The Singers

By Melvin Maddocks

NAMING NAMES by Victor S. Navasky; Viking; 482 pages; $15.95

One August day in 1955 Pete Seeger was brought before a House Un-American Activities subcommittee. He was asked, according to the custom of the day, to recite the names of every Communist he knew. The folk singer politely declined, but with a fine sense of the symbolic, offered to stage a little recital for the committee chairman, Francis E. Walter of Pennsylvania: "I know many beautiful songs from your home county."

To sing. To play the canary. To be a stool pigeon. The blackest humor jeers behind the slang for acting as informer --naming names. To say the word "informer" is to evoke the history of betrayal, to hear the ring of 30 pieces of silver. Yet for a brief period in the late '40s and '50s the community's moral leper was promoted to something of a cultural hero. That elevation was not so odd as it first appeared. Soviet espionage, after all, was no fiction: wartime thieves of atomic secrets had been tried and convicted in federal courts. Nor was the Gulag a fantasy; as early as the '30s Stalin's murderous intent had been revealed. The "Red Menace" has been revised downward many times, but a generation ago there were many non-hysterical, unxenophobic Americans who found Communist rhetoric and performance to be morally squalid, and who deserved better than the work of self-aggrandizing Congressmen and sycophantic "cooperative witnesses."

Three decades later, sifting through the ruins in a study he describes as "less a history than a moral detective story," Victor S. Navasky begins with a question for the informers and their ghosts: At what price--not only to their victims and themselves but to the country as a whole --did these singers sing?

Navasky, 48, editor of the weekly magazine Nation, begins by assuming that the informer was not vital to the containment of the American Communist Party. The party, he points out, numbered only 31,608 members in 1950, including undercover FBI agents. Even if witnesses were required, they were not to be found in show business--unless headlines were worth more than truth. Actor Larry Parks, a onetime Communist, exposed the machinery of informing when he begged Hollywood investigators: "Don't present me with the choice of either being in contempt of this committee and going to jail or forcing me to really crawl through the mud to be an informer. For what purpose?" The purpose, Navasky judges, was "punitive," the staging of a "degradation ceremony" as an end in itself. A witness could clear his name only by naming others--singing for his supper.

There are theater-of-the-absurd interludes to the chronicle. The screenwriter Martin Berkeley, in a burst of informer's promiscuity, names 161 names. Judy Holliday, the incomparable impersonator of Hollywood dumb blonds, hires a researcher to check out her own political past. Zero Mostel shakes a grisly cap-and-bell to boast: "I am a man of a thousand faces, all of them blacklisted."

But mostly the pages groan with the sound of trust cracking--for instance, the break in the friendship of Arthur Miller and Elia Kazan. Uncooperative Witness Miller went on to write his morality play about Salem witches, The Crucible, honoring resisters. Cooperative Witness Kazan directed On the Waterfront, arguing through the powerful performance of Marlon Brando that it takes guts to testify against malefactors. There is a horrifying glimpse of the playwright Clifford Odets, who named his Group Theater friend J. Edward Bromberg, then delivered a tearful eulogy after Bromberg died, blacklisted, broke and heartsick.

Something like what happened to these private lives happened to the public life of America, Navasky maintains. HUAC acted consistently: the committee was "an 'honest' Red hunter." It was the rest of the community that was out of character--especially the liberals who kept their skirts clean by attacking other liberals "with more venom than they had ever directed at any economic royalist."

Navasky is well aware that the Communist Party, with "its clandestine style, its overresponsiveness to Soviet policy and the consequent abrupt flip-flops in its party line ... was a contributor to its own problems." But, he argues, the U.S. was overresponsive to the Communist threat. In the end, the decline of the U.S. Foreign Service, the nuclear arms race and the Viet Nam War all bore a cause-and-effect relationship to the fall from innocence that began by naming names.

Navasky's findings are the material of continuing debate, but his achievement is unarguable. With Naming Names, the author of Kennedy Justice establishes himself as that rare historian who can, like a novelist, illuminate the boundaries where power and conscience meet. That illumination comes from a white heat, an unwillingness to endorse the conclusion of the blacklisted scenarist Dalton Trumbo: "It will do no good to search for villains or heroes . . . there were only victims." Navasky comes closer to the aphorism of Trumbo's bitter colleague, Albert Maltz: "To understand all is not to forgive all." But a third blacklistee offers a sounder conclusion, and perhaps a method of keeping distinctions sharp while permitting life to go on. Speaking of the informer as individual and as genus, the director Abraham Lincoln Polonsky observed: "He only did a bad thing. He did not destroy the universe."

--By Melvin Maddocks

Editors' Choice

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