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SPOILER ALERT!
HUAC and McCarthyism
My Son John is a movie about a communist named John, John Jefferson to be exact, played by Robert Walker. It is impossible to discuss this movie without noting that it was made at a time when America was obsessed with communism. The House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) was hard at work looking for communists, including in the movie industry, leading to the Hollywood Ten, those who refused to testify before the committee in 1947, who were then blacklisted. And the movie was made right in the middle of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s investigations into the way communists had infiltrated the federal government.
Communism and Me
However, before delving into the movie itself, I cannot resist relating a few personal stories on this matter. I was seven years old and living in New York when the Army-McCarthy hearings were taking place. I remember my mother standing outside, talking to her neighbor Mildred through an open window, asking her if she had been watching the McCarthy hearings on television. She said she had. The year was 1954.
Shortly thereafter, we moved away, ending up in Houston in 1957. One day my mother received a letter from Mildred. She said that a couple of FBI agents had come to her house, asking questions about my father, including questions concerning communist affiliation. She had addressed the letter to my mother rather than to both my parents, for she figured that my mother was innocent in the matter, not realizing that she was married to a communist, and she wanted to warn her. She said that she was mailing the letter from out of town, making sure she was not being followed. She told my mother, “It looks like the jig is up!”
My mother sent Mildred a letter back, telling her that my father had applied for a job with the Internal Revenue Service, and that the FBI was merely conducting a routine background check, as they are required to do for a lot of government positions. Unhappily, my mother never heard from Mildred again.
And now for my second anecdote. In the spring of 1980, I was at a party where I met a beautiful woman named Kim, who was about my age. She was there with her boyfriend, with whom she had been living for about a year. Early in our conversation, she told me that she was a communist, and had been one since she was in college in the 1960s.
I too had been in college at that time. In my first few semesters at the University of Houston, in 1964 and 1965, I had to swear, “I am not now nor ever have been a member of the Communist Party.” The fact that by 1966 we no longer had to swear that oath is some indication that the anti-communist hysteria was slowly coming to an end. As the Vietnam War was getting serious by then, and as my college deferment would be over in a couple of years, I, like a lot of other male students, was looking for ways to dodge the draft. I was told that some guys, whose deferment had run out, told their local draft board, “I am a homosexual and a communist.” The response was, “Nice try, pal, but you’re being drafted anyway.”
Anyway, Kim said that she had given serious consideration to moving to the Soviet Union. It was clear from the way she was talking that her not emigrating was simply a matter of inertia rather than any disillusionment about the Soviet system. She still regarded Russia fondly, as a place where the ideals of communism were being realized. I had always known that such notions regarding the Soviet Union were common among communist sympathizers here in America, from the Bolshevik Revolution right through the 1950s, but I was surprised to hear such sentiments in 1980.
Three months later, in August, I was invited to a smaller party. When I arrived, Kim and her boyfriend were standing near the entrance. “Oh, the communist,” I said, by way of a greeting. She smiled and said, “You remembered.”
About an hour later, there were six of us sitting around a table, having a little something to eat. Kim was sitting next to me, and her boyfriend was sitting across from her, carrying on a conversation with the guy sitting next to him. Kim and I were talking about the upcoming election, in which the nominees were Jimmy Carter, the incumbent president, and Ronald Reagan. We were agreeing that we would be voting for Carter, when all of a sudden, her boyfriend looked up and said, “What! You’re voting for Carter?” He was aghast.
She turned to him to respond, but I never heard what she said. I was too stunned. They had been living together for over a year, the election was less than three months away, and only now he was finding out she intended to vote for Jimmy Carter. Moreover, I know he heard me when I referred to her as a communist, although I should have thought he already knew about that. Did he really think a communist would vote for Ronald Reagan? Well, as I said, she was beautiful, and maybe having sex with her was all he cared about, so he never bothered to find out what she thought about anything.
All right, that’s enough about me.
John’s Parents
Although John is the title character in My Son John, the words “my son” indicate the perspective of one of his parents, Dan and Lucille Jefferson, played by Dean Jagger and Helen Hayes respectively. Which parent is being referred to by the words “my son” in the title is never stated explicitly.
The movie opens on a Sunday morning, in what appears to be a nice, peaceful neighborhood. But then Dan comes outside his house, and he is angry. Lucille is running late for church as usual. He goes over to his car and starts honking the horn several times. A neighbor comes outside and tells him he is waking her baby. He stops honking the horn and starts yelling at Lucille, as if yelling at his wife would not be as disturbing to his neighbors as honking the horn.
Of course, instead of making so much noise outside, he could have remained inside the house and said to Lucille, “Come on, honey, we’re going to be late again.” But some people are not content to keep their marital frustrations a private matter but must put on a big display for the whole neighborhood.
Later in the movie, Dan is not watching where he is going as he drives down the street, and as a result, he runs into the car in front of him. Although it is clearly his fault, he starts yelling at the other driver, blaming him for what happened.
So, Dan seems to be in a perpetual state of anger. He is not very smart either. This movie wants us to have a low regard for his intelligence because it sets up an opposition between him and John, who is an intellectual. Dan resents the way John uses “two-dollar words.” At one point in the movie, John, who is soon to be given an honorary degree of Doctor of Law, asks Dan, “Are you still teaching at the little red schoolhouse, Father?”
“Oh, yes, yes,” Dan replies, “still teaching them the same, down to earth….”
“Fundamentals,” John helpfully adds.
The implication is that Dan is not much smarter than the children he teaches in elementary school.
At one point, Dan threatens to quit his job. “What’s the use of the use of teaching honesty, goodness, love of home and country?” he asks Lucille. He says all the parents seem to care about are “good grades, not character.” One father even complained to the school.
He wanted me fired. He heard that I mentioned God in the classroom. His little son of a … father like that snitched on me. I must teach his little stool pigeon reading, writing, and ’rithmetic. Just suppose that he gets excellent in the three Rs and gets a goose egg for character. Reading, excellent, but if he reads nothing about his faith, whatever it might be, his head will be as empty as John thinks mine is.
Lucille, on the other hand, is sweet and pleasant, and her relationship with John is mostly on an emotional level, one of maternal affection. And whereas John can barely stand his father, it is clear that he loves his mother. Actually, Lucille is childlike, and though she is his mother, yet John loves her much in the way a man might love his daughter, even though she is not too bright. She is clearly the parent referred to in the title.
However, the love of one’s mother must be secondary to the ideals of communism, and toward the end of the movie, John threatens to have her committed to a sanitarium to keep her from testifying against him. We begin to be prepared for Lucille’s fragile mental state early on, when Dr. Carver shows up to give Lucille some pills. She has been having dizzy spells, and the doctor was worried that the additional strain of having two of her sons sent off to war might be too much for her. He tells her of two other women about her age that he has had to put in a rest home. As she explains to John, the pills are supposed to keep her from going “goofy,” but she hasn’t been taking them. “I told Dr. Carver that I’d just as soon put my faith in God and what he intended.”
Later in the movie, as she begins to suspect John of being a communist, this puts her on the verge of a nervous breakdown as she struggles between the love of her son and love of God and country. It is at this point that John suggests she might have to be put in a rest home like those two other women Dr. Carver referred to.
John’s Brothers
At the beginning of the movie, we see John’s two younger brothers, Chuck and Ben, played by Richard Jaeckel and James Young, tossing a football back and forth in front of their house, having played the game as halfbacks in high school. They are apparently the same age, so perhaps they were fraternal twins.
Both Chuck and Ben are blond, as opposed to John, who has dark hair. But the main difference between these younger brothers and John is that they are mesomorphs while John is an ectomorph, said to be “the bright one.” Later in the movie, Lucille reminisces with John about Chuck and Ben when they were playing football:
I think sometimes it hurt you when your father and I jumped up and down cheering for them. Which you remember that I whispered to you, “Keep on studying. There are other goals, John.”
In real life, an athlete could just as easily be a communist as anyone else, but not in a movie, so it is no surprise the John never played in any sport.
When we saw Chuck and Ben tossing a football back and forth at the beginning of the movie, they were in a different kind of uniform, about to be sent overseas to fight in the Korean War. Lucille continues her reminiscence: “Now we’re cheering for Ben and Chuck again. They’re fighting on God’s side now, and I’m fighting with them.”
John graduated from college in 1941, which means he would have been the right age to fight in World War II. Even though Senator McCarthy was worried about communists in the United States Army, it would have been incongruous, as far as this movie is concerned, for John to have fought in that war. The patriotic connotations of John’s having done so would have caused us to have mixed feelings, spoiling the simplistic oppositions being set up in this movie. No reason is given as to why John has had no military service, leaving us with only the suspicion that he managed to avoid it somehow.
Finally, there is the suggestion that John is a homosexual. At least, I have read critics that say as much. Writing a review for the New York Times when the movie first came out, Bosley Crowther says, “As the ‘bad’ son, the late Robert Walker does an elegantly suave and unctuous job, scratching his eyebrows with his little finger and doing other self-revealing things like that….” I did notice that when John smokes a cigarette, he sometimes holds it with his thumb below and three fingers on top, which seems a little dainty.
There was an association between homosexuality and communism in those days. Homosexuals were a security risk because they could be blackmailed, but more fundamental than that was the idea that since homosexuality was regarded as a sexual perversion, it was easy to suppose that it could lead to a perversion of an ideological sort. Finally, homosexuals were thought to be weak, which fits with John’s unathletic nature.
Religion
Because John is a communist, he is an atheist. By way of contrast, the rest of the Jefferson family is exceedingly devout. The movie emphasizes this by beginning on a Sunday as they prepare to go to church. After the service, Father O’Dowd (Frank McHugh) asks about John. His parents are embarrassed, with Dan making the excuse that John was detained. John eventually phones, saying he won’t be able to make it, owing to “official business” where he works in Washington, D.C. (We might as well assume he works for the State Department, since that is where Senator McCarthy claimed there were lots of communists.) In any event, it is clear that by not showing up, John has spoiled all the intense family feeling at Chuck’s and Ben’s final dinner before they report for duty at Ashville.
In fact, it is Father O’Dowd who gives them a ride to Ashville. Normally, it is not one of the duties of a priest to provide transportation to another city. Besides, either Dan could have driven them there, or they could have taken a bus. But as Lucille said, the boys will be fighting for God, and having Father O’Dowd drive them there is a way of making it clear that Chuck and Ben are on a religious mission.
A week later, Dr. Carver arrives to give Lucille the pills referred to above. Then John shows up just as Dr. Carver is leaving. John tells him how much he has come to appreciate men of science like him and the research they do. Carver acknowledges that scientists are indeed discovering new things and making progress. “But more and more,” Carver continues gravely, “some of us are beginning to realize that someone put them there for us to discover.”
“Somebody hides things around for us to find,” John says, feigning an effort to understand, “kind of like an old-fashioned egg hunt, huh?”
We note that instead of saying, “like an Easter egg hunt,” he drops the word “Easter” and adds the term “old-fashioned.” Of course, the Easter Bunny is no more essential to the religious meaning of Easter than Santa Claus is to Christmas. Nevertheless, the message here is that John regards Easter as something that is no longer to be taken seriously.
Later in the movie, when Lucille begins to worry about John, she gets him to swear on her Bible that he is not a communist. But Dan says that if John is an atheist, that would be meaningless.
“Do you believe in the Bible?” Dan asks John.
“Well, now, Father,” John replies, “do you believe every page? I mean, Jonah and the whale?”
“I believe every page, Son. Jonah and the whale.”
“Even the pages you don’t understand?”
“I believe in those too. That’s faith.”
“It certainly is, Father.”
So, Dan is a fundamentalist. Interpreting the Bible literally is something we normally associate with certain Protestant sects, but the director of this movie was Leo McCarey, who was a Catholic, so maybe he was more comfortable making Dan and Lucille Catholics too.
The religious argument Dan and John are having makes Dan angry, which is his normal emotional state. John, as usual, remains composed, though just barely able to conceal the contempt he has for his father’s beliefs. Finally, Dan gets to the Ten Commandments, asking about the first one, asking John if he believes in God. John turns away, having had enough of this foolishness, but Dan pulls him back. “What about honoring your father and your mother? That’s the Fourth Commandment.”
“Well,” John replies, “you’re making that one difficult.” Dan grabs the Bible with both hands and bangs it down on John’s head. “What page was that on?” John asks. Dan pushes John, who falls backwards over a table, tearing the knee on his pants.
Lucille comes running in, and seeing the pants, turns to Dan and says, “You hit your son!”
“Well,” John explains, “he was just trying to pound some religion in me, Mother.”
The Key
Lucille runs Dan out of the house. John changes his pants and catches a taxicab back to Washington, telling Lucille to give the pants to Father O’Dowd for charity. When Dan comes back home, Lucille tells him that John merely has liberal views, just like St. Paul. Dan is holding a newspaper, and he shows it to Lucille, saying of John’s liberalism, “They just caught one of his kind down in Washington.”
The headline says, “Ruth Carlin Sentenced,” followed by, “Convicted Courier Gets Twenty Years,” which in turn is followed by, “Still Refuses to Name Others.”
The next morning, Lucille receives a long-distance phone call from John, asking her to send those torn pants to him. She says she gave them to Father O’Dowd, as he told her to. He insists that she go right over to the church, get them back, and mail them to him. She agrees to, but before she can leave, the man whose car Dan ran into shows up. By coincidence, it turns out that he is FBI agent Stedman (Van Heflin), who has been investigating John. He asks questions, and she is evasive, for now she is suspicious that Dan was right, that John is a communist.
When she retrieves the pants, she finds a key in one of the pockets. She flies to Washington with the pants and visits John where he works. When she shows him the key, he says it’s to his apartment, saying it’s no big deal. They are interrupted by someone, telling him the committee is waiting for him. He says to her that they’ll talk later, and she drops the key back in her purse.
Apparently, Ruth Carlin’s address was published in the newspaper, and Lucille decides to see if the key fits the door to her apartment. Little does she know that the FBI have cameras all over the place, watching her every move, including cameras inside Ruth Carlin’s apartment. As Stedman and another agent watch the film later, Stedman says, “She knows,” when Lucille is able to open the door to the apartment. She looks inside and then closes the door.
She confronts John with this knowledge. He tells her that he and Ruth were intimate, so naturally he had a key to her apartment. As far as Stedman is concerned, however, John’s having that key is evidence that he is a spy, provided Lucille is willing to testify that she found that key in John’s pants. It is because she is struggling with whether to testify to that effect that John starts talking about putting her in a sanitarium, where no one would believe her.
But the excuse John gave to his mother about being intimate with Ruth Carlin could be the same excuse he gives to the FBI. He could even embellish it, saying, “You know, I used to wonder why she was always asking me questions about my job at the State Department. I never told her anything of significance, of course.”
So, as far as I can see, that key would prove nothing. John might lose his security clearance as a result, but that would be about it. At first, I figured that the FBI had other evidence that John was a spy, but they don’t. Stedman says to another agent that if Lucille does not testify, then they have no case against John at all.
And what did John want the key for anyway? It’s not as though he would ever go back to Ruth’s apartment. Whoever Father O’Dowd gave the pants to would probably just throw the key away when he found it.
In other words, there is no way to make sense of this business with the key within the story itself. Those who made this movie needed some way to get Lucille involved in the investigation so that she would have to choose between love of her son and love of God and country. And so, the idea that the key would be conclusive evidence that John is a spy is imposed on the story from without.
Three Speeches
There are three speeches in this movie. The first is the one Dan intends to give to the American Legion, where he is running for Commander of the Post. Lucille suggests that John help Dan with the speech, something that Dan really doesn’t want. Essentially, Dan’s speech asserts that there are “God-given rights.” If the people allow the state to regard itself as the source of those rights, he says, the state may take them away. Therefore, the Legionnaires must fight to keep power in the hands of the people.
In editing Dan’s speech, John struck through those remarks, saying that one must exercise caution when putting power in the hands of the people because it can be misused. Since John is an atheist, we know he does not believe that there are God-given rights. Rather, rights exist only to the extent that they are conferred on the people by a government. Dan reverses all of John’s blue-pencil corrections and gives the speech he intended originally.
A second speech is the one that John has been working on, a commencement speech to be given to his Alma Mater. We get some idea of what is going to be in that speech when he explains his liberal views to Lucille: “I love humanity, Mother. I love the downtrodden, the helpless minorities.”
Lucille is pleased, comparing what John is saying to the writings of St. Paul, happy that the early religious training she gave to John has borne fruit. John qualifies this, saying, “I know everything that you stand for, Mother, and what I’m striving for is an intelligent and practical way to bring into existence a new and better ordered world.”
Before continuing on to the third speech, let us pause to consider a movie that might have been. Suppose Dan was not always so angry and not such a religious fanatic and patriotic zealot. Furthermore, imagine that John was not a spy, just a man who wants the American system of government to reflect the ideals of communism. In that case, the conflict would be merely one of ideas. However, this movie takes the melodramatic step of making John a spy, which means, by way of an argumentum ad hominem, that John’s views must be wrong.
After Lucille finds out that John is a communist spy, she becomes horrified when thinking about the speech he intends to give, fearing that he will turn the entire graduating class into a bunch of communists themselves. That speech, however, is never given.
When Lucille collapses under the strain, she is put to bed. She says to Dan, “Let’s pray for John.” We hear religious music in the background as they say the Lord’s Prayer, with John downstairs listening, eyes looking upward. Through a combination of divine intervention and love for his mother, he is having a change of heart.
He had planned on flying to Lisbon, where he would be beyond the reach of the FBI, but he calls Agent Stedman, saying he’s not going to be on that flight. Instead, John says he wants to do “one decent thing.” Stedman assures him that “Everybody’s life has some purpose, even Judas.”
I guess the idea is that if it hadn’t been for Judas, Jesus would not have been crucified. If he had not been crucified, he would not have died for our sins. If he had not died for our sins, no one would be saved. If no one is ever saved, then we all have to spend eternity in the fires of Hell. Thank God for Judas!
Then Stedman starts worrying that other spies might find out that John is not going to Lisbon. They might try to kill him before he can do that one decent thing. He says, “Now, listen John, use whatever free will you have left to make your own decision and get over here.”
Free will? He could just as easily have said, “If you’ve decided to do the right thing, get over here as soon as you can.” Free will is not exclusively a religious concept, of course, but that would seem to be its significance here, standing in opposition to the economic determinism of Karl Marx. So, with Stedman’s reference to Judas and then free will, we know that the FBI shares the same Christian values as the Jefferson household. Furthermore, it means that this one decent thing John wants to do will have religious significance.
John goes back to his office and tapes a third speech, quite different from the one that he originally intended to give. He calls Stedman again, but while on the phone, Stedman realizes that someone is listening in, and that John’s life is in danger. He says, “John, get out of there as fast as you can. Take Pennsylvania Avenue!” Of course, since the spies were listening in, they know to take Pennsylvania Avenue themselves, allowing them to riddle the taxicab John is in with a machine gun, causing it to turn over, right there on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.
In his dying breath, John tells Stedman that the taped speech is in his office. The next day, Stedman plays the speech on a tape recorder, which is sitting on a lectern, for the graduating class, while a heavenly beam shines down on it from above. John tells of how he got caught up in poisonous ideas, that he substituted faith in man for faith in God. He admits to having become a traitor, warning the students as he wishes he had been warned. He now prays for God’s mercy. John and Lucille are there, and as they leave, they decide to pray for John and pray the students will remember his words.
When I first watched this movie on television in 1970, I thought that was a good idea having John get killed so that only the taped speech could be heard. I figured it would be too much to ask of us to watch John actually make that speech in person, after all that we knew about him by that time. It simply would not have been believable.
Then I learned that Robert Walker died of a drug overdose while this movie was being made, that it was intended that John make the speech in person, after which he would go to prison. When Walker died during production, the script was changed so that he would be killed. Walker had already taped the speech John was supposed to give, and that was played for the graduating class instead.
Now that I think about it, if the audience for this movie in 1952 had seen John give that speech in person, renouncing communism and affirming his faith in God, they probably would have savored it.