ARTHUR MILLER — COMMUNIST: Paul Kengor does yeoman work sifting through the memory hole at the American Spectator:
Given this newfound fame and influence, by the mid-1950s, Arthur Miller was called to appear before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. His testimony on June 21, 1956 received tremendous attention. It prompted eye-catcher headlines in the New York Times, such as, “Arthur Miller Admits Helping Communist-Front Groups in ‘40s.” Or, as the Times put it in the lead: “Arthur Miller, playwright, disclosed today a past filled with Communist-front associations.”
To Congress, Miller conceded the numerous pro-communist appeals he had signed and the protests he joined by Red-backed groups. He refused to name names of those who were there with him. Likewise, he would not name people who joined him during the mere four or five times that he said he had attended Communist Party writers’ meetings. Miller also denied that he had ever been under “communist discipline” and would not answer the question of whether he had ever joined the Party.
The most dramatic moment of the hearing came when the House Committee’s lead counsel asked Miller if he once signed an application to join the Communist Party. As Miller dissembled, the counsel presented the exact five-digit application number on the Communist Party application form that contained Miller’s name and address at 18 Schermerhorn Street in New York. Congress went so far as to publish a photocopy of the application card.
That exhibit remains a striking form of evidence. A photocopy is published on page 191 of my book, Dupes. Under the banner “Victory in 1943,” the form states, “APPLICATION FOR MEMBERSHIP” and lists an “A. Miller,” with occupation of “writer” at an address that just happened to be Miller’s own Brooklyn address. The number of the application was 23345. Confronted with this rather compelling evidence, and asked if it indeed proved that he had made an “application for membership in the Communist Party,” Miller curiously told Congress, “I would not affirm that. I have no memory of such thing.”
For a man that the left still hails as nothing short of unsurpassable genius—with the word “brilliant” a standard description—this was a notable and lamentable memory crash.
Read the whole thing, which calls to mind Mark Steyn’s take on one of Miller’s contemporaries, novelist and screenwriter Dalton Trumbo. When an off-Broadway play originally starring Nathan Lane a decade ago attempted to whitewash Trumbo’s legacy, Steyn responded, “Although the play won’t tell you the answer to that famous question—‘Are you now or have you ever … ?’—the truth is: yes, he was. The more interesting question is: How do you feel about getting one of the great moral questions of the century wrong?”