Arthur Miller on a Red-hunter who stopped hunting
The president fired him for it
The author of several classic American plays, especially Death of a Salesman and The Crucible — and briefly, but famously, the husband of Marilyn Monroe — Arthur Miller was a McCarthyite target in the fifties. Refusing to name the names of people who’d attended a Communist writers’ meetings a couple decades before, he was charged with contempt of Congress. A former Redhunter, Harry Cain, testified for him. He tells Cain’s story in his autobiography Timebends: A Life.
A much decorated marine who had fought in the Korean War [Harry] Cain was one of a very few Red-hunters to have turned against the whole business, in his case with a vengeance.
He had ridden the anti-Communist tide out of his native state of Washington when, with no trace of any political background, he was picked up by the Republicans and run for the Senate. His sole campaign theme was the Communist menace, about which he had such powerful feelings that he would demand Chaplin’s deportation for having asked “the self-admitted Communist Picasso” to help organize French protests against American repression. . . .
In court, Cain testified that he had read my plays and found that politically they were so contradictory that they could not have been written under Party control. It was pleasant testimony, but obviously the tracks were laid and the train was going to its appointed station no matter what.
Miller was convicted, fined $500, and sentenced to a month in prison, which was suspended. His legal fees totaled $40,000, he said.
Cain’s transformation had grown out of his former job as head of the Subversive Activities Control Board, to which he was appointed by President Eisenhower after his defeat for a second term as senator. The board’s mandate was to see that no Reds were hired by government or held government positions.
In an ordinary day he received a bushel of letters of denunciation of one citizen by another for real or imagined subversive views, plus a small but steady number of complaints by accused people claiming innocence of Communist associations or sympathies, which went into the files with little ado.
A persistent man in Baltimore, however, caught Cain’s bored attention with a semiliterate protesting letter about every third day claiming that he had been unjustly fired as a subversive from his job at the post office. A real Red, Cain imagined, had to know how to spell better than this, and he wrote agreeing to see the man to discuss the matter, figuring he would probably not dare to show up and face his interrogation.
But he did appear one morning and convinced Cain of his innocence. He had the same name as a man known to have contributed to some Party front.
Cain got him his job back, but he now found himself staring at his massive files containing the hundreds of denials, partial denials, remorseful confessions, denunciations — the whole mixed detritus of thousands of Americans who had lived through the New Deal years and had been tainted with what was simplistically branded subversion.
Beginning by attempting to sort out the obvious from the less obvious Reds, the far leftists from the more conservative leftists and the mere left liberals, he arrived in some worried weeks at the point where he no longer believed that the government should be in the ideological policing business at all.
He got an appointment with Eisenhower, to whom he confided his deep misgivings that they were assembling a governmental structure of a totalitarian, mind-controlling bent. Eisenhower listened and Cain was promptly fired.
Miller described Cain’s change of mind in a slightly different way in a Harvard lecture, “The Crucible in History,” delivered some years later. Cain
had been a sidekick of McCarthy’s and a weekly poker partner. But disillusionment had worn him down when, as head of the Loyalty Board, he had had to deal with an amazing load of letters arriving each morning from people suspecting employers or employees, neighbors, friends, relatives and the corner grocer of communist sympathies.
The idea of the whole country spying on itself began to depress him, and looking down from his office window he had the overwhelming idea of a terrified nation out there — and worse, that some substantial fraction of it had become quite literally crazed.
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