[On June 9th, 1954 laywer
Joseph Welch famously asked Senator Joseph McCarthy, “Have
you no sense of decency?” So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of
contexts for McCarthyism, leading up to a weekend post on that moment and
historical turning points!]
On one historically
symbolic and one very literal cultural engagement with McCarthyism.
As I wrote in
this post, allegory can be a tough genre for audiences (and all of us) to
figure out, or at least an ambiguous and uncertain one; sometimes it’s not even
clear whether a text is allegorical at all. But I’m not sure any potentially allegorical
work has had a more shared and agreed-upon interpretation than Arthur
Miller’s play The Crucible
(1953). Miller’s play focuses entirely on its fictionalized depiction of a
two-and-a-half-century past historical event, the
Salem Witch Trials, with no reference of any kind to contemporary issues. But
that hasn’t stopped critics and audiences, from 1953 down to 2018, from reading
the play as a clear commentary on the era of McCarthyism and its own versions
of witch hunts. Sealing the deal for that interpretation was Miller’s
questioning three years later by the House of Representatives’s Committee on
Un-American Activities, where he was convicted of contempt of Congress
because he refused to name names. The
Crucible certainly contributes interesting ideas to our narratives of the
Salem Witch Trials, but there’s little doubt that it’s also an allegorical
cultural work from and of the McCarthy era.
There weren’t a
lot of direct cultural engagements with McCarthyism in its own era, but a
couple decades later a film was released that offers a striking such
engagement: director Martin Ritt and screenwriter Walter Bernstein’s The Front (1976). Both
Bernstein and Ritt had been blacklisted
from working in the industry during the McCarthy era, as were multiple
actors involved in the production; the film’s closing credits highlight these
figures and identify the year that they were added to the blacklist. The movie
itself tells the story of a bookie and cashier (played by Woody Allen in a rare
serious turn) who finds himself impersonating a screenwriter in order to
help a blacklisted friend get his films made; without spoiling all the plot
twists, the film portrays with painful accuracy the life-altering and even
fatal effects of the blacklist (including a tragic, acclaimed performance from
one of those formerly blacklisted actors, the great Zero Mostel [SPOILERS in
that clip]), and certainly considers the broader histories and stakes of
McCarthyism as well: it ends with one of its characters facing the House
Un-American Activites Committee and exiting in handcuffs.
I’m not gonna
try in this third and final paragraph to make the case that one of these ways
of engaging with a historical moment like McCarthyism is necessarily more
productive or meaningful; there is of course a place for both allegory and
realism in how we deal with any topic and theme. But I will say that I believe
very few 21st century Americans know about the blacklist at all
(even in the 1970s Mostel made the case for The
Front’s existence by arguing that “a lot of kids don’t even realize that
blacklisting ever existed”), and thus that realistic cultural works like The Front can do important work in
highlighting such histories. The Crucible’s
broader themes of social hysterias and witch hunts, of their origins and
effects, of how they can destroy individual lives and entire communities, are
of course crucial ones to engage with at any time, and likewise have a great
deal to tell us about the McCarthy era in specific terms. So there’s a role for
both these kinds of cultural works (among many others) in how we engage with
the past—but I would add that it might help to view The Front first, to add to our knowledge and perspective about the
moment allegorized so powerfully in Miller’s play.
Special post
this weekend,
Ben
PS. What do you
think?
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