The Uneasy Chair

by Wallace Stegner

  Congress, he said, was representative of the people, so truly representative that the associated garden clubs could sometimes scare a congressman into defying the power lobby. Congress was the people, and the people were ourselves. And—his old refrain—we should not expect perfection, knowing the fallible material out of which democracy was made. “Sure the people are stupid: the human race is stupid. Sure Congress is an inefficient instrument of government. But the people are not stupid enough to abandon representative government for any other kind, including government by the man who knows.” Experts, he said further, were useful employees, disastrous masters. Like any other elite given power, they ended up with a machine gun in their hands, imposing their higher wisdom on the unenlightened.

  It must have surprised readers who had heard him express opinions of congressmen not too distant from those of Mark Twain, who referred to them as a “criminal class.” But it shouldn’t have surprised anyone who knew DeVoto. Like an anti-clerical Catholic, he could believe in the cloth without necessarily believing in the men who wore it. When he made his defense of the Congress, in November 1950, his mood was still relatively sanguine, or at least resolute. He thought that the erosions of American liberty could be halted, and would be. Eventually the people, through their representatives, would produce some sort of Soil Conservation Service of the spirit that would restore, not fully but enough, the gullied and wind-blown guarantees by which the republic lived.

  He was still in a relatively confident mood when, in the Atlantic for February 1951, he returned to his old theme of the ex-Communists, some of whom had recently, like Whittaker Chambers, been testifying against what they had once supported, and acting as if they were the only people who understood democracy, having for so long been deluded into subverting it. DeVoto thought they were, as a class, people who found freedom intolerable—panacea hunters, true believers whose self-righteousness had not been cured by conversion but only redirected. He thought them not dangerous but ridiculous:

  With ideas, empirical demonstration is the payoff, and serves as at least a rough measure of intelligence. If the side of a cube is twelve inches square the man who measures it and says it is twelve inches square is right. A man who for some time maintains that it is a half gallon in the key of C-sharp and blue at that is not displaying conspicuously penetrating intelligence when he finally picks up a ruler.9

  It was the tune he had been singing all his life, the same tune he had sung when going to war against the literary intellectuals and their successors the literary Marxists: in lusting after the impossible, they misread and undervalued the possible. In giving away their hearts to perfection, they gave away their minds.

  It is difficult even for people who lived through it to bring back the atmosphere of oppression, fear, and silence that hung over the McCarthy period. But it was real and frightening and bewildering at the time, a smog that tainted all American life. Simply by asserting the American gospels when so many were publicly attacking them and so many were privately doubting them, DeVoto heartened his Easy Chair readers. Attacked in two speeches by McCarthy,10 he was disturbed, angered, and sickened, and Avis remembers his walking the floor, scowling and upset, saying that he could take a lot, but there came a time when he had to speak up if it meant he would lose his markets and never hold a job again. There was a sorry sort of amusement in the typical McCarthy blunder—in the first speech, the man attacked was called “Richard” DeVoto—and even a sort of protection in it, for a man who could not correctly name the people he attacked could hardly be trusted to know their politics. Nevertheless he did not underrate McCarthy’s power to poison; he knew some of the victims: Owen Lattimore had been a Bread Loaf staff member; the son of his friend Dr. Jacob Fine had been entangled in an Army loyalty hearing. No Cambridge cocktail party, no gathering of the DeVoto Sunday evening group, failed to bring up new instances.

  Despite his basic confidence in democracy’s capacity to correct its imbalances, he had long since begun to wonder if this demagogue McCarthy was as bush league as he had once thought. He wondered where the public’s nerve was. Too few had the courage to fight back and call McCarthy the liar he was. The President sat on his hands, the Congress did nothing to control the member whom many of them deplored and despised. The public, for all one could tell, was apathetic, scared, or actively behind the witch hunt. And one of the uncomfortable facts about a ramshackle government was that Congressional committees were exempt from the usual forms of legal redress. To fight them, too often meant the swift termination of one’s public character and perhaps of one’s job. At the same time, if one were Bernard DeVoto, one did not rush to the unqualified defense of everyone whom the witch-hunters attacked. Witness his refusal to sign a declaration in defense of the Hollywood Ten until he knew the people with whom he would be associated. That was not fear of McCarthy. That was, from his point of view, only a reasonable concern for his intellectual self-respect and a caution about being manipulated.

  By April 1953, when the Easy Chair returned to the Congressional investigations in “The Case of the Censorious Congressman,” DeVoto had lost a good deal of his optimism. Stevenson had been badly defeated, the raiders were in the saddle in the West and in Washington, the attrition of civil liberties had proceeded alarmingly, the fungus of suspicion and fear had spread. So, though the Gathings Committee, of which he wrote in this Easy Chair, had only wanted to censor cheap comic books and paperbacks, he took it with the greatest seriousness. For this represented, in his view, the spread of an infection. This was an attack on the right to read, and it was made not by village snoops or the Watch and Ward, but by Congress. This was official, and because of its auspices it had to be considered along with Congressman Wood’s attempt against college reading lists. The Gathings Committee report, on the surface, did no worse than degrade Congress to the level of any police-court snooper. What it did less obviously was pound another nail into the coffin of traditional American freedoms. For what could be censored in paperback could be censored in royal octavo boards; what Congress could suppress as pornography it could as easily suppress as heresy or un-American activity.

  The accuracy of the Easy Chair’s analysis was promptly attested when one of the members of the Gathings Committee, Representative Kearns of Pennsylvania, called his criticism pro-Communist. He entered in the Congressional Record a statement about “activities” of DeVoto’s which, he said, “spoke for themselves.” DeVoto had signed a New York Times advertisement urging the abolition of the Wood-Rankin Committee. He was on the council of the Society for the Prevention of World War III, “headed by Rex Stout, former editor of the New Masses.” He had published in Harper’s an article, “Due Notice to the FBI,” which the New Masses had quoted with approval. The Daily Worker reported that he had been among those opposing a move to outlaw the Communist Party. The People’s Daily Worker said he had denounced an action of the House Un-American Activities Committee.

  Absurd, predictable, symptomatic, and scary, that sort of generalized smear had already destroyed too many people, and had to be replied to. DeVoto replied in the Easy Chair for August 1953, and incidentally told the story of his unsuccessful attempt to force a retraction from Representative Kearns in the Congressional Record. (Representatives Celler of New York and Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota, and Senator Neuberger of Oregon had all assisted him in that effort, but without success.) Since Kearns elected to be a “hit and run defamer,” DeVoto said, he would use him as an instance of the technique of defamation. He pointed out that every major newspaper in the United States, as well as the New Masses, had commented on and quoted from “Due Notice to the FBI.” Dozens of papers besides the Daily Worker had reported his distaste for the Un-American Activities Committee and his considered opposition to the outlawing of the Communist Party. His attitude toward communism could have been ascertained by fifteen minutes in any library. Rex Stout was not, and never had been, editor of the New Masses, and prevention of World War III was not exactly a sly Communist
maneuver. All of this, Representative Kearns could have determined or have had a staff member determine. Instead, he chose to make an official smear and then hide behind Congressional immunity.

  Being who he was, with a gift for controversy and a forum from which to practice it, he effectively shut Kearns’s mouth and calmed the pulse of anyone who for the moment might have feared that the Easy Chair was fellow traveling. But not everyone had such skill in self-defense, and the technique of smear that was ridiculous when applied to someone who could fight back was fatal to the many who could not.

  Call them liars, he had kept saying, and they will back down. But by the beginning of 1954, what had at first galvanized him with indignation had begun to sicken him. In February he wrote Mattingly, abroad on a Guggenheim Fellowship, asking not quite humorously where he could find sanctuary from the American scene. It seemed to him that we had come out of the war the strongest and most confident nation on earth, grown-up, civilized, and powerful, and that in less than ten years we had become “the sorriest collection of clowns and cowards in the contemporary world.”11 During the years when he had been writing The Course of Empire he had been working against difficulties that half maddened him, and yet he had felt, too, “like a lover imagining the young girlhood of his bride.” That bride had become something that made him turn his back. All the exhilaration that American institutions had always stimulated in him was gone; his robust confidence in the country and the system had weakened, along with the depletion of his energies and the decline of his health. On every side, he saw Americans collaborating in the destruction of their freedoms, as the people of the West had consistently collaborated in the rape of their natural resources. Ignorance, greed, suspicion, cowardice, cynicism looked at him out of every morning’s New York Times. America was potentially a great place, but it was lousy with Americans.

  It demoralized him to see a whole nation afraid—demoralized him so utterly that he read the Army hearings in the summer of 1954 as a McCarthy triumph, whereas in fact the ramshackle system had been shackling to its belated firmness. The tears of a hardboiled lawyer, seen by millions on television, and one outraged cry, “Senator McCarthy, have you no shame?” were like an alarm clock waking a sleeper from an ugly dream. From that point on, the system went quietly on with the job of adjusting the noose around McCarthy’s neck that DeVoto had predicted four years before.

  Demoralized or not, gloomy or not, DeVoto never stopped fighting what he hated. The Easy Chair was never more serious, more public-spirited, or more effective than during 1954 and 1955, when out of twenty-three issues thirteen dealt either with environmental problems or the ordeal of civil liberties. In April 1954’ with acrid distaste, he discussed the activities of the Veterans of Foreign Wars and the American Legion in collecting lists of “proved” Communists, “suspected” Communists, and fellow travelers. In May the Red-baiting attacks on Chief Justice Warren and the episode in which some Puerto Rican militants fired into the House of Representatives had him shooting back from the middle at both sides. He did not blame the Puerto Ricans for their anger, but he was appalled at their way of expressing it; it sickened him to see Congress fired upon, but he had to believe also that “the most dangerous subversives operating in the United States today are in Congress.” As vividly as he hated the cowardice that dared not fight back against the tyranny of the witch-hunters, he hated the timidity that was afraid to impose law and order lest revolution follow.

  Yet even then he had, or declared, a hope. Sooner or later the country would call a halt. Sooner or later it would get pushed so far that it would start resisting, and would deny that discussion and dissent were treason. Sooner or later we would restore the Bill of Rights to operation, without fear of being “wasted at noonday.” Not forever would we be subjected to the spectacle of Mike Fink becoming Caspar Milquetoast, the eagle-screamers becoming poltroons, the tradition of popular freedom becoming “a box of sawdust for Joe McCarthy to spit in.”

  He had never feared the Communist revolution even when it was being confidently announced. All around the Communist intellectuals, while they passed their resolutions and wrote their editorials and slanted their book reviews and bored from within into liberal organizations, the real revolution of the New Deal had been going on—an American-style revolution-by-reform, which worked within the social and political habits of the American people. By 1955 not even McCarthy was convincing many people that the country was riddled with Communist conspirators. His capacity to terrify began to shrink after the Army hearings, and before long, taintedly, he would be dead.

  DeVoto lived to see only the beginning of the change. In his lifetime there was no legitimate reason to relax. In April 1955 the Easy Chair hit the mind-hating Reece Committee and its investigation of the tax-exempt foundations, in “Guilt by Distinction.” In July, reviewing Murray Kempton’s Part of Our Time, a study of communism among the intellectuals, DeVoto noted for the hundreth time how futile had been the whole movement. “Peter and Wendy in the Revolution,” he called that contemptuous Easy Chair. The Communists would have got only a footnote in history, like the Millerites, if for reasons of political power seeking the 1950s had not chosen to make into bogeymen this “heterogeneous miscellany of unworldly dreamers, flawed ascetics, officious nonentities, arrogant neurotics, followers of a dime-store grail, and intellectual gossips and stumblebums.” Now ballyhooed as a dangerous gang, they had always been about as socially dangerous as the Jehovah’s Witnesses. The Reds had never been cause for alarm; only the Red-baiters were.

  In August he wrote his last installment on that theme when he attacked the Public Health Service for withholding research funds from projects conducted by anyone against whom “derogatory information” had been alleged. The Public Health Service, he said, wanted to be “clean” in the eyes of Congressional committees, and avoid trouble. Result: medical research got shorted, responsible scientists such as John Edsall of Harvard announced they would accept nothing with loyalty strings attached, and the system sank deeper into its hysterical restrictiveness. The Public Health Service, with important public duties to perform, opened its veins for fear of the knife, like the Boston booksellers intimidated by Watch and Ward.

  In the summer of 1955, when he wrote that Easy Chair, DeVoto was fifty-eight, and sick, and tired, and gloomy in his mind. No one would have known it from reading the column he had now written in Harper’s for nearly twenty years. His pieces still had their old muzzle velocity, and he was still a deadly shot. Tired he might be, and afflicted with ailments whose precise nature he could not define, but he was more than ever a man of principle, and he was still a warrior. The first role that he had adopted had proved one of the most durable.

  8 · “May Six O’ clock Never Find You Alone.”

  In the fall of 1920, yearning outward from his exile or refuge in deepest Ogden, DeVoto had written to Melville Smith that he wanted to spend his vigorous years in “creative criticism of America.” He wanted to pour his “God-awful emulsion” into the examination of whether, or how, the nation would make the turn from adolescence into adulthood, from exuberance and confusion into a greatness commensurate with its expressed ideals and the inspiring vastness and variety of its geography. His motives in 1920 had been mixed. Even then he was a cultural patriot, though a critical one; and even then, in the midst of his first and most helpless breakdown, he had seized upon work, the more ambitious the better, as the surest safety. Ambition was a trapeze on which he swung high above everything he despised and feared, but in his cunning he hung the habit of work beneath him like a net. Part of his panic in 1920 had been brought on by an inability to work. He had fallen, and fallen hard. Part of his recovery had involved rigging the safety net so that he could force the coward within to get up on the rings.

  Except for brief periods, he had kept the interior coward too busy to become that afraid again, and whenever he had fallen, work had saved him. “The bravest damn man I even knew,” Avis called him, knowing what the eff
ort cost. Others, seeing what he produced, thought him the most compulsive worker alive, and that impression grew stronger, not weaker, upon close acquaintance, for only his close acquaintances knew the enormous correspondence that flowed in and out of his study each week. Four fifths of his productive iceberg was under water. He was a public man, with public mail: fan letters and their polite acknowledgment, argument and its rebuttal, inquiries and information, all the questions and answers of research, all the continuations in private of controversies begun in public. He had had careers for three men, and he had subsidiary correspondence for them all;1 but everything including the correspondence tended to focus on the creative criticism of America that he had set himself when barely out of college.

  Except for his bootlegging excursions into Quebec, a couple of drives across Ontario, a hypothetical trip to Mexico as a boy, and a brief trip to the Canadian Rockies with Gregory Rochlin, one of his psychiatrist friends, he had never been outside the United States, yet his view was wide, not provincial. The perspective that others got by looking back from Europe (as John Brown’s Body and Look Homeward Angel had come out of a European homesickness) he got by looking West from Cambridge, or back from the present into the past, or forward from the past into the present. There have been few American writers whose work is more of a piece, or whose “vigorous years” produced more illumination of the country and culture that produced them. The brattish boy from Ogden taught his contemporaries something, even those who thought him an angry barbarian.