540
DAVID CAUTE
And if roles are reversed, so are attitudes and values. The infonner,
once so loathsome to liberals, is now urged to open wide his memory,
to name names, and to produce documents from his bulging briefcase–
that symbol of American fact worship once so precious to Wisconsin
fanners.
Such a reversal, of course, has its precedents. In the 1920s and, more
particularly, the 1930s, the power of Congressional inquisition was dear
to radicals but devilish to bankers and munitions manufacturers, dear to
Frankfurter and Black but devilish to the Liberty League. Yet within a
few years those same radicals, confronted by Dies, Walter, McCarran,
McCarthy, Jenner, and Eastland, were desperately grasping the First and
Fifth as they invoked the memory of Jefferson. In those Cold War days
the press which indiscriminately headlined fact and rumor, evidence
and hearsay, was not the heroic champion of liberty it is now proclaimed
to be.
Naturally the growth of executive power and of security agencies
undermining security is not a feature peculiar to American government;
yet it is only in the U.S. that the executive fortress of clandestine phone
taps and bungled burglaries
is
periodically besieged and assaulted by a
populist democracy whose apparent passion for justice may, in the
event, be satisfied by a feast of exposure. And in the course of that
periodic confrontation, the most written of constitutions reveals inva–
riably its creaking ambiguities and no-man's-lands, its capacity to harbor
power hungry factions ready to savage one another in the interests of
America and personal ambition. At such moments of high temperature,
an essentially commercial civilization can never have enough.
Surely, then, Watergate sheds some light on the nightmarish ero–
sion of restraints which characterized that other inquisition described by
Cedric Belfrage, himself a victim. But I doubt whether he would agree.
He came to the U.S. in 1926, became a permanent resident in 1937,
and, in 1948, helped to found the left-wing weekly,
The National Guard–
ian.
Never a Communist but always a fellow traveler, he encountered
between 1950 and 1955 the Immigration Service, Ellis Island, HUAC,
McCarthy, the law courts, and the West Street prison. In 1955 he was
deported.
When the victim of an unjust deportation later turns historian he
faces two problems. First, he must gather his material while physically
barred from access to essential documents and sources; secondly, he must
quell his bitterness and master his sense of grievance to the extent of
achieving an objective overview of events in which he was once a fiercely
partisan participant. Belfrage has done better in the first respect than
