A Good American Family

by David Maraniss

  I am supremely confident that the same spirit that motivated those men in the brave days of our past still lives in the American people.

  I am confident that the people of Detroit will reject this committee’s effort to subvert the U.S. Constitution.

  I am confident that the American people will not allow our traditions and freedom to be transformed in the image of fascism nor allow our cities and millions of our people to be destroyed in the hellish fires of atomic war.

  ELLIOTT MARANISS

  25

  * * *

  Witches or Traitors

  DURING THE STRETCH in late February and early March 1952 when Chairman Wood’s committee brought Elliott Maraniss and Bob Cummins into Room 740 to question their loyalty to America, Arthur Miller started to think about writing a new play that evoked what he saw as the fear and irrationality of the moment. This was more than an abstract issue for Miller. An earlier play, Death of a Salesman, for which he won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1949, had just moved from the Broadway stage into movie theaters—and into a new round of controversy.

  The film, starring Fredric March as Willy Loman, the tragic salesman, was being picketed and boycotted at theaters on Long Island and in Washington by members of the American Legion, who charged that the playwright and his story were both un-American, Miller for his past connections to communists and the story for its bleak portrayal of Loman as a victim of the capitalist system. Columbia Pictures, the studio producing the film, seemed afraid of the public reaction even before the movie was released and tried to soften the message by combining it with a ten-minute short titled Career of a Salesman that presented a rosier portrayal of the sales business. The short was finally pulled after Miller loudly objected. “Why the hell did you make the picture if you’re so ashamed of it?” he asked. But both episodes only strengthened his determination to find a dramatic story that would illuminate the era.

  It was at the University of Michigan, in an American history course, that Miller first studied the witchcraft trials that enflamed Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692. More recently, the story came back to him when he read The Devil in Massachusetts by Marion Starkey. His first impression was that Salem was trapped in “the long-dead past” and too centered on “inexplicable mystifications” to resonate in the present. “My own rationality was too strong, I thought, to really allow me to capture the wildly irrational outbreak,” he explained later in Timebends, his autobiography. “A drama cannot merely describe an emotion, it has to become that emotion.”

  Then, slowly, he started to see connections between what happened in Salem and what the House Committee on Un-American Activities was doing in Washington and at hearings around the country. “The main point of the hearings, precisely as in seventeenth century Salem, was that the accused make public confession, damn his confederates as well as the Devil master, and guarantee his sterling new allegiance by breaking disgusting old vows—whereupon he was let loose to rejoin the society of extremely decent people. In other words, the same spiritual nugget lay folded within both procedures—an act of contrition done not in solemn privacy but out in the public air.”

  Miller decided to drive to Salem to see what he could find. As it happened, he stopped on the way to visit Elia Kazan, a close friend and theater-world associate who had directed two of Miller’s plays, All My Sons and Death of a Salesman, on Broadway. Kazan had been called before HUAC in January and was questioned about his association with the Communist Party from 1934 to 1936 as a member of the Group Theatre. Born in Turkey in 1909, Kazan had immigrated to the United States as a child and was educated at Williams College, where he became disillusioned with America’s privileged elite and receptive to communism as an alternative. But that was in the past, an affiliation long since rejected.

  When the committee first called Kazan, he had refused to cooperate, but he could not live with that decision. Seeking to cleanse himself and clear his conscience, he agreed to appear before HUAC in executive session and name friends and associates who had been in the party with him. He wanted to talk to Miller about why he had changed his mind. Miller thought Kazan was seeking his blessing, confirmation that he was responding appropriately. He admired Kazan as a director of genius, but now he heard Kazan implying that his career would have been threatened had he not chosen to confess to the committee. At first Miller felt sadness, then a troubling sense of estrangement at the realization that his dear friend might have named him if they had been involved in the party at the same time and place, which they were not. Along with those reactions, Miller was overtaken by rage at the government for putting people in this situation. “Who or what was now safer because this man in his human weakness had been forced to humiliate himself?” Miller thought. “What truth had been enhanced by all this anguish?”

  As Miller was leaving, Kazan’s wife, Molly, came out to the car and started to defend her husband. Miller told her that he was on his way to Salem, to which she replied with dismay, “You’re not going to equate witches with this!”

  * * *

  ONE IMAGINED, ONE real. There were no witches in Salem in the seventeenth century. But there were communists in America in the twentieth century. Was it reasonable to call the inquisitions led by John Stephens Wood and his congressional colleagues witch hunts, evoking Salem, where nineteen supposed witches were hanged in a bout of mass hysteria? If so, should one differentiate between people who were inaccurately accused of being communists and suffered through guilt by association and those, like my father and uncle, who had belonged to the party? Real or imagined, was being a communist the equivalent of being a witch? Those questions ran through my mind as I studied the transcript of my father’s appearance before the committee and the statement he had written but was not allowed to read into his testimony.

  In that statement, my father made a direct comparison to the Spanish Inquisition, during which the fidelity to Christianity of converted Jews like the Marranos and others was tested and an auto-da-fé was required—an act of faith involving contrition and penance—followed by punishment, which often meant burning at the stake. He also likened his situation to the witch hunts of colonial Massachusetts and urged anyone who “believes this comparison far-fetched” to consider a quote from Cotton Mather, the influential Puritan minister in Boston whose writings and sermons on satanic witchcraft laid the religious foundations for the Salem trials. Mather did not recommend torture to extract confessions, but other methods such as “cross and swift questions” to confuse the witches and get them to break. My father believed the Fifth Amendment, the right that he invoked during his testimony time and again, was written into the Bill of Rights “precisely to combat this technique, to rule it out forever from American life,” even if the committee took it as a de facto confession of guilt.

  I also considered his testimony and statement in the context of Judge Learned Hand’s axiom on the curtailment of freedom of speech: “the gravity of the evil discounted by its improbability.” Did my father’s political beliefs and the likelihood they could lead to evil actions make it legitimate for the government to limit his First Amendment rights?

  If my father had invoked only the First Amendment—freedom of speech and assembly, freedom of the press—the committee could have cited him for contempt of Congress, as it had the Hollywood Ten five years earlier. The Fifth Amendment was the only legal way for him to defy the committee’s efforts to get him to confess and then, having done so, to name names, which he was determined not to do. But throughout his testimony and his statement, he made clear that he considered the committee’s subpoena an abridgement of his First Amendment rights. “I view this committee’s attempt to muzzle me and drive me off my job as a direct attack on freedom of the press and the right of newspapermen to participate freely in the political life of the country without fear of reprisal.”

  Along with the Bill of Rights, he thought, he should be protected by the constitution of the CIO’s Newspaper Guild, part of which he read into the rec
ord during his testimony: that no guild member should be barred or penalized because of “political submission, or anything he writes for publication.” He reinforced this idea with a recounting of the history of newspapermen standing up against authority to express their political opinions freely, from the time of Peter Zenger, a fearless printer in New York City who published articles critical of the colonial governor in the 1730s and was charged with libel and imprisoned for months before a jury found him not guilty. My father knew that history well, was proud of the tradition of press independence, and often talked to me about it in later years. He saw himself in that tradition, and by the time I knew him as a crusading newspaperman in Madison, I saw him that way as well. But I also thought there was a hole in his statement as it related to his situation in 1952. In my own career as a journalist, I would have been fired if it had been found out that I was surreptitiously doing political work elsewhere, and justifiably so. Whether it was for Democrats or Republicans, fascists or communists, was not the issue; it was against my newspaper’s ethics for that sort of participation. Voting, yes. Expressing informed opinions, of course. A secret second newspaper life, no.

  But that is an issue entirely apart from the purpose of the Detroit hearings, something solely between the Detroit Times, the Newspaper Guild, and my father. It had no direct correlation to the question of whether he should be forced to testify about his political beliefs, which is the only reason the Times found out about his other activities and the reason he was fired. He had broken no laws. He had served his country at a time of war. He had paid his taxes. He had a family and a job and a home. He had followed all the guideposts on the way to the American Dream. The FBI and its thirty-nine informants never reported a single instance when he advocated the violent overthrow of the U.S. government or much of anything beyond the fact that he wrote and edited for a communist newspaper and on behalf of leftist causes. He might have been, as he later said, stubborn in his ignorance about the horrors of the Soviet Union, but what was the gravity of his evil and its likelihood to cause harm?

  * * *

  THIS WAS MILLER’S first time in Salem. He knew it only from history books and was jolted by the reality of its modern dreariness in contrast with his mind’s image of “an old wooden village.” The past, again, seemed remote, if not irrelevant. At the courthouse, he asked the clerk for the village records of 1692. He combed through “the usual debris a town leaves behind it for the legal record” until he came across the transcripts of the witchcraft trials. He found them in a neat stack, all typed out by writers employed by the Works Progress Administration in the 1930s. It was that era’s form of digitization, making the documents more accessible, and it proved to be an inspiration for Miller, giving him a sense of the vocabulary and rhythms of that long-ago time. He spent three weeks in Salem, reading the transcripts and other accounts of the trials, including Charles Upham’s 1896 two-volume set, Salem Witchcraft.

  Miller wrote in a trained cursive hand, neat and legible. He plotted out in notebooks the play that would become The Crucible. The first was a Pen-Tab composition book of ninety-two pages. In it, he tried out various titles that eventually were rejected—If We Could Speak, Inside and Outside, The Reserved Crime—and tested dialogue and jotted down thoughts and themes. On one page he wrote, “VERY IMPORTANT—To say ‘There are no witches’ is to invite charge of trying to conceal the conspiracy and to discredit the highest authorities who alone can save the community!”

  * * *

  THE MORNING AFTER Elliott was interrogated by the highest authorities, the Free Press ran a photograph on its front page summing up two weeks of testimony in Room 740. There were no people in the picture. Instead there was a close-up of an old satchel, with the caption “The hearings are over and back to Washington goes this briefcase stuffed with testimony taken by its owner, Frank S. Tavenner, chief counsel for the House Un-American Activities Committee. When it first appeared, it contained the secret testimony that stripped the veil from Detroit’s communists.”

  The intent here was symbolic. Evil exposed, secrets revealed, names named, right prevailing, communists on the run, work done. The hearings had personal consequences for Elliott and Bob and others, yet they were essentially ceremonial performances. A few acts of repentance and contrition, more acts of blaming and shaming for the world to see, the curtain closing with the committee saving the community.

  The real-life drama in Detroit took place at a time when Washington had aligned with the film industry to spread the message of the evils of communism to larger audiences. After the Hollywood Ten hearings in 1947, when Nixon was still on HUAC, he had called on the major studios to start making “pro-American” movies, and in response came The Red Menace in 1949, I Was a Communist for the FBI in 1951, and dozens of others, including two now in production: My Son John and Big Jim McLain. That last film, meant to glorify the communist-hunting House committee, was the creation of John Wayne, the actor, and his producer partner, Robert Fellows.

  In the week between HUAC’s two visits to Detroit, Donald Jackson, the congressman from California who had replaced Nixon on the committee, met with Wayne and Fellows to discuss the picture they were making for Warner Bros. about a committee investigator who goes to Honolulu to root out communists despoiling the tropical paradise. The plot was based in part on an article by Richard English titled “We Almost Lost Hawaii to the Reds” that ran in the Saturday Evening Post. William Wheeler, HUAC’s lead investigator, was consulted for many of the details. The role of Big Jim McLain seemed made for Big John Wayne, one of the leading anticommunists in Hollywood and a majordomo in the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals. Wayne often played rough-hewn cowboys and rugged individualists, and for this movie he could maintain that character as a committee investigator instead of a sheriff, chasing commies instead of Indians or outlaws.

  The committee was involved at every step of the movie-making process. In a follow-up letter to Jackson a few weeks after their first meeting, Fellows described the plot, said he would soon send along the screenplay, and asked the committee to keep mum about story details out of fear that opponents would cause trouble when the filming started if they knew the subject matter. “Because of this, we have announced the picture as an adventure story of a cowboy who goes to Honolulu to raise cattle,” Fellows wrote.

  The shoot began in April, and within a month Fellows wrote to Tavenner that he had shown “5 reels of a rough version to Mr. J. L. Warner last night at the Warner Studio.” The Hawaii scenes would not be wrapped until June 5, Fellows noted, but Warner, after viewing the first reels, seemed “unusually enthusiastic about this picture both from an entertainment standpoint and its content on the American scene.” Fellows enclosed the script for Tavenner to examine and sought permission to incorporate photos and newsreels of the committee into the movie to lend it authenticity. When Fellows visited Washington in June, Tavenner gave him notes on the script, but Fellows misplaced them and had to write a follow-up letter after he returned to Los Angeles, asking about the committee counsel’s main suggestion, “something about communists being traitors.”

  “The note that I prepared was designed to be a statement made by the narrator at the place where he is describing Jim McLain and what Jim McLain stands for,” Tavenner responded. “My thought was that Jim McLain could, at the appropriate place, make this statement: He believed, as everyone should, that any person who has been an active communist since 1945 is a traitor to his country. Best of luck, Tavenner.”

  Fellows took the advice, and turned it up a notch. In the opening scene, Chairman Wood and members of the committee are seen at work in their hearing room in Washington. “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” plays in the background as the narrator intones, “We, the citizens of the United States of America, owe these, our elected representatives, a great debt. Undaunted by the vicious campaign of slander launched against them as a whole and as individuals, they staunchly continue their investigation, pursuing t
heir stated belief that anyone who continued to be a communist after 1945 is guilty of high treason.”

  That settled it, the movie wanted America to believe. Any attacks on members of the committee were slander. Anyone named by the committee, including Elliott, was a traitor. They were subhuman, just like the commies Big Jim hunted down in Honolulu. Brenda Murphy, analyzing the movie in Congressional Theatre, her book on dramatizations of the McCarthy era, wrote, “It also conveyed a vivid subtext that stigmatized communists as breeders of disease and insanity, instigators of disaster, insidiously deceptive co-workers and neighbors, hypocritical rich men who manipulate and exploit the working man only until they can take over the world—then liquidate. It appealed to America’s self-satisfaction on the one hand and its deepest fears on the other.”

  In early July, Fellows wrote Tavenner to tell him the movie was done and to thank the committee for its cooperation. “The film turned out well and I think you will be pleased with the results.” He enclosed stills for the committee’s use. “If you or Judge Wood would like extra copies of any still, I will be glad to make them for you or send negatives.” At the end of July, Wood was the guest of honor at a special showing at the Warner Bros. projection room in Atlanta. A few weeks later, the first public preview of Big Jim McLain was held at the Warner Theatre in Huntington Park, California. Viewers were given cards to offer their critiques. The reviews were mixed:

  The best anti-communist picture I have ever seen—a fine patriotic entertainment.

  Good for every American no matter what age.

  I think a different title would be better.

  Still better as a cowboy.

  More production companies in Hollywood should bring more of this to the screen.