Looking for the Public in the Private: American Lives, Un-American Activities

Abstract

Book Reviews Review Essay Looking for the Public in the Private: American Lives, Un-American Activities Thomas W. Benson Whittaker Chambers. By Sam Tanenhaus. New York: Random House, 1997; pp. 638. $35.00. Odd Man Out: A Memoir of the Hollywood Ten. By Edward Dmytryk. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1996; pp. 210. $34.95 cloth; $14.95 paper. Inside Out: A Memoir of the Blacklist. By Walter Bernstein. New York: Knopf, 1996; pp. 292. $24.00. Anything Your Little Heart Desires. By Patricia Bosworth. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997; pp 416. $27.50. Un-American Activities: A Memoir of the Fifties. By Sally Belfrage. New York: HarperCollins, 1994; pp. 263. $22.50. fohn Wayne's America. By Garry Wills. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997; pp. 380. $26.00. American politics, according to its own myths, is the definitive enactment of the democratic promises of the public sphere. At the same time, participants in American politics, from left, right, and center, necessarüy conduct their own political activities in what are at best only approximations of genuinely accessible public settings and in language that appeals as much to personal identity, virtue, religious or ideological conviction, and tribal hostilities as to civic ideals. Where can we look to find the public? One answer suggested by a diverse collection of recent accounts is that public and private are necessarüy fuzzy, partial, approximate, and simultaneous. According to our actual practices, it appears that Thomas W. Benson is Edwin Erie Sparks Professor of Rhetoric atPenn State University in University Park, Pennsylvania. © Rhetoric & Public Affairs Vol. 1,No. 1,1998, pp. 117-141 ISSN 1094-8392 118 Rhetoric & Public Affairs we often enact, affirm, or critique our public life from the perspective of the private, or the reverse, or find one in the other, or mistake one for the other, or ruin one for the sake of the other. I propose to read as a rhetorical critic some recent accounts of the intersection of a great public event with a series of private lives. These accounts offer themselves both as political enactments—that is, as rhetorical appeals—and as, at least implicitly, political theories—that is, theories of the relations of public and private experience as revealed in biography and autobiography. These stories recall the time we now call the McCarthy era, though McCarthy himself was an opportunistic intruder on territory first exploited by the House Committee on UnAmerican Activities and its most junior member, Richard Milhous Nixon.1 Fifty years after the House Committee on Un-American Activities launched its October 1947 investigations of communism in Hollywood, and fifty years after Whittaker Chambers accused Alger Hiss, before the same committee, in August of 1948, of having been part of Chambers's Soviet spy ring in the 1930s, the echoes of those painful days continue to resound. Sam Tanenhaus's Whittaker Chambers is the first biography of Chambers (19011961 ), whose autobiography, Witness, was for years a bible of postwar American conservatism.2 Alger Hiss (1904-1996) had been a law clerk for Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes and a star among young New Deal bureaucrats. Hiss transferred to the State Department in 1936; in 1945 he served as secretary-general of the conference that created the United Nations. In 1946 he became the president of the Carnegie Endowment. In 1948 the seemingly patrician Hiss was accused by Chambers, then a senior editor at Time, of having participated in a Soviet espionage ring in Washington in the 1930s. In a confrontation before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC), Hiss, who had at first denied knowing Chambers, said that he had known Chambers slightly, but under the pseudonym George Crosley. As a result of his testimony before HUAC and a grand jury, Hiss was eventually tried for two counts of perjury. A first trial resulted in a hung jury; the second jury convicted Hiss for having "lied twice to the grand jury, first in saying he had not seen Chambers after July 1, 1937, second in saying he had not transmitted the spy papers to Chambers" (431). Hiss denied until his death that he had been guüty. For decades, many liberals believed...