[A-List] US state: PBS on HUAC (from Bill Mandel)

["Michael Keaney" <michael.keaney@xxxxxx>]

   Last Sunday I watched a PBS show with a strangely reversed title:
"Arthur Miller, Elia Kazan and the Blacklist: None Without Sin." It is
superb, with one very serious flaw, which will be the burden of this
pose.
   The two men in the title were the closest of friends, and
collaborators, Kazan directing Miller's first plays, which were great
hits. They had relations with, and Miller married, Marilyn Monroe, of
whom there is truly lovely footage, and who played a remarkable role in
bringing them together again after the crisis that provides the story
line of this special in the American Masters series.
   Miller and Kazan were both called before the House Committee on
Un-American Activities. Miller would not name names, Kazan did. The
first-rate film historians who carry the program demonstrate
convincingly that the subsequent works of both were essentially a duel
continuing the rationale of each for his behavior before the committee.
   Miller's "The Crucible," a flop on Broadway largely because the press
dared not say a good word about a play against the witch-hunt, hinged on
the character Proctor, who, after confessing to that which he was not
guilty of, argues and pleads for the one thing he has left -- his name,
which would be taken from him if they compel him to name others.
   Kazan's "On the Waterfront," in which Marlon Brando tells on the
mobsters, including his own brother, responsible for the crimes that
forced longshoremen to endure conditions not far from slavery, is an
argument in favor of naming names.
   The PBS show is dramatic and convincing until the wrap-up. At this
point it jumps from the effects of the House Un-American Activities
Committee upon Hollywood, Broadway, and the country at large to saying
that it gradually lost popularity, and didn't amount to much when it
attacked the civil rights and the anti-Vietnam-War movements in the
middle Sixties. The End.
   Gradually lost popularity? PBS drops a major movement and four years
of history down the memory hole. In May 1960 HUAC subpoenaed 46 people
to appear before a hearing in San Francisco. From my autobiography:
   "May 13th proved to be tremendously exciting. Actually, it was
historic, for it launched the mass movement of white students of the
1960s. Black students were already on the move, primarily by sitting at
lunch counters in the South and demanding to be served on a par with
whites.
   "HUAC made a fatal error in including an 18-year-old UC student, Doug
Wachter, among the subpoenees....The leader of the liberal Berkeley
student party SLATE and another student who had headed the Student Civil
Liberties Union called a meeting to organize a protest against the HUAC
hearing....They...organized a picket line outside the hearing and a mass
rally in San Francisco."
   "The police turned hoses on and viciously beat the mass of students.
The next day, the San Francisco Chronicle immortalized the occasion by
devoting its entire front page to nothing but a photograph of the City
Hall rotunda with the students being washed down the staircase."
   "HUAC...was totally taken aback by the massive student outpouring. So
it lashed out by making a movie of these events....The film, Operation
Abolition, was given enormous audiences - 18 million total - by the
cooperation of the largest corporations and the nation's police
departments."
   "'Police riot' is a phrase the students invented to describe the
events that occurred....The American Civil Liberties Union soon made a
film titled Operation Correction, devoted solely to exposing the
falsehoods in the Committee's movie and its editing....Finally, an
opponent of the committee, Hollywood producer Robert Cohen, made the
best of the anti-HUAC films, despite its deadpan title, House Committee
on Un-American Activities."
   "The first two showings of Operation Abolition were on TV in Los
Angeles, introduced by a former governor of California."
   "The Los Angeles TV commentator's type of attack did have some
dangerous consequences. A month later, an incendiary bomb was thrown
against the building of the Citizens Committee to Preserve American
Freedom, in Los Angeles. It was headed by Frank Wilkinson and was the
adult organization seeking to abolish HUAC. A man of classically
respectable upbringing and background who had been a public housing
administrator, Wilkinson has been convicted of contempt of Congress and
served a year in jail. First, however, he had a truly triumphal speaking
tour at campuses across the country, including one at UC Berkeley with
an audience of  5,000. A couple of months later, a lunatic walked into
the office of English professor Tom Parkinson, as rational and decent a
man as could be found on the Berkeley campus, blew the side of his face
off with a gun, and killed a graduate student. When captured, he said
that this was an anti-Communist act and he had hoped to start World War
III."
   "Attacks, not lethal but politically more dangerous, came from
presumably saner quarters. The Saturday Evening Post, the weekly
middle-America trusted, with 6 1/2 million circulation, editorialized
about the student protests: 'Those Mobs Are Part of the Kremlin's Plan,'
and said: 'Directions for these disorders...were printed in The
Californian, UC student newspaper, and circulated among the rioters.'
That was a lie, and the Daily Californian forced the printing of a
retraction."
   "A nationwide mass movement now arose to abolish HUAC. The silent
acceptance of McCarthyism during the preceding decade was a consequence
of belief in the inevitability of war with the USSR. This belief
demanded that all Americans close ranks. That the United States would
beat the USSR even in a nuclear war was taken for granted. Then Sputnik
went up in 1957. This proved the Soviet claim to have developed an
intercontinental ballistic missile, because they clearly had rockets
capable of boosting payloads beyond the pull of gravity. The small
minority of citizens who had hitherto been vocal opponents of nuclear
arms swelled into a mass movement embracing people from all strata of
society. Americans now realized that this country too would be destroyed
in such a conflict. In that sense, Sputnik, opening people's eyes on all
these issues, contributed to the anti-HUAC movement."
   "Berkeley students could not abandon their opposition to HUAC even if
they wanted to, which they didn't. Sixty-eight people, primarily
students, had been arrested the day I appeared." I was one of the
subpoenaed witnesses, and was called to the stand immediately after the
students were washed down the stairs. "Students now organized to oppose
HUAC and to defend themselves legally."
   "The students' behavior was highly principled. When offered dismissal
of the charges against them on condition they file no suits against the
police, they agreed, provided the judge would also dismiss charges
against non-student demonstrators. He did so."
   "In October, just weeks after U.C. Berkeley's fall semester began...I
wrote to Bill Sennett, a veteran of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, then
living in North Hollywood. He had invited me to speak to his discussion
group about the split between the USSR and China that had just occurred.
My letter tried to convince him to change the subject of my talk. I
wrote:
    "'There is one phenomenon in current American political life -- and
current American political MOVEMENT -- with which I am intimately
associated and highly familiar, and which I believe is more important to
your group than this Sino-Soviet business.
    "'I refer to the student movement, and in particular student
opposition to the Un-American Committee....It is important for your
group to know that a new MOVEMENT is under way that, I am absolutely
convinced, will have a major impact on American life in the years just
ahead'."
    "A month later a pamphlet called Campus Rebels appeared, written by
Al Richmond, editor of the communist People's World. He had interviewed
me and quoted me anonymously, thus:
    "'An older radical, who is acquainted with student leaders, said
this movement might well spearhead a progressive democratic revival in
American life filling a vacuum that he believes has been created by the
abdication of labor leadership and the ineffectiveness of existing
radical groups.'"
    "I spent much of the next four years responding to the furor created
by Operation Abolition" which treated me as chief villain and "briefly
made me a national figure among youth," "and participating in the
counteroffensive the hearing and movie stimulated." I was invited to
speak at campuses across the country.
    It was those four years of student activity that reduced the
prestige of the Un-American Activities Committee to zero, causing its
attacks on the civil rights movement and the anti-Vietnam War movement
simply not to be taken seriously, and resulting in its abolition by
Congress not long thereafter.
    But viewers of the PBS film get not one word on that.

    William Mandel
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The title of my autobiography, SAYING NO TO POWER (Introduction by
Howard Zinn), is based on my demolition of Sen. Joe McCarthy and later
of HUAC in hearings of 1953 and 1960. It is a history of how the
American people fought to defend and expand its rights since the 1920s
(I'm 86) employing the form of the life of a 30s AND 60s activist, one
who was involved in most serious movements: student, labor, 45 years of
efforts to prevent war with the USSR and Cuba, civil rights South and
North, women's liberation [my late wife appears on 50 pages], 37 years
on Pacifica Radio [where I reinvented talk radio, of whose previous
existence I had been unaware], civil liberties, and opposition to
anti-Semitism and to Zionism. You may hear/see my testimonies before
McCarthy and, later, HUAC on my website, http://www.billmandel.net  I am
the author of five books in my academic field, have taught at UC
Berkeley, and earlier held a postdoctoral fellowship, by invitation, at
Stanford's Hoover Institution.
 The book may be ordered through all normal sources. For an autographed
copy, send me $24 at 4466 View Pl.,#106, Oakland, CA. 94611
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