Jump to: navigation, search

Quarterly Review of Film and Video (2012) - Cold War Confessions and the Trauma of McCarthyism: Alfred Hitchcock's I Confess and The Wrong Man

Details

Links

Abstract

Genter features writer Whittaker Chambers. Chambers was being quite disingenuous when he stated that he could not understand why his fellow editors needed to expose themselves in such fashion; in many ways, Chambers was the prime example of the mid-twentieth-century confessional self, someone driven by political and self-imposed pressure to testify about his personal history.

Article

Cold War Confessions and the Trauma of McCarthyism: Alfred Hitchcock’s I Confess and The Wrong Man

ROBERT GENTER

In his 1952 autobiography, Witness, Whittaker Chambers, the self-confessed ex-Communist and star witness of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, recounted his experience as an editor at Time magazine shortly before he made his public declarations in 1948 about his previous espionage activities. He described how his colleagues at Time would often enter his office, lock the door, and reveal to him intimate details about their lives—their fears, their sins, and their sufferings. According to Chambers, “they would sit down, and after a rambling preamble, suddenly confide to me some distress that was destroying their peace or their lives.” His office, explained Chambers, had become a confessional of sorts.

Chambers was being quite disingenuous when he stated that he could not understand why his fellow editors needed to expose themselves in such fashion; in many ways, Chambers was the prime example of the mid-twentieth-century confessional self, someone driven by political and self-imposed pressure to testify about his personal history. Throughout endless congressional hearings, courtroom trials, and an eight hundred page autobiography, Chambers compulsively confessed to every aspect of his life—from his brother’s suicide to his own Communist party activities. Like his colleagues at Time, Chambers hoped that his confessions would serve a therapeutic function, helping him to come to terms with his troubled past and helping to realign him with the moral authorities at HUAC. As he explained, the duty of every witness called before Congress was to “testify to every crime, every sin, every evil, that he had committed or that had beset his life without reserve.” As historians have long noted, confessions by ex-Communist party members such as Chambers about their past espionage activities helped usher in widespread governmental investigations into Communist subversion, giving rise in the late 1940s to the seemingly endless procession of federal employees forced to testify before loyalty review boards about their pasts. This spectacle of forced confessions began in 1947 when President Truman signed Executive Order 9835, officially establishing a federal employee loyalty program. Overseen by the Loyalty Review Board, the program empowered federal agencies to investigate the backgrounds of all federal employees and to dismiss those for whom there were “reasonable grounds” to believe they might be disloyal.

The program was amended in 1953 by President Eisenhower with Executive Order 10450, which mandated that review boards focus not just on an employee’s loyalty but more importantly on the interests of “national security” in determining an individual’s suitability for a federal job. Thus, review boards were to consider not just whether or not a potential or current employee might engage in espionage or treason but whether or not an employee possessed the suitable character, in terms of past and current behavior, to work for the federal government.

Employees were consequently forced to testify not only to political affiliations but also to their views on foreign policy, labor relations, marriage, race relations, and economic policies and to their personal relationships, sexual orientations, family histories, drinking habits, friendships, etc. In many ways, this demand for employees to produce a complete account of their life histories bordered on the demand for self-beratement that Michel Foucault has famously associated with subject formation—the interpellation of the self by juridical authorities who ordered, under the threat of punishment, the interrogation of the psychic interior of the self.5

For friendly witnesses like Chambers, such public confessions were personally welcomed, serving as a means of atonement for past actions. As he explained to FBI agents in 1949 when he finally decided to reveal the homosexual activities he had engaged in as a young man, “I tell it now only because, in this case, I stand for truth. Having testified mercilessly against others, it has become my function to testify mercilessly against myself.”6 But for unfriendly witnesses—those with something to hide, those troubled by the political implications of such hearings, or those with the more immediate concern about losing their jobs because of embarrassing past transgressions—these forced public confessions were debilitating at best.

Throughout the early 1950s, an enormous debate emerged over the legality of such confessions, coerced or not. Two issues were paramount: the first was whether or not such forced testimony violated the right against self-incrimination guaranteed by the Fifth Amendment; and the second was, if such loyalty programs were constitutional, what were the limits to what an individual could be forced to confess. In 1954, theU.S.Congress passed the Compulsory Testimony Act, designed to circumvent the ability of witnesses to cite the Fifth Amendment as a way to avoid testifying. The Compulsory Testimony Act stated that witnesses under investigation for “crimes” related to the “Communist conspiracy” could use the Fifth Amendment only to prevent prosecution on evidence they were forced to give but not to refuse to testify in general.7 In Ullman v. United States (1956), the U.S. Supreme Court declared the act constitutional, arguing that once the threat of prosecution was eliminated, the right against self-incrimination ended. This constitutional wrangling over the litany of Fifth Amendment cases was, however, unimportant in comparison to the growing assumption that those witnesses who invoked this right did so because they were in fact guilty.

As Senator Joseph McCarthy explained, “a witness’s refusal to answer whether or not he is a Communist on the ground that his answer would tend to incriminate him is the most positive proof obtainable that the witness is a Communist.”8 Naturally, most defenders of these investigations were much more subtle than McCarthy. Confession, argued proponents, served two purposes: first, confession helped to alert na¨ıve citizens to this growing threat and to bolster patriotic support for the Cold War; and second, confession helped to cleanse the souls of those guilty of transgressions. For both conservatives and anti-Communist liberals, confession marked the transition from innocence to maturity. As literary critic Leslie Fiedler argued in his 1951 commentary on Chambers’s revelations, “the qualifying act of moral adulthood is precisely this admission of responsibility for the past and its consequences, however undesired or unforeseen.”9

Others were not so easily convinced, and saw these forced confessions as the ...

[ to view the rest of the article, please try one of the links above ]