First Amendment cases rarely involve Reader’s Digest

The title phrase refers to the fact that battles over the First Amendment usually don’t involve respectable, clean-cut types of speech, just as Fourth Amendment cases rarely involve someone strip-searching a nun. Defending people’s rights often means defending something unsavory or controversial—but sometimes, people try to have it both ways.
In 1952, Big Jim McLain asserted that only a filthy, stinking, Commie traitor scum would use the Fifth Amendment to hide from the righteous justice of the House UnAmerican Committee.
Decades later, films such as The Front (1976), House on Carroll Street (1988) or Guilty By Suspicion (1991) took the opposite view: Refusing to name names, as the protagonists do, is an act of moral courage, the stuff of heroes. HUAC is shown as the witch-hunt that it was, persecuting innocent people.
The innocence is what struck me while I was proofing the text for Screen Enemies of the American Way; although the movies condemn HUAC, they’re careful to condemn them for persecuting decent, left-wing Americans. Nothing in the movies suggest that persecuting real Communists would be bad too.
In Guilty By Suspicion, deNiro is blacklisted because he attended a couple of Communist Party meetings in the thirties (“I think I got thrown out for arguing.”) and refuses to identify anyone else he met there.
In The Front, Zero Mostel asserts that his ties to the Communist Party were purely to get laid by a large-breasted Red (I don’t believe any of the other blacklistees were Communists either—feel free to correct me if you know otherwise). In Carroll Street, Kelly McGillis is a left-wing civil-rights activist, not a Red.
I don’t mean to trivialize the damage the blacklist did to people whose politics veered left of center, or didn’t veer at all (the blacklisters routinely reported rumors, inaccuracies and flimsy allegations as facts). But I also don’t think persecuting Communist Party members just for the politics is a good thing either. Despite the lurid claims of the FBI and informants such as Herb Philbrick and Matt Cvetic, the blacklistees weren’t spies or subversives. The standard legal tactic (as detailed in the book Naming Names) was to have an informant explain that when Communists talked about winning power democratically they “really” meant by violence; or that some Communist somewhere advocated violence against the government (violating the Smith Act), so by the laws against conspiracy to commit a crime, any Communist could be held liable for that. Plus, some informants simply lied (and admitted it later).
Apparently even 30 years after the blacklist, Hollywood doesn’t want to defend actual Communists against persecution; much safer to list the crimes the blacklist commited against the innocent.
Which is actually an old tactic in movies. Tea and Sympathy (1956) tackles homophobia by showing how much pain it causes when a sensitive straight guy is tagged as gay. Several movies about the Civil Rights movement show how much pain segregation caused decent white people.
Even in the real world, this approach persists. A book about the “high school slut” stereotype I read a few years back pointed out that when parents sue schools over kids “slut shaming” their daughters, the defense is invariably that she’s a virtuous decent girl, not that slut shaming is objectionable in itself (in fairness, I’d be much more concerned about defending my daughter than establishing fundamental principles if I were in the same boat).
I wonder if this won’t change over time: The McCarthyite period is near and dear to modern conservatives, but with the USSR dead for 20 years and American Communism about as dead, the fear of being labeled “communist” may finally die.
But I’m quite sure there will be other issues that will have to be approached just as gingerly.