Read Death of the Liberal Class Online
Authors: Chris Hedges
Tags: #Political Culture, #Political Ideologies, #General, #Conservatism & Liberalism, #Political Science, #Liberalism
Death of the Liberal Class (19 page)
A letter to the drama editor of the
New York Times
after Loeb’s death said he “died of a sickness commonly called the blacklist.”
46
The actress Jean Muir, after being named, was removed from the cast of a television sitcom
The Aldrich Family
, in which she was supposed to appear as Mother Aldrich. The folk group the Weavers, which included Pete Seeger and the actress Lee Grant, all vanished from the public stage. Those who were blacklisted watched as friends, neighbors and acquaintances severed contact with them.
New York Times
after Loeb’s death said he “died of a sickness commonly called the blacklist.”
46
The actress Jean Muir, after being named, was removed from the cast of a television sitcom
The Aldrich Family
, in which she was supposed to appear as Mother Aldrich. The folk group the Weavers, which included Pete Seeger and the actress Lee Grant, all vanished from the public stage. Those who were blacklisted watched as friends, neighbors and acquaintances severed contact with them.
“My life revolved around those friendships,” Bernstein wrote:
They were almost entirely with other blacklisted people; we had circled the wagons and it was dangerous to step outside the perimeter. In the morning I tried to write—speculative scripts or articles or the occasional story—but they were desultory, lacking conviction. I seemed to need a validation I could not produce from myself alone. The days were aimless, as they had been when I was waiting to be drafted. I felt suspended; my real life was somewhere else, on hold, waiting to be resurrected when the country came to its senses. Finally, I had to admit I was depressed, a recognition that only added to the depression. A conspiracy was afoot to make me feel unworthy and I was giving it credence.
47
Many, including Mostel, Faulk, Grant, and Seeger, and even Bernstein, would return to prominence in the 1960s, but the purges marked the last gasp of an era, one of progressive and radical artists who were allied with working-class movements and saw art as linked to the articulation and creation of a social and political consciousness. The broad, bold ideas and truths expressed by radical movements and artists before the witch hunts were effectively censored out of public discourse.
“The overall legacy of the liberals’ failure to stand up against the anticommunist crusades was to let the nation’s political culture veer to the right,” writes Ellen Schrecker in
Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America
:
Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America
:
Movements and ideas that had once been acceptable were now beyond the pale. Though Communists and their allies were the direct victims, the mainstream liberals and former New Dealers within the Democratic Party were the indirect ones. Condoning the campaign against communism did not protect them from being denounced for “losing” China or, like Supreme Court Justice Black, for supporting desegregation in the South. Moreover, because the left had been destroyed, when liberals came under attack they had to defend themselves from a more politically exposed position than they would otherwise have occupied. This may seem obvious, but it is a point that needs to be stressed. The disappearance of the communist movement weakened American liberalism. Because its adherents were now on the left of the political spectrum, instead of at the center, they had less room within which to maneuver.
48
In the wake of the witch hunts, networks such as CBS forced employees to sign loyalty oaths. Walt Disney and Ronald Reagan, president of the Screen Actors Guild, cooperated in hounding out artists deemed disloyal. Those who refused to cooperate with the witch hunts or who openly defied HUAC instantly became nonpersons. One such resister was Paul Robeson, who went before the committee in June 1956. A celebrated singer and actor, Robeson, who was a communist sympathizer and vocal supporter of civil rights, was banned from commercial radio and television. He would end his life in obscurity. Although an African American, he encountered obstacles to performing afterward in black churches. Established liberal institutions, including the NAACP, the American Civil Liberties Union (where ACLU cocounsel Morris Ernst worked closely with FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover), Americans for Democratic Action, the American Association of University Professors, and the American Committee for Cultural Freedom either were silent or collaborated in the banishment of artists, teachers, writers, performers, scientists, and government officials.
The widespread dismissals of professors, elementary and high-school teachers, and public employees—especially social workers whose unions had advocated on behalf of their clients—were often carried out quietly. The names of suspected “reds” were routinely handed to administrators and school officials under the FBI’s Responsibilities Program. It was up to the institutions,
49
nearly all of which complied, to see that those singled out lost their jobs. There were rarely hearings. The victims did not see any purported evidence. They were usually abruptly terminated. Those on the blacklist were effectively locked out of their profession. Schrecker estimates that between ten thousand and twelve thousand people were blackballed through this process.
49
nearly all of which complied, to see that those singled out lost their jobs. There were rarely hearings. The victims did not see any purported evidence. They were usually abruptly terminated. Those on the blacklist were effectively locked out of their profession. Schrecker estimates that between ten thousand and twelve thousand people were blackballed through this process.
The fiercely anticommunist AFL-CIO, which subordinated itself to the Democratic Party, was permitted to flourish, while militant unions, including those in Hollywood, were ruthlessly purged or closed. The leadership of the CIO expelled several left-led unions in 1949 after disputes erupted over the party’s initial support for Henry Wallace’s presidential campaign. The CIO used the threat of further expulsions to stifle internal debate and discredit radicals, including anarchists, socialists, pro-Soviet communists, Trotskyists, and others who once played a vital role within the labor movement. Unions, formerly steeped in the doctrine of class struggle and filled with those who sought broad social and political rights for the working class, collaborated with the capitalist class and merged with the liberal establishment. The embrace of fanatical anticommunism was, in essence, an embrace of the suspension of civil liberties, including freedom of speech and the right to organize, values the liberal class claimed to support.
The Taft-Hartley Act, passed in 1948 and the single most destructive piece of legislation to the union movement, was a product of anticommunist hysteria. When it was passed, about half of all American workers belonged to labor unions. That figure has now dropped to twelve percent. The Taft-Hartley Act was devised as a revision of the National Labor Relations Act (NLRB) of 1935, known as the Wagner Act. It was one of the first new pieces of postwar legislation to roll back the gains made by workers under the New Deal. The Wagner Act, known as “the labor bill of rights,” had created the NLRB, and it forbade employers from engaging in unfair labor practices. Although the gains by workers were made primarily in the North, since southern whites sought to block union organizing among blacks, the NLRB represented a major achievement for working men and women. To get it in place, Roosevelt had permitted the NLRB to exclude agricultural and domestic workers, a coded way to exclude blacks and keep southern politicians, who were mostly Democrats, behind him.
The Taft-Hartley Act, which is still law, prohibited jurisdictional strikes, wildcat strikes, solidarity or political strikes, and secondary boycotts—union strikes against employers who continue to do business with a firm that is undergoing a strike. The act forbade secondary or “common situs” picketing, closed shops, and monetary donations by unions to federal political campaigns. All union officers were forced to sign noncommunist affidavits or lose their positions. Heavy restrictions were placed on union shops, while individual states were allowed to pass “right-to-work laws” that outlawed union shops. The Federal Government was empowered to obtain legal strikebreaking injunctions if an impending or current strike “imperiled the national health or safety.” The act effectively demobilized the labor movement. It severely curtailed the ability to organize and strike and purged the last vestiges of militant labor leaders from the ranks of unions. With the passage of Taft-Hartley the power of labor to fight back effectively against the corporate state died. Labor, once the beating heart of progressive radical movements, became as impotent as the arts, the media, the church, the universities, and the Democratic Party.
IV
Politics as Spectacle
What if the world is one kind of—of show! . . . What if we are
all only talent assembled by the Great Talent Scout Up Above!
The Great Show of Life. Starring Everybody! Suppose enter-
tainment is the Purpose of Life!
—PHILIP ROTH,
“On the Air”
1
“On the Air”
1
THE RADICAL upheavals of the 1960s were infused with the same hedonism and cult of the self that corrupted earlier twentieth-century counterculture movements. There was an open antagonism between most antiwar activists and the working class, whose sons were shipped to Vietnam while the sons of the middle class were often handed college deferments. Working-class high schools sent twenty to thirty percent of their graduates to Vietnam during the height of the war, while college graduates made up two percent of all troops sent to Vietnam in 1965 and 1966. Students who opposed the war were derided by the power elite, and many in the working class, as draft dodgers. Antiwar activists were portrayed as spoiled children of the rich and the middle class who advocated free love, drug use, communism, and social anarchy.
The unions remained virulently anticommunist, spoke in the language of militarism and the Cold War, and were largely unsympathetic to the civil-rights and antiwar movements. When student activists protested at the 1965 AFL-CIO Convention in San Francisco, chanting, “Get out of Vietnam!” the delegates taunted them by shouting, “Get a haircut.” AFL-CIO president George Meany ordered the security to “clear the Kookies out of the gallery.” Once the protesters were escorted out, Walter Reuther, president of the United Automobile Workers and a leading force in the AFL-CIO, announced that “protestors should be demonstrating against Hanoi and Peking . . . [who] are responsible for the war.” The convention passed a resolution that read “The labor movement proclaim[s] to the world that the nation’s working men and women do support the Johnson administration in Vietnam.”
2
2
Those that constituted the hard-core New Left, groups like Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), found their inspiration in the liberation struggles in Vietnam and the third world rather than the labor movement, which they considered bought off by capitalism. “With few exceptions, New Left radicals regarded the working class in the heart of the imperialist beast as a [big] part of the problem, and they looked elsewhere for allies,” Sharon Smith writes.
3
Radicals turned to Mao Zedong, Joseph Stalin, and Leon Trotsky. And with that came an embrace of armed revolution. The Black Panthers, the Nation of Islam, and the Weather Underground Organization, severed from the daily concerns of the working class, became as infected with the lust for violence, quest for ideological purity, crippling paranoia, self-exaltation, and internal repression as the state system they defied. Only a few hundred radical Maoists, many of them living in communes in cities such as San Francisco, broke with the SDS and took jobs in factories as blue-collar workers in an attempt to organize the working class. But they were a tiny minority.
3
Radicals turned to Mao Zedong, Joseph Stalin, and Leon Trotsky. And with that came an embrace of armed revolution. The Black Panthers, the Nation of Islam, and the Weather Underground Organization, severed from the daily concerns of the working class, became as infected with the lust for violence, quest for ideological purity, crippling paranoia, self-exaltation, and internal repression as the state system they defied. Only a few hundred radical Maoists, many of them living in communes in cities such as San Francisco, broke with the SDS and took jobs in factories as blue-collar workers in an attempt to organize the working class. But they were a tiny minority.
Protest in the 1960s found its ideological roots in the disengagement championed earlier by Beats such by Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William Burroughs. It was a movement that, while it incorporated a healthy dose of disrespect for authority, focused again on self-indulgent schemes for inner peace and fulfillment. The use of hallucinogenic drugs, advocated by Timothy Leary in books such as the
Politics of Ecstasy,
and the rise of occultism that popularized Transcendental Meditation, theosophy, the Hare Krishna branch of Hinduism, and renewed interest in Zen Buddhism and study of the
I Ching
, were trends that would have dismayed the Wobblies or the militants in the old Communist Party. The counterculture of the 1960s, like the commodity culture, lured adherents inward. It set up the self up as the primary center of concern. It, too, offered affirmative, therapeutic remedies to social problems that embraced vague, undefined, and utopian campaigns to remake society. There was no political vision. Herman Hesse’s
Siddhartha,
with its narrator’s search for enlightenment, became emblematic of the moral hollowness of the New Left.
Politics of Ecstasy,
and the rise of occultism that popularized Transcendental Meditation, theosophy, the Hare Krishna branch of Hinduism, and renewed interest in Zen Buddhism and study of the
I Ching
, were trends that would have dismayed the Wobblies or the militants in the old Communist Party. The counterculture of the 1960s, like the commodity culture, lured adherents inward. It set up the self up as the primary center of concern. It, too, offered affirmative, therapeutic remedies to social problems that embraced vague, undefined, and utopian campaigns to remake society. There was no political vision. Herman Hesse’s
Siddhartha,
with its narrator’s search for enlightenment, became emblematic of the moral hollowness of the New Left.
These movements, and the counterculture celebrities that led them, such as the Yippie leader Abbie Hoffman, sought and catered to the stage set for them by the television camera. Protest and court trials became street theater. Dissent became another media spectacle. Antiwar protesters in Berkeley switched from singing “Solidarity Forever’ to “Yellow Submarine.” The civil-rights movement, which was rooted in the moral and religious imperatives of justice and self-sacrifice, what Dwight Macdonald called nonhistorical values, was largely eclipsed by the self-centeredness of the New Left, especially after the assassinations of Malcolm X in 1967 and Martin Luther King Jr. a year later. And once the Vietnam War ended, once middle-class men no longer had to go to war, the movement disintegrated. The political and moral void within the counterculture meant it was an easy transition from college radical to a member of the liberal class. The 1960s counterculture, like the counterculture of the Bohemians or the Beats, was always in tune with the commercial culture. It shared commercial culture’s hedonism, love of spectacle, and preoccupation with the self.
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