New York in the '50s (40 page)

More than jobs and reputations as loyal Americans were lost in the wake of McCarthy's televised investigations. Raymond Kaplan, a forty-two-year-old Voice of America engineer, committed suicide by jumping in front of a truck, leaving a letter to his wife and son that said, “You see, once the dogs are set on you everything you have done since the beginning of time is suspect.… I have never done anything that I consider wrong but I can't take the pressure upon my shoulders any more.” After Kaplan's death, McCarthy said blandly that he had no evidence of wrongdoing against the man.

It would hardly be surprising if young people listening to those hearings became cautious about what they did and said, both in print and in conversation, in public and even in private—perhaps intimate—situations. A former girlfriend testified against Roger Lyons, who was director of religious programming for the Voice of America, saying that he was, or had once been, a nonbeliever. Lyons denied that he was an atheist or even an agnostic, and testified before the Senate subcommittee and the nation: “I believe in God.” No doubt to prove his credentials in religious and spiritual matters, Lyons said he had studied psychology with Carl Jung. McCarthy asked if Jung attended a church or synagogue.

My friends and I on
Spectator
didn't get to see our most famous alumni editor grilled by McCarthy that spring, for the two times that
New York Post
editor James Wechsler was brought before the committee the sessions were closed—though later, transcripts were released at Wechsler's own request. No doubt he wanted the press and the world to know that the senator from Wisconsin had charged that the
Post
, New York's leading liberal newspaper and a constant critic of McCarthy, was “next to and almost paralleling the
Daily Worker
.”

Wechsler had been a member of the Young Communist League from age eighteen until twenty-one, yet he'd been a staunch anti-Communist ever since, attacking both internal subversion and Soviet foreign policy, but McCarthy accused him of a “phony break” with the Reds: “I feel you have not broken with Communist ideals.
I feel that you are serving them very, very actively. Whether you are doing it knowingly or not, that is in your own mind. I have no knowledge as to whether you have a card in the party.”

Though the term “McCarthyism” came to be the name of this type of witch-hunting mentality and procedure, McCarthy in 1952 had to elbow his way onto the already crowded field of anti-Communist snipers. “Tail Gunner Joe” had to agree not to compete with the investigations of the House Un-American Activities Committee, which was going after the Hollywood community, and the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, headed by William Jenner of Indiana, which had taken for its own Red-hunting grounds the United Nations, as well as public and private schools. This was the Cold War, and as my Village neighbor David Amram now reflects, “The fifties was a repressive time too, in spite of all the creative things going on. McCarthy got as far as he did because of the nature of the times. He wasn't just the cause, he was part of the whole picture. Miles Davis used to say, ‘Only the strong survive in jazz.' But he meant in general terms, too.”

Young people were bound to be affected by the witch-hunts that were rife at the time, and wonder how our own futures would be influenced by what we said, wrote, joined, and signed while in college. Max Frankel, who was the editor of
Spectator
that spring of 1953 when McCarthy grilled Reed Harris on television, says, “There was an anxiety with which we came through the Red-baiting period. Those of us who wanted mainstream careers felt we were walking on eggshells—in what we signed, what political organizations we joined.”

Though we indeed were cautious about joining and signing, we did not stifle our opinions, nor were we cowed into the fearful silence for which we were unjustly famous. The little known, often denied fact—the truth that is lost because it doesn't fit our generational image—is this: we did stick our necks out!

The harassment of Reed Harris for opinions he had expressed in
Spectator
editorials did not silence Max Frankel or his successor on the paper, Jerry Landauer; it did not prevent them from writing outspoken editorials defending academic freedom, opposing congressional inquiries of colleges, and protesting Columbia's own administration for banning controversial speakers, like Howard
Fast, from campus. Nor did the atmosphere of the times prevent me from expressing my own new liberalism the following year in the place most likely to cause controversy, my own hometown.

The great Robin Hood controversy began on May 21 that year, my birthday, while I innocently munched a French cruller and sipped my coffee at Mr. Zipper's drugstore on Amsterdam Avenue while reading the
New York Times
. My eye was caught by an editorial titled “Liberty in Indianapolis.” It cited an earlier story about a member of the Indianapolis school board who wanted the story of Robin Hood banned from the public schools on the grounds that his habit of taking from the rich and giving to the poor was a sign of communism. My hometown had also gained notoriety the previous year when the War Memorial banned from its premises the initial meeting of the Indiana chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union. Edward R. Murrow had come to Indianapolis and filmed a documentary on the War Memorial banning, showing that the ACLU was finally allowed to assemble in a local Catholic church whose priest believed in the principles of free speech.

“Now the issue has arisen again,” the
Times
editorial went on, “in connection with a meeting of the Indiana chapter of the ACLU at which Paul Hoffman, one of Indiana's most distinguished citizens [he was a liberal Republican businessman, chairman of the board of the Studebaker Corporation], is scheduled to speak on the Bill of Rights. Again the use of the War Memorial has been refused this group.… It seems to us that the guardians of the War Memorial made themselves ridiculous. Certainly, they have failed once again to honor the purpose to which their building is dedicated.”

I finished my cruller and coffee and hurried back to my room in the dorm to write an impassioned letter to the
Indianapolis News
. I mailed it the same day, then forgot about it when I took the train back home for the summer break, arriving just in time to see my letter published as the lead of the Letters to the Editor column of May 25, under the headline “University Student Mourns Loss of His Home City's Prized Prestige.”

I looked at the page and took a deep breath. Uh-oh, I thought. Now I've done it. Back home in Indiana, my words sounded more inflammatory as I read them in the pages of the
Indianapolis News
,
drinking a Coke in the den of my parents' mock-colonial home with all the amenities of fifties living, including a small, screened-in hallway connecting house and garage called a breezeway. How can you oppose the status quo from your parents' breezeway? Such discomforting thoughts needled me as I reread my letter.

Lamenting with heavy irony that my hometown used to be famous for the 500-mile auto race, I said it was now becoming better known as the place where Robin Hood was thought to be a Communist and a civil liberties group was banned from the War Memorial. Showing my patriotism as well as my liberalism (thank God I'd put
that
part in), after quoting from the
Times
editorial I said,

The saddest and most shameful aspect of the situation is that people in every communistic country will read this just as they read reports of the Robin Hood incident which the Russian press so gleefully gobbled up and dispatched. Here we have provided them with a blatant example of American hypocrisy. This is the nation, founded on the principle of free speech and free assembly, now denying those basic rights.…

My poor parents were barraged by phone calls offering condolences for having sent their son east to college, especially to a hotbed of pinkos like Columbia. Weren't the worst fears of Uncle Clayton and Aunt Mary proved true? After all, when I left home my only political affiliation was as a founding member of the Young Republicans of Indianapolis; only two years later, I was defending Robin Hood and the ACLU!

The prevailing local opinion of my radical new outlook was expressed eloquently in a letter the
News
featured four days later in answer to mine, under the headline “Reader Says It's Up to ACLU to Prove Its Pro-Americanism.” That reader, who identified him- or herself only by the initials J.G.T., wrote:

It is regrettable that the young people today have had so much sensational and left wing propaganda thrown at them the last 20 years that they cannot possibly get a true picture or judge correctly the situation of today.… They
do not have a firm belief in Christian principles, in logic and in facts.…

Why do not Dan Wakefield, et al. get down to the real meaning of the Robin Hood story and appreciate and approve our independent stand on federal aid to education, federal welfare, federal hospital grants and even PTA board dictatorship?

Indiana has proved to be a pro-American state and we are mighty tired of the liberties allowed subversive groups and see no reason why their detrimental endeavors should be encouraged in our tax-supported public buildings. There have been no facts but only opinions on whether the ACLU is a left wing organization.… When it is proved that the ACLU is thoroughly pro-American and not leftish, then it is time to weep for Indianapolis and not before.

Other letters followed, as well as other phone calls. My parents, though disturbed, never once berated me or asked that I keep my new opinions to myself. My letter could have hurt them in their respective businesses, for my father had a drugstore at that time under his own name, and my mother was selling real estate. Patriotic customers could well have shunned them, which was not unheard-of, and perhaps some did. My mother and father would never have told me if it happened. My impression was, though, that they received more sympathy than condemnation. After all, you couldn't control young people, not even in those days. That sourpuss young actor with a bad attitude, that James Dean fellow, was a hero to lots of young people, and with a cigarette dangling from his mouth, he summed up the disrespectful mood that lots of kids seemed to be in around that time.

Another letter to the
News
asked pointedly, What other newspapers did I read besides the
New York Times
? The implication was clear—I'd been brainwashed. Most readers seemed to understand that my parents weren't to blame. It was New York, and the
Times
, and going east to college, especially Columbia. The I-told-you-so doomsayers who believed that east was the direction of hell and the George Washington Bridge the gateway to it were no doubt as confused
as I was delighted by the next letter in the ongoing controversy.

My friend Richard T. “Fuzzy” Stout, with whom in high school I'd written words to unpublished—and unpublishable—musical comedies (e.g., “Alaska—Or, The Old Folks at Nome”), had written to the
News
in my defense. It was a true act of friendship and political conviction. The letter from Stout, a talented journalist who was later to become a staff writer for
Newsweek
and a popular college journalism teacher, was all the more powerful—and all the more gutsy—because he had not gone east to school but was a student at DePauw, right there in Indiana. His letter was featured on the editorial page of June 3: “Local ‘Youngster' Rallies to the Defense of His Generation.”

Stout defended my views on Robin Hood and the ACLU, identified himself as one of the “et al.'s” referred to by my attacker J.G.T., and said that critic's letter would have been more meaningful if its author had signed his or her name. He ended by quoting a noted “son of Indiana,” the famous radio commentator Elmer Davis, who had said, “This nation was not established by cowards, nor will it be preserved by cowards.” Hurray for Elmer Davis, and hurray for stout-hearted Fuzzy Stout.

We were hardly silent. Not even in Indianapolis, where views such as Richard Stout and I expressed were definitely in the minority.

“All right we are two nations” was a cry from John Dos Passos's trilogy
U.S.A
., which I'd read the previous autumn while lying in the hospital after my automobile accident. The sentence took on a physical, geographical specificity for me when I still lived in Indianapolis with my parents during summer and Christmas vacations from college and spent the rest of the time in New York as a student. It was like commuting between two countries with the same language (though different accents) that held opposing values, customs, manners, and politics.

Fuzzy Stout was one of the few Democrats I knew from high school. Most of us grew up accepting the political and religious faith of our fathers and mothers, most of whom were God-fearing, Christian, middle-class, middle-of-the-road, middle-aged, conservative Republican, all-American believers in the values (or their
symbols) that Reed Harris satirized when he was a student at Columbia.

I never had a Communist professor at Columbia, nor did I ever hear any teacher or student defend or uphold communism or the Communist Party. I'm sure some of the faculty had once been members—as had been the student editor James Wechsler—of the Young Communist League in the thirties, or maybe even the Party, but by the fifties the idealism that drove such zeal had turned to disillusionment, and some of the strongest anti-Communists were those who felt they'd been duped by the Party.

I did, of course, meet many liberals, Democrats, and maybe even Socialists, and certainly left-wing views were as prevalent on Morningside Heights as Republicanism was the norm in Indianapolis. So was I simply falling in line, taking on the coloration of my landscape—red white and blue in Indiana turning to pink at Columbia? That may be partly the case, but I know there was more to it. One emotional factor was that after my rejection at fraternity rush at Northwestern, I identified for the first time with the underdogs, the have-nots instead of the haves, the Outs instead of the Ins. (Later I learned that C. Wright Mills told his friend Harvey Swados he believed the severe hazing he underwent as a college freshman at Texas A & M before transferring to the University of Texas “had made him into a rebel and outsider.”)