Priests of Our Democracy: The Supreme Court, Academic Freedom, and the Anti-Communist Purge

9. The Moral Dilemma: Naming Names

162 > 163 dishonorable,” Hellman wrote; “I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year’s fashions.”2 Her letter soon became famous as a crisp statement of the moral issue involved. Like fellow playwright Arthur Miller, who took the same position a few years later, Hellman risked imprisonment for contempt of Congress. Both avoided that fate,3 but what if one did not have the stature of a Lillian Hellman or Arthur Miller? To keep one’s job and support one’s family were powerful incentives to give investigating committees, the FBI, and their counterparts on boards of education what they wanted, especially if one could rationalize, as Kazan and many others did, that the Red hunters already had the names, that communists were not worth sacrificing one’s livelihood to defend, or, as the more fervid anti-communists such as the selfdramatizing Whittaker Chambers asserted, that the informer was a “patriot, prophet, and moral hero.”4 Informing was problematic for reasons beyond those so trenchantly stated by Hellman. First, even when a board of education or investigating committee already had the names, providing confirmation of what might only be the muddy recollection of an opportunistic or frankly delusional informer would indeed harm people who had not committed any crime. Then there was the sense of betrayal when witnesses, to save themselves , named former (and sometimes current) friends. The biologists Harry Albaum and Alex Novikoff had been colleagues and close friends at Brooklyn College in the 1930s and ’40s, but in 1952, Albaum, under pressure from Gideonse, confirmed to the SISS that Novikoff had been in the Party. Novikoff, confronted with the same dilemma the following year, resisted the subcommittee’s imprecations and those of his employers at the University of Vermont: he refused to name names. “I would rather have lived through this period than have to live with myself if I did what Harry did,” he wrote to a friend.5 Finally, informing meant participating in a debasing ritual premised on a Manichean myth of good and evil. The ritual was not, as Victor Navasky points out in his book Naming Names, “a quest for evidence; it was a test of character.”6 One journalist called forced informing a “glorification of betrayal,” a “sadistic attempt to break men intellectually and spiritually and leave them drained of all self-respect and self-esteem.”7 For those who were willing to answer questions about their own political past but refused to name others, there were practical choices to be made. Legally, the question was whether to cite the First or Fifth Amendment, or some other legal or ethical constraint, in justifying one’s refusal. By the early 1950s, the First Amendment would not stand as a legal defense; one risked criminal prosecution for contempt of the investigating committee. The Fifth 164 > 165 of communist affiliation on application forms. If it were board policy to dismiss every employee who had lied in answer to the question, that would be one thing, Jansen wrote. “However, this has not been the policy. . . . The circumstances surrounding the making of the false affidavit are taken into consideration . In the case of former communists among teachers, immunity has been given if they name names,” but this did not mean that informing should be mandatory or that teachers who refused to inform should be punished with a false-affidavit charge.12 Moskoff shot back that Jansen “took lightly the making of a false statement .” He criticized the superintendent for reinterviewing some teachers without telling him and for “expressing concern” over the sheer number of teachers who were being pursued.13 Moskoff urged adherence to the policy proposed in a recent World-Telegram and Sun editorial, which argued that if a teacher had “otherwise proven” his break with communism, he should not be forced to name names “as further proof of his patriotism,” but that the board would be justified in requiring “extra proof” from teachers who had “a long record of affiliation with the left-wing Teachers Union or with recognized front organizations.”14 Newspapers got word of the dispute. Responding to one front-page article , TU president Abe Lederman and legislative director Rose Russell wrote an alert to “All Teacher Interest Committees” urging that although people might differ “about the general policy of the recent inquiries, they must all view with abhorrence any attempt to force teachers into becoming informers ” and...