Zombie Apocalypse Now

As soon as it became apparent that the Covid virus posed a problem and we were advised to “shelter in place” – my neighbor boarded up his tattoo shop. First, he boarded up his display windows, fitting the ply-board tight against the sidewalk below the windows. The next day he boarded up his front doors, the boarding again reaching tight against the pavement so that no crowbar could be wedged underneath to pry the boards loose. Finally, he even closed off his mail slots, making the front of his building one big impregnable barricade.

When we asked him what he was doing, a sort of gleam came into his eyes, like the gleam of sly triumph that illuminates someone who feels himself to be in possession of secret knowledge. The young man didn’t fully divulge his purposes, but intimated that this virus might signal “The Coming.” The coming of what – the apocalypse, end times, hordes of the kind of disease-crazed cannibals who populated Cormac McCarthy’s The Road?

Oh dear. And here I had thought the young man was a sane, sound artist, etching beautiful rose tattoos onto his customers’ arms. I thought of a lunch I’d had with a 90-year-old friend of mine – just before the virus hit. As we were finishing off our plates of pasta at the Olive Garden, we had drifted into some darker conversational waters – the war-torn Europe she’d known as a child, the cruelty of her first few years in America when her classmates had chanted “DP, DP, ain’t even got a place to pee” at her. Thinking back on what had been her general experience of life, she leaned over the remnants of our salad bowl and ominously whispered to me, “People are insane. I don’t mean some people. I mean all people.”

I tried to make a joke of it. I quoted that clichéd observation, “Everyone is crazy except you and me – and sometimes I wonder about you.” I laughed, hoping my laughter would put a lightening spin on my friend’s earnest take on life. But she didn’t laugh in return. Her seriousness chilled me. I privately knew that my own experience of life, even in the seeming smiling security of my lifelong Chicago neighborhood, had brought me to much the same conclusion. When I scratched the surface of people who appeared in passing to be upright, grounded individuals, I’d found all too often that they harbored a dangerous crookedness in their thinking.

Was my neighbor another illustration of that absolute my friend had claimed – all insane? Did that cheerful fellow who so helpfully collected my packages from UPS when I wasn’t home, really expect an assault from the resurrected dead?

Or should he be so readily dismissed? He eventually painted the ply-board he’d hammered in place, making an attractive façade of his hoarding. But for a week or so, the bare panels made the street truly look like something out of a post-nuclear holocaust movie. There was his board-up on one side of me, an overgrown lot on the other side of me, and abandoned storefronts scattered along much of the rest of the way. And then, the final apocalyptic touch was added to the scene late one night.

I was walking across the street in the A.M. – going to return a movie at the neighborhood Redbox. When I got in front of my neighbor’s forbidding new blankness, I saw a figure coming towards me. It was a shockingly thin man, dressed in shabby, threadbare work clothes. He was wearing a standard Covid mask. But his eyes, visible above the mask, were sunken, red-rimmed. He lurched towards me, stopping just inches in front of my face, hardly observing the 6-foot distancing. He spoke. “Where Troy?” he demanded. “You know Troy? Where, where Troy?” his demand turned into a strange, pleading in broken English.

I went almost numb with the oddness of this approach. Troy? I searched my brain. With complete irrelevance, the only Troy that came to my mind was Troy Donahue, the popular actor from the 60’s. I was about to tell the man that I was sorry, but that I thought Troy Donahue had died some years before. But then it hit me. Of course! Troy was the next street east. I’d lived in this same place since I was a child, with Troy Street being adjacent the whole time. So why had my mind jumped to the obscurity of Troy Donahue? In my defense, the reason might have been the way the man had worded his question. When he’d asked, “You know Troy?” it sounded as if he was referring to a person.

Still, it was a sign of the whole weird incongruity of the scene that my mind had jumped to Troy Donahue rather than to the obvious. I had made a comic, hysteric leap to an absurd association. I straightened up and told the man that Troy Street was the next street over. I crooked my finger, pointing east.

The man thanked me, jerked a nod, and shambled off into what was – of course – a gathering mist. He rounded the corner and was gone.

Who was that masked man? Or what was he? Was it possible that my neighbor hadn’t been veering into the crazies after all by boarding up his building, expecting marauding gangs of the undead? Had his precautions been all too prescient? Was he perhaps the exception, the one sane person whose existence both my friend and I had denied? Had I just seen the start of what my neighbor had correctly anticipated – a Zombie Apocalypse – now?

McCarthy Come Full Circle - Part I

Lately I’ve been steeped in the McCarthy era. One book on the subject has led to another and another – and so on. After reading for a while, I was inspired to look up what videos there might be available of the Army-McCarthy hearings on YouTube. I was only able to find a few hours of video out of what had been thirty-six days of those Hearings. For the rest, I will probably have to be content with reading the transcripts.

When I started to watch those few available hours, I did so with a somewhat fearful, haunted feeling. My father had bought our first TV set so that he could watch the Hearings. It was a Wells-Gardner set in a beautiful oak console that included radio and phonograph. Before that, I had only seen TV a few times, when we went to friends’ houses and I caught glimpses of “Uncle Miltie.” Now here I was, sixty-six years later, sitting in the same spot, watching those same Hearings. They had been the first things I saw on TV, and I nervously wondered if they might be the last. I peered over my shoulder to see if a figure carrying a scythe might be emerging from the shadows to collect me. But I saw no spectral lowering, so I went ahead and started to watch.

Almost all the segments of the Hearings available on YouTube feature that defining moment when Joseph Welch, Counsel for the Army, withered McCarthy by asking him, “Have you no sense of decency?” Welch was provoked to deliver this historic put-down after McCarthy, apparently feeling on the defensive, had flung out the name of Fred Fisher, a young attorney on Welch’s legal staff, and had announced Fisher as having Communist affiliations (through his membership in the Lawyers Guild).

Welch went on with his world-weary rue, asking what on earth young Fisher had ever done to McCarthy to provoke him into making such an unwarranted attack. Welch profoundly regretted that now Fisher would be scarred for life, his legal career nipped in the bud. McCarthy did seem to be chastened, although he came back with a few rephrased repetitions of his charge.

I was a toddler then and scarcely understood what the Hearings were about. But, like most of America at that moment, I sided with Welch, feeling that he radiated a sort of gentle, avuncular wisdom as opposed to McCarthy’s “recklessness and cruelty.” It’s likely that even people who generally sided with McCarthy’s determination to root out Communism wherever it was having crypto influence in the U.S. – probably felt McCarthy should have indeed been ashamed of himself in that instance.

But one of the books I recently read cast that famous exchange in a whole new light, turning the tables on right and wrong. In his book, Blacklisted by History, Stanton Evans makes a telling correction on this point. He reprints a page from an issue of the New York Times that came out two weeks before that pivotal Welch-McCarthy exchange. The featured article on the page was an interview with Joseph Welch in which he himself said he was suspending Fred Fisher from his team on the Hearings because of Fisher’s affiliation with the Lawyers Guild, presumed by some to be a Communist front.

So actually, it was Welch himself who outed Fred Fisher as a possible Communist sympathizer! In any event, Fisher didn’t seem to have been scarred by either Welch’s or McCarthy’s revelation of his leanings. Fisher went on to have a very successful career. He continued his employment with Hale and Dorr, Welch’s legal firm, and went on to hold many distinguished posts, including President of the Massachusetts Bar Association – seemingly without a scar. Some might argue that if anything, this exposure in front of the Hearings advanced Fisher’s career by eliciting sympathy for him and putting him in the spotlight.

After reading author Evans’ remarks on this and other points about Welch’s behavior in front of the committee hearings, I have somewhat changed my opinion of Welch. Evans points to aspects of Welch’s behavior that make it seem as if he had carefully staged his confrontations with McCarthy, casting himself as the simple, honest country lawyer going up against city slicker McCarthy (although McCarthy actually came from the farming town of Appleton, Wisconsin). It seems as if Welch might have had Clarence Darrow in mind as his model. He advanced his points with a rumpled display of profound aggrievement, emoting even to the point of seeming to turn away in tears over Fisher’s fate. Meanwhile McCarthy was left in the disadvantageous position of being merely himself.

Whether Evans generally leans too much in McCarthy’s favor or not, he still sets the record straight on several other key points about which I was confused, and about which I think most Americans have remained confused.

Most of us associate McCarthy with The House Un-American Affairs Committee. When we hear McCarthy’s name, we think of a variety of our favorite Hollywood stars being grilled before HUAC, being forced to “name names.” Actually, McCarthy had little or nothing to do with HUAC or with accusing any Hollywood stars such as Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall or any Hollywood scriptwriter such as Dalton Trumbo. Evans points out what should have been obvious to all of us. HUAC operated under “House” auspices and McCarthy was a Senator holding authority on committees only within the Senate. But in any case, the principle Committee responsible for putting Hollywood actors and authors on the spot and for curtailing their careers was an early incarnation of HUAC, more specifically called the Dies Committee, which operated from the late 1930’s through the mid 1940’s, and then beyond, under different names.

McCarthy didn’t start his hunt for Communists until 1950 and shortly thereafter when he became Chairman of the Government Operations Committee and its Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations – in the Senate. The primary aim of this Committee was to ferret out Communist infiltration in the State Department. As head of this Committee, McCarthy didn’t challenge any celebrity artists about their Communist affiliations, with the exception of a few such as poet Langston Hughes and composer Aaron Copland. He questioned them only as a result of some connection they’d had with State Department programs overseas.

So on the whole, when the term “McCarthyism” is used as a pejorative to condemn the way in which Hollywood artists were stifled – the term is a misnomer. People should refer to “Diesism,” after the name of the Democratic Representative from Texas who did officiate over most of the inquiries into Communist influence in Hollywood. But that makes for sort of a messy term. McCarthy had a name with a much easier handle.

Similarly, the act of “blacklisting” these celebrities shouldn’t be pinned on McCarthy. McCarthy did wave a lot of lists around in the course of his investigations. The lists were often an unwieldy conglomerate of people that the Dies Committee had investigated, people the FBI had reason to suspect, and people who had been named as having Communist affiliations by individuals such as Whitaker Chambers. Most of these lists were lists of government employees. Some of the lists that McCarthy waved were just lists of numbers with accompanying suspected acts or affiliations. McCarthy often refused to attach names to these numbers because he said he didn’t want to smear people without sufficient evidence.

It’s true that the kinds of activities that had landed people on one or the other of McCarthy’s lists were very trivial participations. Sometimes simply subscribing to The Daily Worker landed an individual on a list of “unreliables.” In one startling case, I saw a person listed because he had favored going to war with Germany – in 1937. It seems in 1937, we were still trying to take a conciliatory stance toward Germany, so advocating war with them was not the thing to do.

The point though is that none of these lists that McCarthy brandished were the famous “blacklists” with which his name has, again, been wrongly associated. The famous blacklists were compiled and enforced by the Hollywood studios themselves. When it got bruited around that someone was a Communist sympathizer or when someone had been questioned by the Dies Committee (or was scheduled to be questioned by some such committee) – that individual was viewed as “box office poison.” The studios usually failed to stand up for these actors and writers and simply, by tacit agreement, blacklisted them. In most cases, no actual written lists existed. The studio heads just agreed that certain individuals were likely to mean trouble, and they didn’t hire them.

Most of the people who were blacklisted don’t seem to have suffered too much. Lucille Ball and Edward G. Robinson were among those who landed on one or the other of these lists and one can hardly say that such listing plummeted them into permanent obscurity. Also, the most famous of those who were blacklisted, screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, generally continued to work under pseudonyms. Then in some sense, when the veil was lifted, one could say he was compensated for the years of obscurity he suffered by the fame and admiration he received for having remained so defiant and stalwart in the face of his victimization.

One of the stars who suffered a definite gap in her career was Lee Grant. She says she missed all her “ingenue years.” She wasn’t able to get work through her twenties. However, then when the red scare passed, she did become an acclaimed leading lady and has been getting almost more work than she can handle.

But again, most of what Hollywood talent suffered wasn’t due to any of McCarthy’s actions. His probes came later and focused mostly on concerns over infiltration of State Department programs, the diplomatic corps, and the Army (particularly the Army base at Monmouth, New Jersey).

Similarly, McCarthy is largely innocent of the charges of suppressing freedom of speech and of book-burning that have become attached to his name. It seems the charges of book-burning were the result of some actions taken by overseas librarians in the wake of a visit paid them by Roy Cohn (McCarthy’s legal counsel during the Army-McCarthy Hearings) and Cohn’s friend David Schine.

The two young men went on a junket through large parts of post-war occupied Europe. Although they no doubt did a lot of partying along the way, they had an official assignment. They went there to inspect the Reading Rooms that the State Department had set up with taxpayer dollars to give Europeans access to writings that presumably represented American ideals. Those Reading Rooms were much like Christian Science Reading Rooms in that they were established for the express purpose of promoting a particular point of view. In the bubbling cauldron of ideologies of Communism, socialism, etc. that was postwar Europe – America hoped to gain converts to the American way of life.

However, Cohn and Schine were disappointed to find that these Reading Rooms weren’t doing a very good job of advancing democratic principles. They found the rooms heavily stocked with the works of far-left and outright Communist authors. Most of the books on China that they found there were pro-Mao. They found books extoling Lenin. In several locations they found Langston Hughes’ book of poems prominently displayed, with an early poem entitled “Good Morning Revolution” proclaiming:

Better that my blood makes one with the blood the blood

Of all struggling workers of the world…

Until the Red Armies of the International Proletariat

Their faces, black, white, olive, yellow, brown

Unite to raise the blood red flag that

Never will come down.

This was hardly the Little House on the Prairie sort of fare that the Government had intended the Reading Rooms to project. So when Cohn and Schine got back home and gave their account, McCarthy and other Committee members moved to have certain listed authors and books removed, just from those Reading Rooms. It was NOT ordered that these books be burned. It was suggested that they be taken to public and private libraries in the various European towns where they were found. The point was simply that the Government did not want to sponsor such opinions with U.S. tax money.

McCarthy and some of his colleagues did spread their net a little too wide when it came to which authors should be extracted from the government shelves. For example, McCarthy included Dashiell Hammett (author of the Thin Man series and The Maltese Falcon) on the “Remove” list because of Hammett’s presumed participation in some Communist front organizations. But on the whole, most of the books that were to be removed were blatantly pro-Communist. Even at that, there was considerable discussion before the decision was made to remove them. Some thought it would be good to leave them on the shelves to demonstrate how open-minded and welcoming of all viewpoints America was. In the end though, the decision was made to have the books put – somewhere else.

The managers and librarians of many of these individual Reading Rooms sometimes took shortcuts in the matter. They took down the listed books and either threw them away or, yes, in some cases, just got rid of them by burning them. This had not been the Government’s intention though and it was not anything that McCarthy had ordered.

In fact, McCarthy is on record as saying he believed everyone in America should have the right to express any opinions they wanted to and to espouse any political views, whether they be Republican, Democratic, Communist, or anything else. What he objected to was people who flew under false colors, entering public life and positions of influence pretending to hold one set of beliefs but actually working to advance another set. He generally only persisted in grilling those individuals coming before his Committee who denied having any current Communist affiliations but for whom he believed he had proof to the contrary – (although, again, sometimes his “proof” consisted of rather trivial signs such as a subscription to The Daily Worker or attendance at parties where other suspected Communists were present).

His general philosophy on this point though was a reasonable one, supported by many scholars such as Sidney Hook. In several of his noted essays, Hook stated that in a free society such as ours, people ought to be able to hold any beliefs and ought to be able to openly express those beliefs in any way they choose. They only transgress and ought to be stopped when they conceal their true ideology. He felt it necessary that candidates for office or any position of authority or influence expose their ideas in the public marketplace of opinion. Let voters and would-be supporters get genuine knowledge of the candidates’ views. Democracy is only endangered when people hide their true philosophies and mole their way through society, weakening its foundation with their subterranean machinations.

McCarthy probably would have agreed with Hook about this and would have said that matched what he was hoping to accomplish with all his committee hearings. He wanted to root out underground Communists. He wanted, not to banish them, but to make them have to advance whatever opinions they held in an aboveboard, open forum.

So, McCarthy was not really guilty of some of the worst charges that have been leveled against him. He was NOT connected with the House UnAmerican Affairs Committee as many academics continue to this day to insist that he was. He was NOT responsible for blacklisting Hollywood’s creative people. He did NOT advocate book-burning or the suppressions of free speech. So he does NOT deserve to be labeled with many of the extreme appellations that are commonly attached to him – appellations such as “Oppressor, Demagogue, America’s Hitler.”

All of which leads me to a number of questions about the way history has treated him. And it leads me to consider a number of criticisms that I think can legitimately be made against him. But I’ll save these speculations for one or more sequels to this article.

Meanwhile, I’m still wary about what might be lurking in the shadows behind me. With my life having been bracketed – from childhood to considerable maturity – with those Army-McCarthy Hearings, I’ve come full circle, and usually when a story comes full circle, it ends. But so far, I’m still here and I’ll write those follow-up essays