thinkers in the 1930s and ’40s, was nicely positioned to reflect back to its readers their new sense of themselves as citizens of the world.
E. B. White
NOVEMBER 1, 1947
This magazine traffics with all sorts of questionable characters, some of them, no doubt, infiltrating. Our procedure so far has been to examine the manuscript, not the writer; the picture, not the artist. We have not required a statement of political belief or a blood count. This still seems like a sensible approach to the publishing problem, although falling short of Representative J. Parnell Thomas’s standard. One thing we have always enjoyed about our organization is the splashy, rainbow effect of the workers: Red blending into Orange, Orange blending into Yellow, and so on, right across the spectrum to Violet. (Hi, Violet!) We sit among as quietly seething a mass of reactionaries, revolutionaries, worn-out robber barons, tawny pipits, liberals, Marxists in funny hats, and Taftists in pin stripes as ever gathered under one roof in a common enterprise. The group seems healthy enough, in a messy sort of way, and everybody finally meets everybody else at the water cooler, like beasts at the water hole in the jungle. There is one man here who believes that the solution to everything is proper mulching—the deep mulch. Russia to him is just another mulch problem. We have them all. Our creative activity, whether un- or non-un-American, is properly not on a loyalty basis but merely on a literacy basis—a dreamy concept. If this should change, and we should go over to loyalty, the meaning of “un-American activity” would change, too, since the America designated in the phrase would not be the same country we have long lived in and admired.
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We ran smack into the loyalty question the other day when we got a phone call from another magazine, asking us what we knew about a man they had just hired. He was a man whose pieces we had published, from time to time, and they wanted to know about him. “What’s his political slant?” our inquisitor asked. We replied that we didn’t have any idea, and that the matter had never come up. This surprised our questioner greatly, but not as much as his phone call surprised us. When he hung up, we dialled Weather and listened to the rising wind.
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Louis B. Mayer told the House Committee he wouldn’t know a Communist if he saw one. Later he testified that three writers in his employ had been mentioned to him as Communists, and he named them. The newspaper accounts added that among the movies written by one of them, Lester Cole, was The Romance of Rosy Ridge, and when we learned that this picture was currently playing at Loew’s Forty-second Street, we sent our man Stanley over to see it, with instructions to watch especially for subversive propaganda and to report back. Lest we inadvertently distort the sense of Stanley’s notes in attempting to rephrase them, here they are, just as he turned them in:
“Wish I knew shorthand. This a post–Civil War costume-&-dialect picture, & what with everybody in cast mumbling & me taking notes in dark, can’t guarantee accuracy my version dialogue. Anyhow, picture begins with M-G-M lion & ‘Ars gratia artis.’ Un-American phrase? Lester Cole did screen play all right—said so on screen. Most pictures have either Guy Kibbee or Thomas Mitchell, & this one has both. Van Johnson is star. How much more American can you get? Plot involves Confederate-minded family with old man (Mitchell) unwilling forgive & forget. Van Johnson is Union vet. Wanders along playing mouth organ, moves in with family, falls in love with daughter (Janet Leigh—cute). Masked night riders burning barns, stirring up trouble between Union & Confederate sympathizers in Missouri. Nobody dares help neighbors harvest crops, because have to protect own barns. Van finally breaks down ill will. Also shoots four men & horse with five bullets; beats up fifth guy barehanded, thus disposing of barn-burners; gets girl; rides off toward horizon with her at end, like close of FitzPatrick Traveltalk. Elapsed time: 1 hr., 45 mins. This not entire story, but hard to keep awake. At least I absorbed more of movie than fellow next to me, who fell asleep moment Van started in on that mouth organ.
“As to possible propaganda lines, near start of picture somebody says, ‘Peace is achieved by the good will of people & not by
flourishing strokes of a pen.’ Might be Senator Taft line. There’s little boy (guess you couldn’t make picture like this without little boy), who says he always carries a fishing rod with him, in case he happens to run across any fish. Would say too frivolous & opportunistic an attitude toward life’s grim realities to be politically harmful. Guy Kibbee flatly disapproves of barn-burning, believes in property rights. Somebody asks Van explain difference between right & wrong. He says, ‘To me, right is lots o’ things, like plantin’ your fields an’ havin’ rain fall on ’em, like havin’ songs to sing when your heart is right.’ He said more along that line, but I got lost. Also said, ‘Rain water tastes better’n sassprilla.’ Statement allowed to go unanswered. Point debatable, I should say. Twice during picture, Kibbee, trying to get arguments settled, urges everyone present to be democratic & to take a vote. This accepted American way for resolving squabbles? Possible un-American note when two women are discussing what to wear to party & one says, ‘Shucks, Maw, dressin’ purty ain’t everythin’.’ Possible current allusion when Van says, ‘The war’s over, but some people, ’stead o’ lookin’ for friends, are lookin’ for trouble.’ Crack at somebody here? Twice during picture, Van, barefooted & carrying shoes over shoulder, explains that they’re good-wearing shoes, and so he wants to preserve them. Honest toil, neighborly love, thrift stressed throughout. Van says of dead soldier buddy & himself, ‘We both wanted to make this country a free country, for folks—all folks—to live in.’ Pinko sentiment, maybe? Noticed one thing. Communists supposed to be exploiting plight of Negroes in South nowadays. Well, this about Civil War issues & not a single Negro in it, not even one in background strummin’ on ol’ banjo. I’d give it clean bill of health but wouldn’t want anyone to think I recommend seeing it.”
Edmund Wilson
OCTOBER 20, 1945
I had interviews, in Athens, with two remarkable professors who have become political figures: George Georgalas and Alexander Svolos. Both are middle-aged men of top standing in their fields, and they are typical of the Greek intellectuals who have been driven by the needs of their country to take an active part in the E.A.M. movement, the National Liberation Front, which organized the resistance to the Germans and which controlled most of the countryside of Greece before the Papandreou government, a creation of the British, took over. They present the best possible proof that that movement has not been the creation either of professional radicals or of cutthroats from the mountains. Svolos, an authority on constitutional law, was the president and spokesman of E.A.M. through the period of crisis last winter; Georgalas, formerly the head of the government geological service, is now the director of E.P.O.N., the United Panhellenic Organization of Youth, which is the junior branch of E.A.M.
Georgalas I saw in his office, just off his geology classroom in the Polytechnic School. He showed me the statistics on Greek education with the enthusiasm and energy of a man who was fighting for reforms that were obviously needed and that inevitably had to come: the rudiments of democratic education. The state of Greek education seems really, to an American, incredible. The figures for the school year 1937–38 show how bad the situation was before the general wreck brought by the war. At the beginning of that year, out of a population of seven and a half millions, there were 987,000 children attending the primary schools, and before the year was done, 80,000 had dropped out. Of 231,000 children who had entered the first grade in these schools, only 82,000 were surviving in the sixth grade, so that only about a third of the ordinary Greeks (who did not go to private schools) got even a complete primary education. The teaching, too, was quite inadequate: one teacher had sometimes a hundred pupils. In 1937, 3,700 villages had no school of any kind. In the same year there were graduated from the high schools only 94,920 students. Of these high schools there were five hundred to educate the less than 9 percent of the population who practiced the liberal professions, and only two to give agricultural training to the more than 58 percent engaged in agriculture. The education in the high schools was mainly based on the reading of the ancient Greek authors in a purely philological way and the study of the physical sciences in a purely theoretical way and with no direct contact with nature. “Here you Americans,” Georgalas said, “are inventing an atomic bomb, while our physicists in Greece have hardly come to grips with any practical problem!” Among the graduates of the two universities, Athens and Salonika, in 1937–38, 45 percent became lawyers, 33 percent doctors, 7 percent philologists, 5 percent chemists, and of the remaining 10 percent, 8 percent had gone in for the physical sciences. The men from these schools and colleges that equipped them with a classical education did not want to return to the towns: they almost invariably remained in Athens to find or look for government jobs and become “parasites on the bourgeoisie.” There had, in 1937–38, been 11,140 graduates of the regular universities, while at the two small agricultural schools nineteen students had been graduated, of whom only two were of working-class origin. The principal school of agriculture, founded in 1920, had been closed in 1939 by the dictator Metaxas and its faculty obliged to become part of the University of Salonika, where they had been working ever since with no laboratories.
What E.A.M. was aiming at was to provide instruction in agricultural chemistry and other technical subjects which would make it possible for the peasants to develop their barren country and raise their meagre standard of living. The reactionaries had never wanted this, because they did not want the common people strengthened. There would be no real education in Greece till the monarchists were removed from power.
E.P.O.N. itself, he told me, had taken in children under fourteen from all sorts of political backgrounds, and had once had five hundred thousand members. It had organized two hundred stations, where the children were fed and given playgrounds; but all this work had been undone when the public activities of E.A.M. had been stopped.
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With Svolos I talked mainly about politics, and I put to him certain questions to which he was in a position to know the answers. I had in my mind a fairly clear version of the incidents that had led up to the civil war. The British, in their anxiety to bring back the King and to defeat the activities of the Communists, had been alarmed by the Left tendencies of E.A.M. and by the formidable proportions it had attained, and they had attempted to disarm E.L.A.S., its army. They had announced that they were disarming all units, of the Right as well as of the Left, in order to create a true national army; but when E.L.A.S. in good faith had laid down its arms, the Royalist troops—the Mountain Brigade and the Sacred Battalion—were allowed to retain theirs. On December 3rd of last year, E.A.M. held a demonstration in Constitution Square, in Athens, to protest against the policy of the British. They were unarmed, and many of the women had brought their small children. The British had given a permit for this meeting, but they had revoked it at three o’clock that morning in such a way that it had been impossible to call off the demonstration. Nobody seems to know precisely what started the trouble: the Royalists claimed that the crowd were trying to rush the guard at the government’s headquarters in the Grande Bretagne Hotel; but there is no question that the majority of the demonstrators went on quietly marching while the Royalist police fired into them and killed and wounded about a hundred people. Funerals were held the next day, and a procession passed through the streets. The Royalists fired on the procession from the windows of hotels and killed or wounded between a hundred and fifty and two hundred people.
I asked Svolos now whether it were true, as had been said and as might seem to be indicated by the British revocation of the permit at that impossible time of night, that the whole thing had been a British provocation intended to provide them with a pretext for crushing E.A.M. before it grew stronger. He answered that he did not necessarily believe that the British role in the drama had been so simple or so conscious as this. They had perhaps not provoked the insurrection that followed these attacks by the Royalists, but they “had not been sorry” to have it happen. It was an exam
ple of the familiar British practice of half allowing, half stimulating actions which, though carried out by other people, would be advantageous to British interests. He said that the responsibility had to be shared, in various proportions, by the Royalists, the British, and the Communists. Was it true, as I had been told by an American who said that he had been in a position to know, that at the time of the Lebanon conference of May, 1944, stage-managed by the British, when Svolos had wired to E.A.M. for advice as to how to proceed in regard to a proposed program for a “government of National Unity,” and E.A.M. had directed him to make certain reservations, the telegraphed answer from E.A.M. had been suppressed by British Ambassador Leeper? He replied that it was impossible to say that the telegram had been suppressed but that it had certainly been sent and had never arrived. Was the impression I had got correct that, at the time of the crisis last winter, the Greek Communists in E.A.M. had been acting without the approval or knowledge of Moscow—Stalin perhaps having agreed at Yalta, in return for a free hand elsewhere, not to interfere with the British in the Mediterranean? Svolos said that he believed this to be true—that the Greek Communists had at that time sent a delegate to Russia but that Moscow had refused to see him and dispatched him straight back to Athens, and that, throughout this period, the Moscow radio had made no mention of events in Greece. I asked him about the atrocities alleged to have been committed by E.A.M.—mass executions of civilians murdered with knives and axes, men and women hostages marched barefoot for days in the snow, till many died of exhaustion—of which so much was made by Ambassador Leeper in his reports to Anthony Eden. Svolos did not deny that such things had happened, but said that they were not, as had been declared, mere outrages by ruffians from the mountains but a part of a long and bitter history of private revenges and political reprisals that had begun under the Metaxas regime and gone on through the German occupation, during both of which periods the Greek Fascists had been committing most of the atrocities. After the liberation, the British, who controlled the news from Greece, had succeeded in forestalling or suppressing reports of what the reactionaries were doing to the liberals. At present, as everybody knew, the jails were full of political prisoners, and every day the agents of the government were arresting more people without warrant, shooting them and beating them up on the street, and torturing them to extort information. He was worried by Bevin’s speech on British policy, which had been delivered the day before. They had been hoping for an amnesty, but now Bevin, it seemed, had announced that this might be difficult, since, according to him, there were “violent criminals” mixed up with the political prisoners, and there was a problem of sorting these out.