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In Memory of
Arthur Miller
by Gaetana Caldwell-Smith/ March 2005 issue of Socialist Action
Arthur Miller died Feb. 11. He is known as a
playwright and novelist, the husband of screen idol Marilyn Monroe—and for
standing up to HUAC in the 1950s.
Miller had been a member of the Communist Party
in the 1930s and ‘40s. When called up before HUAC, he refused to name names
and was convicted for contempt of Congress, but the charges were later
dropped.
In his 1987 autobiography, “Timebends,” Miller
wrote that in his search for God, he found salvation in Marx. Miller also
claimed that should he not have found Marx, he would not have been in Salem
two decades later, studying the records of the eponymous witch trials of
the year 1692, while writing “The Crucible.” This play served as an analogy
to the McCarthy “witch-hunt” subversion trials of the early 1950s.
Miller had joined the Communist Party, he wrote,
because the Great Depression, “was a moral catastrophe, a violent
revelation of the hypocrisies behind the facade of American society.”
Later, he concluded that the Stalinist line the CP advocated was not for
him. But when he broke with Stalinism, he also turned away from what he
(mistakenly) identified as Marxism.
In his memoir, for example, Miller criticizes the
principle that he alleges lies “deep within Marxism” that power is
forbidden to the individual and rightly belongs only to the collective. His
plays remain within the tradition of American liberalism, flattening out
class conflicts and prizing individual initiative far more than collective
action.
In his play “After the Fall,” written in 1964, in
which he deals with his and his friends’ past involvement with the
Communist Party, parallels are evident between Nazi Germany and the United
States today in respect to the war on terror and the killing and detaining
of innocent people.
One line from that play is as apropos now as it
was during the anti-communist witch hunt: “We must be careful not to adapt
a new behavior just because there’s hysteria in the country.” This can
apply as a warning today, as the government takes measures to tear down our
civil liberties in the name of fighting “terrorism.”
In a 1966 Paris Review interview, Miller was
asked if his political views had changed since the 1950s. He responded that
he’s not ready to advocate a tightly organized planned economy and that he
was “in deadly fear of people with too much power. … Now it’s a day-to-day
fight to stop dreadful things from happening.”
Thirty-plus years later, dreadful things have
happened and continue to happen; the fight goes on. In December 2001, at
age 85, Miller gave an interview to the BBC World Service, voicing his
concerns about the emergency measures the U.S. government put in place
shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks. He explained that he had spoken out
against the attacks, describing them as part of a “war against humanity.”
Additionally, he expressed his view on the plight
of non-Americans accused of allegedly helping the country’s terrorist
enemies, who were being tried outside the normal courts by military
tribunals. He stated that he feared for our civil rights and that the U.S.
government could be seen as “taking advantage of the situation and
increasing its power over the individual.”
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