Now you’re making it up, brother: Paul Robeson, HUAC, and the challenge of institutional narrative authority

ABSTRACT

In the mid 1950s, the House Committee on Un-American Activities was a rhetorical colossus. Within the closed doors of a hearing, committee members displayed a rhetorical mastery of procedural, topical, and logical moves that left even the best-prepared witnesses sputtering. HUAC used institutional narrative authority as a major rhetorical resource. This strategy rhetorically produced a narrative “reality” conducive to achieving institutional goals. Having established the “official” version of events, the committee situated further argumentation within a value hierarchy that placed national security above “secondary” values that witnesses attempted to invoke in their defenses. A notable exception to the committee's rhetorical dominance came in the 1956 testimony of Paul Robeson, an African American singer and activist who had been called before the committee to answer for pro-Soviet statements he made while traveling abroad. Using a number of rhetorical tactics to disrupt the institutional narrative, Robeson was able to recontextualize his comments within an interpretive framework of racial justice in America – a debate the committee was less prepared to handle. This article contributes to ongoing studies of institutional rhetoric, especially rhetorical argumentation that takes place within institutional settings.

KEYWORDS:

• Institutional rhetoric
• argumentation
• House Committee on Un-American Activities
• value hierarchies
• Cold War
• McCarthyism

Acknowledgement

The author wishes to thank Ryan Skinnell and Thomas Moriarty for helping with earlier drafts of this article. The author also gives thanks to the reviewers, editor, and editorial assistant for their detailed feedback and helpful suggestions.

Notes

1. For example, on the early Dies Committee, committee member Representative Joe Starns sincerely asked a witness whether the long-dead playwright Christopher Marlowe was a Communist, resulting in laughter from the audience. United States Congress House Committee on Un-American Activities and Eric Bentley, Thirty Years of Treason: Excerpts from Hearings before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, 1938–1968 (New York: Thunder's Mouth Press/Nation Books, 2002), 25.

2. Though I have come up with the name institutional narrative authority, variations of this concept are spread across a number of disciplines outside of rhetoric such as organizational studies, business management, sociolinguistics, workplace studies, and various branches of sociology. This paper consolidates these findings into a framework specific to rhetorical analysis, especially as it applies to institutional rhetoric and the inherent asymmetries of argumentation that takes place in institutional settings.

3. Mark Andrew Thompson, “Institutional Argumentation and Institutional Rules: Effects of Interactive Asymmetry on Argumentation in Institutional Contexts,” Argumentation 31, no. 1 (2017): 1–21.

4. Hamilton Bean, “A Complicated and Frustrating Dance: National Security Reform, the Limits of Parrhesia, and the Case of the 9/11 Families,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 12, no. 3 (2009): 429–59; Christopher Eisenhart, “Reporting Waco: The Constitutive Work of Bureaucratic Style,” in Rhetoric in Detail: Discourse Analyses of Rhetorical Talk and Text, eds. Barbara Johnstone and Christopher Eisenhart (Amsterdam; Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2008), 57–79; Andrea Mayr, Language and Power: An Introduction to Institutional Discourse (New York: Continuum, 2008); Tarla Rai Peterson, “The Rhetorical Construction of Institutional Authority in a Senate Subcommittee Hearing on Wilderness Legislation,” Western Journal of Speech Communication 52, no. 4 (1988): 259–76; Robert A. Francesconi, “James Hunt, the Wilmington 10, and Institutional Legitimacy,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 68, no. 1 (1982): 47–59.

5. Walter Goodman, The Committee: The Extraordinary Career of the House Committee on Un-American Activities (New York: Farrar, Strauss And Giroux, 1968), 391.

6. Martin B. Duberman, Paul Robeson (New York: Knopf, 1988), 433.

7. A bemused Robeson had testified before the Joint Fact-Finding Committee on Un-American Activities in California in 1946 during better personal times. Jordan Goodman, Paul Robeson: A Watched Man (London; New York: Verso, 2013), 231.

8. Thompson, “Institutional Argumentation and Institutional Rules.”

9. Erik Doxtader, “Learning Public Deliberation through the Critique of Institutional Argument,” Argumentation & Advocacy 31, no. 4 (Spring 1995): 185. EBSCOhost, http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ufh&AN=9512190052&site=ehost-live&scope=site.

10. I’m borrowing only Bitzer's vocabulary here. He doesn't explicitly tie the rhetorical situation to the management of institutions. Lloyd Bitzer, “The Rhetorical Situation,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 1, no. 1 (1968): 3.

11. G. Thomas Goodnight, “Strategic Maneuvering in Direct to Consumer Drug Advertising: A Study in Argumentation Theory and New Institutional Theory,” Argumentation 22, no. 3 (2008): 361.

12. Jill J. McMillan, “Symbolic Emancipation: A Case of Shifting Power in the Organization.” Annals of the International Communication Association 13, no. 1 (1990): 203–14. doi:10.1080/23808985.1990.11678754.

13. Though critical institutional theory is present throughout the work of these authors, widely cited publications are: Michel Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge (New York: Routledge, 2002); Louis Althusser, On the Reproduction of Capitalism: Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (London; New York: Verso, 2014); Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Volume Two (Boston: Beacon Press, 1987); Pierre Bourdieu and John B. Thompson, Language and Symbolic Power (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991); Anthony Giddens, The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). For traditional approaches to the study of institutions, see: Max Weber, The Theory of Social and Economic Organization (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1947) and Talcott Parsons and Leon H. Mayhew, Talcott Parsons on Institutions and Social Evolution: Selected Writings (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982).

14. Dennis K. Mumby, Communication and Power in Organizations: Discourse, Ideology, and Domination (Norwood, NJ: Ablex Pub. Corp., 1988), 125.

15. Marsha Witten, “Narrative and the Culture of Obedience at the Workplace,” in Narrative and Social Control, ed. Dennis K. Mumby (New York: Sage, 1993), 100.

16. McMillan, “Symbolic Emancipation,” 204. However, position within a hierarchy doesn't necessarily ascribe the power to assert an official narrative. Competing factions within an organization might struggle internally to present the public with the “official” institutional message, as John Lynch shows in the battle between conservative and reform-minded Catholic leaders over the church's official position on GLB rights. Nevertheless, for these narratives to hold any institutional weight, some degree of organizational sanction is required to legitimize them. “Institution and Imprimatur: Institutional Rhetoric and the Failure of the Catholic Church's Pastoral Letter on Homosexuality,” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 8, no. 3 (2005): 383–403.

17. Two excellent overviews of the use of narrative in organizational study are Barbara Czarniawska, A Narrative Approach in Organizational Studies (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1998), and David M. Boje, Narrative Methods for Organizational and Communication Research (London: SAGE Publications, 2001).

18. Witten, “Narrative and the Culture of Obedience.”

19. Mary Helen Brown and Jill J. McMillan, “Culture as Text: The Development of an Organizational Narrative,” Southern Communications Journal 57, no. 1 (1991): 57.

20. Michael Humphreys and Andrew D. Brown, “An Analysis of Corporate Social Responsibility at Credit Line: A Narrative Approach,” Journal of Business Ethics 80, no. 3 (2008): 403–18.

21. Carl Rhodes, Writing Organization: (re)presentation and Control in Narratives at Work (Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing, 2001).

22. Paul Drew and John Heritage, eds., Talk at Work: Interaction in Institutional Settings (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Renata Galatolo and Paul Drew, “Narrative Expansions as Defensive Practices in Courtroom Testimony,” Text and Talk 26, no. 6 (2006): 661–98.

23. Erving Goffman, Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates (New Brunswick, NJ: Aldine Transaction, 2007).

24. Mayr, Language and Power.

25. Steve Linstead, “Deconstruction in the Study of Organizations,” in Postmodernism and Organizations, eds. John Hassard and Martin Parker (London: Sage, 1993), 49–70.

26. Doxtader, “Learning Public Deliberation.”

27. Norman Fairclough, Discourse and Social Change (Cambridge, MA: Polity Press, 1992), 152–6.

28. Peterson, “The Rhetorical Construction of Institutional Authority.”

29. Weber gives the traditional sociological account in The Theory of Social and Economic Organization and Foucault updates the role of the archive as tool of institutional power in Archaeology of Knowledge.

30. Eisenhart, “Reporting Waco.”

31. Francesconi, “James Hunt, the Wilmington 10, and Institutional Legitimacy.” In a major speech meant to address public outrage, Hunt attempted to legitimize what appeared to be a clear case of racial prejudice by the police and courts through a narrative that reframed the issue as a technical-procedural aspect of an equitable institution.

32. Doxtader, “Learning Public Deliberation.”

33. Bean, “A Complicated and Frustrating Dance,” 444.

34. Jan Blommaert, Mary Bock, and Kay McCormick, “Narrative Inequality in the TRC Hearings: On the Hearability of Hidden Transcripts,” Journal of Language and Politics 5, no. 1 (2006): 37–70.

35. Chaïm Perelman and Lucy Olbrechts-Tyteca, The New Rhetoric: A Treatise on Argumentation (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1969), 74–83.

36. U.S. Senate, Committee on Governmental Operations, Special Senate Investigation of Charges and Countercharges Involving Secretary of the Army Robert T. Stevens, John G. Adams, H. Struve Hensel and Senator Joe McCarthy, Roy M. Cohn, and Francis P. Carr, 83rd Cong., 2nd Sess, part 2 (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1954), 81.

37. Ibid.

38. Goodman, The Committee, 160.

39. Robert K. Carr, The House Committee on Un-American Activities, 1945–1950 (New York: Octagon Books, 1979), 17.

40. Ibid., 18.

41. Athan G. Theoharis, The FBI & American Democracy: A Brief Critical History (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2004), 88.

42. Athan G. Theoharis, Beyond the Hiss Case: The FBI, Congress, and the Cold War (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1982).

43. Doxtader, “Learning Public Deliberation,” 185.

44. U.S. Congress. Investigation of Communist Activities New York area—part VII (entertainment): Hearings before the Committee on Un-American Activities, House of Representatives, Eighty-Fourth Congress, First Session, August 17 and 18, 1955 (Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office, 1955), 2468–9.

45. I only draw upon two witnesses at this particular hearing to illustrate these points, but the entire transcript from these two days gives many more examples. See in particular the testimony of Madeleine Lee, actress and social activist, who was called to explain why her union refused to honor the blacklist. U.S. Congress, Investigation of Communist Activities, 2393.

46. U.S. Congress, Investigation of Communist Activities, 2414.

47. Ibid., 434.

48. U.S. Congress. Investigation of the Unauthorized Use of United States Passports—Part 3: Hearings before the Committee on Un-American Activities, House of Representatives, Eighty-Fourth Congress, Second Session, June 12 and 13, 1956 (Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office, 1956), 4491.

49. U.S. Congress, Investigation of the Unauthorized Use, 4491.

50. Ibid.

51. The law was not on HUAC's side here. A federal court had recently ruled that the “behavior” the committee was targeting was entirely lawful and that U.S. citizens had the right to international travel. Nevertheless, institutional narratives live as established truths within contexts of their own creation, and the hearings continued in spite of this decision. Duberman, Paul Robeson, 432.

52. U.S. Congress, Investigation of the Unauthorized Use, 4495.

53. Ibid., 4494–4495.

54. Ibid., 4496–4497.

55. Ibid., 4496.

56. Ibid., 4509.

57. Ibid., 4501.

58. Duberman, Paul Robeson, 342.

59. Thompson, “Institutional Argumentation and Institutional Rules.”

60. U.S. Congress, Investigation of the Unauthorized Use, 4509.

61. Ibid., 4507.

62. Ibid.

63. Ibid., 4508.

64. For example, Pete Seeger's 1955 testimony before HUAC: U.S. Congress, Investigation of Communist Activities, New York Area—Part vii (Entertainment), 2447–2460. The singer repeatedly defends his actions by claiming he has the right to perform for anybody and HUAC repeatedly uses this as an opening to demand Seeger name names. Thompson, “Institutional Argumentation and Institutional Rules.”

65. Anticommunists struggled to muster a public counterargument to these charges. Though the anticommunist South largely dismissed civil rights as a communist cause, many Northern anticommunists supported civil rights as a means of taking away these talking points from the Soviet Union. James Zeigler, Red Scare Racism and Cold War Black Radicalism (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2015).

66. Mark Roberts, “Communication Breakdown: Understanding the Role of Policy Narratives in Political Conflict and Analysis,” Critical Policy Studies (2018): 12, doi:10.1080/19460171.2016.1230507.

67. HUAC knew the weakness of its case here. Referring to a U.S. government pamphlet that offered the official framing of civil rights issues during the Cold War, Mary L. Dudziak writes, “The image of America projected in The Negro in American Life, the classic example of the narrative of race and democracy, would be hard to sustain in the face of criticism by Paul Robeson … and others perceived to be more authentic voices on the topic of American racial justice. For that reason, silencing Robeson … and other critics can be seen as part of the broader effort to safeguard the image of America.” Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), 77.

68. U.S. Congress, Hearings Regarding Communist Infiltration of Minority Groups: Hearings Before the Committee on Un-American Activities, House of Representatives, Eighty-first Congress, First Session (Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office, 1949–50).

69. Manning told the board he had no problems with lying under oath to help the government's work against Communists. Jeff Woods, Black Struggle, Red Scare: Segregation and Anti-communism in the South, 1948–1968 (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press 2004), 101.

70. U.S. Congress, Investigation of the Unauthorized Use, 4499.

71. Ibid., 4501.

72. Woods, Black Struggle, Red Scare, 52–57.

73. Ibid., 56.

74. The reference to Eastland so upset the committee, in fact, that after the hearing, Walter cited the “personal attack” as one of the primary reasons for citing Robeson with contempt. Goodman, Paul Robeson, 246.

75. U.S. Congress, Investigation of the Unauthorized Use, 4504.

76. At the mention of slavery (Ibid.), however, the committee scores some points of its own with Robeson, asking him whether he visited any slave camps while in the Soviet Union and pressuring him on his former praise of Stalin. Robeson refused to walk back his previous pro-Stalin statements but he also refused to acknowledge them. Instead he attempted to move the conversation both to his definition of slave and then moving to discuss his love of the Soviet people, not their dictator. Robeson seems flustered by this portion of the exchange but regains his confidence as the hearing rolls on.

77. U.S. Congress, Investigation of the Unauthorized Use, 4504.

78. Ibid., 4509.

79. Goodman, Paul Robeson, 246.

80. Ibid., 247. Walter Goodman, critical of Paul Robeson's performance, nonetheless similarly concluded that “although [Robeson] was inordinately contemptuous … the Committee thought better than to give him yet another stage for his resonant defiance.” The Committee, 391.

81. Duberman, Paul Robeson, 443.

82. Ibid., 442–443.

83. “Kent v. Dulles,” https://www.oyez.org/cases/1957/481.

84. Harvey Matusow, False Witness (New York: Cameron and Kahn, 1955).

85. Theoharis, Beyond the Hiss Case.

86. “Watkins v. United States,” https://www.oyez.org/cases/1956/261.

87. “Yates v. United States,” https://www.oyez.org/cases/1956/6.