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Its remarkablealmost a feat of nanotechnologythat Jules Feiffer fits so much betrayal into a play as spare as A Bad Friend. With his genius for compression, he shows naïveté hardening into the rigor mortis of thought, and the rigor mortis of thought producing betrayals, which move his story alongnot prettily. Innocence is the twin of gullibility, and together theyre bound for betrayal. Perhaps not since Jean-Paul Sartres 1948 Dirty Hands has any playwright so wickedly demonstrated how deeply political fanaticism is haunted by the fear of betrayal and punctuated by its actuality. Its not an incidental or unfortunate accident that political fanaticism makes people surrender their judgment: its what fanaticism requires.
No surprise, Dirty Hands, like A Bad Friend, concerns the dishonesty of Communists, their manifold betrayals and self-betrayals, their surrenders of thought, the rationalizations of the idealists and the triumphs of the hard-headed realists. Of course Feiffer, being Feiffer, is genial, generous, and funnynot Sartres strong suits. But its striking that when the two men turned to Communism as a subject, both men wrote dramas of betrayal, for the history of Communism is a history of bad faithand this goes not only for the American Communists but for the Russian Communists and, not least, for their persecutors, the McCarthyites.
The calamity of American Communism was born in a rapture about the Russian Revolution and moved quickly into the shadow land of realpolitik. In the early phase, after the Bolshevik Revolution, Communists unfurled utopian ideals about equality, co-starring the working class and the Soviet Union. They thoughtthey knewthat they had deciphered history with a capital H, and this certainty infused them with courage. They organized industrial unions. At this, no one was more dedicated, though someanarchists, Social Democrats, liberalswere equally dedicated. They fought against lynching. They learned how to fuse their wills in the white heat of organization, for they had more, much more than ideasthey had the Party. And the Party cultivated the arts of intellectual surrender. Especially at their higher organizational levels, they also fought against liberty of thought and expression. This they had to doin order to make the world look sufficiently tidy, so that the faithful could taste redemption, developed people could be encouraged to become more developed, and the Progressive Forces could grow to defeat the Reactionary Forces.
In the course of the Great Depression and World War IIto overlook for a moment the not insignificant exception of the 1939-41 interlude of the Hitler-Stalin Pactthe Communists learned how to speak an American language, and also, oddly enough, to pretend that it was the language that Stalin also spoke. Because the party line had changednot for the last timethey were under instructions to recast nationalism as Progressive with a capital P. Their Communism would beas boss Earl Browder saidtwentieth-century Americanism. Political fights at home would be painted over on behalf of the big picture. Such beliefs were not unique to them. What was unique was a set of nested leadership principles, to the effect that the Party would lead the People on a Forward March, that the U.S.S.R. would lead the Party on an onward March. Through Stalins ascendancy, Communists could feel the powerthe steely power of organization.
As their historical show starred the Communist Party itself, they continued (sometimes) to perform heroic feats. Their discipline was legendary, their capacity for sacrifice impressive. They also continued to tie themselves to the tail of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Few were Soviet spies, but few felt much conflict over pursuing the party lines zigs and zagsexcept in 1939, when the Hitler-Stalin Pact shoved the most skeptical out in the cold. Faced with voluminous charges against the Stalinist way of life, they cultivated a style of euphemism, illogic, and rationalization best summarized in the old gag about the Stalinist trying to cope with the gulag: It didnt happen, it was necessary, and theyre not doing it anymore. When the war and the Roosevelt-Stalin alliance were over, they were persecuted, and for a while persecution did not incline them to think more clearly, to question their own myopia. Many tightened their blinders and redoubled their will to believe. As they became less revolutionary in practice, their will to believe sometimes became more franticas Feiffer exhibits in Naomis fervent speeches. Eventually, though, others wised upas Feiffer also exhibits in Shelleys slow dawn of awareness.
Which is why, when they think of American Communism, so many liberals and Social Democrats think first of betrayal. They remember the way fervent Communists accused them of betrayal whenever the shifting party line required it. Sometimes the party line made more sense to them and sometimes less, but in either event, liberals heard backstage whispers keeping unpleasant matters off the agenda and inserting various Soviet foreign-policy priorities. It was enough to make them think that all politics was hopelessly corrupt, that democracy was a sham and mass movements the products of puppeteers.
The McCarthyites had their own fleet of vehicles to take people for a ride. With carrots, sticks, and patriotic treacle, they coaxed and coerced hundreds of ex- and not-quite-Communists into betraying their friends. Sometimes they were sincere, sometimes (as with McCarthy himself) cynical, using the mirror-image Communist logic that you couldnt make an omelette without wrecking people. Sincere or not, their thinking was Bolshevik, an unforgiving sacrifice of actual, difficult life on the altar of abstraction. The Bolshevik quality of their reasoning, however, is immortalized in the joke about the Social Democrat who is standing on the fringe of the crowd at a Union Square May Day rally, observing, only to find himself swept up by the cops and arrested. Youve got the wrong guy! he yells. Im an anti-Communist! I dont care what kind of Communist you are! says the cop, with the smack of a billy club.
If American Communism still enjoys a warm, fuzzy reputation in some musty quarters of the American left, this is because it looks victimized, and because a fervent opposition, even in the name of bad ideas, was at least an opposition. It was victimized. Thousands of Americans were interrogated, fired, blacklisted, deported, or driven underground for no good criminal reason. Many were coaxed into naming namessometimes in the name of the now Higher Cause of anti-Communism, but more often in the name of nothing more glorious than saving their own skins. Vicious, ignorant committees harboring their own contempt for ideas prowled the land. Some of the victims were Communists. Some were fellow travelers. Some were leftists and liberals who were neither of the above. Some were denounced for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, and the denouncers were, often enough, even wrong about that. Paranoia about Soviet fifth columns improved nobodys acumen.
Writers reeled from these accusations for decades. It has taken us into the twenty-first centuryexactly fifty years after the death of Stalin, neatly enoughbefore someone could write with both humorous distance and authority about the real positions and psychological dynamics of American Communists. Untill now, most writers have been gripped by sentimentality, or its opposite, brutality. A poisonous either or mood lingered. To refuse sentimentality about Communists was to go to bed with McCarthyites. Writers on the left were either defensive or pontifical, or both. (In the fiction of recent decades, the outstanding exception is E. L. Doctorows The Book of Daniel.) Writers on the right were either offensive or pontifical, or both. The way to duck these bad choices was with another bad choice: evasiveness. Movies and novels about the blacklist often pivoted on mistaken identity: the persecuted character wasnt really a Communist, or had only been fighting against racism and for the workers.
At a time of incipient panic about Americas enemies, real and imagined, the morals are evident: The best writing is freelance. It may play favorites, but it doesnt play false. Euphemisms are good material. Scoundrels are everywhere. So is wisdom.
Todd Gitlin is a professor of journalism and sociology at Columbia University and the author, most recently, of Media Unlimited: How the Torrent of Images and Sounds Overwhelms Our Lives (Metropolitan/Holt) and Letters to a Young Activist (Basic Books).
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