The Grand Inquisitor's Manual (44 page)

By far the greatest number of victims managed to stay out of prison but were fired from their jobs because their names appeared on one of several blacklists whose existence was officially denied. Some were already in ill health when the subpoenas were served, and the stress has been blamed for accelerating their deaths. A few were so demoralized that they took their own lives; one victim committed suicide on the night before he was scheduled to testify before HUAC, declaring himself to have been “assassinated by publicity.”
²⁴

Because the House Un-American Activities Committee sought so many of its victims in the entertainment industry, the Communist witch-hunt of the McCarthy era is refracted in the work of more than a few celebrated writers. Bertolt Brecht’s
Galileo,
first staged at a small playhouse in Los Angeles in 1947, characterizes Galileo as a moral and physical coward, a fact that has prompted some critics to observe that “the Galileo of his drama is Zinoviev or Bukharin…dressed up in historical costume.” When Galileo is asked why he went on his knees before the Inquisition, Brecht makes him say: “I recanted because I was afraid of physical pain.” And his depiction of Galileo prefigures Brecht’s own strange and tortured performance when he was subpoenaed by HUAC only weeks after the premiere of
Galileo.
²⁵

Brecht, in fact, was among the first witnesses summoned to testify at the 1947 hearings on Communist influence in the entertainment industry, and he followed the last of the Hollywood Ten to the witness stand. Rather like Galileo before the friar-inquisitors of the Roman Inquisition, Brecht did not openly defy his interrogators. Instead, he took advantage of a thick accent and an imperfect command of English to confound them, and his testimony began to resemble an Abbott and Costello routine.

Q
: Have you attended any Communist party meetings?

A
: No, I don’t think so….

Q
: Well, aren’t you certain?

A
: No—I am certain, yes.

Q
: You are certain you have never been to Communist party meetings?

A
: Yes, I think so….

Q
: You are certain?

A
: I think I am certain.
²⁶

But when Brecht was finally cornered on the question of whether he had ever applied for membership in the Communist party, he suddenly demonstrated his mastery of the English language: “No, no, no, no, no,” Brecht declared. “Never.” He also denied that his writings were “based on the philosophy of Marx and Lenin,” a disingenuous answer that amounted to the disavowal of his life’s work. At the end of the session, the committee chairman thanked him for his cooperation and cited him as “a good example” to the unfriendly witnesses. Then, quite literally, Brecht caught the next plane out of town and spent the rest of his life behind the Iron Curtain.
²⁷

An openly defiant commentary on the Communist witch-hunt can be read between the lines of
The Crucible
by Arthur Miller, a play that was first produced just as the McCarthy era was reaching its zenith in 1953. “I speak my own sins,” says the character John Procter, who pointedly refuses to betray his friends and neighbors to save his own life, “I cannot judge another.” When Miller himself was subpoenaed by HUAC, he offered to testify about his own flirtation with the Communist party—“I have had to go to hell to meet the devil,” said Miller—but he refused to name names, a stance that earned him a contempt citation. Later, he warned about the dangerous consequences of seeing demons where none exist.
²⁸
“No man lives who has not got a panic button,” observed Miller, “and when it is pressed by the clean white hand of moral duty, a certain murderous train is set in motion.”
²⁹

None of the victims of the Communist witch-hunt were, in fact, the kind of “wreckers” they were made out to be by McCarthy and his gang of red-baiters. About the worst crime that HUAC could imagine was the insinuation of Communist propaganda into the movies that the Hollywood studio system cranked out in the 1930s and 1940s, but even these offenses existed only in the eye of the beholder. Apart from the much-abused
Mission to Moscow
—a war movie made at the encouragement of the White House at a time when the Soviet Union was an ally of the United States and doing most of the fighting against Nazi Germany—the red-baiters were unable to discover a single instance in which the party line had found its way into a Hollywood movie. “It was hard to insert proletarian class consciousness,” cracks historian Ellen Schrecker, “into such vehicles as
Sweetheart of the Campus, Charlie Chan’s Greatest Case,
or
Our Blushing Brides.
”
³⁰

The actors, directors, and writers whose names ended up on the Hollywood blacklist were the most publicized victims of the McCarthy era. But diplomats, bureaucrats, librarians, university professors, classroom teachers, labor union officials, and serving officers of the armed forces—almost all of them obscure and unnoticed by the media—were also the objects of persecution as the tribunals of the Communist witch-hunt ranged across the country in search of subversives. The Hollywood blacklists were notorious, but even the New York City school system maintained a little list of its own. “From Hollywood to Harvard,” writes Schrecker, “the anticommunist crusade blighted thousands of lives, careers, and marriages.”
³¹

One such victim was a man named Milo Radulovich, a twenty-seven-year-old Air Force reserve officer who lived in a little town in Michigan and held down two part-time jobs while studying physics at the University of Michigan. He was taking care of his two young children while his wife was at work when a pair of Air Force officers showed up at his door. Radulovich was officially notified that he had been denounced as a “security risk” and now faced a dishonorable discharge on the grounds that his father subscribed to a socialist newspaper and his sister had once participated in a demonstration to protest the refusal of a Detroit hotel to rent a room to the African-American singer, actor, and activist Paul Robeson. “I had done nothing,” Radulovich later explained. “Guilt by blood, of all things.”
³²

When Radulovich consulted an attorney, he was advised to “disavow” his father and sister in order to save himself. Fatefully, the Radulovich case caught the attention of CBS journalist Edward R. Murrow, who featured the young soldier’s dilemma in a report on the news program
See It Now.
A month later, the Air Force officially exonerated Radulovich, and Murrow went on to prepare the famous broadcast that finally called Joe McCarthy to account for his groundless accusations against innocent Americans. The Senate formally censured McCarthy for his excesses in 1954, and the inquisitorial machinery in America finally began to sputter and stall.

Still, the American inquisition, like its Spanish counterpart, was not easy to dismantle. Arthur Miller, for example, was not subpoenaed by HUAC until 1956, and his citation for contempt of Congress was upheld by a federal judge in 1957. The Hollywood blacklist was not decisively broken until 1960, when Dalton Trumbo was openly credited as the screenwriter of
Spartacus.
HUAC remained in formal existence until 1975, although—rather like the Roman Inquisition—it was renamed as the House Committee on Internal Security in 1969 in a belated and ultimately futile effort to repair its appalling reputation.

Even now that HUAC and McCarthy himself are both long gone, however, the inquisitorial impulse is still deeply imprinted on the American democracy, and the machinery of persecution remains available. And whenever new events and personalities strike us as a Rendezvous of Devils, we are tempted to hit the panic button.

A revival of
The Crucible
was staged on Broadway in the spring of 2002. After the final lines of dialogue were spoken—“You are pulling Heaven down,” cries John Procter, “and raising up a whore!”—the audience was presented with a spectacular stage effect. The elaborate wooden set was made to collapse upon itself, and the last piece of debris to fall was artfully designed to resemble a fragment of the distinctive façade of the World Trade Center, a familiar image borrowed from the daily newspapers and news broadcasts. The play itself, of course, uses the Salem witch trials as a stand-in for the McCarthy era, and now the producers were reminding us of yet another and more recent moment in American history.
³³

The visual reference to the horrific events of September 11, 2001, in a performance of
The Crucible
was a daring gesture, especially when human remains were still being dug out of the ruins at Ground Zero. But it was also a Brechtian moment that forces us to ponder the linkage between the war on witchcraft in colonial America, the Red Scare of the McCarthy era, and the newly declared war on terror in contemporary America, all of which are examples of “what can happen when fears and anxieties [are] combined to create hysteria in public and political life,” as journalist Haynes Johnson observes in
The Age of Anxiety.
The same “devil’s brew of fear, suspicion and paranoia,” along with a dollop of “cynical political opportunity,” created the historical Inquisition and now threatens to set the machinery of persecution back into operation.
³⁴

To be sure, the attack on America on September 11 was just as real as the one that took place on December 7, 1941. And it prompted the same sense that the ground had shifted under our feet, the same righteous indignation, the same call for vengeance against the aggressor. Thus did George W. Bush preach a “crusade” to “rid the world of evildoers.” But it is also true that America hit the panic button in the aftermath of both attacks, and the result has been the victimization of men and women who pose no real threat to America. Like the 120,000 Japanese-Americans who were arrested and interned during World War II, thousands of men and women whose only apparent crime is their Arabic or Islamic ancestry have been targeted for arrest, incarceration, and interrogation. Americans of every race, color, and creed also pay a price whenever a new inquisition is cranked up.
³⁵

More than a few unsettling parallels can be drawn between the medieval Inquisition and the modern war on terror. The FBI reportedly considered a plan to secretly monitor the sales of Middle Eastern foods in grocery stores in order to detect the presence of Muslim terrorists in America; the FBI later denied the report, but the whole notion echoes the readiness of the Spanish Inquisition to arrest young men of Muslim ancestry who were seen eating couscous. Federal law enforcement officers were, in fact, “ordered to search out and interview Muslim and Arab men between the ages of eighteen and thirty-three,” an
inquisitio generalis
that was intended to flush out a vast and secret conspiracy of alien terrorists. So far, however, only a handful of malefactors have been detected, even fewer have been convicted of a crime, and the conspiracy that seemed so real and so urgent on September 12, 2001, may have existed only in our collective imagination.
³⁶

Like the canons of the Fourth Lateran Council, the Patriot Act and related federal legislation enacted in the wake of 9/11 have provided a legal framework for the war on terror. Secret trials were mandated for foreign nationals whom the federal authorities sought to deport—the real targets, of course, were men and women from Muslim countries—and the evidence on which the government relied could be withheld from their attorneys. Of the 13,740 foreigners who were prosecuted under these new laws, according to the American Civil Liberties Union, “not a single one of these individuals was ever publicly charged with terrorism.” Of the estimated 5,000 foreign nationals who were rounded up by federal agents during the investigation of the attack on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center—most of them from Arab or South Asian countries, and nearly all of them Muslim—“not one was convicted of a terrorist crime.”
³⁷

The parallels are even more striking when it comes to American military and intelligence operations in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere around the world. Like the war on heresy in the Middle Ages, the war on terror has been the occasion for coining new and evasive phrases: “extraordinary rendition,” for example, refers to kidnapping a suspect off the streets and sending him to a secret prison in a “third country” where he can be subjected to “harsh interrogation techniques,” a euphemism for torture. Indeed, the technique now called waterboarding is precisely the same one that the friar-inquisitors of the Middle Ages called the ordeal by water, and the same one used by the Gestapo and the NKVD. The spirited debate among attorneys, politicians, and pundits over whether waterboarding is or is not torture is yet another Kafkaesque moment in the long history of the inquisitorial enterprise.
*

The inquisitorial prisons, where victims could be held for years or even decades and tortured at will, find their counterparts in the Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad and the detention facilities at the U.S. military base at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba. The notorious photograph of a naked and shackled Iraqi prisoner taken in a cellblock at Abu Ghraib features a specific item of apparel that was a favorite of the friar-inquisitors—the Iraqi man has been crowned with a conical “dunce’s cap” that resembles the
coroza
worn by victims of the Spanish Inquisition at an auto-da-fé. In both cases, the point of the headgear was to degrade and humiliate the victim.