From the "talebearer" condemned in Ecclesiastes to the "stool-pigeon" villain of the modern-day comic book, the informer has traditionally been the object of peculiar contempt on the part of his fellow citizens. Perhaps this hatred of the man who betrays his fellows has reached its height in the United States--from childhood on, almost every. American absorbs a dread of "tattling". The emotion has become deeply ingrained in our society.

But in an age of widespread insecurity, Americans have become acutely aware of the complex demands of national security, and increasingly fearful that many historic American attitudes may no longer be adequate for the present day. The problem of the informer has arisen in new and vivid forms since the war, largely as an outgrowth of the intensive search for subversion of recent years.

Congressional committees and other investigating bodies have questioned literally thousands of Americans who have at one time participated in Communist activities. And witnesses have inevitably been asked to answer questions not only concerning their own activities, but those of friends and associates as well.

Informing Repugnant

Some witnesses have assented to the demands of investigating committees almost gladly, virtually assuming the role of professional informers. Others, perhaps the great majority of all witnesses, have testified about associates grudgingly. And yet a third group has simply been unable to overcome its repugnance to disclose information about others--these witnesses, while often describing their own activities in detail, have refused to testify about others altogether.

A number of members of the American academic community have found themselves face to face with this unwelcome dilemma in the past few years. Witnesses such as Harvard's Wendell H. Furry, Cornell's Marcus Singer, and several New York City public school teachers, have steadfastly refused to speak about former associates before investigating groups on grounds of conscience. As a consequence of their defiance, they face the possibility of explicit, legal punishment, as well as the more intangible sanctions that many former Communists have encountered.

Their dilemma resolves itself in essence into a series of perplexing questions: "Should considerations of personal friendship and the desire to shield friends from public humiliation prevail over the demands of national security?" "Do I as a teacher have greater moral and legal obligations than my fellow citizens?" "Should I accept departures from the historic ideal of due process in apparent questions of national security?" "Have I the right to question the power and motives of a committee which claims to uphold national security?"

Procedure Challenged

These questions appear in what is perhaps their fullest complexity in the case of Professor Furry. The basic moral problem of informing on one's associates is present not only in abstraction, but reappears again and again because of the special procedural circumstances of the case.

In a sense, the overriding moral issue can in fact be seen only in terms of the procedural aspects of the case. Furry's lawyers have challenged the government's case on a number of grounds: the scope of the authority of the Government Operations Committee of the Senate under the legislative reorganization act of 1946; the pertinency of the investigators' questions; the motives and objectives of Senator McCarthy's subcommittee; the conduct of the particular hearings at which Professor Furry testified in January, 1954; the presence of television cameras in the learning room.

Each of these must be decided on technical legal grounds; each, however, has introduced additional moral considerations into Furry's refusal to reveal the names of former Communist associates to the subcommittee. For as Mark DeWolfe Howe, Professor of Law, has asserted, "clear authority and decent procedure" are fundamental to "these matters of conscience."

To a noted Washington lawyer, Abe Fortas, many Congressional investigations such as the McCarthy hearings have failed flagrantly to meet these tests. Fortas has said, "There are no standards of judgment, no rules, no traditions of procedures or judicial demeanor, no statute of limitations, no appeals, no boundaries of relevance, and no finality. In short, anything goes; and everything frequently does--and often on television."

In the Furry case, there is initial dispute as to the authority of the McCarthy subcommittee. Its parent committee was originally designed, Furry's lawyers claim, to oversee only the General Accounting Office and the Bureau of the Budget, and was delegated the task of "studying the operation of government activities at all levels with a view to determining its economy and efficiency." Alan Barth, editorial writer of the Washington Post and a sharp critic of congressional investigative techniques, has argued that "It is one thing to strip Congress of its investigatory power and quite another to strip a committee of power which Congress never delegated to it... The deference due Congress ... is not due a committee of subcommittee spuriously acting in the name of Congress."

It has been further argued that McCarthy's intentions were not directed toward gathering information, with an eye to possible legislation, presumably the proper function of a legislative investigative committee. In his discussion of Congressional investigations, Bath has commented, "the purpose of an inquiry seems the significant key to its validity. Questioning aimed at inhibiting expression or harassing non-conformity of conducting a legislative trial entails purposes that are unconstitutional. It is certainly possible to ban such questioning without impairing the ability of congressional committees to discharge their vitally important part of the legislative process." Here again, it seems impossible disentangle substantial moral questions from the purely legal aspects of Furry's refusal to testify concerning others before the McCarthy committee.

The abstract moral question of informing, obscured somewhat in the Furry case with its complex procedural issues, perhaps emerges most clearly in the controversy over the responsibilities of former Communist teachers in the New York public schools.