McCarthyism and Postwar America: The Reality and Mythology of the Red Scare 041584102X, 9780415841023

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Table of Contents
Series Introduction
List of Figures
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1 The Origins of Red Scare Anti-Communism
2 The Big Red Scare
3 The New Deal
4 The Red Scare Begins
5 The Red Scare at Full Tide
6 Culture Wars
Epilogue: Consequences
Documents
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

McCarthyism

In this succinct text, Jonathan Michaels examines the rise of anti-communist sentiment in the postwar United States, exploring the factors that facilitated McCarthyism and assessing the long-term effects on US politics and culture. McCarthyism: The Realities, Delusions and Politics Behind the 1950s Red Scare offers an analysis of the ways in which fear of communism manifested in daily American life, giving readers a rich understanding of this era of postwar American history. Including primary documents and a companion website, Michaels’ text presents a fully integrated picture of McCarthyism and the cultural climate of the United States in the aftermath of the Second World War. Jonathan Michaels received his Ph.D. in history from the University of Connecticut at Storrs. He currently teaches history at the University of Connecticut, Greater Hartford Campus.

Critical Moments in American History Edited by William Thomas Allison, Georgia Southern University

The Louisiana Purchase A Global Context Robert D. Bush The Fort Pillow Massacre North, South, and the Status of African Americans in the Civil War Era Bruce Tap From Selma to Montgomery The Long March to Freedom Barbara Combs The Homestead Strike Labor, Violence, and American Industry Paul E. Kahan

The Battle of Fort Sumter The First Shots of the American Civil War Wesley Moody The WPA Creating Jobs and Hope in the Great Depression Sandra Opdycke The California Gold Rush The Stampede that Changed the World Mark Eifler Bleeding Kansas Slavery, Sectionalism, and Civil War on the Missouri-Kansas Border Michael E. Woods

The Flu Epidemic of 1918 America’s Experience in the Global Health Crisis Sandra Opdycke

The Marshall Plan A New Deal for Europe Michael Holm

The Emergence of Rock and Roll Music and the Rise of American Youth Culture Mitchell K. Hall

The Espionage and Sedition Acts World War I and the Image of Civil Liberties Mitchell C. Newton-Matza

Transforming Civil War Prisons Lincoln, Lieber, and the Politics of Captivity Paul J. Springer and Glenn Robins

McCarthyism The Realities, Delusions and Politics Behind the 1950s Red Scare Jonathan Michaels

McCarthyism The Realities, Delusions and Politics Behind the 1950s Red Scare

Jonathan Michaels

First published 2017 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2017 Taylor & Francis The right of Jonathan Michaels to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Names: Michaels, Jonathan, 1951– Title: McCarthyism : the realities, delusions and politics behind the 1950s red scare / by Jonathan Michaels. Description: New York : Routledge, 2017. | Series: Critical moments in American history | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016040754 (print) | LCCN 2016044952 (ebook) | ISBN 9780415841023 (alk. paper) | ISBN 9780203766712 Subjects: LCSH: Anti-communist movements—United States—History— 20th century. | Internal security—United States—History—20th century. | McCarthy, Joseph, 1908–1957. | Subversive activities—United States— History—20th century. Classification: LCC E743.5 .M53 2017 (print) | LCC E743.5 (ebook) | DDC 324.1/3—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016040754 ISBN: 978-0-415-84102-3 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-415-84103-0 (pbk) ISBN: 978-0-203-76671-2 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo and Helvetica Neue by Florence Production Ltd, Stoodleigh, Devon, UK Visit the series page: http://routledgetextbooks.com/textbooks/_author/criticalmoments/

To Sylvia, Walter and Bob—whatever there is of good in this book owes so much to each of you.

Contents

Series Introduction List of Figures Acknowledgments

Introduction

viii ix x

1

1

The Origins of Red Scare Anti-Communism

18

2

The Big Red Scare

38

3

The New Deal

70

4

The Red Scare Begins

105

5

The Red Scare at Full Tide

141

6

Culture Wars

183

Epilogue: Consequences

231

Documents Bibliography Index

243 280 301

Series Introduction

Welcome to the Routledge Critical Moments in American History series. The purpose of this new series is to give students a window into the historian’s craft through concise, readable books by leading scholars, who bring together the best scholarship and engaging primary sources to explore a critical moment in the American past. In discovering the principal points of the story in these books, gaining a sense of historiography, following a fresh trail of primary documents, and exploring suggested readings, students can then set out on their own journey, to debate the ideas presented, interpret primary sources, and reach their own conclusions – just like the historian. A critical moment in history can be a range of things – a pivotal year, the pinnacle of a movement or trend, or an important event such as the passage of a piece of legislation, an election, a court decision, a battle. It can be social, cultural, political, or economic. It can be heroic or tragic. Whatever they are, such moments are by definition “game changers,” momentous changes in the pattern of the American fabric, paradigm shifts in the American experience. Many of the critical moments explored in this series are familiar; some less so. There is no ultimate list of critical moments in American history – any group of students, historians, or other scholars may come up with a different catalog of topics. These differences of view, however, are what make history itself and the study of history so important and so fascinating. Therein can be found the utility of historical inquiry – to explore, to challenge, to understand, and to realize the legacy of the past through its influence of the present. It is the hope of this series to help students realize this intrinsic value of our past and of studying our past. William Thomas Allison Georgia Southern University

Figures

4.1

5.1

5.2

Senator Joseph McCarthy standing at microphone with two other men, probably discussing the Senate Select Committee to Study Censure Charges (Watkins Committee) chaired by Senator Arthur V. Watkins. Courtesy of Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, LC-DIG-ds-07186. Nevada Senator. Washington, DC, April 24. An informal picture of Senator Pat McCarran, Democrat of Nevada. Courtesy of Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, LC-USZ62-117816. Roy M. Cohn, head-and-shoulders portrait, facing right. Courtesy of Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, LC-DIG-hec-26549.

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Acknowledgments

The acknowledgments required here are few but important: first, thanks are due to my friend and one-time academic advisor, Professor Robert Asher for his patient reading and re-reading of chapters, always followed by critical corrections and insights. Next, I owe a debt of gratitude to my brother, Walter Benn Michaels, who made important suggestions for general readability and logic and who saved me from many, many mistakes. I want to thank Kimberly Guinta—now at Rutgers University Press— who first took me on for this project and also I want to thank Eve Mayer and Ted Meyer of Routledge who helped see it through to completion. Thanks also to Sue Cope for her patient and meticulous copyediting. Then appreciation is due to the Herb Block Foundation which generously made important political cartoons available to us. And finally my heartfelt thanks go to my wife Sylvia who supported me and loved me through the travails of writing a book that, when I began I thought would be quick and easy, but which ended up being not so much so.

Introduction

I

t was unusually chilly—snow was still on the street—that first morning of May in 1950 when, around 6 am, five armed men burst into the bedroom of Ralph E. Kronenwetter, mayor of the small town of Mosinee (pop. 1,453), Wisconsin. Shouting “You’re an enemy of the people!” they dragged him from his house into the street. Mosinee was now part of the United Soviet States of America, they told him, and the Council of People’s Commissars had taken charge of the town. Not far away the Chief of Police, Carl Gewiss, was subjected to the same rough treatment as was the editor of the local newspaper, the Mosinee Times. A pistol at his back, the mayor surrendered peacefully, but the Chief resisted and was killed. A photograph exists of him, before his death, being interrogated by two members of the new Soviet Police, one armed with a knife, the other with a club. The new town bosses had set up checkpoints at the bridges leading into Mosinee’s downtown where a platform had been set up festooned with a sign that proclaimed “The State must be Supreme over the Individual!” Stepping onto the platform a local man, Joseph Kornfeder, proclaimed to the townspeople—assembled at gunpoint—that the town’s industries were now nationalized, that all political parties save the Communist Party were now illegal and that all civic and church organizations were abolished. Private property was now to be “the property of the state by order of the People’s Council of Commissars.” There were those who resisted; they and all of Mosinee’s businessmen were taken to concentration camps that had been enclosed in barbed wire, set up to house “enemies of the people” until their fates were decided. Church services were interrupted by armed men and clergymen were taken away and herded into the camps with the capitalists. Rationing of foodstuffs was imposed on the town, the townspeople were issued permits for food

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and gasoline while black bread and potato soup were now all that could be ordered in local restaurants. What was once the Mosinee Times was now renamed the Communist Red Star, page 1 featuring a photograph of Russian dictator Joseph Stalin along with instructions about how life would proceed under the new regime. The new rulers swiftly set about getting control of the townspeople’s minds as well as their bodies, removing all “undesirable” books from the public library and commandeering the movie theater for the showing of communist propaganda films. Young, malleable minds were a special target and as part of a re-education program, students at the high school were ordered into the gym where their instruction began in communist doctrine. A poignant photograph survives from that day showing a child gazing wistfully into a store window where a sign had been posted reading “Candy for Communist Youth Members Only.” Finally, more than a thousand citizens were forced to parade down Main Street, carrying banners reading “Competition is Waste,” “Religion is the Opiate of the People” and “Cast Off the Chains of Capitalism.” Now in truth, no one was killed that day and no one was forced to do anything they did not freely choose to do; the whole “invasion” from start to finish was a two-day charade, an elaborate enactment organized by the Wisconsin Department of the American Legion as an “object lesson in Americanism” to show Americans what they believed it would be like if Communists ever were to take over the United States. As The American Legion Magazine put it, the “whole purpose was to demonstrate to the people of America the treachery, betrayal and ultimate slavery which is masked by the term “communism.”1 In that year of 1950 Americans had some cause to be alarmed about the rapid expansion of communism in the world: just the year before the Soviet Union had successfully tested an atomic bomb and two months later Communists took over China, driving our wartime ally, Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek (Jiang Jieshi), from the mainland to the island of Taiwan. The troubles were not just in foreign lands: not long before the “Communist takeover” of Mosinee, newspaper headlines had announced the conviction of physicist Klaus Fuchs who had passed nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union and on February 9, 1950, Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin had given a speech at Wheeling, West Virginia, in which he had claimed to hold in his hand a list of traitors working in the bowels of the US Government itself, in the State Department. Given that a very large portion of the globe had fallen to communism and that Soviet spies— some of them highly placed in the US Government and others privy to extremely sensitive secrets such as those concerned with the construction of nuclear weapons—had been uncovered, it is not surprising that there

INTRODUCTION

were those who were worried about McCarthy’s allegations, all the more alarming because he mentioned specific numbers, implying that he was in possession of very detailed information (though those numbers had a protean quality, changing several times over the course of a few months as fellow politicians pressed McCarthy to disclose what he knew). Then, when in June of that same year the Communist North Koreans launched a ferocious attack on South Korea and the United States became involved in a war against what was conceived of as “world communism,” the stage was set for a national diminution of toleration of dissenting views—war nearly always has that effect. What those worried Americans—people like the good citizens of Mosinee—did not realize was that the internal menace—the spy menace— in America had been largely resolved: the spies had been identified and neutralized and the Soviet network had collapsed. Yet, despite this, McCarthy’s career as a “red hunter” (he never uncovered any actual Communists in government or anywhere else) was just getting going and the full effects of the great red scare of the 1950s had yet to be felt. While some Americans were worried about what would happen in America if we ever fell under Communist rule, there were others who worried about what was happening already as a result of those fears. A mere 15 months after McCarthy’s Wheeling speech, clearly deeming it a matter of great and growing importance, the New York Times published two lengthy articles, both on the same day, documenting the frail state of “freedom of thought and speech on college campuses” in the age of what had already become known as “McCarthyism.” Appearing beneath a headline that read “College Freedoms Being Stifled by Students’ Fear of Red Label” ran an article that gave the results of a study of 72 “major colleges in the United States” conducted by the Times. The study found that students were worried, “wary” of “speaking out on controversial issues, discussing unpopular concepts and participating in student political activity” because they were afraid of being labeled “Pink” or even Communist. They worried about social disapproval generally and about being criticized by their friends, university regents and state legislatures and, more concretely, they feared that expressing their opinions might set them up for rejection by graduate schools and might bring the unwanted “spotlight of investigation” by government and private industry, harming their prospects for postgraduate employment or service with the armed forces. So, even though there were few instances of “reprisal or overt action” against free expression, there was “considerable evidence” that students were censoring themselves, taking care to avoid any association with the words “liberal,” “peace” or “freedom,” avoiding classmates who might be considered liberal, while kidding each other in a “serious-comic way”

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INTRODUCTION

about some investigating committee or other “getting you” if you said or did the wrong thing. Students, worried about their names appearing on a list that might somehow in some way be connected with accusations of communism, were fearful of signing petitions and Dean Millicent C. McIntosh of Barnard College found that some students feared that “anything identified with peace, freedom of speech or negotiation to resolve differences” was “suspected of communist influence.” McIntosh went on to say that the “obscurantism that is McCarthyism” had made it so that “[g]irls are becoming afraid to advocate the humanitarian point of view because it has been associated with communism.”2 This atmosphere of extreme caution, the Times study noted, had left many campuses “barren of the free give-and-take of ideas” and had depleted the ranks of campus liberals, bringing an “apathy about current problems that borders almost on their deliberate exclusion.”3 Three years later the situation had worsened. In April 1954, at the height of the red scare, Redbook magazine—which during the 1950s was geared to “young adults” between 18 and 34 and often published general interest articles on controversial issues such as racial prejudice and the dangers of nuclear weapons—ran an article entitled “Fear on the Campus.” After conducting a survey in many US colleges and universities and interviewing students, author André Fontaine had found that “[o]ur colleges are being invaded by an atmosphere of fear and suppression created by irresponsible investigators, hysterical community leaders and other selfappointed ‘thought police’ who have succeeded in intimidating both our students and faculties.” 4 Like the New York Times study three years before, Fontaine found that college students were afraid to ask questions about controversial issues; were afraid to support unpopular causes even when they believed they were in the right; and were reluctant to criticize the political and economic system of the United States. What had worsened was that, while the earlier study had not found any evidence of “reprisal or overt action,” Fontaine discovered that college students were being actively intimidated; for example, at the University of Michigan an investigator belonging to the state police took down names of those attending “liberal” or “leftist” meetings and the license numbers of any cars parked in the vicinity while at Contra Costa Junior College in California students’ discussions were taped as a record of their reactions to and opinions of Marx’s Communist Manifesto. And students were well aware now that there could be a very real price to be paid for political nonconformity: they knew of other students who had been denied jobs and commissions in the armed forces for affiliation with the wrong organization or attendance at the wrong meeting.5

INTRODUCTION

THE DEBATE ON THE RED SCARE Historians have usually—and very reasonably—pointed to the converging events of the period as being most contributory to the development of the post-Second World War red scare: a fraying alliance with an emerging Soviet super-power driven by an ideology inimical to the United States and dedicated to eradicating our way of life (as we were dedicated to eradicating theirs), the acquisition by that super-power of atomic weapons, the victory of the Communists in the Chinese civil war, the discovery of Communists operating as spies in the US Government and in important government programs, the taint attached to liberals who had associated themselves with the Popular Front of the 1930s, the Communist associations of Henry Wallace’s presidential campaign of 1948, all these generated a rising tension that was capped by the outbreak of war in Korea. And all these were powerful circumstances that combined to form a demoralizing challenge to New Deal/Fair Deal Democrats. The red scare of the late 1940s and early 1950s had its grassroots elements, but it was promulgated by elite conservatives—businessmen, top elected officials and prominent media personalities—both Republican and Democratic. Its underlying mechanics are not mysterious. In a democracy, to promote a cause or interest, voters must be induced to select representatives who will either be active in promoting that cause or (almost as good) representatives who are too intimidated to resist that cause. As early as 1955 journalist Chadwick Hall had documented the determined and well-financed efforts of business groups to roll back the social welfare programs of the New Deal, beginning with the initial 1934 attempt of DuPont family members through their seminal funding of the anti-New Deal American Liberty League. Hall also pointed to similar early efforts by groups such as the National Association of Manufacturers, the National Security League and the Liberty League working through organizations like the Constitutional and Free Enterprise Foundation, the National Association for the Preservation of Free Enterprise, the Committee for Constitutional Government and the Foundation for Economic Education, efforts that were revived and intensified in the postwar “educational crusade” launched by the business community in 1946 to “sell” free enterprise to the US public as “the American way of life.”6 A central theme of the barrage of messages (financed by substantial resources) dedicated to scuttling President Roosevelt’s New Deal and later President Truman’s Fair Deal was that the programs associated with them—programs such as the Housing Act of 1949, and the new civil rights legislation, federal housing programs, unemployment insurance benefits, tax cuts for the poor, federal funding for education and federal health care and health insurance

5

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INTRODUCTION

program proposed under the Fair Deal—were all linked to socialism and through socialism to communism and through communism to the loss of freedom for Americans. Counter to the New Deal/Fair Deal vision of America was the conservative worldview, a radical individualistic tradition that had been most cogently expressed by sociologist William Graham Sumner back in the 1880s and that had not changed since. Sumner wrote, The institutions of civil liberty leave each man to run his career in life in his own way, only guaranteeing to him that whatever he does in the way of industry, economy, prudence, sound judgment, etc., shall redound to his own welfare and shall not be diverted to some one else’s benefit.7

Sumner continued, summing up the view of the modern conservative when he argued that “the State cannot get a cent for any man without taking it from some other man, and this latter must be a man who has produced and saved it.”8 So the money and the unremitting determination to roll back welfare state policies came from that segment of American society that had the biggest stake in the matter: business. And, in 1971, historian Robert Griffith completed the picture of the resurgence of the right with an analysis of the governmental side of the equation, showing how the passage of two of the most important and mischievous Senate bills of the period, the McCarran Act of 19509 and the Communist Control Act of 195410 were pushed through by a combination of astute Congressional power-wielding and maneuvering on the part of the radical right accompanied by gross pusillanimity on the part of those who called themselves liberals. The McCarran Act—characterized by Republican William Langer as “one of the most vicious, most dangerous pieces of legislation against the people that has ever been passed by any Senate” 11 and shamefacedly voted for by liberal Senator Hubert Humphrey—passed over President Truman’s veto by 57–10 while the Communist Control Act, sponsored by Hubert Humphrey and in his words a “great blow” for freedom and against the “evil conspiracy” of communism—passed unopposed by a vote of 79–0. As Griffith put it, the Senate was “vulnerable to [Senator Joseph] McCarthy’s brand of political adventure” because he “filled a vacuum created by a combination of irresponsibility, irresolution and ineptitude on the part of Republicans and Democrats alike.”12 There is little that requires further explanation here: a motivated segment of the population possessing ample means goes to work to further its material interests by influencing the minds of voters. It is very substantially aided by those politicians who are sympathetic to and active

INTRODUCTION

in its cause, and moderately aided by those politicians who—fearful that the voters’ minds have indeed been influenced—believe that their jobs are in jeopardy if they resist. Hubert Humphrey praised Estes Kefauver for, unlike himself, voting against the McCarran Act but the shame Humphrey professed in voting for a law that restricted civil liberties did not, as we have already noted, prevent him from coming out as a strong and outspoken supporter of the Communist Control Act. The term “McCarthyism” was coined by political cartoonist Herblock (Herbert Lawrence Block) in a March 29, 1950 Washington Post cartoon, but it was in a flurry of scholarly activity that took place in the mid-1950s in response to McCarthy’s onslaught that we find intellectuals beginning to respond to an identifiable something whose name has still not been agreed upon—McCarthyism? Rightwing anti-communism? The radical right? Alarmed by attacks on freedom of speech—and by seemingly widespread public support for such attacks—both within and without academia, left-leaning American intellectuals believed that something terribly un-American was happening in the United States. Articles began to appear which sought to explain this devastatingly successful assault from the right. Some, like Will Herberg, saw McCarthyism as a form of demagoguery restricted to the person of Senator McCarthy himself.13 Others, like Marya Mannes, sought to explain McCarthyism as a form of proto-totalitarianism. Writing on the Army-McCarthy hearings, Mannes found McCarthy’s methods—the relentless, interminable breaking down of the witness; the repeated statements of unverified fact; the assumption of guilt without proof; the deliberate evasion of basic issues . . . the open admission and condonement of a spy-and-informer system within our government [and the] radical attempt to wreck the Executive Branch of the United States Government

—all these seemed dreadfully reminiscent of Nazi and Soviet patterns of assault on the rule of law and reason.14 Then, in 1955, a group of eminent intellectuals, including such luminaries of the time as Richard Hofstadter, Talcott Parsons, Seymour Lipset and Daniel Bell, contributed essays to a volume edited by Bell entitled The Radical Right.15 The outstanding feature of this group of writings is that they treated McCarthyism as a social phenomenon subject to sociological explanation. The contributors put forward a treatment of McCarthyism as a manifestation of status anxieties, of populist anti-intellectualism and anti-elitism, and of moralistic agrarian opposition to the consequences of rational urban industrialization. According to this view, the new repression was supported by groups whose

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INTRODUCTION

position in American society was undergoing change, whether for better or for worse. These groups included the newly rich, “soured patricians,” the rising middle-class elements of various ethnic groups (especially the Irish and the Germans) and a few intellectuals. Bell et al. also suggested that the roots of McCarthyism lay in agrarian radical movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries claiming that the proponents of McCarthyism shared similar concerns with their purported agrarian radical forebears. The link, it was claimed, lay in the fact that, like the Populists, McCarthy’s supporters were suspicious of leadership and ill at ease with America’s growing industrialization and urbanization. Both groups shared a willingness to bypass established institutions in favor of making government officials at all levels directly responsive to the public will. Senator McCarthy was set apart only by his unusual ability to play on these fears and resentments and channel them into political expression. For some years these explanations of McCarthyism constituted the dominant interpretation of what had happened during the early to mid1950s. However, as the shock of the time of inquisitorial persecution passed from present ordeal into memory, scholars began to re-examine and reassess the meaning of what had happened. Starting with Nelson Polsby in 1960, a series of political scientists took a close look at McCarthy’s support in the polls; based on their findings, they concluded that the sociological interpretations had been mistaken, that McCarthyism represented a normal part of American politics, that McCarthy’s strength could not, in fact, be differentiated from conservative Republican strength.16 Polsby’s work was followed by more extensive analysis by Earl Latham and Michael Paul Rogin. Latham suggested that the McCarthyite reaction was a Republican response to the breaking of a long-established and natural rhythm of alternation in American politics. He based his analysis on the supposition that a “conservative consensus” that legitimated the domination of the economy by private business enterprise had dictated American social values ever since the end of the Civil War. Within the context of this consensus, it had become the Democratic Party’s “historic function” to take on the role of correcting the excess centralization of wealth by periodically getting elected and redistributing some of the fruits of the economy to the have-nots. If, like Grover Cleveland, an occasional Democrat sometimes had crossed over and championed the status quo, this was an anomaly, a “misconceiving” of the historic function. The key event in making McCarthy possible, according to Latham, was Roosevelt’s decision to run for a third term in 1940. Latham even goes so far as to suggest that if Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR) had thought

INTRODUCTION

things over more carefully, he might have abstained from running again, for, by keeping the presidency in Democratic hands for so long, Roosevelt closed “the normal outlets of political expression to the conservatives.” The inconclusive election of 1948 exacerbated this state of affairs by failing to allow “a decisive change in office for which the impulse had been building for a decade.”17 Latham believes that [m]ost people wanted some kind of change but they were not clear what it should be, and the election failed to produce it. . . . The failure of the electorate to effect a change of government in 1948 with such opportunity as the political system might permit for the release of antiwelfarist ambitions, under conditions of some political responsibility for the outcome (which inevitably would have tempered and moderated policy), produced a political compression that exploded in McCarthyism.18

In short, McCarthyism was the voters’ fault because they failed to vote Republican in 1948. Latham points out that “communism was not a strong issue even though the Communist Party was actually riding pretty high in 1948.”19 The Communist Party had reached its membership peak some 10 years earlier, but in the Wallace candidacy it found its greatest opportunity to take an important role in mainstream American politics. The critical moment came that year when Truman sought to put the Republicans on the spot by calling Congress into special session with the challenge that the Republicans—the majority party—enact their own party platform. Though the Republican Congress did little to enact its platform, it did discover a new cause and a new avenue to the presidency: communism in government. As evidence that this was all Republican politicians really wanted, Latham reminds us that what made the issue disappear was the election of a Republican president in 1952. He sums up: McCarthyism in this view of the party movements of almost a century was the agent of a fundamentalist conservatism that was prepared to yield public policy to the reformers for the relatively short periods required to satisfy grievances but which expected to recover predominance when these intervals were over. McCarthy had no social program of his own and in this respect was the perfect instrument for the realization of the social aims of those who were to benefit from his attacks, for the restoration which a third term and a war had denied. The communist issue was the cutting edge for the attack. The communist problem lent

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INTRODUCTION

itself to quiet and nonsensational solutions before the late forties and after 1954. When McCarthy and the communist issue had served their purposes, they both disappeared.20

The final and most devastating attack on the sociological explanations of McCarthyism came from Michael Paul Rogin in his 1967 book The Intellectuals and McCarthy: The Radical Specter.21 The intellectuals of Rogin’s book were Bell, Hofstadter et al., a group Rogin dubbed “the pluralists.” Rogin went further than either Polsby or Latham in his assault on the sociological view; not only did he dispute the factual basis for claiming that dispossessed groups or the heirs of agrarian radicalism were the backbone of McCarthyism, but he also brought into question the theoretical framework that had been the basis for such claims. Rogin viewed pluralism as a full-fledged theory of history based on social responses to industrialization, noting that “[i]ndustrialization destroys traditional stability, but the success of industrialization enables group politics to dominate a society.”22 Pluralists saw group politics as safer and more reasonable than moralistic, irrational mass politics because although group politics did not eliminate political moralism, it did direct it to “its proper concern—social cohesion in a constitutional, industrial society.”23 However, Rogin perceived distinctly anti-democratic tendencies in the pluralist fondness for group politics; the pluralists distrusted mass movements, a distrust that translated into a distrust of the people who comprised those movements. The irrational moralism that characterized these movements could be rendered safe through the mediation of social institutions, groups and their leaders; however, Rogin suggested, what pluralists called group politics is really “not the politics of group conflict but the politics of leadership conflict.”24 By 1990 the political explanation and the concomitant rejection of sociological explanations of McCarthyism had become such accepted wisdom among scholars of the period that in his bibliographical essay in Nightmare in Red, Richard M. Fried could give the controversy only a cursory glance, concluding By the 1960s, most interpreters of McCarthyism had come to reject this sociological analysis. . . . They ascribed McCarthy’s influence to the conventional workings of partisan politics and to the frustrations of Republican Party conservatives. This “political” interpretation has shaped most subsequent writings, but scholars disagree sharply about which “conventional” politicians were to blame for the onset of McCarthyism.25

INTRODUCTION

Now it has been well over half a century since the McCarthy era, yet, despite the passage of time, a hot historical debate over the meaning of the period continues. Relying on the now declassified Venona decryptions of Soviet diplomatic telegrams and material from Soviet archives, one group of scholars, dubbed “traditionalists,” emphasizes that while there were regrettable “excesses” connected with the red scare, the United States did indeed face the very real and very dangerous menace posed by Americans like Alger Hiss, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and others who spied on behalf of the Soviet Union, betraying military secrets to our greatest enemy; given the very great danger, the anti-communism associated with the red scare was thoroughly justified even if some of its proponents went a bit overboard. On the other hand, another school, called “revisionists,” argue that the aspect of McCarthyism that mattered most was not the unearthing of spies—almost all of whom had already been pushed from positions from which they could do damage by the time Senator McCarthy came along, but rather the damage red-baiters (including some vociferously anticommunist liberals) did to a political agenda whose goal was the social benefit of all Americans. They also argue that though the support of Stalinism among American Communists is to be deplored, that should not obliterate our awareness of positive contributions that those Communists made as people who were in the forefront of such valuable crusades as the civil rights movement or the push for strong unions. Everything discussed so far, from the events in Mosinee to the expansion of what appeared to be “world communism” to the worried students, reveals three main areas of interest to those who would understand the era: first, an actual “red menace” posed by a foreign country, the Soviet Union (the fear of whose nuclear weaponry had a fair number of Americans who could afford it building fallout shelters in their houses or yards to protect them in the event of nuclear attack); then a delusory “red menace” posed by American subversives who were imagined to have the resources and ability to undermine America from within, whether by brainwashing the country’s schoolchildren or by poisoning its water supply (in the form of fluoridation of water, which some imagined not to be aimed at dental cavities, but rather at poisoning and weakening American citizens); and finally, an ancillary menace, the menace to free thought and the free expression of thought posed by panicked “super patriots” who were willing to sacrifice some of the freedoms (of others) in the interest of what they deemed to be national security. On one level what we see here is a tension between liberty and security. The essence of the Anglo-American tradition of freedom is that citizens have individual rights that protect them, not only from each other,

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but also from their government. But those same laws that protect the ability of all citizens to think and speak freely also protect those citizens accused of being, or suspected of being, traitors. In a time of national danger from external enemies, can we afford to give the protection of the law to those we believe to be traitors even if we cannot necessarily prove their treason? Can we afford to give them the same rights we give everyone else, all the loyal citizens? One side of the argument reasons that we cannot and should not: If we protect the rights of traitors and allow them to operate freely, then we risk our society’s destruction and then none of us will have any rights or freedom at all. The other side reasons that if we abridge the rights of any members of our society, then we damage everyone’s freedom: after all, the fundamental protection of our freedoms as well as that which defines our freedoms is the law, and it is through the established processes of the law that we determine who is guilty of crime. Once we put aside those processes, then we are exposed to arbitrary judgments that can easily punish the innocent since they do not have the protection of law. Under those conditions, no one’s rights are secure and therefore we have sacrificed liberty in the name of security. On a broader scale, we find a rivalry between two large and powerful nations, each claiming a mission to save humanity. In 1952 the liberal theologian, Reinhold Niebuhr, noted the particular dynamic that set the United States and the Soviet Union in irreconcilable mutual opposition: substantial numbers of citizens and virtually all the leaders in both nations were driven by a messianic conviction that their particular ideology was best, not only for their own people, but for all people; therefore their nation, be it the United States or the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), had a pre-ordained mission to bring the blessings of capitalism or communism, as the case might be, to all humanity. The success of this mission necessitated, of course, the extirpation of opposing ideologies. On the Russian side, Niebuhr saw a “fanatic certainty that it knows the end toward which history must move and . . . [a] consequent readiness to sacrifice every value of life for the achievement of this end.”26 On the American side, Niebuhr notes the tendency to believe that the United States had a special mission, from the Puritan William Stoughton who believed that “God had sifted a whole nation that he might send choice grain in the wildernesss” to George Washington’s declaration that “the preservation of the sacred fire of liberty and the destiny of the republican model of government are justly considered, perhaps as deeply, as finally staked on the experiment intrusted to the hands of the American people”27 to Senator Albert J. Beveridge of Indiana in 1900 when, on behalf of the United States, he claimed the Philippines as “ours forever” because

INTRODUCTION

God has not been preparing the English-speaking and Teutonic peoples for a thousand years for nothing but vain and idle selfcontemplation and self-admiration. . . . He has marked the American people as his chosen nation to finally lead in the regeneration of the world.28

And, though he does not mention it, Niebuhr might have included soonto-be Senator Kenneth Wherry’s 1940 effusion, “With God’s help, we will lift Shanghai up and up, ever up, until it is just like Kansas City!” Less religious Western European nations, in closer proximity to the Soviet Union, found ways to live with their Communists and to allow their Communists to live with them; these peoples tended toward pragmatism rather than dogmatism in their relations with the communist world. However, the common belief of Americans in America’s special mission combined with the widespread belief—including among statesmen as important as Presidents Truman and Eisenhower—that the struggle between the United States and the USSR quite literally represented a battle between God and Satan, these left little room for thoughts of accommodation and compromise, either with the devil without (the Soviet Union) or the devils within (American Communists, fellow travelers and other assorted “pinks”). Given this context of opposing absolutes, the relationship between the terms “anti-communism” and “McCarthyism” deserves some reconsideration. Many historians and political thinkers have drawn distinctions between them, arguing that one was legitimate (anti-communism) because it was based on a reasoned and measured response to an actual danger to human freedom while the other (McCarthyism) was illegitimate because it merely represented the attempts of opportunistic and conscienceless politicians to gain political advantage by fanning the fears of ordinary Americans into a bonfire of hysteria and making baseless or grossly exaggerated attacks on their opponents on the basis of that hysteria. While there is some basis of truth to this analysis, at a deeper level it misses the point: when we think of someone who is reacting “hysterically,” we think of a terrified person who is so overcome by their terror—by the fear generated by their concept of a situation—that they are incapable of seeing what is actually going on. This incapacity, in turn, prevents them from responding in the rational way that would provide the most beneficial results. Panic overcomes the person’s mind, obliterating all hope of accurately assessing: (1) whether there is actual danger in the situation, (2) what degree of danger there might be and (3) what might be the best possible response to that danger.

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So it was with anti-communism in all its varieties, including, but not limited to, McCarthyism. A sort of cultural hysteria took hold in the United States that filled the minds of most Americans—conservative and liberal alike—with the undifferentiated category of “communism.” For those who believed in the importance of individual freedoms—freedom to speak one’s mind without fear of punishment, freedom of a believer to worship according to one’s belief, freedom to choose one’s leaders through a broadly held and freely exercised franchise, etc.—a nuclear armed country driven by Leninist ideology—which only promised those freedoms after everyone on the planet would have accepted the premises of communism— unquestionably represented some kind of threat. However, almost all Americans who opposed communism unthinkingly accepted a key and false premise promulgated by the Communists themselves, i.e., that all Communists in all places and all times are the same in their beliefs, their priorities and their agendas. This archetypal communism, often referred to as “monolithic” communism, was conceived as a single entity, an evil, undifferentiated danger. This construction of communism blinded Americans, conservative and liberal alike, to important signs of fissures within the communist world. Most of all, Americans and American policymakers were blinded to the innate conflict between communism with its emphasis on the oneness of humanity and nationalism with its emphasis on loyalty to one’s own country. It would turn out that nationalism was a powerful force in the communist world, more powerful than the ideological ties that bound communist countries together; however, almost all American policymakers and politicians, along with the people they represented, failed to understand that these divisions existed and therefore they were unable to seize any opportunities that existed to exploit them. Michael Paul Rogin wrote, “Politics alone does not explain McCarthyism; but the relevant sociopsychology is that which underpins normal American politics, not that of radicals and outsiders.”29 This study is based substantially on a basis of the acceptance of the truth of that statement and constitutes an exploration of both the relevant politics and the relevant sociopsychology of McCarthyism in the context of normal American politics. A major, perhaps the major, distinction between moderate/liberal anti-communism and rightwing anti-communism/ McCarthyism was that McCarthyism, far from being a simple fear of communism, was tied to a group of associated agendas, the two most prominent being a drive to halt and reverse the momentum of the New Deal paired with an effort to suppress unions. The means to these goals was a campaign of suppression that, while most obviously aimed at Communists, was accompanied by a rhetoric that accused anybody on the political left

INTRODUCTION

of being, if not an actual Communist, then a tool, witting or unwitting, of Communists. Since no law made actually being a Communist a crime, during the postwar red scare extra-legal means were found to punish people who could not be found guilty of any crime aside from being suspected of being Communists. The usual process was, first, for some organ of the state (often a federal or state investigating committee) to identify the person as a Communist or as someone who was likely to be a Communist because they had invoked their Constitutional right not to testify against themselves when asked if they were a Communist (making them a so-called “Fifth Amendment Communist”); then, the person was turned over to the private sector, as it were, where, almost always, their employer would fire them and potential employers would refuse to hire them, thus depriving the person of their livelihood. Some of these people—perhaps even most of them—actually were Communists, but some were people who had quit the Party but did not wish to “name names,” that is, testify against others they knew to be or to have been Communists; some of them were people who simply believed that it was not any government’s business to inquire into their political beliefs and who were willing to pay the price for standing by their principles. Those who spied for the Soviet Union or abetted that activity did pose an actual danger to the United States; the rest of those punished, Communist or not, did not. However, as the New York Times demonstrated in its article about students and McCarthyism, the repressive effect of the red scare on American society went far beyond those accused of wrongdoing or wrong thinking or wrong believing. Laws give reasonably clear guidelines as to what is punishable and what is not; however, when enough citizens decide that the laws are not sufficient, decide that some form of vigilante justice is necessary, not based on the rules of evidence, but on individual extralegal subjective opinions of what constitutes guilt and what does not, then no one can feel safe. And those who might otherwise ask useful questions are likely to remain silent. As we shall see, this silencing of opinion can come at a very high price. A red scare in the United States is subtly different from anticommunism in much the same way that a flare up of a disease is different from the underlying and ongoing condition. The tendency of American employers to label the attempts of workers to unionize or any effort to use government as a tool to enhance living conditions through programs such as Social Security or Medicare as “anarchism” or “socialism” or “bolshevism” or “communism” has been ongoing, at least until recently. However, certain social conditions—most of all when intensified periods of strikes coincide with the country’s engagement in a war—have brought

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about the flare ups called “red scares,” periods when businesses, government agencies at both the state and federal levels and the courts have been mobilized to repress political radicalism; however, in each instance prominent working-class organizations of the period have been repressed as well: the Knights of Labor disappeared after the Haymarket Affair, the Wobblies (the name commonly given to members of the Industrial Workers of the World) and the Socialist Party were enfeebled by the First Red Scare and labor generally, and the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) particularly, were weakened by the passage of the Taft-Hartley bill during the Second Red Scare. This book is not a history of the institutions of, or even the events of the red scare of the 1950s, but rather an attempt to convey the “scare” part of the red scare. It should be emphasized again that what has given our red scares their power is the “scare” element; in the United States public opinion has always been the critical factor inasmuch as the public acting as voters has the power to make and unmake politicians, institute new policies through those politicians and change the basic rules of the game altogether by amending the Constitution, difficult though that may be. This is why Republican Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Arthur Vandenberg told President Truman that he needed to “scare the hell out of the American people” if he wanted to institute the policies that made up the Truman Doctrine; without that public support, nothing could happen. However, as we’ve already pointed out, the red scare was not one but two things, a scare about the danger of Communist subversion and a different scare, the fear of being suspected of being “Red” or “Pink” or just liberal; either way, whatever the fear, whether of Communists or of the American Legion, this was a collection of events that was driven by a state of mind: it is that story that the following pages aspire to tell.

NOTES 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

American Legion Magazine, June, 1950, 32. New York Times, May 11, 1951, 1, 28, 29. New York Times, May 11, 1951, 1, 28, 29. André Fontaine, “Fear on the Campus,” Redbook Magazine, April, 1954, 34–38. Fontaine, “Fear on the Campus,” 34. Chadwick Hall, “America’s Conservative Revolution,” Antioch Review, Summer, 1955, 207. William Graham Sumner, The Forgotten Man and Other Essays, ed. Albert Galloway Keller (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1918), 470. Sumner, The Forgotten Man and Other Essays, 470.

INTRODUCTION

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10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29

The Internal Security Act of 1950, more usually known as the McCarran Act, established the Subversive Activities Control Board to investigate persons suspected of engaging in subversive activities or otherwise promoting the establishment of a “totalitarian dictatorship,” and required the registration of communist organizations with the United States Attorney General. Members of these groups could not become citizens, and in some cases, were prevented from entering or leaving the country while members who were US citizens could be denaturalized in five years. See Chapter 5 for a discussion of this act. Quoted in Robert Griffith, The Politics of Fear: Joseph R. McCarthy and the Senate (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987), 121. Griffith, Politics of Fear, 151. Will Herberg, “Government by Rabble-Rousing,” New Leader, January 18, 1954, 13–16. Marya Mannes, “Did or Did Not . . . ,” The Reporter, June 8, 1954, 40–41. Daniel Bell, ed., The Radical Right (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1963). Nelson Polsby, “Towards an Explanation of McCarthyism,” Political Studies, 8 (1960), 250–271). Earl Latham, The Communist Controversy in Washington: From the New Deal to McCarthy (New York: Atheneum, 1969), 394. Latham, The Communist Controversy in Washington, 398. Latham, The Communist Controversy in Washington, 396. Latham, The Communist Controversy in Washington, 423. Michael Paul Rogin, The Intellectuals and McCarthy: The Radical Specter (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1967). Rogin, The Intellectuals and McCarthy, 10. Rogin, The Intellectuals and McCarthy, 10. Rogin, The Intellectuals and McCarthy, 25. Richard M. Fried, Nightmare in Red: The McCarthy Era in Perspective (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 224. Reinhold Niebuhr, The Irony of American History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press); Reprint edition (May 1, 2008), 67. Niebuhr, The Irony of American History, 70. Niebuhr, The Irony of American History, 71. Rogin, The Intellectuals and McCarthy, 217.

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CHAPTER 1

The Origins of Red Scare Anti-Communism

I

t was 10:30 pm in the city of Chicago on May 4, 1886, in Haymarket Square and what had been, according to eyewitnesses, a “peaceful gathering of upwards of 1,000 people listening to speeches and singing songs” assembled to protest police violence was drawing to a close, the crowd scattering, when 176 policemen arrived, armed with rifles, ordering the dispersing crowd to disperse. Scuffles broke out and someone whose identity is still unknown threw a bomb, a “hissing fiend, hurled by some practiced hand to perform its hellish mission” which “exploded with a detonation which seemed to shake the city from center to circumference.”1 Panicked, the police opened fire in all directions, including into their own ranks. Some in the crowd returned fire, and when it was all over, between the bomb and the shooting, seven policemen and four demonstrators were dead and more than 60 policemen and 50 demonstrators were injured. The newspapers whipped up public opinion with incendiary language: the New York Times headlined “Anarchy’s Red Hand”2 while the Chicago Tribune railed against “[n]ihilistic agitators” and the St. Louis Globe-Democrat thoughtfully opined that “There are no good anarchists except dead anarchists.”3 Authorities hurriedly rounded up 31 suspects and eventually, eight men, “all with foreign sounding names” as one newspaper pointed out, were indicted on charges of conspiracy and murder. No evidence tied the accused to the explosion of the bomb and, indeed, several of the suspects had not even attended the rally. Nonetheless, all were convicted and sentenced to death. Four were quickly hanged while a fifth committed suicide in his cell. Then, the governor of Illinois, Richard Oglesby, who had privately expressed doubts “that any of the men were guilty of the crime,” commuted the remaining men’s death sentences to life in prison. A short time later Oglesby’s successor, John Peter Altgeld, pardoned the

THE ORIGINS OF RED SCARE ANTI-COMMUNISM

three surviving men, declaring, “The deed to sentencing the Haymarket men was wrong, a miscarriage of justice.” The background of the Haymarket bombing was a growing grassroots movement to reduce the laborers’ workday from 12 or 14 hours (six days a week) down to 8. Chicago had become the focal point of this struggle with local anarchists taking the lead in organizing protests and strikes. On May 3, Chicago police attacked and killed picketing workers at the McCormick Reaper Plant—hence the Haymarket protest. The resultant bombing and the supposed threat to law and order were widely blamed on the labor movement, with the focus, quite unfairly, on the largest union in the United States, the Knights of Labor; as a result, that organization fell into a decline from which it never recovered. More broadly, the response nation-wide to this event of those not sympathetic to the labor movement was a precursor to red scares that would follow it; fearing that the Haymarket bomb was the signal for a general uprising, vigilante groups launched attacks on radicals and labor groups while police intensified raids.

AMERICAN CAPITAL, AMERICAN LABOR: THE ROOTS OF “UN-AMERICANISM” So, though the immediate causes of the red scare of the 1950s can be found in the events surrounding it—the Soviet domination of eastern Europe, the acquisition of nuclear weapons by the Soviet Union, the discovery that American spies had played a role in that acquisition, the takeover of China by Communist forces and the outbreak of the Korean War—the phenomenon called a “red scare” was not something new to America; it was something that had its roots in the first phase of industrialization in the United States, some 80 years earlier, and in the conditions for workers that had arisen from industrialization. And to genuinely understand the red scare of the McCarthy period we need to understand that it arose from a broader and, in some ways, consistent context, i.e., a bitter struggle, from the 1870s to the 1950s and beyond, between owners of large industrial businesses and their workers over the status of labor in business: was labor just another commodity to be purchased as needed at the lowest possible cost? Or did workers have rights in a business as an integral part of that business? And, if so, what were those rights and how far did they extend? The most extreme view on the side of labor was that which held that private property altogether was an institution that was oppressive to human beings, so oppressive that it should be abolished altogether. These radicals—

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A Glossary of The Red Scare Conservative: One who believed that untrammeled private property was the basis of all freedom and that the operation of unregulated markets would provide the best results for all people. Liberal: One who believed that private property and markets were socially valuable but who also believed that, left completely uncontrolled, both those institutions could produce bad results for people. Therefore, liberals believed in a strong role for government to: (1) set limits on property and markets so that the basic needs of all members of society were provided for, and (2) provide a social safety net with programs such as old age pensions, unemployment insurance, workmen’s compensation and other programs to help middle and lower income Americans meet economic challenges. Marxism: The fundamental tenet of Marxism as expressed in The Communist Manifesto, as Marx and Engels wrote, “may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.” In speaking of private property, they did not mean personal possessions but rather what they called the “means of production,” i.e., those things like farms and factories that produce the necessities that keep society going. Socialists: Socialists were those American Marxists, including Eugene V. Debs and Norman Thomas, who are often called “Democratic Socialists” because they believed in arriving at the goal of socialism, i.e., a society based not on private property and individual acquisition but rather on the basis of responsiveness to the needs of all of society’s members, through the process of democratic elections. That is, they believed that it was necessary to educate a majority of citizens to understand the desirability of socialism; having done so, that majority would essentially elect socialism into being. Communists: “Communist” was originally a term used by Marx to describe socialists generally; however, after the 1917 Bolshevik takeover of Russia, communist came to be used to describe those Socialists who followed the teachings of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. Lenin argued (in contrast to the Democratic Socialists) that socialism could not be arrived at through the democratic process but only through violent revolution. Red: A Communist; often used to smear those who were not communists but rather Socialists or liberals. Pink or Pinko: Derogatory term used by conservatives to describe a range of nonCommunists from Liberals to Socialists. Parlor Pink: A dilettante radical; usually a wealthy person who espoused radical views from the comfort of his or her living room without actually doing anything about them.

THE ORIGINS OF RED SCARE ANTI-COMMUNISM

Fifth Amendment Communist: A person who, because they invoked their Constitutional right not to incriminate themselves before a committee investigating Communist activities and therefore remained silent, was presumed to be a communist. These people, though immune to punishment by the courts, were often punished by employers through dismissal from their jobs. (See Chapter 4.). Fellow Traveler: A person who, though not a member of the Communist Party, was in strong sympathy with its ideals and who was generally uncritically supportive of the Soviet Union; historian David Caute noted, the fellow-traveller’s [sic] commitment takes a different form from that of a communist because his disillusionment with Western society is less . . . total. The fellow-traveller retains a partial faith in the possibilities of progress under the parliamentary system; he appreciates that the prevailing liberties, however imperfect and however distorted, are nevertheless valuable.4 This term was often used to smear those who embraced liberal programs (such as racial equality) that were also backed by the Communist Party.

a group that included anarchists, Socialists, syndicalists and Communists— came with an assortment of different theories about how this end should be brought about, but most Americans did not bother themselves with the fine distinctions among them; rather, they were often lumped together in a poorly defined and poorly understood but threatening mass called “reds.” However, the conflict between the owners of businesses and their workers did not take shape simply as an abstract disagreement over the issue of private property or even as a more concrete disagreement over issues of wages and hours; from motives that were perhaps partially genuine but certainly also tactical employers framed it as a battle over national identity, that is, what it meant to be an American. One of the central institutions of the red scare of the 1950s was the House Committee on Un-American Activities, more often, though incorrectly, shortened to HUAC. It was a committee that was dedicated to one purpose: the exposure of “reds,” people considered to be, by virtue of their beliefs about economics, quintessentially un-American and dangerous to the United States as a free nation. In short, the underlying message was that to be pro-employer was American; to be pro-employee was un-American. The word “un-American” is a bit strange; strictly speaking, it should simply mean someone or something that is not American but it does

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not. From an early time in our national history there has been a tendency among some Americans—often, though not always, coming from families who have been in the country for at least a couple of generations—to label others—usually newcomers with different beliefs, manners and/or appearance—as “un-American.” What that fundamentally means is “outsiders.” Another term for this dislike of outsiders is nativism; nativism usually has emerged most intensely as an issue during periods of especially intense immigration into the United States. So, for example, many Protestants of English derivation felt overwhelmed by the Irish Catholics, fleeing from famine back home, who poured into the country in the mid1800s and saw these newcomers as un-American; anti-Irish cartoons for reputable magazines such as Harper’s Weekly featured cartoons stereotyping Irish immigrants as ape-like barbarians, lawless, lazy and drunk. In the years between the Civil War and the Great Depression of the 1930s eastern and southern Europeans came to the United States in large numbers, often invited and sought after by large businesses seeking a cheap source of labor. A few of the newcomers were political and social radicals and a very few of these were willing to resort to violence to achieve their ideals, so the archetypal image of the American who was deemed to be “un-American” became a bearded eastern or southern European fanatic, armed with a bomb and motivated by radical ideas.

BIG BUSINESSES IN SEARCH OF CHEAP LABOR This new stereotype emerged out of that period in the late 1800s when modern, large-scale industries such as steel, coal and oil, spurred by the rapid expansion of American railroads, began to dominate the US economy. As businesses like Carnegie Steel, Standard Oil and others grew into industrial giants, their need for workers grew as well and it is not surprising that in order to maximize profits, businesses employing many thousands of people should want to pay them as little as possible. Industrial enterprises in the United States produced the highest profits when there were too many workers for the jobs available for the simple reason that with a labor surplus, numerous workers would compete with each other for scarce jobs, compelling them to accept low wages. When the great economist Adam Smith described the workings of market economies in 1776, he conceived them to comprise individuals in competition with other individuals. It was recognized at a very early date that if economic actors combined to work together, the extra economic power they would accrue would distort the model, giving what were considered to be unfair advantages to those who combined over those

THE ORIGINS OF RED SCARE ANTI-COMMUNISM

who acted as individuals. This would be equally true for employers who combined with other employers (which could be in the form of a cartel or, later on, a corporation) or workers combining with other workers (in a labor union). To prevent such combinations the British Parliament passed the Combination Acts in the early 1800s; according to these laws, neither employers nor workers could legally band together. Also, in the early days of the American Republic, there was a vigorous political battle over the legitimacy of combined capital (corporations). However, by the end of the nineteenth century, the corporation had won an accepted role in the US economy and an accepted place in American law while its counterpart, the labor union, still struggled on both fronts. The problem for wage workers was that, in the face of a labor glut, with many workers competing for every available job, the only way they could reclaim some control over their wages and conditions of work would be to stop competing against each other as individuals for jobs and join together as an economic unit, that is, to form a labor union. An easilyreplaced individual worker demanding higher wages or safer working conditions from a large business or corporation had little clout, but an entire workforce capable of bringing production to a halt would have a significant voice, one that employers would be forced to heed. For businessmen, then, there were two major impediments to keeping wages low: one was the existence of labor unions that had some power to protect the wages and working conditions of workers, the other, was the fact that few native-born Americans were willing to work at very lowpaying, often dangerous, jobs for long hours. So when Andrew Carnegie and his partner, Henry Clay Frick, wanted to lower labor costs, they first went to work systematically to destroy the power of the union representing the skilled workers in Carnegie’s Homestead steel mills, the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers. Once that had been accomplished, wages fell drastically, with men who had once earned $4 for an eighthour day being compelled to work 12 hours a day, seven days a week for half the pay. By 1890 the average industrial worker was earning around $10 a week, barely more than the poverty line of $500 a year. And many workers made less than the average, forcing them to send their children to work along with both parents. One young immigrant girl, Rahel Golub, sadly asked her father, “Does everybody in America live this way? Go to work early, come home late, eat and go to sleep?”5 Jobs like those in the Carnegie mills no longer held any attraction for those used to better conditions and better pay, and so the second tactic of the employer seeking low-wage labor came into play, i.e., the importation of foreign workers coming from countries so abjectly impoverished that they were willing to work for very low pay in the United States.

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Again, the quickest way to augment profit margins was to lower workers’ wages, and the most effective way to accomplish this was to glut labor markets by importing foreign labor. Bringing in foreign workers drove wages down by increasing the supply of labor, but, in addition to that, immigrant workers offered employers special advantages. As we’ve already noted, most of the newcomers came from poverty-stricken areas and American wages, even though they had been lowered from what they were, were still significantly higher than those that the laborers had received in their countries of origin. Moreover, since many of the immigrants intended (especially in the years before World War I) to stay in the United States for a short time, work hard, save money and then return to their nation of origin, living temporarily in poverty did not seem like an unbearable hardship. Nativeborn workers understood that they were at a disadvantage: as one Wisconsin blacksmith commented bitterly in 1887, “immigrants work for almost nothing, and seem to be able to live on wind—something which I cannot do.”6 The result in the steel and other industries was that by 1890 the workforce, once largely composed of native-born Americans and northern Europeans, had become dominated by eastern and southern European immigrants. Italians, Poles, Jews, Hungarians, Romanians, Greeks, Croats, Slovaks, Slovenes and Czechs, mostly poor and illiterate, came to the United States, settling in New York, Chicago and other cities, speaking different languages, eating different foods and practicing different religions—Catholicism, Orthodox Christianity, Judaism. All of them were regarded with profound suspicion and distaste by many Old Stock Protestants who saw themselves as the only “real” Americans.

BELIEFS, AMERICAN AND “UN” One important unintended consequence of importing cheap European labor was that while most immigrants were eager simply to work hard within the existing American economic system to gain a livelihood, a significant minority brought with them new and unfamiliar ideas about how the benefits of industrial society should be distributed: anarchism, syndicalism, socialism and communism all differed in their prescriptions for reform, but they were united in their rejection of the profit motive and capitalism. They also all conceived of capitalist society in terms of mutually antagonistic economic classes, broken down crudely into those who employ others and those who are employed. They believed that the chief injustice suffered by those who are employed is that they do not

THE ORIGINS OF RED SCARE ANTI-COMMUNISM

receive full recompense for their work—if they did, the employer could make no money from employing them since, no matter how many people he or she hired, those employees would take away from the company precisely what they put in. As far as the radicals were concerned, this alleged failure of the employer to give the worker the full value of what he or she produced was a form of robbery. The employers, being wealthy, were in control of all the important institutions of society—the press, the armed forces and the state—and a single working man or woman had no chance for economic justice against what radicals conceived to be powerful thieves. However, if the workers could combine as a group, since they were far more numerous than their employers and since their contribution to capitalist production—labor—was a critical component of that production, they might turn the tables and wrest some or all control from the employers who kept them in poverty. How this should happen and how far it should go were among the many matters at issue among the various radical groups, ranging from the very moderate demands of the American Federation of Labor (which simply wanted a slightly larger piece of the pie for its constituents) to the anarchists, Marxists and others who wanted to do away with the profit system altogether. Businessmen had a very different view—indeed, an opposite view— of these issues. Opposing the collectivism—group orientation—of the workers, business owners, managers, lawyers, doctors and others in the American upper-middle and upper classes tended to conceive of society in individualistic terms and to think of this individualism as the key ingredient in American freedom. To them, the glory of America was that it was a country in which a hard-working man could get ahead through his own efforts. In an age more blatantly sexist than ours, women, sadly, were not part of this equation. They believed that there were no artificial fetters to stop an industrious, intelligent man from going from poverty to riches. Such a man, while benefitting himself, also benefitted his countrymen by bringing them valuable products or services as well as by supplying them with employment. The essential condition for this system to prosper was liberty, defined in the 1880s by sociologist William Graham Sumner in terms that would be accepted by conservatives through the twentieth century: liberty was “the security given to each man that, if he employs his energies to sustain the struggle on behalf of himself and those he cares for, he shall dispose of the produce exclusively as he chooses.”7 If a man (and again it was a world that thought almost exclusively in terms of men when considering these matters) failed to thrive, it could only be because he was not hard-working enough or not smart enough—he had no one to blame except himself. This mode of thought was absorbed into an intellectual analysis popular among the middle and upper classes of the

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day, Social Darwinism, an attempt to extend the biological insights of Charles Darwin regarding the evolution of species into the social realm. According to this theory, the iron law of nature was “the survival of the fittest” in the “struggle for existence.” The word “fittest,” however, was defined in a way most convenient to the purposes of the wealthy; while in biological terms “fitness” is determined by the number of surviving offspring a species is able to produce and is conceived in terms of a group— the species—rather than individualistically, among most Social Darwinists fitness was defined in terms of domination or strength: the individual who could dominate his fellows was the fittest. Also, in an extremely raceconscious and racist age, the “race” that could dominate others was the fittest. So, for example, Social Darwinist Andrew Carnegie, himself very rich indeed, believed the rich man was “fitter” than his employees and therefore better suited and entitled to make key decisions about his life, about their lives, about society at large. The “Anglo-Saxon” race, many Americans firmly believed was the fittest, the unarguable sign being that it had been able to dominate Indians, Africans and Asians. Where older creeds had found their ultimate justification in the word of God, this new creed found it in nature, nature being the final court of appeal. So, Sumner argued, to go against this system based on raw domination was to go against nature itself: If we do not like it, and if we try to amend it, there is only one way in which we can do it. We can take from the better and give to the worse. We can deflect the penalties of those who have done ill and throw them on those who have done better. We can take the rewards from those who have done better and give them to those who have done worse. We shall thus lessen the inequalities. We shall favor the survival of the unfittest, and we shall accomplish this by destroying liberty. Let it be understood that we cannot go outside of this alternative; liberty, inequality, survival of the fittest; not-liberty, equality, survival of the unfittest. The former carries society forward and favors all its best members; the latter carries society downwards and favors all its worst members.8

So, to Sumner, Carnegie and other Social Darwinists, the capitalist economy was the perfect mirror of nature; the essential condition for what was conceived to be the progress of society was maximum freedom of the individual from the interference of the group (in the form of the state). This alone would allow everyone, by competing with each other, to reach their natural level, the best or fittest at the top, the worst at the bottom.

THE ORIGINS OF RED SCARE ANTI-COMMUNISM

Collectivist visions of society based on the idea that all forms of labor, whether manual or intellectual, common or rare, should be rewarded equally would distort the “natural” workings of the human economy and bring everyone down in the end.

COMBINATIONS: CORPORATIONS AND UNIONS There is an irony in the fact that at this very time there were important businessmen, most prominently John D. Rockefeller and J. P. Morgan, who were preaching against competition as wasteful, with Rockefeller— the richest man in the world—proclaiming that “[t]he day of combination is here to stay. Individualism has gone, never to return.”9 And so it seemed to be as a very powerful device of economic combination—the for profit corporation, itself a device created and empowered by governments and the courts—became increasingly dominant as America moved into the twentieth century. However, this acceptance of combination and condemnation of competition was not sustained by employers when it came to their employees forming their own combinations, i.e., unions. To most of the upper and middle class, the working-class people who sought to work together to better their lot were, in Andrew Carnegie’s words, “a parcel of foreign cranks whose Communistic ideas are the natural growth of the unjust laws of their native land, which denied these men the privilege of equal citizenship and hold them down as inferior from their birth.”10 However, as historian Michael Heale aptly comments, “By locating the red menace in foreign-born radicals, patriots were marginalizing rather than terminating the threat. Foreign workers, after all, were needed.”11 For workers the most obvious counterbalance to the power of the collective capital represented by the corporation was a labor union. After all, they reasoned, if an individual worker at US Steel, the world’s first billion-dollar corporation, were to ask for a raise or for shorter hours, what leverage would he have? One employee, a repairer of machines and furnaces who worked 12 to 13 hours a day with occasional 36-hour stretches, found himself “very tired” one day and requested to be excused that day from having to work overtime: he was penalized by being laid off for a week. Shorter hours were, in fact, one of the chief demands— or perhaps we should say dreams—of workers. A pipe worker in the Carnegie Steel Mill with two children worked seven days a week, 10 hours when he was on the day shift, 13 hours when he was on the night shift. In addition, every second week he had to work a 24-hour shift from 7am Saturday until 7am Sunday with just one hour off for food and rest

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after which he had to pick up again at 3 pm, continuing until 7 am the next morning. His children barely knew him. Aiding businessmen in their efforts to keep wages low was a longstanding belief held by some Americans that labor unions were intrinsically “un-American.” A half century earlier a judge convicting striking shoemakers in New York City of conspiracy had written in his 1836 verdict: In this favored land of law and liberty, workers have no need of artificial combination. Every worker knows, or ought to know, that he has no need of artificial combinations. They are of foreign origin and, I am led to believe, upheld mainly by foreigners.12

It is worth noting that this verdict was handed down during the same period that some of the Americans who aligned themselves with Andrew Jackson and his new Democratic Party were fighting against corporations as a form of “artificial combination.” The rules of the game were still being worked out. However, by the late 1800s, with a long succession of court cases establishing the rights of corporations and disallowing the rights of unions, the prevailing view of American elites was that corporations— whose leaders tended to be Protestants of northern European ethnic heritage—were American while unions—whose members were often Catholics, Orthodox and Jews of eastern and southern European heritage— were un-American. Importing massive numbers of poor foreigners to fill low wage jobs put old stock Americans in a peculiar position: on the one hand, these foreigners were highly desirable inasmuch as they would work at undesirable jobs for very low wages; on the other hand, as foreigners, they were unpleasantly different, different in appearance (sometimes darker skinned, a problem in a country that suffered from deeply entrenched racism), different in customs and often different in their ideas.

RADICALISM In 1871 an event occurred that highlighted the insecurity that many old stock Americans were feeling about their changing world; oddly, it was an event that occurred across the ocean, in France, and yet it resonated deeply in the United States. In March 1871, at the end of the FrancoPrussian War—a war between France and what was about to become the new country of Germany—the workers of Paris, rising against the conservative central government of France, established a new municipal

THE ORIGINS OF RED SCARE ANTI-COMMUNISM

government, declaring Paris to be an independent commune. Two events stood out in the reporting of most American newspapers: first, executions by the Commune, including the Archbishop of Paris and a judge, in retaliation for a massacre that had been carried out by the army and, second, the decree of April 16, 1871 that stated that businesses abandoned by their owners could be taken over and run by the employees. Aided by the flow of information enabled by the new trans-Atlantic cable, the Commune dominated newspaper headlines during the 1870s along with the Marxist International Workingmen’s Association which was said to have inspired it (but did not). Only American Government corruption received more attention from the press during this period.13 Along with lurid depictions of Paris as a “den of wild beasts” with mobs running amok and Parisian streets flowing with blood, major American newspapers joined in concluding that the “common people exhibited their political incapacity by their reliance on terror and theft” and that the Commune was “synonymous with communism.”14 American businessmen were quick to translate Parisian conditions to American soil; so, for example, the owners of coal mines dubbed a coal strike in Pennsylvania “The Commune of Pennsylvania”15 and striking miners in Amador County, California were labeled the “Amador Communists” while establishment publications like the New York Times warned that if American workers heard that there was a chance to grasp the luxuries of wealth, or to divide the property of the rich, or to escape labor and suffering for a time, and live on the superfluities of others, we should see a sudden storm of communistic revolution even in New York such as would astonish all who do not know these classes.16

This same period—the late 1800s—was one of intense strike activity in the United States; between 1880 and 1900 America saw 23,000 strikes. The press told Americans that the railroad strikes of 1877 were the work of agents of the Paris Commune, that anarchists were responsible for the strikes of 1886 and that the strike wave of 1919—the most intense in US history—was the work of Bolshevik agents. The actual causes varied and included low pay, long hours and workers’ objections when managers tried to increase their control over the work process. However, the biggest issue was the right of workers to form unions and to engage in collective bargaining. Very often the strikes ended only when government at the state or federal level applied its power against the unions, for during this period government intervened with armed force to end strikes some 500 times, always on the side of management.

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THE RED HAND OF ANARCHISM Businessmen believed that there must be plotters behind all this unrest: but who could they be? Before the Communist takeover in Russia in 1917 the main leftwing object of businessmen’s fear was the anarchist. There were some anarchists in the United States and they were usually foreigners. They could be broadly divided into two categories, there were peaceful dissenters, described in a 1908 study by newspaperman Elias Tobenkin as “intellectual anarchists” who were “absolutely harmless,” and then there were those—probably not more than a thousand in total—who advocated violence against government. Tobenkin’s survey pointed out that the earliest anarchism that could be properly called a movement was in the 1880s when in Chicago alone the numbers “went into thousands.” Some of these “were armed and practiced shooting.” By 1908 Tobenkin found that there were only half a dozen anarchist newspapers in the United States, of which only one advocated violence and that “violence and terrorism” were not generally found in written or oral anarchist propaganda.17 However, an indelible and negative image was planted in the imaginations of many—perhaps most—Americans by the spectacular acts of those few violently inclined anarchists. A defining moment for radicalism in the pre-World War I era was the Haymarket bombing; it marked a major turning point in the history of nineteenth-century labor, discrediting unions by linking them more firmly in the public mind with violent anarchism/socialism/communism and instigating America’s first major red scare. After Haymarket, it became a usual tactic of employers to accuse workers who made demands of being “Reds.” Though nobody knows who threw the Haymarket bomb, anarchists unquestionably were behind a number of assassination attempts and fear of anarchists intensified with each act of violence: the assassination of King Umberto of Italy in 1900 had been planned by a group of Italian anarchists in Paterson, New Jersey; the attempted assassination of American businessman Henry Frick had been planned by anarchist Alexander Berkman; and President William McKinley was assassinated by Leon Czolgosz, who claimed to be an anarchist. Each of these incidents led to brief periods of intensified fear, leading to the 1903 Anarchist Exclusion Act in which Congress banned from entry into the United States “anarchists or persons who believe in or advocate the overthrow by force and violence of the government of the U.S., or of all government, or of all forms of law, or the assassination of public officials” as well as anyone who “disbelieves in or who is opposed to all organized government, or who is a member of or affiliated with any organization entertaining and teaching” such doctrines.

THE ORIGINS OF RED SCARE ANTI-COMMUNISM

Turn of the century businessmen were under pressure from movements as varied as the agrarian Farmers’ Alliance and Populists of the West and South and the Knights of Labor and the Socialist Party who united in demanding, among other items, the nationalization of the railroads, the telegraph and telephone, the graduated income tax, recognition for unions and a shorter workday. The anarcho-syndicalist Industrial Workers of the World (known colloquially as “Wobblies”) simply proposed doing away with capitalism immediately.

THE DISENFRANCHISEMENT OF WORKING-CLASS AMERICANS With the easy talk of violent revolution by groups on the far left along with the occasional incidence of actual violence, worried establishment figures began to argue that private property was not safe under conditions of universal male suffrage; these were powerful people and they were, in fact, successful in severely restricting the franchise in America from the late 1800s through the 1920s. It is widely known that African-Americans in southern states were almost universally excluded from voting by means of poll taxes, literacy tests and intimidation; what is less commonly known is that many working-class white men were similarly excluded. With the push by business and corporate leaders to limit the franchise, between the 1890s and 1920 voting turnout tumbled as mechanisms such as poll taxes, complex voting registration procedures, literacy tests and outright disenfranchisement were mobilized to muffle the political voice of the working class. During these decades voting turnout plummeted as millions of men—mostly African-Americans, immigrants and other workers— were eliminated as voters. Connecticut had adopted a literacy test in 1855 to keep Irish immigrants from voting and through the 1920s there were 11 states in the North and the West that imposed literacy tests. The underlying intention of these “reforms” was commented on by Ray Stannard Baker, who in 1910 noted that, while new registration laws had eliminated “hundreds of thousands” of voters from the rolls, “[i]t is revealing that many registration requirements applied to urban and industrial areas [where workers of foreign origin were likely to be concentrated] but not elsewhere.”18 And historian Francis Parkman, a conservative voice, underlined the point, writing, It is in the cities that the diseases of the body politic are gathered to a head, and it is here that the need of attacking them is most urgent. Here the dangerous classes are most numerous and

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strong, and the effects of flinging the suffrage to the mob are most disastrous.19

In New York alone, almost 20 percent of the people who took literacy tests during the 1920s were not allowed to vote. Complex voter registration procedures also eliminated many potential poor voters; moreover, information concerning how, where and when to register was frequently withheld from voters considered undesirable by the administrators of the system. In Indiana voter participation had included approximately 92 percent of the eligible voters in 1900 but was down to 72 percent in 1920. In Lawrence, Massachusetts, by 1912 poll taxes and restrictive registration rules had reduced the workers’ vote to a mere 15 percent of those eligible. In the South, in the four years between 1900 and 1904, the number of registered voters in Houston, Texas, fell from 76 percent of those formally eligible to 32 percent while by 1900 in South Carolina—which had seen turnouts of over 80 percent in the 1880s—a mere 18 percent voted. In Louisiana the number of registered voters declined from 294,000 in 1897 to 93,000 in 1904. Figures for Southern participation in presidential elections between 1920 and 1924 show abysmally low rates of between 27 and 35 percent of adult whites voting with literally no African-Americans voting. Overall, after 1896 well-todo areas saw little decline in voter turnout, but in working-class districts it fell by more than 50 percent with the political power of well-to-do Caucasians increasing dramatically while that of the poor vanished. It must also be noted that while the Nineteenth Amendment gave women the right to vote, the retention of poll taxes in many states cut back on women’s votes among the poor, white as well as black. In an age in which women’s property rights were still incompletely recognized, married women and their daughters might not have control over their own or their family’s finances and a recalcitrant father or husband could prevent the tax from being paid. If a family had only enough money to pay for one tax, it was likely to be the husband’s. And if a woman was single and independent, her earnings were likely to be too small for her to be able to afford to pay the tax.20 With all these limitations, nationwide voting levels between 1896 and 1924 fell from 79 to 49 percent of all adults; since those excluded were overwhelmingly working class, the effect was to move national politics far to the right and to entrench pro-business policies as the political orthodoxy of the era. So though we can say that the elections of that period reflected the will of the majority of American voters, it is impossible to say that they reflected the will of the American people.

THE ORIGINS OF RED SCARE ANTI-COMMUNISM

Along with voting discrimination against the poor went an increasing use of red scare tactics to discredit labor organizations with their moderate goal of using collective bargaining as a tool to gain higher wages, shorter hours and safer working conditions. Simultaneously, the organs of local state security such as the police and the National Guard were beefed up. By 1903, these same nativist domestic pressures led Congress, for the first time in US history, to pass a bill excluding people from America based on their political beliefs, the Immigration Act of 1903, while the states of New York, New Jersey and Wisconsin passed criminal anarchy laws that criminalized speech advocating the forcible overthrow of the government.

THE POLITICAL TEMPER OF THE AMERICAN WORKING CLASS There was little to indicate that most American workers were radicals because most American workers were not radicals. The largest radical organization— the Socialist Party—had been organized in 1898 with about 10,000 members and had increased to 40,000 members by 1908. At its very height, with a membership of close to 110,000, the Socialist Party of America won 1,200 political offices nationwide, including one Congressman, 32 state representatives and 79 mayors. Though this was sufficient to cause President Theodore Roosevelt to believe that socialism was “far more ominous than any populist or similar movement in the past,” still, in their best showing, in the election of 1912, the Socialists, hampered by the laws designed to restrict working-class participation, polled only 6 percent of the votes cast. There was much to prevent workers from becoming radicalized: first, there was the faith in America as the unique land of opportunity that had brought so many immigrants to these shores to begin with; while employers might use Pinkerton detectives, National Guardsmen and the Army to break strikes, while Wobblies and Socialists might battle on the picket lines and talk of revolution, most American workers, for whatever reasons, acquiesced to the existing scheme of things, hoping for economic improvement for themselves but not for the overthrow of the government or of the capitalist system. Furthermore, many of these workers were Catholics and the Catholic Church was a politically conservative institution, especially disapproving of the atheism of most (though not all) radicals. The papacy had long had an ambivalent attitude toward capitalism, disapproving of the unbridled license the market gives to what, from Catholicism’s point of view, is the sin of greed. While the theory of the

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market held that the employer and worker had no obligations one to the other except for the worker to provide work and the employer to provide recompense at a level determined by the relationship of the supply of labor to the demand for labor, the Church was bound to a point of view in which moral law superseded natural law. Thus, while in his 1878 Papal Encyclical “Quod Apostolici Muneris” Pope Leo XIII roundly condemned Socialists as being “bad men” embracing “poisonous doctrines” of economic and social equality, he followed this declaration with the encyclical “Rerum Novarum.” Here he argued that though the right of private property was one endorsed by God, the employer—whose relationship to his employees the Pope likened to that of a father to his children— had, like a father, an obligation to his or her employees, a greater obligation than merely to pay the smallest wage the market would allow. Now, while in Europe the Church often moderated the conservatism of business, in the United States, dominated by a conservative Irish hierarchy eager for acceptance by an anti-Catholic political and social establishment and eager to counteract opinions that Catholicism was “un-American,” it tended to push toward the right, moving many Catholic workers away from a receptivity to far left doctrines. Another important institution moderating the radicalism of American workers was the successor to the Knights of Labor, the American Federation of Labor (AFL), founded in 1886. In contrast to radical groups, the AFL abjured trying to remake society or the American economy and abstained from political activity, rather concentrating on the limited goals of “higher wages and a shorter workday.” The most radical demand of the AFL was not political at all; it was the demand for the “closed shop,” an arrangement under which the employer hires only union members, and which requires employees to remain members of the union to retain their positions. It is easy to understand why unions would prefer this; after all, if only some workers in a business are union members, then the union’s ultimate bargaining chip—the threat of a strike—becomes greatly diluted since if a strike were to be called, not all the workers might walk off the job. And if the business can continue to operate without the union members, then the strike can be easily broken and the workers’ demands ignored. On the other hand, the same reasoning shows why managers would be adamantly opposed to the closed shop, as indeed they were. In fact, when employers, with the backing of court injunctions against strikes and the coercive forces of government, launched an open shop movement in 1903 with the purpose of driving unions from the longshore, construction, mining and other industries, membership in AFL unions declined substantially.

THE ORIGINS OF RED SCARE ANTI-COMMUNISM

THE FIRST WORLD WAR AND THE INTENSIFICATION OF ANTI-RADICALISM Wars have a way of making the boundaries between “us” and “them” more rigid; after all, people are getting killed for their country in large numbers and there seems to be little room for fine shades of allegiance. Therefore, it is not surprising that America’s two major red scares— times when enduring suspicions of Communists and those either sympathetic to them or insufficiently antipathetic to them flared into widespread accusations of disloyalty accompanied by a narrowed definition of acceptable dissent along with social punishment for those who went outside the boundaries—accompanied two wars, the First World War and the Korean War. The First World War began in 1914 as Europe’s war with a commitment from American president Woodrow Wilson to keep the United States uninvolved. However, on April 6, 1917, the United States entered the war as a combatant, and, having campaigned on its achievement in keeping America out of the war, the Wilson administration now had the task of getting public support for a large, expensive undertaking that would demand the sacrifice of American lives. A new Committee on Public Information organized patriotic parades and rallies, printed and distributed pamphlets and sponsored films and public speakers. Supporting the effort were grassroots organizations like the semi-official American Protective League, a group with a membership of 250,000 mostly business and professional people formed in 1917 by advertising executive A.M. Briggs with a mission to scout out disloyalty; this included identifying people who did not buy Liberty Bonds, rounding up draft dodgers, disrupting Socialist meetings and breaking strikes. There was even a group of schoolboys over 10 years old called the “Anti-Yellow Dog League,” devoted to searching out disloyalty and claiming a network of a thousand branches.21 Simultaneously anti-German feeling grew, but this hatred was not confined to German-Americans or German aliens; it spread to anyone who opposed the war. The American Socialist Party, which had taken a position against the war, was condemned for being “not only un-American but anti-American,” “dominated by men who are not American, but proGerman in sentiment.”22 New legislation sought by the Wilson administration and enacted by Congress—the Immigration Act (1917), the Espionage Act (1917) and the Sedition Act (1918), gave the federal government tools for going after dissenters, especially political radicals. The Immigration Act allowed the exclusion or the deportation of aliens who belonged to revolutionary

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organizations or who espoused the ideas associated with such organizations, the Espionage Act made statements “obstructing the war effort” (the term “obstructing” being open to broad interpretation) or “aiding the enemy” illegal, while the Sedition Act made those who used “disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language” about the US Government, its flag or its armed forces or who caused others to view the US Government or its institutions with contempt subject to imprisonment for 5 to 20 years. Radicals were the loudest in their opposition to the war and under this law, the Socialist leader Eugene V. Debs was sentenced to 10 years in prison for speaking in opposition to the draft. However, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) made an even more attractive target for anti-radicals than the Socialists. Attorney General Thomas Watt Gregory believed—incorrectly—that the Germans were bankrolling the IWW and on September 5, 1917, he had US marshals descend upon local headquarters of the IWW in many towns and cities across the nation, seizing books, checks, correspondence and other documents. A number of Wobbly officials were arrested while in Chicago federal agents took possession of the national headquarters of the Socialist Party, seizing its documents. The new Congressional legislation seemed to open the floodgates of repression as federal agents, local law enforcement and vigilantes went into action, beating, tarring and feathering Wobblies, packing them into freight cars and dumping them in the desert, and, in at least one case, lynching them. Socialist leader, Victor Berger, was sentenced to a 20-year prison sentence (later set aside by the Supreme Court), with the presiding judge declaring that his preferred course of action would have been to have “Berger lined up against a wall and shot.”23 The postwar period was not shaping up to be a favorable time for American civil liberties.

NOTES 1

2 3

4 5

George McLean, The Rise and Fall of Anarchy in America: From Its Incipient Stage to the First Bomb Thrown in Chicago (Chicago & Philadelphia, PA: R G. Badoux & Co., 1888), 18. New York Times, May 6, 1886, 1. Quoted in James R. Green, Death in the Haymarket: A Story of Chicago, the First Labor Movement and the Bombing that Divided Gilded Age America (New York: Pantheon Books, 2006), 201. David Caute, The Fellow-Travellers: Intellectual Friends of Communism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988), 5. McGerr, Michael E., A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America, 1870–1920 (New York: Free Press, 2003), 14.

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6

7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

21 22

23

Robert Asher and Charles Stephenson, “American Capitalism, Labor Organization, and the Racial Ethic Factor: An Exploration,” in Labor Divided: Race and Ethnicity in United States Labor Struggles, 1835–1960, Robert Asher and Charles Stephenson, eds. (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990), 10. William Graham Sumner, “The Challenge of Facts” in The Challenge of Facts and Other Essays (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1914), 23. Sumner, “The Challenge of Facts,” 25. Allan Nevins, John D. Rockefeller (New York: Scribner, 1959), 622. Quoted in M. J. Heale, American Anti-Communism: Combating the Enemy Within, 1830–1970 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 29. Heale, American Anti-Communism, 41. Quoted in Labor Divided, 21. Samuel Bernstein, “The Impact of the Paris Commune in the United States,” The Massachusetts Review, Vol. 12, No. 3 (Summer, 1971), 436. Bernstein, “The Impact of the Paris Commune in the United States,” 437. Bernstein, “The Impact of the Paris Commune in the United States,” 437. Bernstein, “The Impact of the Paris Commune in the United States,” 438. Elias Tobenkin, “Anarchists and Immigrants in America,” The World Today, May, 1908, 484. Quoted in Gerald Friedman, State-Making and Labor Movements. France and United States, 1876–1914 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998), 187. Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward, Why Americans Still Don’t Vote: And Why Politicians Want It that Way (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000), 90–91. Ronnie L. Podolefsky, “Illusion of Suffrage: Female Voting Rights and the Women’s Poll Tax Repeal Movement after the Nineteenth Amendment,” Notre Dame Law Review, Vol.73, No. 3 (March, 1998), 846. John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860–1925 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1988), 211. David Harry Bennett, The Party of Fear: From Nativist Movements to the New Right in American History (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press Books, 1988), 185. Quoted in David Harry Bennett, The Party of Fear: From Nativist Movements to the New Right in American History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988) 186.

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CHAPTER 2

The Big Red Scare

n Centralia, Washington on Armistice Day, 1919, parading American Legionnaires moved toward the local IWW hall. Wobblies had been special targets for vigilante violence before; for example, in Bisbee, Arizona in July 1917, around 1,200 members of the IWW were rounded up, taken out of town in railroad cars and abandoned in the desert. Soon afterward Wobbly Frank Little was lynched in Montana. With this history, the Wobblies in Centralia were on the alert, especially since their hall had been attacked not long before with members beaten and driven from town. Accounts of what happened that day are contradictory and confusing. All parties agree on some of the details, including the fact that members of the Legion were carrying rubber hoses and lengths of gas pipe. It is agreed that the Legionnaires stopped before the IWW hall. It is agreed that the Wobblies had been attacked before in Centralia, though not by members of the American Legion. The American Legion’s own account of the matter, published in their magazine, The American Legion Weekly, refers to a town meeting at which it was agreed that it was necessary to “get rid of the nuisance” of the IWW. All parties agree that during the parade, the American Legion halted before the IWW hall. They also agree that the Wobblies were armed with firearms and that they opened fire. It is not agreed, however, whether the Wobblies were attacking or being attacked. It is agreed that four men were killed. It is also agreed that in the aftermath one of the Wobblies who was taken prisoner, Wesley Everest, was seized from jail and lynched by the Legionnaires. The American Legion Weekly described the denouement with unmistakable satisfaction:

I

“He fell off the bridge,” was the laconic explanation which soon went the rounds. That there was a rope around his neck which prevented him from reaching the water was a detail not

THE BIG RED SCARE

discussed. This was the sole instance of retributive justice by the direct method, and reprehensible though lynch law is, there is no doubt that in this case a real murderer was saved the ceremony of trial.1

THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION The events recounted above did not come out of the blue. We’ve already seen that the First World War gave rise to a political atmosphere favorable to patriotic intolerance. At the same time dramatic events had been transpiring in Russia that would add coals to the fire. The Russian war effort had put severe strain on that country, economically and politically; in February of 1917 food riots and protests escalated into revolution and the Western world’s last remaining absolute monarchy, the Russian autocracy, was overthrown. For a brief time it seemed as though Russia might have a constitutional government on the western European model, but then in October 1917 a coup orchestrated by the relatively small Bolshevik Party overthrew the politically and economically moderate Provisional Government, turning Russia into the first country ruled by a self-styled Socialist Party, committed to spreading its revolution to the rest of the world. All Marxian Socialists agreed that market systems based on private property and the profit motive were also based on an unjust exploitation of labor and should, therefore, be abolished. They also agreed that neither true personal freedom nor true political freedom was possible under the conditions created by capitalism, where wealth concentrated in the hands of wealthy individuals gave those individuals disproportionate control over society’s resources and over their fellow human beings. By the turn of the twentieth century, however, two distinct Marxist camps had emerged, the mainstream Social Democrats, so-called because they believed that the path to the abolition of private property must be through the democratic acceptance of that goal by a majority of people, and the Bolsheviks—those later to be styled “Communists”—who, following the teachings of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, believed that the socialist goal could only be reached through revolution. Among Lenin’s most contentious teachings were his views on the subject of individual freedom, which, in contrast to other socialists, he saw as a goal of, but not as part of the path to, socialism. He believed that until the socialist revolution had been achieved, a tightly centralized controlling political party must lead the way, with severe limitations on freedom of speech and of action; this thinking offended the democratic sensibilities of most socialists,

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including even those on the far left of the party like the German/Polish Rosa Luxemburg, who famously wrote in her book The Russian Revolution: Freedom only for the supporters of the government, only for the members of one party – however numerous they may be – is no freedom at all. Freedom is always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently. Not because of any fanatical concept of “justice” but because all that is instructive, wholesome and purifying in political freedom depends on this essential characteristic, and its effectiveness vanishes when “freedom” becomes a special privilege.2

European leftists were not the only ones disturbed by Lenin’s views. The American anarchist, Emma Goldman, recorded her disappointment in her book My Disillusionment in Russia, where she noted the Bolsheviks’ imprisonment of her fellow anarchists and the closing of their press. Queried by her on the subject, Lenin blandly answered, “As to free speech, that is, of course, a bourgeois notion. There can be no free speech in a revolutionary period.”3 So alarmed were European Socialists by the Bolsheviks’ judicial attack on their erstwhile Russian socialist rivals, the Socialist Revolutionaries, putting them on trial with the threat of the death sentence (itself abhorred by Socialists) for 47 of them, that Belgian socialist leader, Emile Vandervelde traveled to Russia to defend them.4 To Lenin’s chagrin, the lives of these political opponents were spared; still, by 1921 any shadow of dissent or even leftwing politically diverse opinion in Russia had been crushed as all parties save the Bolsheviks were made illegal. Lenin never renounced these views on individual liberties and, for all the later statements of American Communists in favor of individual freedom, there was little reason to trust their protestations so long as they remained loyal to the doctrine that Lenin originated, Marxism-Leninism or communism. The point is critical because it is with the success of the Bolshevik coup and the appearance of a Communist Russia that the conflict between capitalists and radical leftists begins to be framed in terms of political freedom versus communism rather than economic freedom (the claim made for capitalism) versus communism. It is also critical because there is a strong element of truth in this juxtaposition: Communist regimes never brought political freedom to the countries where they ruled. However, repressive events such as red scares would serve to bring the identification of American-style democracy with freedom into question as well. If the Bolshevik nonchalance regarding individual freedoms was not enough to worry most Americans, Bolshevik views on revolution were also a matter of great concern. For example, Leon Trotsky, close to Lenin and organizer and leader of the Red Army, wrote:

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The problem of revolution, as of war, consists in breaking the will of the foe, forcing him to capitulate and to accept the conditions of the conqueror . . . As long as class society, founded on the most deep-rooted antagonisms, continues to exist, repressions remain a necessary means of breaking the will of the opposing side.5

He went on to confess that circumstances had “forced the Russian proletariat, in a moment of the greatest peril, foreign attacks, and internal plots and insurrections to have recourse to severe measures of State terror.”6 In saying this, however, Trotsky had wandered off into fantasy, something that most Americans seem to have intuited, for he continually identified the Bolsheviks (as did Lenin and the other Bolsheviks) not merely as the representatives of the working class, but as indistinguishable from the working class; however, there had been no process whose legitimacy anyone except a Bolshevik could recognize through which the working class had chosen the Bolsheviks as either its leaders or its representatives. Indeed, in the one genuine free election that had been allowed to take place—the election of the Constituent Assembly in 1917—the Bolsheviks were decisively defeated by the Socialist Revolutionaries (whose leaders soon found themselves on trial for their lives). Many explanations were and have been offered to justify Lenin’s next step which was to disperse that Assembly, but the fact remains that the Bolsheviks/ Communists never again dared risk their power on the basis of a freely held election. And so, any American who was unconvinced by the arguments of American Communists about the benefits of communism— which is to say, if we judge from the tiny number of people who actually joined the Communist Party, almost everyone—had good reason to be profoundly skeptical about and even hostile to this new movement, a movement that was openly committed to the views that: (1) Bolshevism represented the interests of the working class regardless of what actual members of that working class might think, and (2) the end justifies the means.

THE AMERICAN RESPONSE The broad American response to the first Russian Revolution in March was enthusiastic, with President Wilson speaking of “the wonderful and heartening things that have been happening within the last few weeks in Russia,” a country that “was known by those who knew it best to have been always in fact democratic at heart.”7 But once the Bolsheviks had

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taken over, things quickly changed. Socialists were at first uniformly exuberant at the emergence of the world’s first self-proclaimed socialist government. However, as American radicals became more familiar with the character and doctrines of the new regime, some remained enthusiastic while others’ support cooled. Moderate socialists, people like Morris Hillquit, a co-founder of the Socialist Party, and Benjamin Schlesinger, Socialist President of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union, could not understand why, once the revolution had succeeded, civil liberties could not be restored to the Russian people. In the wake of a trip to Russia, Schlesinger noted, “It requires courage in Moscow for one to declare himself as a non-conformist with communistic dogma or the Third Internationale. Still more courage is required for one to defend any other Socialist party, to say nothing of defending the America trade union movement. That really means to put one’s life in danger . . .”8 The Bolshevik seizure of power in Russia—unsettling enough to most Americans—was followed by copycat efforts in Germany (in Berlin and in Bavaria), Hungary, Austria, Bulgaria and Finland in 1919; in March of that year the Russian Bolsheviks sponsored the creation of the Third International (Comintern) whose expressed purpose was to foment world revolution. To many it seemed as though Bolshevism was on the march and who knew where that march might end? These events abroad were the critical background to the development in the United States of the wave of government and vigilante repression that would become known as the “Big Red Scare.” However, although the red scare was cast in political terms, its true origins were economic. For the two years prior to US entry into the First World War, the national economy had been booming due largely to increased sales of American goods to the European belligerents. The war itself made tremendous demands on the national economy as well as the nation’s population; the federal government became involved in the running of the economy in ways previously unthinkable except in the minds of Socialists and Progressives. In the name of the war effort the government encouraged and sometimes enforced measures previously only dreamt of by the labor unions; not only did it reduce the hours and increase the wages of those directly in its employ, but it pressured private business to do the same. Furthermore, the government gave its support to state legislation that protected working women or that aimed at eliminating child labor. Also wage adjustment authorities were established who operated on the principle that all people should be recompensed sufficiently for their labor to be able to afford “a minimum of health and decency.”9 With this in mind cost of living increases were instituted, particularly for poorly paid workers.

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POSTWAR BOOM AND BUST The war’s end increased economic tensions which, in turn, increased political tension. The war effort had included federal spending on a hitherto unknown scale, shifting national production to the goods needed for war. Nine million people had been employed in war-related industries and four million soldiers had been serving in the armed forces; now those war industries had lost their contracts and, as a result, were laying off workers whose labor was no longer needed. At the same time four million soldiers were being demobilized and sent home; all this meant large numbers of men looking for scarce jobs as factories that had been turning out goods for the war effort shut down, either permanently or temporarily as they retooled for peacetime activity. The United States Employment Service worked to ease the plight of veterans until, with no significant opposition from President Wilson, Congress reduced appropriations for that agency by 80 percent. The result was a skyrocketing of unemployment from a low of 1.4 percent in 1918 to 11.9 percent by 1921. Businessmen, on the other hand, were treated much more graciously; communications, railroads and shipping facilities were returned to their former owners on generous terms and the antitrust laws were altered to the advantage of big business. On the other hand, the capitalists’ opponent, organized labor, met with official hostility. With the war’s end government wartime controls on the US economy were lifted and consumers hurried to buy goods that had been in short supply during the war due to rationing. At the same time, businesses that had been forced to keep prices low during the war quickly raised those prices. The result was a sudden rise in inflation: food prices rose 84 percent, clothing 114 percent and furniture a whopping 125 percent. Overall the average family had to pay bills that had doubled; however, the wages they earned to pay those bills remained static or were lowered as employers who had made large profits during the war and who now faced higher operating costs due to inflation moved to lower their labor costs by cutting workers’ pay. Technology took its toll on employment as machines replaced human beings in an ever-widening arena. The intentions of business toward workers were expressed clearly by an engineer who declared, during the steel strike of 1919, “We do not intend to improve the condition of unskilled labor; we intend to abolish it.”10 But initially for most workers the postwar future seemed bright; almost all labor unions had strongly supported the war effort and with full employment and relatively high wartime wages, there had been little reason to go on strike. United States Bureau of Labor statistics show that nationwide membership in unions increased from 2,607,700 in 1915 to

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3,104,600 in 1917.11 This figure represented a little more than one-eighth of the total number of wage-earners in the country. However, after the end of the war the workers’ rising expectations proved to have been built on shaky ground. Employers who had accepted collective bargaining, higher wages and other benefits for their employees imposed by government during a crisis, immediately started looking for ways to return to prewar conditions, while the government, seemingly so friendly during the war, now turned a cold shoulder to labor. Moreover, the atmosphere of the entire country was becoming hostile to union interests because of the widespread, though largely inaccurate, association in the public mind of trade unionism with radical causes, an association which antiunion employers were to cultivate with devastating effect. Workers found themselves with less steady employment and more underemployment as the historic trend of a steady increase in the number of people employed in manufacturing peaked in 1919 and then reversed in a downward trend with no end in sight. Fewer jobs and higher prices led the unions to try to maintain their ground by forceful means; 1919 was a year of many strikes—strikes in textiles, clothing, food, transportation, coal and steel which altogether involved some four million workers. However, in labor it was a buyers’ market and most of these strikes were unsuccessful.

THE BIG RED SCARE BEGINS The problems and hopes of working-class men and women were core issues in the complex of events that would become known as the Big Red Scare. It started in January 1919 in the city of Seattle when 35,000 shipyard workers, who, for patriotic reasons, had accepted what they believed to be subpar wages during the war, went on strike for higher pay. Seattle was a strong union city with a centralized union body, the Seattle Central Labor Council, which moved to support the shipyard workers by calling a general strike which began on February 6, exempting only what were deemed to be essentials such as garbage, laundry, milk trucks, coal and water. Altogether some 60,000 workers stopped work. The Seattle American Federation of Labor (AFL), more radical than its parent organization, had declared its support for the Russian Revolution. Added to that, Seattle already had extensive experience with the IWW which was without question a very radical organization; though the actual Wobbly involvement in the strike was minimal, it was wildly exaggerated by local figures, including the mayor, Ole Hanson, and the police chief, both of whom had their own political agendas to promote. A relatively

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new organization, the Bureau of Investigation—later to become the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)— had an agent present, Special Agent Petrovitsky, who notified his superiors that Seattle Chief of Police Joel Warren had warned repeatedly, without any basis in fact, that radicals were stockpiling weapons preparatory to an attempt to take over the city. Petrovitsky also reported that clashes between the strikers and the authorities were largely provoked by the police “no doubt for political capital of the mayor and chief of police” who, he suspected, would have been disappointed “if the strike did not come to pass.”12 And in a book that proclaimed his own heroism, Americanism vs. Bolshevism, then-mayor Ole Hanson stated his own conviction that “there was a widespread conspiracy throughout the Union for a concerted effort to establish bolshevism.”13 Despite the fact that the strike was proceeding peacefully, Hanson called in troops. The strikers found themselves confronted by some 3,000 armed men, police and federal troops. Locally and nationally, news organizations portrayed the strike as a red revolution. The strike leaders themselves were not tactically astute; they set neither goals nor a time limit for the strike; weakened by this aimlessness, it did not take long for the effort to begin to dissolve. In fact, the AFL urged the workers to abandon the strike and they did so on February 11. Newspapers around the country were jubilant with the New York Times characterizing Hanson as a “champion of order” who was “not at all adverse to a little rough and tumble fighting, or any other kind.”14 Woodrow Wilson’s Secretary of Labor, William B. Wilson, breathed a sigh of relief at the defeat of the attempt “to establish a Soviet form of government in the United States.”15 There were few radicals among either the strikers or the strike leadership, but Special Agent Petrovitsky put his finger on the salient issue: Seattle was, to a large extent, a closed shop town where workers had to be members of a union in order to get a job; he was hopeful, then, that the breaking of the strike would “result in much good in that it will result in the open shop in Seattle.”16 And indeed, once the strike was over Seattle’s employers launched an open-shop offensive that succeeded in transforming Seattle from a predominantly closed-shop to an open-shop city. Ole Hanson, now a national celebrity, resigned as mayor to go on a lucrative lecture tour of the country, telling people everywhere he went that America was under imminent threat of a red revolution. It was in large part the events in Seattle that on February 4 caused a Senate subcommittee of the Senate Committee on the Judiciary chaired by Lee Slater Overman (D-NC) that had been investigating charges of anti-American activities by the United States Brewers Association to shift its focus to possible subversion stemming from Soviet Russia. A star witness

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of these hearings was attorney Archibald E. Stevenson whose special target was American universities which he declared to be “festering masses of pure atheism.”17 Stevenson submitted a list of 200 professors whom he alleged to be Communists. Moreover, the Committee published the names of those who were deemed to be tainted by suspicion of Bolshevism, even when there was no substantiation for such charges. In this and other ways the Committee provided a precedent for the later and much more powerful House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC). There was an anti-Semitic theme in much of the testimony as witnesses came up with allegations that there were special relations between Jews and Bolshevism; however, the most spectacular—and from the point of view of mainstream America, the most shocking—charges had to do with the supposed disposition of women in the new Soviet state. On October 26, 1919, the New York Times reported that at least one district in the new Soviet state had turned women into the “property of the State.” According to this report a young woman was obliged to register with the state at the age of 18 at which point she would have the right to choose a husband with said husband having no voice in the matter. Any children of the union were likewise to become “property of the State.”18 That this and other such decrees were actual policy statements of any official Soviet bodies was hotly disputed in the testimony of Louise Bryant, a journalist sympathetic to the Bolshevik regime and married to American Communist John Reed. However, despite Bryant’s rebuttal, the more lurid charges dominated the headlines and gave Americans the sense that Bolshevism presented a direct and dire threat to the traditional monogamous, patriarchal American family. In fact, the government-approved sex lives of Soviet citizens would turn out to be at least as prim as the publicly approved version of any American married couple. The Overman Committee’s hearings on Bolshevism ran from February 11 to March 10; just over two weeks later (March 26) the New York State Legislature created a committee headed by freshman Senator Clayton R. Lusk to investigate findings by the same Archibald Stevenson who had turned the Overman Committee’s attention from German subversion to the Bolsheviks. And there were indeed those on the far fringes of the political left to whom the Lusk Committee’s nightmares were hopeful dreams to be advanced by any means available: in April 1919 the housemaid of a Georgia senator opened a package addressed to her employer and had her hands blown off by a bomb contained therein. Immediately the mails were investigated and 36 other bomb packages were discovered in various cities, all addressed to political and business leaders, including Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Senator Overman, millionaire John D. Rockefeller, Seattle Mayor Ole Hanson and the Attorney General

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of the United States, A. Mitchell Palmer. The headlines of the Chicago Daily Tribune came as close to screaming as a headline can: “SEND DEATH BOMBS TO 36 U.S. LEADERS, Huge May Day Plot Exposed, COAST TO COAST DEATH SCHEME IS REVEALED.”19 And then before the country had properly had time to catch its collective breath, on June 2, eight much larger bombs went off, one of them demolishing the house of Attorney General Palmer. Each of the bombs was accompanied by a note with the following bloodcurdling words: War, Class war, and you were the first to wage it under the cover of the powerful institutions you call order, in the darkness of your laws. There will have to be bloodshed; we will not dodge; there will have to be murder: we will kill, because it is necessary; there will have to be destruction; we will destroy to rid the world of your tyrannical institutions.20

Although the perpetrators were never discovered, the widespread assumption was that Bolsheviks or Wobblies were behind the plot with subversion and overthrow of the federal government as their goal (members of the left, on the other hand, suspected agents provocateurs to be the true culprits). At least a portion of the American public became unhinged: an advertisement run by businessmen in the Tacoma Leader and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer read: We must smash every un-American and anti-American organization in the land. We must put to death the leaders of the gigantic conspiracy of murder, pillage and revolution. We must imprison for life all its aiders and abettors of native birth. We must deport all aliens.21

According to contemporary observer Frederick Lewis Allen, Big-navy men, believers in compulsory military service, drys, anticigarette campaigners, anti-evolution Fundamentalists, defenders of the moral order, book censors, Jew-haters, Negro-haters, landlords, manufacturers, utility executives, upholders of every sort of cause, good, bad, and indifferent, all wrapped themselves in Old Glory and the mantle of the Founding Fathers and allied their opponents with Lenin.22

These bombings helped give a free hand to investigating committees such as the Overman and Lusk Committees. The investigator for the Lusk

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Committee, Archibald Stevenson, had already carried out an investigation sponsored by the wealthy and conservative Union League Club which had then petitioned the State Legislature to follow up on its findings. The Lusk Committee, whose hearings started on June 12, adopted a novel modus operandi, not merely calling witnesses but conducting raids on suspected subversive institutions including a Russian government agency located in New York City, the Russian Soviet Bureau. A follow up raid at the Rand School, a socialist educational institution, brought more documents that ostensibly showed that the school was plotting revolution in collusion with the Bureau. All in all, vast amounts of written materials were seized which, Lusk dramatically claimed, contained evidence that the United States was the target for a Bolshevik revolution. However in reality, as the famous public intellectual Walter Lippmann wrote, “The Committee found nothing.”23 Or, as another source noted, the Committee had successfully and triumphantly proven “that the Socialist and Communist Parties wish to establish socialism and communism.”24 The report, as would be common with rightwing anti-communism, lumped together all forms of radicalism, non-violent and violent, stating “that the aims and purposes of the Socialist Party [were] substantially identical with those of the Communists” and that “any statements in the official documents which indicate otherwise [had], of course, been inserted to gull the public.”25 Along these same lines, the Committee’s final report also looked at “revolutionary industrial unionism,” focusing for the most part, not on the unquestionably revolutionary IWW, but on established reformist unions such as the Amalgamated Clothing Workers, the International Ladies’ Garment Workers, the Amalgamated Textile Workers and others. These constructive organizations which, as The Nation observed, had “not only brought order and reasonably tolerable conditions out of a chaotic and sweated industry, but [had] increased its production standards as well,” the report asserted, were dedicated to class struggle and therefore “the real danger to American government and to the structure of American society and its institutions rests in the continuous activity of such organizations.”26

THE FEAR OF FOREIGNERS A national red scare was developing and nativism was emerging as one of its prominent themes. Nativism was not simply a revulsion against foreigners or new immigrants; it embraced a complex of racist beliefs, beliefs that asserted what we would call ethnicities were, in fact, biologically distinct races with a distinct hierarchy of superior/inferior. In the United

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States the proponents of nativism invariably asserted that the very finest of all the races was the “Anglo-Saxon race,” that is, the descendants of the inhabitants of England (but not Ireland or Scotland who were considered to be members of a different race). Now, modern genetic research has demonstrated that the genetic characteristics of the English, Irish and Scots are more or less indistinguishable, all of them being descended from a common group that arrived in the British Isles around 16,000 years ago from Spain. However, to the racial theorists and proponents of the false but widely embraced “science” of eugenics there were vital differences that, for example, made the Anglo-Saxons far the biological superiors of their cousins, the Irish, to say nothing of the earlier inhabitants of the Americas, the Indians or the Africans who had been brought as slaves or the Italians, Hungarians, Middle Easterners or Jews who had been encouraged to come as cheap laborers. People like Dr. Charles B. Davenport were becoming alarmed that with the influx of new “races,” the US population would “rapidly become darker in pigmentation, smaller in stature, more mercurial, more attached to music and art, [and] more given to crimes of larceny, kidnapping, assault, murder, rape and sex-immorality” and that “the ratio of insanity in the population [would] rapidly increase.”27 And lawyer and conservationist Madison Grant, the scion of a wealthy family, in his widely read 1916 book The Passing of the Great Race (which Adolph Hitler later hailed as his “Bible”) proposed that America rid herself of all her social problems by “[a] rigid system of selection through the elimination of those who are weak or unfit.” This action “would allow us to solve the whole question in one hundred years, as well as enable us to get rid of the undesirables who crowd our jails, hospitals, and insane asylums.”28 Grant believed there was a hierarchy of races with the so-called “Nordic race” sitting at the pinnacle of humanity. Given the premises of these thinkers, it is clear that the mixing of races— certainly of any “inferior” race with the “superior” Nordics—was something to be avoided at all costs. These were all respectable ideas among educated members of the American elite in an age when Caucasian Protestant men—business executives, bankers, lawyers, doctors— unapologetically belonged to men’s clubs and country clubs that excluded African-Americans, Jews, Italians, Irish, women and anyone else who was not Protestant, male and of the appropriate northern European descent—in other words, members of Madison Grant’s “Nordic race.” And so it is not surprising that ideas that did not benefit this elite—programs that tended toward either economic or racial or ethnic equality—should be viewed by most of its members (with some very notable exceptions) as the intellectual products of inferior foreign minds. The Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United

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States, Former US President William Howard Taft, was on record as saying of the foreign-born that “[m]any of them have a prejudice against all government and do not have the sympathy with our institutions which makes for real assimilation. . . . It is they who form the nucleus of the Socialist Party. It is they who strengthen the anarchist group.”29 For example, influential as a special counsel for the Lusk Committee was Special Deputy Attorney-General John B. Trevor, a captain in Military Intelligence and a regular contributor of essays on radicalism in the United States to the State Department, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, Naval Intelligence and the Bureau of Investigation. Trevor believed that those who did not have an Anglo-Saxon heritage were not worthy of US citizenship and attributed all labor unrest and political radicalism to dangerous foreigners. His influence with the Committee was reflected in its final report (written by Archibald E. Stevenson) which alleged that “aliens” and “foreign workers” were inciting “class hatred and a contempt for government.”30 In this view, the labor movement, including admittedly conservative organs such as the AFL, had been subverted by radicals; educated upperclass pacifists (represented by prominent women like Jane Addams and Lillian Wald) were tools of radicals; university students, professors, students, clerics and even American industrialists were all being undermined by “skillfully employed” propaganda; while “various revolutionary agencies” aroused the “race hatred [and] so-called class consciousness” of “negro followers.” All these were being enlisted to subvert the United States according to the fearful and paranoid view of the Lusk Committee. Speaking in June before the House Appropriations Committee, Attorney General Palmer who, having his sights set on the upcoming 1920 Democratic presidential nomination, thought it worthwhile to develop a reputation as one who ate radicals for breakfast, warned that radicals would “on a certain day . . . rise up and destroy the government at one fell swoop.”31 No doubt a small number of would-be revolutionaries in the United States would happily have fulfilled Palmer’s dire prediction; however, the notion that there was a conspiratorial group with the actual ability to do this was pure fantasy. Nonetheless, much of the country and many politicians were susceptible to this particular fantasy and Palmer quickly received a substantial sum from Congress to pursue radicals. He appointed former Secret Service head, William J. Flynn as chief of the Bureau of Investigation with the task of chasing down subversives. And, believing as they did that the tiny group of Bolsheviks represented a dire threat to American democracy, they had much to do, or at least much to look into. The Socialist Party was just then in the process of falling apart as members split on whether or not to pursue a Bolshevik-

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style revolution in the United States. When Lenin invited the American Socialists to join the Third International, a major rift in the party had emerged. Though a large majority supported the move, the moderates (dedicated to pursuing socialist goals through the democratic process) expelled those on the far left (advocating revolution) before a vote could take place. What was left was a rump Socialist Party with only a third of its former membership. Meanwhile, those supporting the Russians were not themselves united and they formed two Communist parties, the Communist Labor Party and the Communist Party of America, both of which shared the view that the great world revolution was at hand and that, as Lenin himself had written, reformist labor organizations like the AFL were worse than useless. It should be noted that these three groups, even taken collectively, were very small. A contemporary assessment in the Atlantic Monthly estimated that the Socialist Party might have 39,000 members, the Communist Labor Party 10,000 to 30,000 members and the Communist Party from 30,000 to 60,000 members. At the very most, then, that added up to some 129,000 people out of a national population of 104,514,000; in other words, leaving aside the Socialists (who were not revolutionaries but reformists), 90,000 American Bolsheviks comprised around one-tenth of 1 percent of the population of the country, enough to pursue some dangerous terrorist acts if they were so inclined (they weren’t), but not enough by any standard to create a revolution. Still, from the beginning the Bureau of Investigation was keeping tabs on these very dangerous developments and on August 1 Flynn set up a new specialized outfit, the General Intelligence Division under the 24-year-old John Edgar Hoover. That summer of 1919 it truly seemed that the country was aflame. Along with the bombings and the new Communist parties, AfricanAmerican veterans of the First World War, having risked their lives for their country, returned home to a world of segregation and humiliation that seemed less tolerable than ever. Returning soldiers were less willing to tolerate discrimination and that summer and fall race riots rocked American cities, including Chicago where 23 African-Americans and 15 Caucasians were killed, 537 were injured and 1,000 black families were left homeless. In Washington, DC four whites and two African-Americans were killed and later that year, in Arkansas, some 300 to 400 white men killed at least 25 black men, women and children. The Caucasian establishment was distressed, the New York Times editorializing, “There had been no trouble with the Negro before the war when most admitted the superiority of the white race.” And despite the many, many reasons African-Americans had to resist discrimination, respectable sources sought to attribute their resistance to nefarious radicals, with a New York Times

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headline reading “REDS TRY TO STIR NEGROES TO REVOLT; Widespread Propaganda on Foot Urging Them to Join I.W.W. and ‘Left Wing’ Socialists.”32 The Attorney General of the United States, A. Mitchell Palmer and his head radical hunter, J. Edgar Hoover saw sinister connections between what was being called the “New Negro”—a more outspoken, less submissive African-American—and the “Red Menace.”

STRIKE WAVE 1919 was a year of many strikes and large segments of public opinion believed that radicals and anarchists were behind them all. The first important one occurred in early September in Boston when the overworked (with an 86-hour average work week) and underpaid Boston police, seeking and failing to receive city recognition of the local union they had organized in affiliation with the AFL, walked off the job. The striking policemen were far from being radicals, but newspapers around the country agreed with the Wall Street Journal which warned, “Lenin and Trotsky are on their way.”33 Massachusetts Governor Calvin Coolidge took over the situation, refusing AFL President Samuel Gompers’ request for arbitration with the famous statement that “[t]here is no right to strike against the public safety by anybody, anywhere, any time.” When the Police Commissioner fired the striking officers and set about hiring a new police force, the strike collapsed, but not before 5,000 National Guard troops had been called out to keep order in Boston while nightmares of red anarchy started to haunt many Americans. As historian David Shannon noted, “The police strike had serious consequences, to be sure, but to attribute revolutionary intent to Boston Irish Catholic cops required a departure from normal rational processes.”34 Just two weeks after the Boston police were crushed, another, much larger strike hit the steel industry. The average steel worker was still laboring 12 hours a day, 69 hours a week for $1,466 a year at a time when it was estimated that a family of five needed $2,500 to get by; in other words, some 60 percent of all steel workers and their families lived below or barely above a minimum subsistence level. Representatives of the AFL approached US Steel president Elbert Gary to discuss the improvement of labor conditions but were met with a blanket refusal to discuss anything at all. In response the steel workers went on strike, demanding recognition of their union, an eight-hour day, one day off per week, higher wages, double pay for overtime and the abolition of company unions. The steel companies began with the advantage of a workforce marked by divisions that had been carefully cultivated by the companies themselves:

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workers belonging to some 30 nationalities and living separate lives, each with its own language, customs and traditions. And all these workers were intimidated, knowing that the workforce was riddled with labor spies and informers who, should any worker speak of a union, would turn them in. The certain result would be firing; the possible results included blacklisting, arrest and deportation. William Z. Foster, a union organizer who was to become important in the Communist Party, led the strike in steel on behalf of the A.F. of L. The strikers’ central demands included the 8-hour day, a 48-hour week, the abolition of 24-hour shifts and higher pay. Management responded by claiming that the workers were well-paid and only on strike because they wanted a holiday; this was said with a straight face. They further averred that the strike leaders were Bolsheviks, Elbert H. Gary (chairman of the board of US Steel) claiming that the strikers wanted “the closed shop, Soviets, and the forcible distribution of property.”35 The steel strike was not a revolutionary movement; nonetheless, these charges and others like them helped bring public opinion around to the management’s side and there was no public outcry when in 1920 first the police and the National Guard and then federal troops were used to break up the strike. Nonetheless, more than 350,000 men walked off the job. They found the full force of government leveled against them as the Sheriff of Allegheny County forbade gatherings and made 5,000 strikebreakers deputies. State police would attack men in the streets with clubs and in some localities strikers were jailed and fined, some for the offense of “smiling at the State Police.”36 The federal government joined in: in Gary, Indiana, federal troops arrested strikers and dispersed picketers, and the Department of Justice arrested and deported strikers on the charge that they were Bolsheviks. Overenthusiastic Socialists inadvertently harmed the strike by publicly endorsing it as containing “possibilities of revolution” or as being a battle to “crush the capitalists;” this rhetoric played right into the hands of Elbert Gary and the other steel executives who sought to portray the strike, not as a protest against substandard working conditions, but as a Bolshevik attempt to overthrow a free republic and to enslave free Americans. The tactic was effective: in the end two reports, one by the US Senate and one by the Interchurch World Movement—a body whose members included a Methodist and an Episcopal bishop, plus a secretary of the Presbyterian Board of Home Missions—agreed that the strike had been broken above all by the strikebreaking methods of the steel companies and their effective mobilization of public opinion against the strikers through the

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charges of radicalism, bolshevism, and the closed shop, none of which were justified by the facts; and by the suppression of civil rights.37

A large-scale coal miners’ strike followed a similar pattern as the mine owners ascribed the strike to Russian Communist leaders and newspapers accused the strikers of seeking red revolution. Overall, in the year 1919 alone some four million workers had walked off the job in over 3,600 strikes. However, these strikes were not simply events occurring in some isolated economic sphere; they had profound political implications since they were all accompanied by accusations that the strikers were Socialists and/or Communists. The intention of employers was to stick a label of treason on any collective action on the part of their employees to get higher wages, safer working conditions or even the recognition of a union. And to a large extent they succeeded. With striking copper miners in Butte, Montana, striking telephone operators all over New England, striking textile workers in Lawrence, Massachusetts and Passaic, New Jersey, striking actors on New York City’s Broadway along with the Seattle general strike, Boston Police strike, the steel workers’ and the coal miners’ strikes—and with race riots breaking out in unprecedented numbers accompanied by horrific violence, perhaps it is not unreasonable that many Americans reading their morning papers might have thought that all this turmoil was the forerunner of revolution.

ROUNDING UP RADICALS Certainly the US Senate had its concerns regarding these disturbances; Attorney General Mitchell, empowered to go after radical aliens, had seemingly been inactive and on October 17, in a resolution passed unanimously, the Senate required him to account for this inaction. In fact, his department had been busy; his young radical hunter, J. Edgar Hoover had earlier worked at the Library of Congress where he demonstrated a penchant for the gathering and organizing of information that would characterize his entire career, having created an index file of some 200,000 cards. Now he had the agents of his new antiradical division putting together names and they were concentrating on a 4,000 member group, the Federation of the Union of Russian Workers, as a nest of likely revolutionaries (its constitution called for overthrow of a government; however, the government in question was the already overthrown Russian czarist government); that this group had degenerated from a group of active

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radicals into what might be described as a social club did not seem to be a matter of concern. On November 7, 1919—not coincidentally the second anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution—agents of the Bureau of Investigation along with local policemen in 12 cities raided the Russian Workers, taking into their net as they went passers-by along with unfortunate teachers who were merely teaching night classes in shared spaces with the radical club. Police and agents beat suspects and threw many of them down flights of stairs; subsequently, in some communities, even friends and relatives who came to visit those already imprisoned found themselves behind bars. The legality of the raids was at best dubious since the number arrested was far greater than the number of warrants that had been issued. Still, establishment America was in no mood to be picky: Palmer informed the country that 250 dangerous radicals had been arrested; the New York Times praised Palmer as a “lion-hearted man” and Congress cheered him. And the next day, New York State’s Lusk Committee sent out 700 police to raid 73 radical centers, arresting 500. Palmer, now dubbed the “Fighting Quaker,” played his role to the hilt, distributing leaflets to the press “containing pictures of horrid-looking Bolsheviks with bristling beards and asking if such as these should rule over America.”38 As contemporary author Frederick Lewis Allen noted, others picked up on and elaborated the theme: Politicians were quoting the suggestion of [WWI veteran and author] Guy Empey that the proper implements for dealing with the Reds could be “found in any hardware store,” or proclaiming, “My motto for the Reds is S.O.S.—ship or shoot. I believe we should place them all on a ship of stone, with sails of lead, and that their first stopping-place should be hell.” College graduates were calling for the dismissal of professors suspected of radicalism; school-teachers were being made to sign oaths of allegiance; business men with unorthodox political or economic ideas were learning to hold their tongues if they wanted to hold their jobs.39

VIGILANTES In this overheated atmosphere mobs struck back at their imagined enemies, breaking up meetings of radicals all over the United States. A Wobbly giving a soapbox speech in San Diego was beaten up by vigilantes and on May 1, 1919 The Call, a Socialist daily newspaper in New York City, had

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its office destroyed and its workers terrorized by men in service uniforms. Patriotic organizations such as the American Defense Society and the National Security League began to weigh in. The American Defense Society told Americans that the Sixteenth Amendment (creating the income tax) was a weapon of Bolshevism while the National Security League sought to give the average man or woman a simple rule of thumb for determining whether or not someone was disloyal, saying, “[W]hen you hear a man tryin’ to discredit Uncle Sam, that’s Bolshevism.”40 One of the most important and influential of the patriotic organizations was a new one, the American Legion, established in March of that year and committed in its constitution “to uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States of America; to maintain law and order; [and] to foster and perpetuate a one hundred per cent Americanism.” From the beginning the Legion’s elite founders—American military officers led by Lieutenant Colonel Theodore Roosevelt, Jr.—intended the organization to act as a means of channeling the energy of returning veterans to combat radicalism on the home front. Just how effective was demonstrated on Armistice Day, November 11, 1919 in Centralia, Washington. An atmosphere of accepted illegal violence had been building in the United States: in February, an alien had been murdered in Indiana for shouting “To Hell with the United States!” and the jury acquitted the man who killed him after two minutes’ deliberation. In early May around 400 soldiers and sailors attacked the offices of a socialist newspaper in New York City, beating up Socialists and smashing up property before moving on to the Russian People’s House, forcing those they found there to sing the national anthem. And on May 6, when a man at a victory loan pageant failed to stand for the national anthem, a sailor had shot him in the back and, as the Washington Post reported, “the crowd burst into cheering and handclapping.”41 It was shortly after this that the clash between the Centralia IWW members and the American Legionnaires along with the lynching of Wesley Everest took place. In the aftermath, IWW offices all over Washington were raided by police and over a thousand leaders were arrested; ultimately 11 Wobblies arrested in connection with Centralia were tried, convicted of murder and sent to prison with terms ranging from 25 to 40 years. Nor was all the response extra-legal; 32 states passed laws forbidding membership in revolutionary organizations and 28 states forbade the display of red flags. The Wilson administration not only failed to speak out against such infringements of civil liberty and constitutional process, to a

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The American Legion The American Legion, Inc., is the world’s largest veterans’ organization with a membership that peaked after the Second World War at 3.3 million. It was founded in France in 1919 at the instigation of Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., by a group of 20 officers of the US Army. Although the Legion was designed to function as a grassroots group, it is of some significance that it was founded and initially financed by businessmen and other members of the economic and social elite who, alarmed by developments in Europe (most of all the emergence of the new Soviet Union) and radicalism and class tensions at home, conceived the organization specifically as one that would replace economic divisions in veterans’ minds with the nationalistic and non-economic identification attached to “Americanism.”42 And, in fact, along with becoming an effective advocate for an extensive welfare system for veterans with benefits that included pensions for the disabled, health care and affirmative action in civil service employment, the Legion became the leading antiradical organization in the United States. In its early days it was engaged in intimidation, kidnapping, mob attacks on radicals and strikebreaking, so much so that “by 1921 the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) ‘despaired of counting them’ and labeled the Legion ‘the most active agency in intolerance and repression in the United States’ ”43 and at its January 1923 Convention, Commander-in-Chief of the American Legion, Alvin Owsley endorsed Mussolini and fascism. The Legion took on communists, unions, progressives and radicals during the Great Depression. During the red scare of the 1950s, the FBI discouraged mob action, urging Americans to “Leave it to the FBI.” That did not stop the Legion from being active in working against anything it deemed to be subversive in education and other areas of American life. As David Caute has written, “backed by the weight of 17,000 Legion posts and property holdings worth a hundred million dollars, the Legion and its Americanism Commission molded opinion within the heartland of Middle America.”44 Moreover, during the 1950s the FBI enlisted the Legion into its activities with the American Legion Contact Program which secretly expanded the FBI’s surveillance of dissidents without public or congressional awareness or approval. Under this program, Legion participants were engaged as informers who “investigated, and reported to their FBI liaisons, the political and associational activities of ‘subversive’ individuals and organizations.”45

considerable extent it led the wave of Know-Nothing reaction. Thomas W. Gregory, Attorney General during most of the war, had to restrain his chief upon occasion in his requests that radical critics of the war be prosecuted for minor irritations.46

It was in April of 1919 that Eugene V. Debs, the most conspicuous and revered of American Socialist leaders of the time, was jailed for a speech

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he had given in 1918 in which he mildly criticized the war. So adamant was President Wilson against Debs that he personally refused all requests to release him, even though the requests were approved by his cabinet (including the rabid anti-red Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer). The mood of the established political culture was not charitable: in 1918 for statements opposing the war, Victor Berger, the Socialist congressman from Milwaukee had been put on trial for conspiracy under the Sedition Act, convicted and sentenced to 20 years in prison. Nonetheless, he was re-elected to office; however, he was twice denied his seat by his fellow representatives, first in May 1919 and then, after being re-elected in a special election in December, in January 1920.

J. EDGAR HOOVER ROUNDS UP REDS, ROUND 2 Amid all this unrest, the ambitious young federal investigator, J. Edgar Hoover moved to raise the profile of his department with a dramatic deportation of alien radicals swept up in earlier raids. On December 21, 1919, under the authority of the Espionage Act and the Immigration Act (which allowed the deportation of non-citizens who “disbelieve in or are opposed to all organized government”47), “undesirable” aliens, some of them prominent like the anarchists Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman (both convicted of interfering with recruitment for the military), were loaded onto the USAT Buford (nicknamed the “Soviet Ark”) and sent to Russia amid great applause from the American press. Then a short time later, with the support of his boss, A. Mitchell Palmer, Hoover struck again, launching a series of raids on January 2, 1920 under circumstances of dubious legality. Raids in 23 states pulled in more than 3,000 people, often beaten and arrested without warrants, many of them utterly unconnected to targeted groups and some of them US citizens not subject to arrest and deportation. And the dangerous weaponry to be used to overthrow the US Government seized in these forays comprised, according to Assistant Secretary of Labor Louis F. Post, three pistols. In the end, most of those arrested were released without ever being charged with a crime. Assistant Secretary of Labor Post described the raids: [T]hey involved lawless invasions of peaceable assembly—public and private, political, recreational and educational. Meetings wide open to the general public were roughly broken up. All persons present—citizens and aliens alike without discrimination—were arbitrarily taken into custody and searched as if they had been burglars caught in the criminal act. Without warrants of arrest

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men were carried off to police stations or other temporary prison, subjected there to secret police-office inquisitions commonly known as the “third degree,” their statements written categorically into mimeographed question blanks, and they required to swear to them regardless of their accuracy. The sole excuse for these outrages was the mere presence of the victims at those open and lawful meetings.48

It was open season on leftwing groups, violent or peaceful, revolutionary or reformist. Local officials went to work arresting suspected radicals and breaking up strikes in the name of combatting radicalism. In January 1920 in the New York Assembly expulsion procedures were begun against five legally elected Socialist members, four of whom had already served, and in April they were suspended by an overwhelming majority, the Speaker Thaddeus C. Sweet having declared that the Socialist Party, a party that admitted “admitting within its ranks aliens, enemy aliens” was “absolutely inimical to the best interests of the state of New York and the United States.”49 Notwithstanding this condemnation, the voters in the districts of the Socialists seem to have been satisfied with their choices since all five were re-elected in special elections held in September. Three of the five were again denied their seats, bringing widespread condemnation of the expulsions from members of both parties, with Democratic Governor Al Smith and former Republican Governor, Supreme Court Justice, and presidential candidate Charles Evans Hughes, Theodore Roosevelt, Jr. and Senator Warren G. Harding expressing their revulsion at the Assembly’s actions. Nothing daunted by all the criticism, the Assembly proceeded to pass laws making membership in the Socialist Party illegal, forcing teachers to take loyalty oaths and establishing a State Bureau of Investigation, all vetoed by Governor Al Smith and then passed again over his veto. Meanwhile, other state legislatures were enthusiastically joining the action, with many states passing “red flag” laws making it illegal to display the Socialist red flag and passing their own “anti-syndicalist laws” aimed at general strikes or other radical actions that could be interpreted as aiming to “destroy organized government.”

RED SCARE ANTI-COMMUNISM VS. “COMMONSENSE ANTI-COMMUNISM” The thinking of conservatives on the subject of “Reds” is well-illustrated by a speech given to the Senate by Senator Henry L. Myers, a Democrat

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from Montana on April 28, 1920 on the horrors, some real, some imagined, of the Bolshevik regime. All the elements that characterized red scare logic and rhetoric right through the 1950s were present in this speech that predated McCarthyism by some 30 years and we can profitably examine it to gain an understanding of what distinguished red scare anticommunism from what historian Jennifer Luff has called “commonsense anticommunism.” The first characteristic that marks red scare anti-communism is the explicitly anti-scientific belief that there can be phenomena that have no cause. In his speech, Myers labeled Bolshevism such a phenomenon, something for which there was “neither cause nor justification.” In other words, there were no social conditions that could explain it in this United States “where more liberty is given to the masses, more freedom to its citizens, more rights to its workingmen, more privileges to the whole populace than in any other Government under the sun.” Because it was without cause, Bolshevism could not be “remedied by human agencies”: it was “simply hell in the hearts of men and women” who were “natural criminals.”50 Again, the “criminality” of Bolsheviks/anarchists—the two are confused throughout Myers’s speech—is causeless. Because it is “natural” criminality, it cannot be said to spring from any human conditions and because it does not spring from human conditions, it cannot be remedied by human means or intervention. The only possible cure was an act of God, and “if men and women everywhere had in their hearts the spirit of the Savior of mankind, there would be no Bolshevism.” By way of contrast, if we look at the rhetoric of a “commonsense anti-Communist”—in this case, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt— we find a very different analysis. In a 1936 speech to the Democratic State Convention in Syracuse, New York, Roosevelt argued that “[c]ommunism is a manifestation of the social unrest which always comes with widespread economic maladjustment.” Later in the address, he was more specific about what he believed to be the causes that led people to become so radicalized, saying, “Hunger was breeding it, loss of homes and farms was breeding it, closing banks were breeding it, a ruinous price level was breeding it.” In this analysis there is a remedy short of divine intervention—feeding the hungry, securing their homes and farms, keeping the banking system functioning and controlling price levels. The point here is not that Roosevelt’s remedies were either correct or incorrect, but rather that his way of understanding communism was diametrically opposite that of Myers, with Myers, in effect, asserting that there was no way to understand it at all. With no way to understand it, there was no way to prevent it except, as he makes clear in his speech, forceful suppression.

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Myers was especially alarmed by what he saw to be “widespread sympathy or semi-sympathy” for the Bolsheviks that appeared “to pervade all classes of people and all ranks of society,” including the colleges, the schools, the “ranks of fashion, even the ‘well-to-do and intelligent.’” He also expressed his belief—later mirrored in the activities of anti-Communist organizations such as HUAC and the many “little HUACs” that sprang up around the country—that exposure, getting information to an ignorant public, was the best way to arouse a public that appeared “to be asleep to the dangers which are in their very midst and which are daily growing.” In fact, he believed that the United States was “honeycombed underneath the surface with the vicious activities of hydraheaded monsters and cunning plotters,” and that the country was “reeking and seething with the machinations of disloyalty, sedition, and bolshevism,” aided by unnamed “defenders in high places.”51 Most shocking to Myers were reports (mentioned earlier in connection with the Overman Committee) from the Russian provincial capital, Vladimir, that a decree had been issued establishing a “Bureau of Free Love” where all unmarried girls 18 years and older were required to register before choosing a husband. The man in question was to have no say in this, though unmarried men were also to be able to choose a wife without her consent. Children were to become the “property of the state.” Appalled, Myers expostulated that the Soviets had “utterly destroyed marriage, the home, the fireside, the family, the corner stones of all civilization, all society. They have undertaken to destroy what God created and ordained.”52 Regarding those who had been recently swept up by the Justice Department—indiscriminately labeled “radical Reds, agitators, and undesirable aliens—Myers expressed his comfort with the idea that they all be deported or else “tied in bags and dumped into the middle of the ocean.”53 The sentiment was one expressed by many red scare anticommunists; Billy Sunday, a prominent revivalist, declared, “If I had my way with these ornery, wild-eyed Socialists and I.W.W’s [sic], I would stand them up before a firing squad and save space on our ships” and the president-general of the Daughters of the American Revolution denounced “these foreign leeches” who would destroy “this free Republic if they are not cut and cast out.”54

THE BIG RED SCARE FADES AWAY Nonetheless, the high tide of the Big Red Scare had passed. The Lusk Committee had been the target of much indignation expressed in progressive publications; these journals could be safely ignored, but when

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the New York State Bar Association sponsored a report written by Charles Evans Hughes, Republican presidential candidate in 1916 and future secretary of state and Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, which accused the State Assembly of ignoring the state constitution and the principles of representative government, the members of that body were forced to take notice. This sign that the national hysteria was easing was reinforced when a committee of 12 well-known lawyers and professors of law criticized Attorney General Palmer, accusing him of illegal acts. While J. Edgar Hoover was pressing for more raids, arrests and deportations, more responsible elements of the legal system and the government were asserting themselves, with the Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes ruling that illegally seized evidence could not be used in criminal prosecutions and Secretary of Labor Wilson moving to protect the rights of aliens to counsel during deportation proceedings. Most vigorous in moving against the excesses of the raids was Assistant Secretary of Labor, Louis F. Post who was uniquely positioned to act since he was in charge of deportation proceedings. Demanding that the rights of aliens be respected, Post ordered most of those arrested by Palmer to be released. Palmer struck back with accusations that those who questioned his actions were Communist dupes or sympathizers, but the political tide had turned against him and on June 23, 1920 a federal court ruled that his actions violated civil liberties statutes and that Communist Party membership did not make aliens subject to deportation. Nonetheless, in the end, of the thousands hauled in by the Hoover/Palmer raids, some 600 were deported. However, if greater calm now prevailed, it was mostly because the wave of big strikes had collapsed in defeat, the IWW had been almost obliterated, the Socialist Party was in tatters with the defection of its left wing to the two new Communist parties and those parties, both driven underground by federal action, had seen their membership decreased to a mere 10,000 or so. It was not long before some even found the courage to dub the “Fighting Quaker” the “Quaking Fighter,” the “Faking Fighter” or the “Quaking Quitter.”55 Ironically, it was Palmer himself who may have driven the last nail into the coffin of the Big Red Scare; informed by the ever hyper-vigilant Hoover that May Day of 1920 would see the fruition of a revolutionary scheme to assassinate government officials and blow up government buildings, Palmer sounded a loud and very public alarm and all over the country local authorities, police and militia were on the lookout. When the appointed day came and went without incident, Palmer looked foolish, his presidential ambitions received a mortal blow and the country yawned. Even when someone—probably the same Italian anarchist group known as Galleanists responsible for the 1919 bombings—

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launched a truly horrendous terrorist attack, a bombing of Wall Street in September 1920 which killed 38 people and seriously injured 143, there was no recurrence of the red scare.

IMMIGRATION RESTRICTIONS The Big Red Scare was over, but that did not mean that its effects did not linger; one aspect of American life that was radically affected by changing times was the tradition of nearly unlimited immigration. The 1920s was the decade in which, for the first time in the country’s history, the numbers of immigrants allowed into the country was legally restricted. During the prewar era the inflow of foreigners was encouraged both by liberals who welcomed the world’s politically and economically oppressed people and by businessmen who saw in these newcomers a source of cheap and usually docile labor. However, by the end of the First World War things had changed; for one thing, many Americans were frightened by the growing labor unrest of the early decades of the century which seemed somehow linked to the increasingly powerful leftwing movements in Europe. However, according to historian George Soule, “Those who expected that stopping the influx of immigrants would check the spread of ‘un-American’ and radical ideas were mistaken; there is little evidence that the majority of the new arrivals ever carried such ideas with them.”56 One important factor in the move to curb immigration was one that we see operating in our own time; a great many people with strange languages and different ways had come to the United States within a comparatively short span of time. When there are only a few such, they are easily tolerated; they represent no threat to the natives’ livelihoods or sense of possession of their culture. But when aliens come in great numbers, the question arises among those native to the country, “Will we be overwhelmed? Will our language, our culture, our institutions remain intact? Will these newcomers be assimilated by us or will their cultures take over ours?” The unfamiliar habits and speech of Jews, Italians, Chinese and Japanese grated on American nerves and seemed an intrusion; many decided that it was time to shut the national door. Wartime conditions had cut off most immigration after 1914 but only temporarily. Pogroms during Russia’s civil war led 119,000 Jews to board boats for America and Japanese immigration had been growing as well. In 1920 immigrant arrivals to the United States outnumbered departures by 495,000, rising back to one-half of the prewar level. We have already seen that the war had nourished, as wars always do, national chauvinism; debates were held in Congress centering on the racially “Nordic” character

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of “real” Americans and many Congressmen made no bones about their desire to maintain that particular aspect of the status quo. Large numbers of Americans were worried about being overwhelmed by “different” people, sufficiently many to allow first the passage in June 1921 of a law restricting immigration in any one year to 3 percent of the number of people of any given national origin to 3 percent of those already in the country in 1910 and later the Immigration Act of 1924, signed by Calvin Coolidge on May 26, 1924. This law cut off Japanese immigration altogether while allowing other immigrants to enter for three years only at a rate of 287,000 annually in quantities proportional to the number of their nationality already in the country at the time of the 1890 census. After the three years were up only 150,000 Europeans were to be allowed entry every year with percentages based on fixed quotas set for individual countries. In this way unrestricted immigration came to an end in America.57

THE DOMINANCE OF POLITICAL CONSERVATISM Finally, on the political front fears of the future found expression in an era of conservatism; in 1924 the Democrats ran “an arch-conservative Wall Street lawyer,” John W. Davis, as their nominee. His overwhelming defeat at the polls prevented a repeat of the experiment, but the fact that Democrats even tried to elect a conservative tells something about the temper of the times. In that same election Senator La Follette from Wisconsin took up the liberal and radical slack with a third party race which garnered one-sixth of the popular vote; this, though a good showing for a third party, was no threat to Republican ascendancy. By and large, the 1920s were barren years for radicals and years of worry for progressives; as Frederick Lewis Allen wrote in Only Yesterday, The fear of the radicals was accompanied and followed by the fear of being thought radical. If you wanted to get on in business, to be received in the best circles of Gopher Prairie or Middletown, you must appear to conform . . . A liberal journalist, visiting a formerly outspoken Hoosier in his office, was not permitted to talk politics until his frightened host had closed and locked the door and closed the window.58

These were the years of prohibition, years when respectable intellectuals accepted the false “science” of eugenics, years of the Scopes trial wherein Kansas proudly proclaimed the teaching of actual science (in the form of

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evolution) to be illegal in its schools. The 1924 Johnson-Reed Act passed through Congress, restricting immigration of eastern and southern Europeans and all people of color, partially on the spurious grounds that they were genetically inferior and that same year a resuscitated Ku Klux Klan—anti-African-American, anti-Catholic, anti-Semitic, anti-foreigner as well as anti-radical—played a major role at the Democratic Presidential Convention. The most prominent American event featuring radicals had nothing to do with communism—Communists were operating underground during much of this period, hunted by all authorities—but rather involved two Italian-born anarchists, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, who were accused of murdering a factory paymaster in South Braintree, Massachusetts. Whether they were guilty or not could never have been determined by the kind of judicial process that characterized their trial; the judge dubbed them “those anarchist bastards,” the evidence presented was at best dubious and the biased nature of the procedures precluded any hope of an impartial trial.

THE ANTI-LABOR OFFENSIVE Labor’s general offensive in 1919 having failed, management went over to the offensive, hoping to crush what remained of organized labor with a number of strategies, the most notable of which was the so-called “American Plan,” a reconfigured version of the open shop which would not only relieve employers of the obligation to hire only union members but which would relieve them of any obligation to bargain with any form of union whatsoever. As historian George Soule observed, “[i]n the eyes of unionists, the campaign for the open shop was designed to achieve shops closed against union members.”59 The way that the progenitors of the American Plan put it at a national conference of employers in Chicago on January 21, 1921, was that workers “have the right to work when they please, for whom they please, and on whatever terms are mutually agreed upon between employee and employer and without interference or discrimination on the part of others.”60 With this self-serving logic unionism was denounced as an attack on the freedom of the worker and a tool of Bolshevism. The conference also organized and sponsored a nationwide advertising campaign to bring the American Plan before the public and alert them to the threatened assault on their liberties by the supposedly Bolshevistic forces of organized labor. Another tactic employers used to strike at the unions was the institution of what has become known as “welfare capitalism.” There was a cultural trend to see and portray business and businessmen as the benign

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organizational principle and organizers of society and to see America as occupying a literally sacred place in realizing this vision. Edward Earle Purinton wrote in the Independent in 1921, Among the nations of the earth today America stands for one idea: Business. . . . [I]n this fact lies, potentially, the salvation of the world. Through business properly conceived, managed, and conducted, the human race is finally to be redeemed.61

The most famous exponent of this view was advertising executive Bruce Barton, author of The Man Nobody Knows. Published in 1925 and rising to top the nonfiction bestseller list, it portrayed Jesus as the “founder of modern business” who had “picked up twelve men from the bottom ranks of business and forged them into an organization that conquered the world.”62 In line with this benign vision, company unions were set up as competition to the regular unions. These were mostly started in larger businesses; company unions had only 3 percent of their membership in plants with less than 1,000 employees. The vast majority of employees, however, were totally unorganized by any body, labor or company. Beside or along with the company union some employers explored other tactics that they hoped would render unions irrelevant: these included instituting personnel departments to deal with grievances, suggestion boxes for the deposit of complaints, company housing, pensions and the installation of more comfortable working conditions. Some began selling company stock to employees on an installment plan under the assumption that employees who owned stock would see themselves as part of the company with an interest in its profits. Also some instituted group insurance for employees with workers contributing from their paychecks. Generally, these provided insufficient protection at high prices. And along with the carrot, there was the stick. As had long been the case, strike breaking by violent means was common. Also in order to undermine organizing efforts, some employers employed labor espionage agencies whose task it was to report to the bosses concerning who the active union people were (with the aim of getting rid of them). It was also the task of the spies to create chaos, confusion, fear and resentment against the unions among the rank and file. These efforts succeeded; with union membership declining from a peak of 5,110,800 in 1920 to a low of 3,444,000 in 1929 (most of this loss occurring by 1923 when the membership was 3,592,500) the peace of defeat seemed to come into labor/management relations. By 1925, labor disputes had been reduced by 37 percent from the level of 1916 with only

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48 percent as many workers involved. The trend continued: by 1926–1930, the number of disputes had shrunk to 23 percent of the war and postwar with the number of workers lowered to 13 percent.63 Throughout the 1920s the outlook was bleak for the unions; it was only by the grace of the 1929 crash and the New Deal that they were finally able to find a prominent place in the national life as the 1930s began.

NOTES 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

8 9 10 11

12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21

Jerrold Owen, “Centralia: The Inevitable Clash Between Americanism and AntiAmericanism,” in The American Legion Weekly, Vol. 1, No. 24 (December 12, 1919), 9. Rosa Luxemburg, The Russian Revolution (New York: Workers Age Publishers, 1940), 69. Emma Goldman, My Disillusionment in Russia (New York: Doubleday, Page and Company, 1923), 33. The Socialist Revolutionaries had actually won a plurality in elections that had left Lenin’s Bolsheviks with a mere 25 percent of the vote. Leon Trotsky, Terrorism and Communism: A Reply to Karl Kautsky (Verso Books: Brooklyn, 2007), 51–52. Trotsky, Terrorism and Communism, 54. Woodrow Wilson, War Message to Congress, April 2, 1917, U.S. Department of State, Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States, 1917, Supplement 1, The World War (Washington, D.C., USGPO), 200. “President Schlesinger’s Visit to Russia,” Justice, October 20, 1920, 1. George Henry Soule, Prosperity Decade: From War to Depression, 1917–1929 (New York: Rinehart, 1947), 74. Soule, Prosperity Decade, 210. Committee on Recent Economic Changes of the President’s Conference on Unemployment, Recent Economic Changes in the United States (New York: McGrawHill Book Company, 1929), 480. Regin Schmidt, Red Scare (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2004), 131. Ole Hanson, Americanism versus Bolshevism (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1920), 39. New York Times, February 9, 1919, 3. Kristofer Allerfeldt, Beyond the Huddled Masses: American Immigration and The Treaty of Versailles (New York : Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 118. Schmidt, Red Scare, 132. Todd J. Pfannestiel, Rethinking the Red Scare: The Lusk Committee and New York’s Crusade Against Radicalism, 1919–1923 (New York: Routledge, 2003), 13. New York Times, October 26, 1919, 5. Chicago Daily Tribune, May 1, 1919, 1. Paul Avrich, Sacco and Vanzetti: The Anarchist Background (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), 81. David A. Shannon, The Socialist Party of America: A History (New York: Macmillan, 1955), 122–123.

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22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30

31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47

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Frederick Lewis Allen, Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the Nineteen-Twenties (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1931), 76. Kevin Murphy, Uphill All the Way: The Fortunes of Progressivism, 1919–1929, Ph.D. diss., Columbia, 2013. Albert de Silver, “The Lusk-Stevenson Report: A State Document,” The Nation, Vol. 113, No. 2923 (July 13, 1921), 38. De Silver, “Lusk-Stevenson Report,” 38. De Silver, “Lusk-Stevenson Report,” 39. Charles B. Davenport, Heredity in Relation to Eugenics (New York : Henry Holt and Company, 1911), 219. Madison Grant, The Passing of the Great Race or the Racial Basis of European History (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1936), 50–51. The Nation, Vol. 113, No. 2923, 32. Archibald E. Stevenson, ed. Revolutionary Radicalism: Its History, Purpose and Tactics with an Exposition and Discussion of the Steps being Taken and Required to Curb It, filed April 24, 1920, in the Senate of the State of New York. Vol. 1. Albany, NY: Lyon, 1920. Regin Schmidt, Red Scare: FBI and the Origins of Anticommunism in the United States, 1919-1943 (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2004), 152. New York Times, July 28, 1919, 1. Wall Street Journal, September 12, 1919, 1. David A. Shannon, Between the Wars: America, 1919–1941 (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1965), 27. Shannon, Between the Wars, 24. The Commission of Inquiry, The Interchurch World Movement Report on the Steel Strike of 1919 (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Howe, 1920), 43. The Commission of Inquiry, The Interchurch World Movement Report on the Steel Strike of 1919, 248. Allen, Only Yesterday, 75. Allen, Only Yesterday, 75. The American Legion Weekly, December 7, 9. Washington Post, May 7, 1919, 1. See Alec Campbell, “The Sociopolitical Origins of the American Legion,” Theory and Society, Vol. 39 (2010), 1. doi:10.1007/s11186-009-9097-1 William Pencak, For God and Country: The American Legion, 1919–1941 (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1989), 155–156. David Caute, The Great Fear: The Anti-Communist Purge under Truman and Eisenhower (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1978), 350. Athan G. Theoharis, “The FBI and the American Legion Contact Program, 1940–1966,” Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 100, No. 2 (Summer, 1985), 271–286. Shannon, Between the Wars, 28. Simeon E. Baldwin, “The Growth of Law During the Past Year: Annual Address Delivered Before the Bureau of Comparative Law of the American Bar Association,” Boston, September 3, 1919, 8. Louis Freeland Post, The Deportations Delirium of Nineteen-Twenty (Chicago: C.H. Kerr & Co., 1920), 92.

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49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63

Louis Waldman, Albany: The Crisis in Government (New York : Boni & Liveright, Inc., 1920), 4. Henry L. Myers in Peter G. Filene, ed., American Views of Soviet Russia, 1917–1965 (Homewood, IL : The Dorsey Press, 1968), 42. Filene, American Views of Soviet Russia, 40. Filene, American Views of Soviet Russia, 39. Filene, American Views of Soviet Russia, 42. David Harry Bennett, The Party of Fear: From Nativist Movements to the New Right in American History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 189. Allen, Only Yesterday, 88 Soule, Prosperity Decade, 201. Lucy S. Dawidowicz, On Equal Terms: Jews in America, 1881–1981 (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1982), 88–89. Allen, Only Yesterday, 95. Soule, Prosperity Decade, 200–201. Soule, Prosperity Decade, 200–201. Edward Earle Purinton, “Big Ideas for Big Business: Try Them Out for Yourself!,” Independent, April 16, 1921, 395–396. Bruce Barton, The Man Nobody Knows: A Discovery of the Real Jesus (Indianapolis, IND: Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1925), 6. Soule, Prosperity Decade, 225.

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CHAPTER 3

The New Deal

I

n March 1932, the United States was in the depths of its deepest, longest depression. With a national population of close to 92,000,000 and a labor force of 51.25 million, some 12 million people were out of a job, that is roughly 24 percent. In an era that had more households with a single provider than today, that meant that many, many families had no source of income. Moreover, along with unemployment came under-employed, people who had some work but not enough to pay the bills. According to Detroit Mayor Frank Murphy, 4,000 children a day were standing in breadlines and the city’s suicide rate had risen 30 percent above the average of the previous five years. Dave Moore, an African-American autoworker who later joined the Communist Party, told an interviewer: I hope you never will witness what people went through. People would go down to the old Eastern Market and pick up half-rotten white potatoes or sweet potatoes, lettuce and cabbage, whatever the farmers were throwing away. . . . I came from a family of seven boys and two girls, and the older boys had to leave home. Whatever food there was, was left for the younger ones.1

Many people were desperate and they were exasperated by those, like Henry Ford, who added insult to injury by blaming unemployment on the unemployed, claiming that that “anyone who really wanted a job could find one, if they looked.”2 Meanwhile Ford’s own response to the economic pressures of the times was: (1) to announce that the company would not be contributing to any funds to help the unemployed, and (2) to lay off some 91,000 workers while forcing those who remained to work harder and faster.

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Communists during this period saw an immense opportunity to foment the discontent with capitalism that they hoped might move America toward revolution; they were busy preventing evictions and organizing rent strikes, protests, marches and rallies (declaring March 6, 1930, International Unemployment Day). They encouraged confrontations with the police and often stood in the front lines, taking the brunt of the billy clubs and the tear gas. So, with the Communist Party being one of the few groups in the country willing—eager—to relate to this desperation, in February 1932, it made plans for two of its organizations, the Trade Union Unity League (TUUL) and the Detroit Unemployed Council, to lead a march to the employment office of the Ford plant in Dearborn to protest conditions and to present a list of demands on behalf of the unemployed. March 7 was chosen as the day to march and, despite bitter cold (“one of the coldest days of the winter, with a frigid gale whooping out of the northwest” according to the Detroit Times3), somewhere between 3,000 and 5,000 people gathered about a mile from the Ford plant in Dearborn. Though organized by Communists, the great majority of the racially mixed crowd were not Communists. When they were ready to move, Communist march leader Albert Goetz gave a talk, urging, “We don’t want any violence! Remember, all we are going to do is to walk to the Ford employment office. No trouble, no fighting. Stay in line. Be orderly.” At the Dearborn city line, they were met by 30 to 40 police officers on motorcycles, horses and in cars, blocking their route. The marchers ignored police orders to halt and the police responded with tear gas and billy clubs. Good-humored until now, with the gas stinging their eyes, the crowd became angry. A young girl moved to the front, yelling, “Come on, you damn cowards, let’s give it to ‘em!” Dave Moore remembered: They turned the water hose on us first. That didn’t stop us. We kept going. Then they had about eight mounted policemen come through to break our ranks. That didn’t stop us. We got within about 40 or 50 yards of the Ford employment office on Miller Road when three cars came roaring out the gate. One guy had a machine gun over his shoulder, riding on the running board of the car. I don’t know what the other guy had on the passenger side, but this guy was standing on the driver’s side. There were three or four other cars that followed them. All of a sudden gun shots were heard. People began to scream and scatter.4

And a photographer from a Detroit newspaper reported:

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Suddenly through the mob raced a Ford car containing two men, one of whom, I learned later, was Harry Bennett, chief of Ford’s private police. The car and its occupants were showered with rocks. I left the bridge and raced down to get a picture as I saw Bennett, reeling from a bleeding gash in the head, get out of the car and slump to the road in the space between the mob and the gate.5

The police believed Bennett had been shot and any restraint they had shown hitherto came to an end; hundreds of shots were fired into the crowd, many of them from a submachine gun. When it all ended, four marchers—all members of the Young Communist League—were dead and two dozen were wounded and under arrest, many chained to their hospital beds. No policemen had been shot, though some 25 were injured by thrown rocks, bricks and other debris. In the immediate aftermath, Detroit newspapers united in printing incorrect accounts of the event, claiming that the marchers had fired on the police. The Detroit Free Press editorialized, “These professional Communists alone are morally guilty of the assaults and killings which took place before the Ford plant.”6 However, as the dust settled, the press— calmer now—reassessed events, with the Detroit Times concluding that ‘[t]he killing of obscure workmen, innocent of crime” was “a blow directed at the very heart of American institutions.” Ford security chief, Harry Bennet, said Detroit Mayor Frank Murphy, was an “inhuman brute” and Henry Ford himself a “terrible man.” Events like this or the Bonus March on Washington when hungry veterans gathered in the nation’s capital city to ask for help in the form of bonuses for their First World War service made many fear that the desperation of the times could indeed bring about a Communist revolution. Indeed, Franklin D. Roosevelt himself argued that his radical program called the New Deal was a necessary response to the Depression if capitalism were to be saved. However, one response to the novelty of a governmental response to help the needy would be a new type of red scare: the anxieties expressed in the uproars caused by the Paris Commune, the Haymarket explosion and the first Big Red Scare had been focused on fear of foreigners as well as ideas that were deemed to be foreign. However, in the red scare of the 1950s, though the fear of foreign ideas persisted, the feared carriers of those ideas were fellow Americans, all the more frightening because as nativeborn Americans, there was nothing obvious to set them apart from their neighbors, not their appearance, not their speech.

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Moreover, before the 1930s, the focus of red scare fears had been local. Now, though state and municipal governments and institutions continued to be active agents in ferreting out Communists, there was a new source of worry: the federal government. Beginning in the 1930s and steadily increasing through the 1940s and 1950s, there were substantial numbers of Americans who believed that the elected officials and civil servants of the federal government included agents or dupes of a Communist conspiracy that sought to take over the United States. The roots of the red scare of the 1950s can be found in the reaction of conservatives to the liberal federal programs that emerged in response to the Great Depression of the 1930s, i.e., the New Deal. Conservative thinking was based on the belief that freedom and independence—the ability to take care of your own needs without depending on others—are synonymous. In colonial times a world of subsistence farmers who could take care of all their own and their families’ needs might have had a fleeting reality but subsistence farming had not remained the dominant way of life for long in America; farmers who grew food for their own consumption had soon turned into farmers who grew food to sell and in market economies no one is independent: buyer depends on seller and seller depends on buyer. By the early twentieth century the heyday of independent farming as the dominant American way of life was over and the country was increasingly dominated by great businesses that employed many thousands of men toiling for low wages, men with little prospect of getting ahead. Yet the myth of the independent man still lingered, still, to many, represented the American dream and the American norm. Then, in 1929 the stock market crashed. Unemployment took on catastrophic proportions. America had had depressions before; the standard view was that depressions were events that would last for a couple of years and then, because of reduced wages and lowered prices, spending would start to pick up. As more goods were purchased, businesses would respond by expanding, and things would come back to normal. However, in this case two years into the depression there was a new wave of bank failures and in 1932 and 1933 conditions were more dire than ever. The president, Republican Herbert Hoover, believed he had reached the limit of his ability and the ability of government to respond to this catastrophe, but he kept on promising Americans that if they would just be patient, prosperity was just around the corner. His opponent, Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt did not promise anything in particular during the campaign, except fiscal responsibility, but under the circumstances, the voters believed that the smiling, energetic, upbeat Roosevelt offered more hope than the dour Hoover and they changed presidents.

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As governor of New York, Roosevelt had already shown a willingness to use the power of government to alleviate the pain and suffering that so many Americans were experiencing, supporting unemployment insurance and old age pensions. Now he was president and the call for help was almost universal, not only from the many unemployed, but also from businesses under severe pressure from falling prices and falling sales. The banks were under severe stress, losing money from loans and investments gone bad; they also faced the danger that their depositors might lose confidence in the safety of the money that they had entrusted to the banks and start withdrawing their funds en masse. Workers and businessmen alike were calling out for help. The general assumption that had long dominated American politics had been that government had no role to play in this kind of disaster, that markets could and would regulate themselves and that after a brief period of pain things would get better. Now that self-correction hadn’t happened. It wasn’t happening. It did not seem as though it were about to happen. Some years later, in an address he gave in Syracuse, New York, Roosevelt reminded his audience of the situation he had inherited upon coming into office, asking them, Do I need to recall to you the fear of those days—the reports of those who piled supplies in their basements, who laid plans to get their fortunes across the border, who got themselves hideaways in the country against the impending upheaval? Do I need to recall the law-abiding heads of peaceful families, who began to wonder, as they saw their children starve, how they would get the bread they saw in the bakery window? Do I need to recall the homeless boys who were traveling in bands through the countryside seeking work, seeking food—desperate because they could find neither? Do I need to recall the farmers who banded together with pitchforks to keep the sheriff from selling the farm home under foreclosure? Do I need to recall the powerful leaders of industry and banking who came to me in Washington in those early days of 1933 pleading to be saved?

In the general mood of desperation there was very little opposition, whether from workers or businessmen or bankers, to the federal government stepping in, and in the course of the next few years Roosevelt and New Deal liberals were able with little opposition to push through legislation that would transform the relationship of Americans to their government.

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The Democratic Party The Democratic Party is the older of the two major political parties in the United States, going back to the presidency of Andrew Jackson. Its founding principles were nearly opposite to what they are currently: until the 1930s, the Democrats opposed a strong federal government and favored states’ rights. During the Civil War the faction of the Northern Democrats known as the “Peace Democrats” was sympathetic to the rebelling South and stood in opposition to the dominant Republicans. Meanwhile, the new Republican Party had absorbed the nativist Know-Nothings while the Democrats were more friendly to and dependent on working-class immigrants, especially urban immigrant Irish voters. This led to strange results when the war was over: the party of Lincoln was anathema in the defeated South which became the “Solid South,” that is, solidly Democratic. This meant that in the South, the Democrats were the conservative, anti-labor party of white supremacy while in the North a strong immigrant representation pushed the Democrats toward more liberal positions, much more sympathetic toward unions. This bifurcated party—ranging from reactionary racists like James Eastland, Theodore Bilbo and Pat McCarran to liberals like Robert Wagner and Fiorello LaGuardia—was the one inherited by Franklin D. Roosevelt. Holding together the “Roosevelt coalition” took, in the end, more political skill than even he could muster and after 1937 he was faced with strong conservative opposition within his own party. The migration of large numbers of AfricanAmericans from the South (where they could not vote) to the North (where they could) left Democratic politicians with a stark political choice: stand in favor of racial segregation and alienate the black vote or in favor of civil rights and alienate the white Southern vote. As the party under Truman and his Democratic successors moved more solidly in favor of integration and maintained its support of welfare state policies, the most conservative elements of the party fell away, moving into the Republican camp.

Roosevelt argued that the Depression was indeed a crisis of capitalism, “a crisis made to order for all those who would overthrow our form of government.” Like other modern liberals he argued that government programs were necessary to save capitalism by ensuring that it did not ossify into a system that could not meet the basic needs of American citizens. Looking back, he said, We were against revolution. Therefore, we waged war against those conditions which make revolutions—against the inequalities and resentments which breed them. In America in 1933 the people did not attempt to remedy wrongs by overthrowing their

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institutions. Americans were made to realize that wrongs could and would be set right within their institutions. We proved that democracy can work.7

In effect, this meant carving out an entirely new role for the federal and state governments, that of the protector of citizens in the face of systemic failures associated with the market. More specifically, this entailed a raft of new government programs to arrest the collapse of the nation’s financial system, to address the crisis in agriculture and industry and to offer relief to the many individuals and families who had been engulfed by disaster. With strong Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress and a sufficient number of acquiescent Republicans, the Roosevelt administration pushed through massive liberal legislation to deal with the immediate emergency, shoring up and reforming banking and the workings of Wall Street, to creating jobs for the unemployed, helping home owners keep their homes, preventing farmers from losing their land and bringing electricity to rural areas. The National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) represented an unsuccessful attempt to restructure business relations altogether, mitigating competitive relations between business and business, and also between business and labor. A second wave of legislation starting in 1935 was geared, not simply to address the present emergency conditions, but also to make sure they did not recur; it included higher taxes on the wealthy, strict regulations for private utilities and subsidies for rural electrification. And for the first time ever the federal government extended protection to organized labor: first, the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 gave federal protection to the collective bargaining process and later, the federal Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 mandated maximum hours and minimum wages for most categories of workers. Also, in 1935 Congress enacted the Social Security Act, comprising three major programs—a government administered retirement fund, unemployment insurance and welfare grants (Aid to Dependent Children) for local distribution to single female parents who were in need. These programs represented a fundamental reformulation of the role of government in the United States and it was only natural that there should be those who would resist it, especially those who were paying the new higher taxes and those who were obliged for the first time to engage in collective bargaining with their employees. Just as there were many Americans who loved Roosevelt for what they believed he had done for them, there were many who hated him for what they believed he had done to them and there were those who were simply ideologically opposed to the new programs, alarmed that they formed an entering wedge for

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real socialism in the United States. Some dubbed him a “traitor to his class” (he was from a wealthy family). Republican Representative Robert Rich of Pennsylvania proclaimed that “Roosevelt is a socialist, not a Democrat,”8 and Senator Simeon D. Fess (R-Ohio) declared that “[t]he New Deal is now undisguised state socialism.”9 Thomas Schall, the blind Republican Senator from Minnesota, declared Roosevelt to be “the first Communist president of the United States . . . acclaimed in the Communists Russian newspapers” and suggested that “[t]he next election will definitely settle whether we will continue a republic or be on our way to Moscow.”10 And then there was the Republican National Committee, which came out and charged that “[t]he New Deal was tainted with communism from its very inception” and that “men who advocated revolution, who calmly discussed how much blood should be shed” were “controlling [Roosevelt’s] actions.”11 Joining the attacks and bolstering the notion that the New Deal was a “Red Deal” were the newspapers of William Randolph Hearst—all 28 of them along with 13 magazines and 8 radio stations, reaching a total audience of some 28,000,000—and Colonel Robert R. McCormick’s Chicago Tribune. McCormick came straight out in an editorial with the bald statement “Mr. Roosevelt is a Communist” and asserted that the federal government was now “dominated by a Communist element.”12 Hearst, only very slightly more subtly, went the route of guilt by association, charging that Communists had infiltrated the New Deal, though he was not willing to say in a long editorial published on the front page of all his newspapers whether the “President willingly or unwillingly received the support of the Karl Marx Socialists, the Frankfurter radicals, Communists and anarchists, the Tugwell bolsheviks13 and the Richberg revolutionists which constitute the bulk of his following” but the president had “done his best to DESERVE the support of all such disturbing and destructive elements.”14 Meanwhile, his newspapers printed little poems with verses that sang of: A Red New Deal with a Soviet Seal Endorsed by a Moscow hand The strange result of an alien cult In a liberty loving land.15

THE FUNDAMENTAL CONFLICT In his Syracuse speech Roosevelt responded, charging that “[d]esperate in mood, angry at failure, cunning in purpose, individuals and groups are seeking to make Communism an issue in an election where Communism

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is not a controversy between the two major parties.” In this and other speeches Roosevelt developed a consistent line of logic: ideologically, Republicans and Democrats were united in abhorring communism and in espousing the institutions of a market economy based on private property. And Roosevelt explicitly repudiated “the support of any advocate of Communism or of any other alien ‘ism’ which would by fair means or foul change our American democracy.” At stake in the argument between Roosevelt and his opponents was the meaning of the word “freedom.” A key political principle of classical liberalism from the time of John Locke and also articulated by Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence was that since governments derive “their just powers from the consent of the governed,” it followed that it was also the right of the governed to change the form of government if that government was not deemed to serve the needs of the governed. Now America was faced by a great disaster and it was clear to most people that there was something perverse about it—there was plenty of food, but farmers couldn’t sell it because agricultural prices were too low; it cost them more to store the crops and transport them than they could recoup in sales so the food never made it to market. Farmers unable to repay their loans were losing their farms to the banks. Meanwhile many other Americans went hungry because they had no money to buy the food that the farmers couldn’t sell. Many people were losing their homes because they had no jobs and there were no jobs to be found at even the lowest wage. Roosevelt and the New Deal liberals in Congress believed that if nothing were done by a democratically elected government to alleviate this situation, then Americans might well lose faith in their system of government and economics and turn to radical solutions such as communism and fascism, both forms of totalitarianism that were on the rise in Europe. Inaction in the face of disaster, Roosevelt claimed, was what had encouraged the growth of the Communist Party. As he said in a radio broadcast speech on economic conditions: Democracy has disappeared in several other great nations – disappeared not because the people of those nations disliked democracy, but because they had grown tired of unemployment and insecurity, of seeing their children hungry while they sat helpless in the face of government confusion, government weakness, weakness through lack of leadership in government. Finally, in desperation, they chose to sacrifice liberty in the hope of getting something to eat.16

Roosevelt argued that communism was “a manifestation of the social unrest which always comes with widespread economic maladjustment,” and he

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claimed that the chief difference between Republicans and Democrats was that “[w]e in the Democratic party have not been content merely to denounce this menace. We have been realistic enough to face it.”17 The core political question was one that still continues to dominate our political discourse: the heart of classical liberal thought from the time of Adam Smith was the belief that markets are self-regulating through the three principles of supply, demand and competition. Governments interfere with markets at the dual cost of diminishing the efficient operation of those markets and of impinging on the liberty of citizens by using one person’s taxes without his or her individual consent to benefit a person other than him or herself. So, for example, government aid to the unemployed forces the wealthy to pay for the poor, whether they want to or not, thus doing the wealthy an injustice by forcibly taking their property to benefit another and removing their freedom to do what they want with their property. Also, early American opposition to corporations was based on the fact that corporations were governmentcreated entities that gave special privileges—usually a monopoly—that were not available to other actors in the market. At the heart of this view lies the notion often called “atomistic individualism,” or the idea that there is no such thing as society, but only individuals existing as selfinterested units with no intrinsic tie or obligations to each other. In this view, government is something to be minimized insofar as its actions might interfere with the freedom of individuals to follow their own best interests according to their own lights. So, in conservative eyes, government in its entirety is something to be viewed with great suspicion as a necessary evil, a nexus of power that is likely to infringe on the freedom of individuals and whose power, therefore, should be restricted as much as possible. Roosevelt and those who agreed with him had a different view of government. To him, a government, that, like his predecessor’s, Herbert Hoover, tolerated mass hunger because of an ideological belief that to feed people was wrong because it would make them dependent (an argument Hoover had made), was one that could not last. Most fundamentally, Roosevelt argued that freedom is not simply a formal right to do as one chooses within the limits prescribed by law. Freedom, in his view, is a positive state that offers human beings meaningful choices: “‘Necessitous men are not free men,’” he said, “Liberty requires opportunity to make a living – a living decent according to the standard of the time, a living which gives man not only enough to live by, but something to live for.”18 In other words, the ability to merely survive, the “freedom” to merely survive, is no freedom at all.

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Moreover, Roosevelt noted elsewhere that: [t]he same man who tells you that he does not want to see the government interfere in business—and he means it, and has plenty of good reasons for saying so—is the first to go to Washington and ask the government for a prohibitory tariff on his product

and that while it has been American doctrine that the government must not go into business in competition with private enterprises, still it has been traditional particularly in Republican administrations for business urgently to ask the government to put at private disposal all kinds of government assistance.19

But more than that, Roosevelt argued against the view that sees government “as something apart from the people.” He encouraged Americans not to “forget that government is ourselves and not an alien power over us. The ultimate rulers of our democracy are not a President and Senators and Congressmen and Government officials but the voters of this country.” In other words, in a democratic republic the government elected by and presumably representative of the people has, in some sense, an equivalency with the people. Therefore, Roosevelt argued that government—and this was in many ways the defining difference between liberals and conservatives—is “something to be used by the people for their own good.” Roosevelt liberals believed in a social contract in which people were free to pursue their own welfare but in which at the same time there were mutual obligations, especially to help those who through no fault of their own were faced with material want. The natural medium of that aid, as he explained at length in an address at Marietta, Ohio on July 8, 1938, was government, a tool which, he asserted, Americans historically had viewed as the “greatest single instrument of cooperative self-help with the aid of which they could get things done.” It was with government aid that roads had been built, that railroads had joined communities. In this view, government was not some sinister force seeking to deprive individuals of their freedom but merely “another form of the cooperation of good neighbors.”20 Then, launching into a remarkable rhetorical offensive against the core claim of Republicans, i.e., that the GOP represented traditional American conservative values against the radical innovations of the Democratic New Deal, Roosevelt went on to assert that, in truth, New Deal Democrats were the true conservators of the American heritage. Why? Because the

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The Republican Party The “Party of Lincoln” was born as a coalition of opponents to slavery, advocates of federal involvement in infrastructure projects to build the economic strength of the country and anti-Catholic nativists. As heirs to the economic policies of the old Whig Party, Republicans emerged as the party of big government favoring business interests. The GOP-dominated Congress passed a tariff that protected northeastern business interests from foreign competition, National Banking Acts that established a system of national charters for banks, the Pacific Railway Act of 1862 which deeply involved the federal government in committing enormous national resources to aiding privately-owned corporations in the building of four transcontinental railroads, subsidies for port improvements, along with the Morrill Act establishing land grant colleges in the various states. In the postwar period the party continued as the party of big business with its support of a gold-based currency (beneficial to banking interests because it encouraged high interest rates), high tariffs (which kept prices of domestically manufactured protected goods high at the expense of consumers), massive government assistance to railroad entrepreneurs and policies generally friendly toward corporations. However, though the main thrust of Republican policies were pro-business, there were significant fissures within the party, especially after 1900: many liberal Republicans who favored policies that included government regulation of railroad rates, regulation to prevent fraud by life insurance companies and regulations of prices charged by electrical companies, became prominent on the national stage: Theodore Roosevelt, Robert M. Lafollette, Ernest Borah, Charles Evans Hughes and later on, Jacob Javits of New York and Oregon’s Mark Hatfield. Also, within the conservative fold, there was a Wall Street/Main Street split marked by tensions between the internationalist, moderate and mostly eastern big-business interests that supported Eisenhower’s candidacy and those further to the Right who supported a severely limited role for government and Senator Robert A. Taft (nicknamed “Mr. Republican”) of Ohio. Among this latter group, in some areas of the country one could find many who were so conservative that they were convinced that Eisenhower was a Communist!

“most serious threat to our institutions comes from those who refuse to face the need for change,” and the “true conservative seeks to protect the system of private property and free enterprise by correcting such injustices and inequalities as arise from it.”21 By and large, conservatives—Roosevelt’s opponents—did not merely hold that what they saw as traditional American individualism was better than Roosevelt’s middle way between individual and collective action:

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they held that there could be no such middle way. To conservatives, the New Deal’s middle way was either collectivism—that is socialism or communism—in disguise or else it was a first step toward it. Therefore, as an approach to social problems, it was not merely inferior to a more individualistic approach, it was a betrayal of individualism altogether. On a less theoretical level, the New Deal effected a modest redistribution of wealth and economic power. Programs like the old age pensions of the Social Security Act or unemployment insurance forced employers to pay money to workers who were no longer employed by them while the legal protections for unions embodied in the Wagner Act gave powers to workers versus their employers that they had never enjoyed before. It established a government agency to enforce its provisions that helped workers organize unions and levied money fines on employers who would not sit down with unions to bargain with them. Roosevelt’s appointments to the National Labor Relations Board included some very liberal, pro-union men who interpreted the Wagner Act in an especially pro-union way. Meanwhile laws regulating stock markets and banking—designed to avoid the destabilizing actions by banks and brokers that had encouraged the crash of 1929—restricted the ways in which bankers and investors could make money and obligated them to be honest in their dealings with the public. All of this was innovative and to many businessmen all of it seemed like an intolerable intrusion of government into private business. How far might it go? Where would it end? It is worth noting that this issue of government involvement in the economy was not something new in American history. Back in the 1830s the supporters of Andrew Jackson had complained about what they viewed as unjustified federal economic activism in creating corporations and building infrastructure. At the same time, the South was complaining and would continue to complain about federal activism in creating protective tariffs that favored Northern industrialists. And, of course, leading up to the Civil War the South complained most bitterly about what they believed to be unjustified federal economic activism in hampering the free movement of their human property, i.e., slaves; African-Americans—soon to be citizens of the United States—, not unnaturally, had a different view of the matter. Interestingly, there was relatively little outcry about one of the most massive federal interventions into the economy, the gigantic Republican-sponsored land grants and subsidies to the early transcontinental railroads. And along with that had gone other substantial federal programs such as the creation of the land grant colleges. So federal economic activism was nothing new: what was new was for that activism to be explicitly on behalf of lower-income Americans.

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CONSERVATIVES PUSH BACK It did not take long—just about a year—for some conservative forces to start pushing back against New Deal liberals’ revolutionary use of government. In March, 1934—while conservative Republican and Democratic politicians were still reeling—John J. Raskob, vice president of the Du Pont organization and retired chairman of the Democratic Party urged R.R.M. Carpenter, a retired Du Pont vice president to join him in creating an organization whose purpose would be “to protect society from the sufferings which it is bound to endure if we allow Communistic elements to lead the people to believe that all businessmen are crooks.”22 What took shape out of this was the American Liberty League, a conservative business organization dedicated to discrediting the New Deal whose financial backbone was the Du Pont brothers and the executives of General Motors. In those first years of the New Deal there was little that conservatives, however well-heeled, could say or do to slow, much less stop, the forward motion of New Deal liberalism. The 1934 off-year elections were a triumph for the Democrats and the presidential year elections of 1936 were much the same. However, that year Roosevelt’s one-time political ally, former New York governor Al Smith, went on the attack against the New Deal, once again sounding the alarm against collectivism; at a Liberty League banquet, Smith warned, “This country was organized on the principles of representative democracy, and you can’t mix Socialism or Communism with that. They are like oil and water; they refuse to mix.” At the end of his talk, he re-articulated his rejection of the legitimacy of what we now call a “mixed economy,” telling his audience, Now, in conclusion let me give this solemn warning. There can be only one Capital, Washington or Moscow! There can be only one atmosphere of government: the clear, pure, fresh air of free America, or the foul breath of Communistic Russia. There can be only one flag: the Stars and Stripes, or the Red Flag of the Godless Union of the Soviet. There can be only one National Anthem: The Star Spangled Banner or the Internationale.23

One person who heartily refuted the notion that the New Deal was socialistic was the leader of the Socialist Party, Norman Thomas. Smith had accused Roosevelt of, in effect, carrying out the Socialist platform; Thomas riposted “Emphatically, Mr. Roosevelt did not carry out the Socialist platform, unless he carried it out on a stretcher.” Thomas went on to point out that “there is nothing Socialist about trying to regulate

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or reform Wall Street. Socialism wants to abolish the system of which Wall Street is an appropriate expression.” Moreover, “[t]here is no socialism at all about taking over all the banks which fell in Uncle Sam’s lap, putting them on their feet again, and turning them back to the bankers to see if they can bring them once more to ruin.” He criticized unemployment insurance on the ground that “[i]n the name of security, [Roosevelt] gave us a bill where in order to get security the unemployed workers will first have to get a job, then lose a job.” In all, Thomas said, what Roosevelt had created was not “state socialism” as conservatives had charged but rather state capitalism; that is to say, a system under which the State steps in to regulate and in many cases to own, not for the purpose of establishing production for use but rather for the purpose of maintaining in so far as may be possible the profit system with its immense rewards of private ownership and its grossly unfair division of the national income.

And finally, Thomas pinpointed the definitive distinction between Old Deal and New Deal capitalism versus socialism and its offspring, communism: Republicans and Democrats alike wanted “somehow to keep the profit system. Socialism means to abolish that system.”24 There is a saying that a man who stands in the middle of the road gets hit from both directions; so it was with the New Deal, with conservatives aiming at it from the right, calling it “state socialism” or communism, and Socialists taking aim from the left, dubbing it “state capitalism.” The one group that seemed most erratic in its attitude was the group that was most controversial—the Communists. International Communist policy was promulgated by the Communist International, usually shortened according to the Russian fashion to Comintern. It was this body which represented international communism and to which all Communists affiliated with the Comintern owed allegiance. However, the Comintern itself was dominated by its Russian membership and this in turn was dominated by the Russian Communist Party which, finally, by this time was thoroughly dominated by Josef Stalin. In other words, Comintern policies and hence the policies of member Communist parties expressed the domestic and foreign policy needs of the Soviet Union.25 At its Sixth Congress in 1928 the Comintern had declared the movement toward the world revolution to be in a “Third Period” during which capitalism the world over would be collapsing, a period which called for greater worker militancy than ever. Social Democrats and reform socialists were dubbed “social fascists” and were to be considered the main

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impediment to the ultimate triumph of the masses over their exploiters. However, by the meeting of the Seventh Comintern Congress in the summer of 1935 the rise of German Nazism with its intense hostility to communism and its geographical proximity to the Soviet Union had persuaded Stalin that a change of course was necessary. The Communist parties of the world were instructed to form antifascist alliances—popular fronts—with anybody opposed to fascism who would have anything to do with Communists. To most Americans Communists were beyond the pale, but that group which Doug Rossinow has dubbed “left-liberals,” which Judy Kutulas calls “progressives,” and which anti-communist liberal Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. less charitably called “doughface progressives”26 found that many of their most dearly cherished causes—racial equality and industrial democracy being among the most prominent—though totally ignored by the two mainstream parties, were ones also espoused by the Communist Party, a Communist party that was now willing to make common cause with groups it had once spurned. The issue of the “left liberals” is complicated by the question of whether they can be considered liberals at all. As a group they did not tend to have the same commitment to the institutions of private property held by Roosevelt and what we might call “mainstream liberals,” but rather they aspired, though they were not formally affiliated with either the Communist Party or the Socialist Party, to some form of socialism, however vaguely defined or conceived. Despising racism, believing that the existence of hunger in the midst of plenty was an obscenity, they were willing to take their allies where they could find them, and if Communists, with their embrace of a radical egalitarianism, were willing to fight fascism, racism and poverty and promote unions in the name of radical democratic values, then that made Communists worthy allies. In their treatments of the Popular Front, scholars have tended to fall into two groups: one sees the issue of the role of Communists in the Popular Front as secondary, distracting unnecessarily from the more important matter of the vitality, creativity and humanity of the movement as a whole, while the other group sees the Communist link as critical and central, demonstrating the naïveté of left liberals who trusted in the commitment to democracy of a leading element that followed wherever its foreign bosses in the Soviet Union told it to go. What matters in the present context is not so much which of these schools of thought is correct but rather the fact that the left-liberal/Communist alliance allowed antiNew Deal Republicans and conservative Democrats to make the following connecting thread: Communist to left-liberal to mainstream liberal to New Deal, resulting in the formulation of the so-called “Communist New Deal.” During the 1930s, a successful direct assault on New Deal programs

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like Social Security, unemployment insurance, bank and stock market regulation, etc. was impossible because of the great popularity of those programs. To be sure, that did not prevent conservatives from criticizing the New Deal, insisting that the idea of government action to reduce social ills was intrinsically communistic and “un-American.” A major problem for Roosevelt was that by the spring of 1937 he had lost the support of many conservative Democrats who early on had been allies. Among those who had fallen away was his vice president, John Nance Garner. There were many sources of grievance for conservatives: the New Deal’s deficit spending with the accompanying increase in the national debt, Roosevelt’s (unsuccessful) effort to expand the Supreme Court after it had struck down much of the New Deal legislation. And then there were the administration’s policies with regard to labor. The Wagner Act had given labor an unprecedented boost in its ongoing contest with management, guaranteeing workers’ rights to organize into trade unions and engage in collective bargaining. It had also created a National Labor Relations Board to make sure that workers had the opportunity to vote on whether or not they wanted to organize into a union. For the federal government to take action to protect labor was unprecedented; in the past most government action at the federal, state and municipal levels had been to protect employers from their striking workers, often with the use of troops, militia or police. Federal courts had long been happy to provide employers with injunctions against strikes under the Sherman Antitrust Act, a law that Congress had passed to restrict businesses, not unions. The new state of affairs was sharply highlighted when the newly formed United Auto Workers adopted a novel strategy in forcing General Motors to recognize their union, the sit-down strike. Rather than workers leaving the job and forming a picket line outside to discourage other employees from entering, the automobile workers actually occupied the factory, effectively preventing the company, which refused to negotiate, from hiring strikebreakers to resume productions. When police attempted to enter the plant on January 11, 1937, strikers successfully resisted. Alfred P. Sloan, President of General Motors, declared, “The issue is perfectly clear. Will a labor organization run the plants of General Motors Corporation or will the management continue to do so?”27 Conservatives generally were appalled: the strikers were at best trespassers on property owned by someone else and in their minds it was the government’s obvious duty to exercise its police power and eject them. If those who owned property could not feel and be secure in that ownership, then the viability of capitalism itself was brought into question. And conservatives liked to

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remember Virginia patriot Arthur Lee’s words back in 1775: “The Right of property is the guardian of every other Right, and to deprive the people of this, is to deprive them of their Liberty.” In other words, nothing less than liberty itself was at stake and a government that refused to act to protect property was a government that had turned its back on freedom. Historian Kim Phillips-Fein notes: Business conservatives . . . worried about the political mobilization of their workers which seemed implicit in the model of industrial unionism. They feared that unions would turn workers out to the polls to press for higher Social Security benefits more public spending and an expanded welfare state . . . unions seemed to business conservatives to be the embodiment of the most social-democratic tendencies within liberals. Defeating them was therefore the key to undoing the New Deal order.28

Michigan’s new governor, Democrat Frank Murphy, had been elected with labor’s support and he declined to use the National Guard against the sit-down strikers. Behind the scenes Murphy urged General Motors (GM) to negotiate and as the strike wore on, Roosevelt also refused to deploy force against the strikers, instead authorizing Secretary of Labor Perkins to threaten GM with some kind of economic retaliation if it did not agree to bargain with the Autoworkers’ Union. Among those deeply disturbed by the sit-down strikes were Vice President John Nance Garner of Texas and his fellow Texan and protégé, Representative Martin Dies, Jr. Garner had advocated federal intervention in the sit-down strikes on behalf of GM and Roosevelt’s refusal to acquiesce had alienated the vice president. The two decided that it was time to act to counter the pro-labor tendencies of the Roosevelt administration. Dies had attempted to get House approval of an investigation into the sit-down strikes but had been unsuccessful; the question then, was what to do? There had been a proposal floated in the House of Representatives by a representative from New York City, Samuel Dickstein, to investigate Nazi activity in the United States. In 1934 he persuaded the House of Representatives to adopt a resolution to create a committee, generally known as the McCormack-Dickstein Committee, to investigate the issue. The McCormack-Dickstein hearings were not particularly fruitful and when, in 1937, Dickstein introduced a resolution for a new committee to conduct further investigations, the response of the House of Representatives was tepid, with Representative Johnson of Minnesota asking, “What is meant by un-American activities?”29 Now, with the vice president and Dies looking to counter the La Follette Committee, the Congress of

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Industrial Organizations (CIO) and the president, Dies joined forces with Dickstein, an unlikely ally if ever there was one. A new special committee was born, headed by Dies. Now that the committee had been brought into being, conservative senior Southern Democrats did not merely sideline Dickstein; they altogether excluded him, with Representative Joseph Shannon of Missouri explaining, “An investigation of this kind should not be headed by a foreign-born citizen.” This left Dies— who had jocularly given himself the title of “President of the House of Demagogues” and who, because he had authored legislation aimed at immigrants, was rather popular among American Nazi sympathizers—free to pursue leftwing radicals with only the occasional gesture toward Nazis and other extremists on the right. Heading a committee that was dominated by a coalition of conservatives of both parties, Dies assured the House that he “was not inclined to look under every bed for a Communist.”30 That did not reassure all the members of the House: Patrick of Alabama again asked “But what is Un-Americanism?” and Maury Maverick of Texas gave an answer: “Un-American is simply something that somebody else does not agree to.” And finally O’Malley of Wisconsin warned “Whenever a parliamentary body in any country of the world has found itself unable to deal with the economic problems that face the people, they go on a witch hunt.”31 Warnings notwithstanding, the Dies resolution passed with a vote of 191 to 41. The foremost biographer of HUAC, Walter Goodman, observed that “the conduct of a Congressional investigation generally proceeds from the temperament and objectives of the committee chairman”32 and so it was here. With the chairman having freedom to set rules of procedure, free from the restraints and protections for accused and witnesses that a courtroom imposes, Dies, who had urged the press not to label anyone “un-American” merely because of “an honest difference of opinion with respect to some economic, political or social question,” went to work to place that label on the entire New Deal through a campaign of stigmatizing New Deal supporters as Communists. This marks the beginning of what historians have dubbed the “Little Red Scare,” a heightening of anticommunist activity that lasted until the United States’ entry into the Second World War in 1941 as an ally of the Soviet Union. To a certain extent the Dies Committee took shape in opposition to another Congressional committee, dominated by liberals, a subcommittee of the Senate Committee on Education and Labor, generally called, after its Chairman, Robert M. La Follette, Jr., the La Follette Committee but formally named the Subcommittee Investigating Violations of Free Speech and the Rights of Labor. This committee had been formed in response

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to investigations conducted by the Economic Division of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) that had uncovered the extensive use of company unions, labor spies and violence to obstruct the forming of unions. As La Follette told the Senate, “From its beginning the subcommittee deemed its principal function to be the examination and reporting of instances of resistance to and subversion of the fundamental national labor policy favoring collective bargaining for interstate industries.” La Follette’s desire to facilitate the formation of unions led to a close relationship between his committee and a new labor organization, the CIO. The CIO was the product of an important rift in organized labor. For many years the dominant American labor organization had been the American Federation of Labor (AFL). The AFL was a federation of labor unions that, for the most part, was organized on the basis of craft unionism; in other words, member unions represented skilled workers in trades such as carpentry, printing, railroad engineers, etc. Therefore, on a specific job, such as a construction project, a variety of separate unions would represent the various trades—such as painting, carpentry, plumbing—involved in the project. The proponents of this approach to unions believed that it made sense, first of all, to include only skilled workers because their skills gave them bargaining power that unskilled workers could not have, and secondly that it made sense for the various skills to organize separately because they knew their own concerns and interests best. However, in the 1880s, a different organizing theory had been proposed, that of industrial unions. It was argued that workers would have much more clout in America’s new giant industries, such as steel or mining, if all those employed by the industry, skilled and unskilled, joined together in one union. Joined, they would have the power to bring the entire industry to a dead halt if they were to go out on strike, whereas if they were divided into separate unions, employers could play the game of divide and conquer—trade against trade, skilled against unskilled—as they had many times before. With the high levels of unemployment during the Great Depression, the pressure on unions was intense; with so many out of work, those employed could be easily replaced and the employers seemed to have a stronger hand than ever. Those, like John L. Lewis of the Mine Workers, Sidney Hillman of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, Charles Howard of the International Typographical Union and David Dubinsky of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union, who advocated industrial unionism believed that it was critical to act immediately and in 1935 they joined together to form a Committee for Industrial Organizing within the AFL. The AFL leadership demanded that the Committee dissolve, leading ultimately to the Committee’s split from the AFL and reconstitution as a rival federation, the CIO.

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Now, while the Depression had made the work of unions more difficult, the Roosevelt administration had counteracted that by the passage of the National Industrial Recovery Act in 1933 which, for the first time, had given some largely symbolic, but still important, federal protection to the collective bargaining rights of workers, declaring: Employes [sic] shall have the right to organize and bargain collectively through representatives of their own choosing, and shall be free from the interference, restraint or coercion of employers of labor, or their agents, in the designation of such representatives or in self-organization or in other activities for the purpose of collective bargaining or other mutual aid or protection.

This, and then the more substantial Wagner Act, gave great encouragement to union organizers and workers alike and the new CIO moved into action. Electrical workers successfully organized the General Electric plant at Schenectady, NY, and went on to set up 358 more local unions. The role of Communists in the CIO would prove to be a particularly difficult one for unions and liberals generally. About a quarter of the officers of the various CIO unions were Communists, radicals dedicated to the expansion of unions in the United States. They frequently received support from non-Communist union members since they often were in the forefront of bitter strikes for union recognition, not only working hard at organizing but also putting themselves on the front lines in strikes, experiencing beatings by guards and private police hired by employers who wanted to keep unions out of their shops. In 1937, the recently-formed United Auto Workers’ union (UAW) undertook a daring and extremely controversial strategy, staging a 44-day sit-down in which it effectively occupied General Motors’ Fisher Body Plant, ignoring court orders to vacate the premises, beating off police attacks and spreading the occupation to other factories. The novel situation facing the employer was the fact of the workers actually occupying the workplace rather than simply walking off the job. The controversial element rested on the legalities and the politics of the situation: from General Motors’ point of view, the strikers were trespassers and lawbreakers. However, union officials believed that liberal Democratic politicians would remain neutral and they were correct: management appeals for state or federal intervention—reliable sources of support in past decades—went unheeded by Governor Frank Murphy and Roosevelt. Ultimately General Motors gave in and recognized the UAW. Building on

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that success, the CIO-affiliated Steel Workers Organizing Committee won its own contract. Important to these successes of the CIO was the La Follette Commission; this closeness was not planned but was nurtured by the fact that the Committee was formed just at the time that the CIO had erupted into action in the automobile, steel and mining industries. The fundamental antiunion practices exposed by the Committee were the employment of labor spies (a “common, almost universal, practice”) to discover and forewarn employers of union plans and weaknesses, of private police to help break strikes and the use of tear gas, gas bombs, billy clubs and even machine guns against workers. Red baiting had its place in all this as munitions companies, peddling their goods to employers, tended to blow up every industrial dispute into a danger of impending revolution. One company went so far as to use Elizabeth Dilling’s The Red Network as a standard tool to scare up business, distributing some 1,500 copies of it to prospective clients. The use of tear gas on strikers was promoted as a humane method to protect property and lives, with one company lawyer explaining (implicitly equating union activity with communism), “The whole theory of the use of gas is that it makes it unnecessary to use bullets. I am sorry we have to have strikes. I am sorry we have Communists in the country.” The responsiveness of the La Follette Committee to unionization campaigns of the CIO was nowhere clearer than in Harlan County, Kentucky, where a bitter and violent struggle to organize coalworkers was in progress. La Follette questioned one witness, Bill C. Johnson, hired by the Coal Operators’ Association and asked him about a term he used, “thugging,” which, Johnson replied, meant “we could catch them [union organizers] and take them out and bump them off.”33 Bombs, dynamite and tear gas were also elements of the Coal Operators’ arsenal in use against would-be union members. The publicity brought to the strike by the La Follette Committee and the legal recourse afforded by the still-new Wagner Act allowed 47 company officials and deputy sheriffs to be brought to trial for conspiracy to deprive employees of their rights under the Wagner Act, and though the trial ended in a hung jury, the coal operators, apprehensive of a retrial, surrendered and signed a contract with the United Mine Workers of America recognizing the union and raising wages. The AFL, believing the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) to be partial to its rival, the CIO, was hostile to the government agency, especially after NLRB decisions that awarded important labor units to the CIO. Suspicious of government, especially after having had years of government action on behalf of employers in the form of injunctions

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against strikes and the injection of state militias and federal troops into strikes on behalf of employers, conservative AFL members resented a government agency that purported to operate on behalf of labor, resented it so bitterly that it campaigned against liberals, supported New Deal opponents and in 1939 cooperated with the National Association of Manufacturers to try to limit the power of the NLRA. And one of the most important connections it made with opponents of the militant CIO was the connection with Martin Dies and his new special committee. One of the first witnesses to come before the Committee was John P. Frey, president of the Metal Trades Department of the AFL and he had come to denounce the CIO as an organization controlled by Communists. Frey gave extensive testimony alleging that 180 people associated with the CIO were either Communists or were closely associated with Communists (thus implying that they must be sympathetic to communism). The picture that he painted was one of a CIO that was riddled with Communists, dominated by Communists and on the verge of becoming (if it was not already) an actual organ of international communism. He was careful in his preparation, his information was accurate, and, given the very openly stated aims of the Comintern, his conclusions—that Communists aimed to take over the American labor movement as a step toward a Soviet United States—were plausible. On the other hand, his information was also carefully slanted to lead the auditor to certain conclusions. That Communists were deeply involved in the efforts of the CIO was unquestionably true; that they were important contributors to those efforts was unquestionably true. However, those facts did not in and of themselves answer the questions: (1) Did it matter? and (2) Why did it matter? Frey’s testimony was designed to lead to the conclusions: (1) that it mattered a great deal, and (2) it mattered because Communists, in his view, were, in fact, in control of the CIO which was an important step on the way to their goal of controlling the labor movement which, in turn, was an important step on their way to controlling the United States, which was an important step on their way to controlling the world. CIO leader John L. Lewis, on the other hand, intended to use Communists—many of whom were great organizers—to build the CIO; questioned about his alliance with Communists, he famously responded with a question: “Who gets the bird? The hunter or the dog?” Everything rested on whether Frey or Lewis was right; as it turned out, it was Lewis. It would take a bit of a struggle, but when the Communists had served their purpose and when they became more of a liability than an asset, the CIO would expel them. In truth Frey’s analysis was shallow: he posited an equivalence between the United States and Italy and Germany; in those countries, he argued, reactions to strong Communist parties had opened the way for fascism

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and Nazism, therefore, the American Communist Party could aid in bringing fascism to the United States. This was far-fetched, to say the least. Italy and Germany were both countries with little experience of representative democracy and questionable allegiance to it while the United States had a long and settled allegiance to its democratic tradition. President Roosevelt’s 1938 approval rating in the Gallup Poll, though not as high as it had been or as high as it would become during wartime, was still consistently above 50 percent.34 Frey also intimated that the United States could go Communist; after all, membership in the Party had shot up in France and now, Frey said, “the officers of the French Federation of Labor are not in the position to take any decisive action until they have found that the Communist leadership will go along with them.” However, the strength of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA), though at its height 75,000 (out of a total population of 129,969,000!), was much lower than that of the French Communists. Arguments from this kind of false analogy are seductive and can sound plausible if they are not properly examined. No less a figure than the fabled head of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover, would be guilty of the same misleading logic when he pointed out in 1947 that The size of the party is relatively unimportant because of the enthusiasm and iron-clad discipline under which they operate. In this connection, it might be of interest to observe that in 1917 when Communists overthrew the Russian government there was one Communist for every 2,277 persons in Russia. In the United States today there is one Communist for every 1,814 persons in this country.35

Again, the comparison between Russia in 1917 and the United States in 1947 is untenable; Russia was an impoverished, overwhelmingly agrarian country in a state of chaos with no traditions of self-rule that had just overthrown a medieval style monarchy in the midst of a devastating and widely hated war while the United States in 1947 was a prosperous and stable democracy with a heritage of representative democracy. Still, people with little knowledge of history or the world could hear this questionable logic and deem it plausible, and when the highly respected—revered even in some circles—head of the FBI put the weight of his moral authority behind this thinking, there were many who considered it to be authoritative wisdom from the most reputable of sources. But, consciously or not, Hoover was misleading the public: American Communists may have been willing to betray sensitive national information to the Soviet Union—and some did—but at no time were they in any position to lead a revolution or even a minor uprising.

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In his testimony Frey insinuated that the entire approach of industrial unionism was part of a Communist plot. He also played to Dies’s pet peeve, the UAW sit-down strikes, telling the committee that “more than any other group” the Communists had been responsible for this tactic, it having originated, he alleged, among French Communists seeking to “break into the French trades-union movement.” False analogies, conflation of distinct groups—these were not simply unimportant instances of faulty thinking; they were the stuff out of which the red scares were made. And reputable organs of the press such as the New York Times were willing to simplify matters for the hurried commuter with headlines like “COMMUNISTS RULE THE CIO.” Without a somewhat broad acceptance of such flawed thinking, the red scares simply could not have occurred. That there was a substantial Communist influence in the CIO there can be no doubt; this was by all odds the greatest area of Communist influence in American life and would be a central factor in the national red scare that was just getting underway. In 1946 the CIO was made up of 39 unions and of those 18, including about 1,370,000 workers or about a fourth of the total CIO membership, had Communist leadership. However, while Communist members of the organization did support a pro-Soviet foreign policy, there is no evidence that they put their allegiance to the Communist Party first when engaged in collective bargaining. Now at its very strongest the whole Communist Party could boast of at most 100,000 members in the entire country; that means that of those 1,370,000 union members in Communist-led unions only a tiny fraction could have been Communists. An overwhelmingly non-Communist rank and file kept on electing Communists to lead them and, of course, the question is why? The very serious charge made by Frey and other conservatives, both within labor and without, was the same one that would be leveled at Communists in academia and other walks of life, that is, that because they were Communists, they did not care about the interests of the workers; they were ipso facto tools of a foreign power, the Soviet Union, their minds not their own. However, labor historians have shown that Party discipline over the union leadership was loose and that Communist labor leaders, as Dorothy Healey, said, “never stopped fighting [for workers’ interests] on the shop floor, whatever the national leadership under Browder was saying.”36 Current studies have demonstrated that the Communist-led unions were, on the whole, more democratic, less sexist, less racist and more effective than most other unions at negotiating contracts favorable to their members. It must be noted, however, that the CPUSA’s interest in the plight of American workers, however genuine it might be, was also tactical. During the Depression, the Party’s journal, The Communist, had argued

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that the jobless were “the tactical key to the present state of the class struggle.”37 Though many grassroots Communist Party members might be genuinely and consistently committed to the immediate needs of all American workers, the Party itself followed the directives of Moscow, fighting to empower unions when Moscow said to fight and fighting to repress them—as during the Second World War when the directive came out to oppose strikes—when Moscow said to repress. Along with testimony about the CIO the Dies Committee found room for witnesses like Walter Steele, the self-proclaimed representative of 20 million patriots, on the advisory board of the anti-Semitic Paul Reveres and publisher of the anti-communist, anti-labor, anti-alien and pro-Franco National Republic. Steele gave the committee the names of a host of suspicious groups, ranging from liberal groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union to the Boy Scouts of America and the Camp Fire Girls. Finally, Dies took aim at his committee’s liberal counterpart, the La Follette Committee. John Frey had alleged that there had been “numerous reports of close contacts between investigators of [the La Follette] Committee and members of the Communist Party.”38 He testified that while “[i]n the beginning” the La Follette Committee “was doing a fairly good job”, “after about one third of its existence, it was a Communist affair.” By November Dies himself was publicly considering looking into whether “well-known Communists” had conspired to create the Committee. The fundamental irresponsibility of Dies’ Committee was demonstrated in the way it went about “exposing” suspected subversives: for example, it published the mailing list of a suspected Communist front organization— the American League for Peace and Democracy—in its entirety. This was a mailing list, not a membership list and the people on it may have merely signed up for mailings or have signed a petition without being in deeper sympathy with the organization’s aims and without having any knowledge of the group’s Communist affiliations. Moreover, the organization itself had many members who were not Communists but pacifists; yet in the world of guilt by association, they were tainted. And it was this tactic— guilt by association—that became the principal tool of intimidation used to bully those who held views that were not communistic in themselves but were shared by Communists: Communists in the period of 1939 to 1941 were in favor of peace; therefore, if you favored peace, you must be a Communist, or a Communist-sympathizer or a dupe of Communists. Communists favored the protection of the civil rights of AfricanAmericans; therefore, if you favored racial equality, you must be a Communist, or a Communist-sympathizer or a dupe of Communists. The same went for labor unions, for help for the poor and the unemployed

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and a host of other causes; if the Communists were for it and you were for it, you must be somehow under the control of the Communists and therefore you were a danger to the United States and the cause of freedom. By 1938 the momentum of the New Deal had ground to a halt and reaction was setting in; polls showed more than 70 percent of the public wanted a “more conservative” trend in government. Under these circumstances, the Dies Committee, dominated by enemies of the New Deal and of organized labor, found that its charges yielded ample publicity and used this to full advantage in the midterm elections of 1938. Governor Frank Murphy of Michigan, who had refused to send troops in to break up the sit-down strikes, was targeted along with other liberal Democratic candidates and Republicans made significant electoral gains. The Popular Front, already under strain as the illiberal tendencies of the Communist Party emerged and its drive to dominate all with whom it associated became clear, cracked apart in the summer of 1939 when the news broke that the Soviet dictator, Josef Stalin, had made a pact with Adolph Hitler that divided Romania, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and Finland into German and Soviet “spheres of influence.” For years the glue that had most effectively held together the Popular Front and its main attraction to non-Communists had been its opposition to fascism in all its forms. Now the CPUSA demonstrated how thoroughly it was dominated by Moscow as it embraced and sought to justify the pact. The Party also turned against the Roosevelt administration which it now accused of war-mongering. Meanwhile, the Nazis were overrunning Europe while the Soviet Union moved into Finland, the Baltic States and part of Poland. The sudden alignment of the Kremlin with Hitler hit the CPUSA hard, with party membership falling by 15 percent between 1939 and 1940 while recruitment of new members plummeted by 75 percent in 1940 (compared to 1938).39 Moreover, non-Communists who had participated in Popular Front groups resigned in large numbers and many of those who had been willing to ally with Communists or, like the Lawyers’ Guild and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), to tolerate them in their ranks, now turned fiercely against them, dissociating themselves from front groups and expelling Communists from their ranks. With the United States starting to build up defense industries for mobilization, fears grew of possible CPUSA disruption through its influence in labor unions; strikes were characterized by employers (hoping to reverse labor’s gains under the New Deal) as subversive regardless of the actual circumstances that provoked them. These developments created an atmosphere that encouraged new bills aimed at suspect aliens to be introduced into Congress and for the first time a piece of federal legislation aimed at

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controlling communism passed, the Alien Registration Act, more commonly known as the Smith Act after sponsor Howard Smith (D-VA), providing for the registration, fingerprinting and deportation of aliens who advocated the violent overthrow of the US Government. Also, for the first time since the passing of the Sedition Act in 1798, in this act Congress took aim at American citizens’ freedom of speech, making it illegal for anyone to advocate the overthrow of the government by force or to be a member of any group that aimed to do so. Soon after, Congress passed an act sponsored by a liberal Democrat, Jerry Voorhis, requiring the registration of any group seeking the violent overthrow of the US Government or any group subject to foreign control. The CPUSA responded by simply cutting its formal ties to the Comintern and declining to register. Meanwhile, four states—California, New York, Oklahoma and Texas—, taking their cue from developments in Washington, instituted their own “little Dies committees,” dedicated to exposing Communists and rooting them out of state employment, education and anywhere else they might be found. New York’s was the most influential of these committees, establishing procedures that would be followed in the future by state and federal committees alike. New York passed an act that prohibited the state from employing anyone advocating the forcible overthrow of the government and then, in a March 29, 1940 concurrent resolution of the New York State Senate and Assembly, created a Joint Legislative Committee on the State Education System—more usually known as the Rapp-Coudert Committee after its chair, Herbert A. Rapp and a special investigative subcommittee chaired by Senator Frederic R. Coudert—to investigate subversion in the public education institutions of New York. Coudert made it clear that you had to be tough with Communists, declaring, Now if your dog had rabies you wouldn’t clap him into jail after he had bitten a number of persons—you’d put a bullet into his head, if you had that kind of iron in your blood. It is going to require brutal treatment to handle these teachers . . .40

As historian Ellen Schrecker has observed, much of the importance of this committee lay in the fact that it “pioneered the techniques that later state and congressional investigating committees would employ,”41 including private interrogations, gathering names from cooperative witnesses (former Communists being the most valuable), followed by public hearings for those identified by witnesses willing to “name names.” The Committee, concentrating on New York City’s four public universities,

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interrogated over 500 faculty, staff, teachers and students. None were allowed to have counsel present on the grounds that they were not on trial but were merely witnesses; however, in a very real sense they were on trial as they were questioned regarding their political activities and political associations. Students were not even allowed to have their parents present as they were pressured to name other students, and report on their professors. The Committee’s final report identified 69 teachers as Communists and accused another 434 faculty and staff of being radicals (apparently itself a matter of concern). The Committee itself had no authority to punish those accused but it did not need to have that authority; following the pattern that would become the norm for investigating committees like HUAC or the McCarran Committee, having marked the victims, it was able to safely turn them over to their employers who could act. Charges usually included membership in the Communist Party but the professors brought before the Committee—convinced that if they admitted to Communist Party membership they would be fired—had uniformly lied about their membership in the CPUSA. This allowed the New York Board of Higher Education to dismiss them on charges of obstructing justice which was considered to be behavior unbecoming faculty or staff of the university system. Eventually some 30 lost their jobs. In only one case were charges connected with biased teaching or indoctrination in the classroom or any aspect of teaching at all—most were considered to be superior teachers and scholars—; the only issue was Party membership.42 A pattern of attack on suspected subversion was starting to emerge at the state level, comprising three general approaches: the investigating committee acted to expose suspected subversives to the glare of publicity; the loyalty oath would force teachers and others to swear not only their allegiance to the USA but, as a rule, that they were not members of the Communist Party; and finally, the Communist Control Act sought to regulate the Communist Party by excluding it from the ballot or forcing it or its members to register with the appropriate authorities or to outlaw it altogether. Texas even considered instituting the death penalty for Party membership.43 With the proliferation of investigating committees and the accompanying negative publicity, the Nazi-Soviet pact and America’s military buildup, the pressure to repudiate Communists was mounting on the CIO. By the summer of 1941 opinion polls indicated that more than 75 percent of the public believed that Communists were behind strikes in the defense industries. And as the AFL struggled with the CIO to get the allegiance of local unions, the red-baiting that had been a standard part of the

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Little HUACs In the late 1930s and then again in the late 1940s part of the conservative backlash against the New Deal took the form of “little HUACs,” state investigating committees that mimicked the activities of their role model in Washington, DC. As historian M.J. Heale writes, “The targets of these committees at this point were less the CP itself than its popular front allies, real or imaginary, to be found on the campuses, in the unions, or on the liberal wing of the Democratic Party.”44 These committees—the most notorious of which were California’s Tenney Committee, Washington State’s Canwell Committee and Illinois’s Royals Commission—usually were formed in states with urban industrial areas where the Communist Party had had some success in recruiting among trade unionists, educators, welfare workers, students and racial and ethnic minorities. They often spent much of their time investigating educational institutions since education was much more a responsibility of state governments than of the federal government. As Heale describes it, the states took three main approaches in battling the “Communist threat”: 1.

2.

3.

The investigating or Red hunting committee, dedicated to exposing alleged subversives and then, since being a Communist and since taking the Fifth Amendment were not crimes, counting on their employers to fire them and counting on other employers not to hire them. These committees copied HUAC, staging highly publicized hearings, inviting friendly and forcing unfriendly witnesses to appear, and publishing reports that “named names.” The imposition of loyalty oaths, swearing support of the Constitution and abjuring any group that sought to overthrow the Constitution by force. The most common approach to bullying Communists, radicals and liberals, groups such as the American Legion and the DAR were particularly active in lobbying legislatures to institute these oaths. The general belief was that Communists would perjure themselves without hesitation but, having done so, they would be subject to prosecution (which almost never happened). The last approach was to pass communist control laws, legislation that prohibited belonging to certain kinds of organizations, commonly those included on the Attorney General’s list. Moreover, between 1945 and 1954 some 25 states passed laws prohibiting Communists or members of suspect organizations from appearing as candidates for office on ballots.

As Heale notes, the chief result of all this activity was not to remove subversives from employment but rather to silence dissent. However, though public opinion consistently supported these various actions, most of the investigating committees were short-lived, lasting a mere two to three years before they fizzled out. They often were discredited by their own irresponsibility in making charges; for example, California’s Tenney Committee issued a 1948 report that was criticized by the anticommunist Los Angeles Daily News for falsely naming “scores of good citizens” as subversives.

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AFL’s arsenal intensified. John L. Lewis retired as CIO president and his successor, Philip Murray, a Catholic who already disliked communism, pushed through the CIO annual convention a resolution that condemned “the dictatorships and totalitarianism of Nazism, Communism and Fascism as inimical to the welfare of labor, and destructive of our form of government.”45 Fear of internal subversion, fanned by patriotic organizations, conservative politicians and the press, became so widespread that in July 1940 Time magazine dubbed it a “national phenomenon.” It was at this time that Communist Party leader Earl Browder, who had been running for the presidency on the Communist ticket, was arrested and sent to prison for four years after being arrested for passport fraud (he acknowledged that he had been traveling to Moscow for conferences with Soviet leaders; what he did not tell anyone was that he was working with Soviet intelligence, guiding them to American Communists who might be willing to act as spies). In this atmosphere President Roosevelt gave the FBI the go-ahead to widen its surveillance of potential subversives. And here an important change was instituted in the rooting out of subversion: in the Big Red Scare of the First World War, local officials and vigilantes had played an important and also undisciplined and often lawless role; now investigating suspected subversion and espionage was to be professionalized and centralized in the FBI. Meetings were held in 1940 with state officials across the country—governors, state attorneys general, police chiefs—to get their cooperation and J. Edgar Hoover encouraged would-be red or Nazi hunters to “leave it to the FBI” whose professionalism he constantly touted. However, Hoover wanted no one to believe that the United States was safe; speaking to the American Legion in 1940, he said, “We have a distinct spy menace. Hundreds upon hundreds of foreign agents are busily engaged upon a program of peering, peeking, eavesdropping, propaganda, subversiveness, and actual sabotage.”46 The Hitler-Stalin Pact and the brutal pressures of the Little Red Scare took their toll on the Communist Party itself, and an organization, whose membership by some estimates had grown to almost 100,000 shrank to half that size. At the same time, a Gallup poll conducted in May, 1941 showed that 71 percent of Americans favored outright outlawing the Party. Though, as previously noted, historians have called this period of anti-communist activity the “Little Red Scare,” giving it a separate existence of its own, it could also be conceived as the first phase of the Big Red Scare of the late 1940s and early 1950s, making “Little” and “Big” Red Scares a single event, temporarily interrupted by the Second World War and the US wartime alliance with the Soviet Union.

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Once at war with Japan and Germany, however, the United States of necessity allied with the Soviet Union, following a policy of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” This friendliness extended, to an extent, to the CPUSA, especially since the government wanted Communist workers in defense industries to cooperate in the production of armaments. Consequently, Roosevelt pardoned Communist leader Earl Browder and initiated a campaign to rehabilitate the Soviet Union in American minds; this included not only complimentary language about Stalin and the Russian people, but also encouraging Hollywood studios to demonstrate their patriotism by making movies like Song of Russia and Mission to Moscow that showed a benign Russia that Americans could feel comfortable with. Stalin, in his turn, dissolved the organization dedicated to making communism universal, the Comintern; moreover, the CPUSA, which in 1939 (following Kremlin directives) had skewered Roosevelt as “siding more and more with the incendiaries of war,”47 now demonstrated the extreme flexibility that made so many Americans suspicious of it by doing a sudden volte-face, becoming a loud pro-Roosevelt booster, pushing for US involvement in the war and vowing to support the war effort in every way possible. Most American unions had pledged not to strike while the war lasted; Communists adhered to this policy and then went further, opposing wildcat strikes and working to moderate wage demands while pushing workers to increase productivity. Moreover, Communist leader Earl Browder demonstrated his patriotism by transforming the CPUSA from a political party into a non-threatening sort of club that he called the Communist Political Association. Of course, neither the US Government, nor the American public nor his own associates knew at the time that Browder had also been receiving coded wireless messages from Moscow, advising him on strategy and tactics for the American Communist Party—by whatever name it might call itself. The United States had been attacked by Japan and as a result, unlike the Wilson administration which had to persuade Americans to go to war, the Roosevelt administration had no problem marshaling public support. Consequently, the government felt little need to suppress dissenting points of view, at least those of the left. Workers in defense plants were given loyalty checks but the FBI conducted itself with restraint. Nonetheless, red scare rhetoric did not end during the war; it had become too entrenched in conservative rhetoric. In Roosevelt’s last campaign, one of his opponents, vice presidential candidate and governor of Ohio, John W. Bricker, told a Texas audience that [t]hey [the CIO-PAC and Communist leader Earl Browder] are running the campaign of Franklin Roosevelt . . . not the

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Democratic Party . . . To all intents and purposes, the great Democratic party has become the Hillman-Browder Communist party with Franklin Roosevelt at its front.”48

Moreover, unbeknownst to any American except those who had decided that it was appropriate to betray their own country’s secrets to a foreign power, it was during this time, when US/Soviet relations were at their best, that the Kremlin launched an unprecedented spying effort aimed at the United States, looking for industrial and military information, but above all, for information about the new secret super-bomb that was being developed at Los Alamos, New Mexico.

NOTES 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16

17 18

“Brother Dave Moore and the Ford Hunger March,” Political Affairs, March 7, 2007. www.politicalaffairs.net/brother-dave-moore-and-the-ford-hunger-march. Beth Tompkins Bates, The Making of Black Detroit in the Age of Henry Ford (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012), 161. Detroit Times, March 8, 1932, 1. “Brother Dave Moore and the Ford Hunger March.” Quoted in Alex Baskin, “The Ford Hunger March – 1932,” Labor History, Vol. 13, No. 3 (1972), 338. Detroit Free Press, March 9, 1932, 6. Franklin D. Roosevelt, “Address at the Democratic State Convention, Syracuse, N.Y.,” September 29, 1936. Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project. www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=15142. New York Times, July 24, 1935, 6. Chicago Daily Tribune, August 7, 1934, 1. The Gettysburg Times, May 14, 1935, 5. New York Times, September 22, 1936, 11. George Wolfskill and John A. Hudson, All but the People: Franklin D. Roosevelt and His Critics, 1933–39 (London: The Macmillan Company, 1969), 187. Economist Rexford Tugwell, though by no means a Communist, was one of the more radical members of the Roosevelt administration. Ben Procter, William Randolph Hearst: The Later Years, 1911–1951, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 207–208. Wolfskill and Hudson, All but the People, 193. Franklin D. Roosevelt, “Fireside Chat on Economic Conditions,” The Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1938 Volume, The Continuing Struggle for Liberalism (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1941), 242. Roosevelt, “Address at the Democratic State Convention, Syracuse, N.Y.” Franklin D. Roosevelt: “Acceptance Speech for the Renomination for the Presidency, Philadelphia, Pa.,” June 27, 1936. Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project. www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/? pid=15314.

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19

20

21 22 23

24

25

26

27 28 29 30 31 32 33

34

35

36

Franklin D. Roosevelt: “Campaign Address on Progressive Government at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco, California,” September 23, 1932. Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project. www. presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=88391. Franklin D. Roosevelt: “Address at Marietta, Ohio,” July 8, 1938. Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project. www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=15672. Roosevelt, “Address at the Democratic State Convention, Syracuse, N.Y.” Frederick Rudolph “The American Liberty League, 1934–1940,” The American Historical Review, Vol. 56, No. 1 (Oct., 1950), 19. Alfred S. Smith, “The Facts in the Case” Speech at the American Liberty League Dinner, Washington, DC, January 25. 1936. www.jrbooksonline.com/PDF_ Books/smith36.pdf. Norman Thomas, “Is the New Deal Socialism? An Answer to Al Smith and the American Liberty League,” speech delivered over the Columbia Broadcasting System on February 2, 1936. For more on the Comintern, see William J. Chase, Enemies Within the Gates?: The Comintern and the Stalinist Repression, 1934–1939 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001). Doughface was a term of contempt coined by Virginian congressman John Randolph to describe Northern men who voted with the South in the Missouri crisis of 1819–1820. David Farber, Sloan Rules: Alfred P. Sloan and the Triumph of General Motors (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 196–197. Kim Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands: The Businessmen’s Crusade against the New Deal (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2010), 89. Walter Goodman, The Committee: The Extraordinary Career of the House Committee on Un-American Activities (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1968), 14. Goodman, The Committee, 21. Goodman, The Committee, 22. Goodman, The Committee, 13. Walter Galenson, The CIO Challenge to the AFL: A History of the American Labor Movement, 1935–1941 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960), 202–203. Frank Newport and Joseph Carroll, “Reflections on Presidential Job Approval and Re-election Odds,” June 10, 2003. www.gallup.com/poll/8608/reflectionspresidential-job-approval-reelection-odds.aspx. United States. Cong. House. Investigation of Un-American Propaganda Activities in the United States: Bills to curb or Outlaw the Communist Party of the United States, Committee on Un-American Activities, March 26, 1947. 80th Cong. 1st sess. Washington: GPO, 1947 (testimony of J. Edgar Hoover, Director, Federal Bureau of Investigation), 44. For more, see Robin D. G. Kelley, Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists during the Great Depression (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990); Michael Honey, Southern Labor and Black Civil Rights: Organizing Memphis Workers (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993); Ronald Schatz, The Electrical Workers: A History of Labor At General Electric and Westinghouse, 1923–1960 (Urbana:

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37 38

39 40 41 42

43

44 45 46 47 48

University of Illinois Press, 1983); Toni Gilpin, “Left by Themselves: A History of United Farm Equipment and Metal Workers, 1938–1955,” Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1988; and Joshua Freeman, Working-Class New York Life and Labor since World War II (New York: New Press, 2001). Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward, Poor People’s Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail (New York: Vantage Books, 1979), 68. United States. Cong. House. Special Committee on Un-American Activities. Investigation of un-American propaganda activities in the United States. 1938. 75th Cong. 3rd sess. Washington: GPO, 1938 (Testimony of John P. Frey), 106. Fraser Ottanelli, The Communist Party of the United States: From the Depression to World War II (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1991), 198. New York Times, June 3, 1941. Ellen W. Schrecker, No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 76. On October 26, 1981, 40 years after the Rapp-Coudert dismissals, the City University of New York’s Board of Trustees unanimously adopted a resolution expressing “profound regret at the injustice done to the faculty and staff who had been dismissed or forced to resign in 1941 and 1942 because of their alleged political associations and beliefs and their unwillingness to testify publicly about them.” For a detailed discussion of these three anti-communist strategies, see M.J. Heale, McCarthy’s Americans: Red Scare Politics in State and Nation, 1935–1965 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1998), Chapters 1–3. M J. Heale, McCarthy’s Americans: Red Scare Politics in State and Nation, 1935–1965 (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1998), 26. The Milwaukee Journal, November 21, 1940, 1. M.J. Heale, American Anti-Communism: Combating the Enemy Within, 1830–1970 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 127. Los Angeles Times, December 6, 1939, 6. Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, October 26, 1944, 5.

CHAPTER 4

The Red Scare Begins

O

n November 5, 1946, an election was held for the Congressional representative from California’s 12th district. The contest pitted fiveterm incumbent Democrat Jerry Voorhis, against 32-year-old naval lieutenant Richard Milhous Nixon. In the final days of the campaign the telephone of Mrs. Louis Howard, mother-in-law of Voorhis’s assistant Stanley Long, rang. She went to answer it and the voice on the other end simply asked “This is a friend. Did you know that Jerry Voorhis is a Communist?” and hung up. It soon was discovered that Democratic voters throughout certain parts of the district had received identical calls.1 Zita Remley, a Voorhis campaign leader, had some information about these mysterious communications. She had seen an advertisement for Nixon campaign workers and, interested in getting inside information about the Nixon campaign, had gotten her niece to sign up. The younger woman went to the Nixon headquarters and, as Mrs. Remley recalled, She said they had a whole boiler room with phones going all the time. She said she would call a number and just say, ‘Did you know that Jerry Voorhis was a Communist?’ And that’s all. So finally she said, ‘Well, don’t you think we should say something else?’ They said, ‘Oh, no.’ She worked for two days for them.2

This was an election that opposed a notably scrupulous man, Voorhis, against one who would turn out to be a notably unscrupulous one. Voorhis hadbeen a registered Socialist back in the 1920s; now he was a liberal, supporting labor and the programs of the New Deal while opposing big oil and big banking interests. He was deeply religious and so idealistic that during the campaign he suspended his one connection to the local press, his news paper column, “People’s Business,” not wanting it to be thought that he was using it to influence voters. Every time he voted he followed what he believed to

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be right, often risking his career by opposing the more parochial interests and prejudices of his district or even his state: thus he stood alone among California’s congressional delegation in opposing state ownership of tidelands oil and the forced internment of Japanese-Americans during the war. His scruples did not seem to hurt him politically: the Washington press corps voted him the most honest congressman and the fifth most intelligent of the 435 members of the House. His colleagues in the House voted him the hardest working member. Even Nixon’s own general campaign manager, Harrison McCall, admitted: I don’t hesitate to say that I figured Jerry Voorhis was a very conscientious man. I think he had the interests of the public at heart, and especially the laboring man or the man down and out. Jerry Voorhis, at least in my opinion, would give the shirt off his back to some fellow that came up and asked for it, if he thought that fellow needed it.3

Still, Voorhis was not especially beloved by radicals. He was a firm antiCommunist and, ironically, given the fact that Nixon would red-bait him, was the sponsor of the anti-Communist Voorhis Act of 1940 which required “certain organizations, the purpose of which is to overthrow the government or a political subdivision thereof by the use of force and violence,” i.e. Communists, to register with the Attorney General. He had also been an outspoken critic of Russian aggression in eastern Europe and had been attacked by the Communist press as a “false liberal,” a “smart reactionary boring from within the liberal camp.”4 None of this prevented Nixon from presenting himself to the public as a man opposing communism in the forms of Jerry Voorhis and the New Deal. As Nixon put it during his primary campaign On Tuesday the people by their ballots will vote for me as a supporter of free enterprise, individual initiative, and a sound progressive program; or for the continuance of the totalitarian ideologies of the New Deal Administration.5

In Nixon’s telling of it, Voorhis was a “lip-service American” who “was voting the Moscow-PAC-Henry Wallace line in Congress,” the tool of the CIO Political Action Committee (PAC). There were indeed some Communists active in the CIO-PAC but they were a minority and they neither dominated the PAC nor set its agenda. Moreover, that agenda— an end to poll taxes and lynchings in the South, an end to racial discrimination, the regulation of monopolies, strong price controls, public

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power and rural electrification and unionism—comprised programs supported by anti-Communist liberals as well as Communists. Furthermore, the CIO-PAC had explicitly chosen not to endorse Voorhis’s candidacy. However, without Voorhis’s knowledge another organization, the National Citizens’ PAC (NCPAC), had and throughout the campaign Nixon and his supporters muddied the waters, charging simply that the “PAC” had supported Voorhis, leaving the impression in most minds that they referred to the more well-known CIO-PAC. So, Nixon ads declared “A vote for Nixon is a vote against the Communistdominated PAC” while other ads stated that Voorhis’s congressional record was “more Socialistic and Communistic than Democratic.”6 Finally, a widely distributed ad produced by the Nixon camp asked “DO YOU WANT A CONGRESSMAN WHO VOTED ONLY THREE TIMES OUT OF FORTY-SIX AGAINST THE COMMUNIST DOMINATED PAC?” Voorhis was baffled by this accusation, demanded and finally got Nixon’s sources and then spent a long night investigating the basis for it. What he discovered was that he had not cast 46 separate votes; rather, the Nixon camp had taken 27 votes and had counted the same vote multiple times, making 19 duplicates in all. He also discovered that among his votes designated by the Nixon camp as votes for the “Communist dominated PAC” line were votes for reciprocal trade agreements, for international monetary cooperation, for a postwar loan to financially troubled Great Britain (vigorously opposed by the Communists), for abolition of the racist poll tax, for atomic energy legislation providing for civilian government control of its development, for soil conservation, for unemployment insurance for federal workers, for temporary retention of the United States Employment Service in federal hands following the war, in favor of the school lunch program, for price ceilings on old houses as part of the veterans’ housing program, for unweakened price controls, for federal ownership of tidelands oil and for travel pay for war workers.7 Finally, one of the sources cited by Nixon as damning—the CIO Labor Herald— explicitly stated “12th District—Jerry Voorhis—No endorsement.”8 Voorhis was not temperamentally equipped to fight in the gutter; surprised by vicious and untruthful attacks, his responses were late and weak and ultimately Nixon won by the large margin of some 15,000 votes. Nixon well understood what he was doing; as he later admitted to Stanley Long (Voorhis’s former assistant) when Long challenged him on the tactics he had used, “Of course, I knew that Jerry Voorhis wasn’t a Communist.” He went on to say, “I had to win. That’s the thing you don’t understand. The important thing is to win. You’re just being naive.”9 And later on he would say, “I suppose there was scarcely ever a

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man with higher ideals than Jerry Voorhis or better motivated than Jerry Voorhis.”10 But, then, as he said in another context, “Nice guys and sissies don’t win many elections.”11 However, for the conservatives, communism was always a bit of a stalking horse; the real targets were labor and the New Deal. In his campaign Nixon demanded an end to “destructive” strikes and attacked Voorhis for his support of the right of farm workers to organize and bargain collectively. And when Nixon arrived in Washington, he was anxious to get “a spot on the labor committee.” For, as he told a reporter while waiting to be sworn in, “I was elected to smash the labor bosses.”12 It was a few years before Joseph McCarthy would emerge as a force in politics, but the irresponsible and almost casual and routine red-baiting that would become known as McCarthyism already was a force distorting American politics and Richard Nixon was a master practitioner.

THE ROOTS OF THE SECOND RED SCARE There were three fundamental developments that served to make the postSecond World War red scare different from those that had come before; those were: (1) the American development of an atomic bomb—a weapon of unparalleled destruction that, from the beginning, was understood to have the capacity to destroy entire civilizations and perhaps human life altogether, (2) the Soviet recruitment and use of American spies to get access to American military secrets, especially the knowledge of atomic weaponry, and (3) the national response to the breathtakingly rapid expansion of communism all over the globe. On April 12, 1945, Franklin Delano Roosevelt died and his vice president, Harry S. Truman was sworn in as the thiry-third president of the United States. About two weeks later Secretary of War Henry Stimson and General Leslie R. Groves briefed Truman on the existence of a secret weapon, the most destructive hitherto made by human beings—the atom bomb. Soon after, in August 1945, two atomic weapons were dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing 90,000–166,000 people in Hiroshima and 60,000–80,000 in Nagasaki. Soviet intelligence had caught wind of the American interest in building an atomic weapon as early as 1941. Intensely interested themselves in acquiring such weapons, once the Manhattan Project—the American project to build a bomb—was underway, the USSR started, with considerable success, to recruit spies within the project. It has been estimated that the success of Soviet espionage—conducted by Westerners who, for the most part approached Soviet intelligence of their own accord and who

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gave these secrets for ideological reasons, not for money—took at least one to one and a half years off the time that would have been required for Soviet scientists to develop a bomb on their own. The device, called First Lightning, exploded by the Soviet Union in its first nuclear test on August 29, 1949 was a 22-kiloton nuclear weapon almost identical to that tested by Americans four years earlier. These Russian activities, however, were all quite secret and neither American intelligence nor the American public knew anything about it for some years. What was much more out in the open in the early postwar years was the increasing tension in international affairs, especially between the United States and the Soviet Union. Conflict, open or veiled, seemed to be inevitable between these two nations: each had a crusading vision of its own special mission and each held to an economic system that precluded the other’s. However, the wartime alliance of these two great powers against the Nazi regime had given rise to hopes in some quarters— particularly President Roosevelt, some liberals and virtually all American Communists—that the alliance could be extended into peacetime. However, once peace had been established it did not take long for the alliance to unravel. There is and has been among historians much debate about where responsibility for the erosion of friendly relations lies, some blaming the USSR, some blaming the United States and some blaming both. At the time most Americans squarely put the blame on the Soviet Union. There were signs of attitudes hardening on both sides: in the United States the HUAC was entrenched as a permanent House committee while almost simultaneously Stalin cracked down on American Communist leader Earl Browder’s embrace of the Roosevelt administration and the New Deal, saying, in effect, that it was time for Communists to be Communists again, firmly rejecting all alliances with capitalists and all forms of capitalism and its works. It can be safely said that both Roosevelt and Winston Churchill were realistic enough to understand that at the war’s end they would not be in a position to dictate to Stalin; by the time the allies settled on the terms of the Yalta Agreement that set out the postwar European order, his westward moving armies had already moved into Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland, East Prussia and parts of eastern Germany. Moreover, during the war itself the USSR had already annexed countries ceded to it by its 1939 pact with Nazi Germany; these included eastern Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, part of eastern Finland and northern Romania. However, Roosevelt was eager to save American lives by getting Stalin’s participation in the war against Japan and also wanted Soviet participation in Roosevelt’s chief hope for a peaceful postwar world, the proposed United Nations (UN). For these reasons, FDR was willing to accept Stalin’s

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word when he said that he would support “free and unfettered elections as soon as possible” in Poland, especially given that the alternative, as historian David M. Kennedy has written, was to “order Eisenhower to fight his way across the breadth of Germany, take on the Red Army, and drive it out of Poland at gunpoint.”13 However, as time passed and no signs emerged of any sort of elections, free or unfree, fettered or unfettered, the initial hopes for harmonious international relations began to fade. By the time the “Big Three” met again at Potsdam, Roosevelt was dead, and Harry Truman, the new president of the United States, knowing that he had the newly developed atom bomb at his disposal as a weapon of intimidation, decided to take a harder line with the Russians. Meanwhile, Stalin set about converting the portions of eastern Europe that had been occupied by the Red Army into satellite states, including East Germany, the People’s Republic of Poland, the People’s Republic of Bulgaria, the People’s Republic of Hungary, the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic, the People’s Republic of Romania and the People’s Republic of Albania. All these were dominated by the Soviet Union and ruled by Communist governments that took the Soviet police state as their model. Another point of tension was oil-rich Iran from which Stalin, demanding oil concessions comparable to those of the United States and Great Britain, refused to withdraw troops as he had agreed to do at Potsdam. All these developments contributed to the American chargé d’affaires in Moscow, George Kennan, sending an 8,000-word telegram to the State Department (known as “The Long Telegram”), warning that the “USSR still lives in antagonistic ‘capitalist encirclement’ with which in the long run there can be no permanent peaceful coexistence” and outlining a proposed response. Kennan argued that the nature of Soviet power was not to take “unnecessary risks,” being “highly sensitive to logic of force.” Therefore, if met with strong resistance at specific points, Soviet expansionism could be contained with “no prestige-engaging showdowns.” This telegram would form the basis of an influential 1947 article entitled “The Sources of Soviet Conduct” that Kennan wrote for the journal Foreign Affairs. Urging, not an aggressive attack but rather, “longterm, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansionist tendencies” of the Soviet Union while waiting for its inevitable collapse, the approach advocated by this article would form the basis of US policy through most of the Cold War. Meanwhile, Winston Churchill, in a more public arena, gave a similar but less nuanced warning, declaring on March 5, 1946 in a famous speech given at Westminster College in Missouri that an “iron curtain” had cut off eastern Europe, placing it in subjection to Moscow. The Cold War was starting to take shape and to gain a rhetoric of its own.

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To Americans it seemed—with good reason—that communism was on the march. Eastern Europe was falling fast and western Europe, with strong French and Italian Communist parties, was in danger as well. Great Britain, bankrupted by the war, was withdrawing from its many overseas commitments and among these were Greece and Turkey, both of which seemed vulnerable to Communist takeovers and one of which—Greece— was in the midst of a civil war between Communists and royalists. To understand US policy, it is vital to realize that most Americans, not only the general public but policy makers as well, took communism to be a unified world revolutionary movement directed by and completely controlled by the Soviet Union. This notion—the notion of a unified, centralized, highly-disciplined, monolithic movement containing no internal conflicts—was central to both American foreign policy and also to the domestic fear of communism. This, as we shall see, led to critical policy errors that would cost, among other things, many American lives. An early error born of ignorance was made with regard to Greece, where, after the Nazis’ defeat, Communist forces battled against royalist forces supported by Great Britain. Stalin had promised Winston Churchill not to intervene on behalf of Greek Communists and, we now know, he respected that promise. However, Yugoslavia and Albania, despite Stalin’s advice to the contrary, had been sending supplies to the Greek Communist Party in support of its military efforts and with Great Britain nearly bankrupt by the Second World War and unable to maintain its commitments in Greece and Turkey, and with Greece especially facing a possible Communist takeover, Harry Truman—believing mistakenly that Stalin had broken his word and that the Soviets were the puppet masters while the smaller countries were the puppets—made the decision that the United States should intervene. On March 12, 1947, Truman went to Congress to request $400 million in aid to Greece and Turkey, arguing that it was vital that the United States “support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures,” or more broadly support “free peoples” (which in the event included a slew of dictatorial regimes–if they were non-Communist then they must be “free”) against “totalitarian regimes.” This was the basis of what became known as the “Truman Doctrine”: The United States would seek, not to eradicate communism directly, but rather to restrict its spread, by moving to provide monetary and military aid to regimes threatened by Communist insurgencies. The implications and results of this policy were multiple and complex: •

First, it was based on a concept of communism that was false, i.e., that it was a monolithic world movement, efficiently centralized in

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•

•

•

Moscow. We now know that that was not true, that there were major and minor divisions among the Communist countries that perhaps could have been exploited to America’s advantage with a more subtle foreign policy. Second, the policy marked an attempt to quiet domestic conservatives’ attacks on centrist and leftwing Democrats as being “soft” on communism; more than that, it sought to appeal to voters by showing that moderates were hard on communism, but in a more reasonable and therefore less dangerous way than conservatives, whose hardline approaches might risk a catastrophic third world war. In this regard the Doctrine was ineffective; conservatives believed they had a winning strategy in accusing moderates and liberals of weakness and disloyalty and they would keep it up. Third, with this speech Truman defined the rift already existing within the Democratic Party between those left-leaning Democrats— soon to be supporting a new and short-lived Progressive Party against Truman—who were calling for an attempt to extend the wartime alliance with the Soviet Union, working with it rather than against it, and those moderates and liberals who accepted the idea that the Soviet Union was an irreconcilable enemy that must be resisted, abroad and at home. The Progressives were, in effect, being drummed out of the Democratic Party. Finally, with this policy Truman had raised the issue of the danger of communism to a new level. To get the appropriations necessary for the new foreign aid, Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan had advised Truman that he would need to “scare the hell out of the American people.” Truman had done so and in doing so had effectively validated the fears of rightwing anti-Communists; he now would have to deal with the consequences on the domestic level.

To strengthen the federal government in resisting communism, in that summer Congress passed legislation to restructure the country’s military and intelligence agencies; the National Security Act created the National Security Council and the first US peacetime intelligence agency, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Truman followed up this policy of military resistance with a comprehensive program to help rebuild the war-damaged economies of Europe; the Marshall Plan—so called because it was announced in a June 5, 1947 speech given by Secretary of State George C. Marshall—promised economic assistance to any European nation that chose to participate. The aid had conditions attached and, although it was offered to the Soviet

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Union and the Soviet bloc, it was hoped and expected that they would reject it. Gradually a duel was taking shape, or perhaps it was more like a chess game, between the world’s two new superpowers. The United States’ chief assets were, first of all, the fact that it was immeasurably wealthier than the USSR or, indeed, any other nation in the world, and also that it espoused an ideology of personal freedom under constitutional law that was attractive to many people throughout the world. That personal freedom might be very imperfectly realized, as evidenced by the continued widespread existence of racial segregation and discrimination in America, but still, the United States was a place where those who were oppressed could struggle for improvement in their legal, social and economic conditions with a hope of success, even if the battle often was accompanied by great personal danger. The Soviet Union, on the other hand, had the advantage of proximity to Europe while the United States was an ocean away. That meant that it could maintain its very large armies within easy striking distance of any eastern European territory while continuing to represent a substantial threat to the entirety of Europe. Moreover, the USSR was ultimately ruled by a single man—Stalin—who could make critical decisions (such as the decision to spend an enormous amount of the country’s gross domestic product (GDP) on its military) without going through the cumbersome procedures and disagreements of adversarial democratic politics. Having moved to outflank conservative opponents on the international front, Truman also sought to do so domestically and to head off conservatives hammering the administration with being “soft on communism” with his own anti-subversive program; nine days after the Truman Doctrine speech, he instituted a new loyalty program with Executive Order 9835, the first in American history, designed to undercut any possibility of internal subversion by screening out disloyal federal employees. Despite the fact that, as Attorney General Tom Clark affirmed, there were only some two dozen Communists employed by the federal government, more than four million people were to be subjected to loyalty investigations to determine whether there were “reasonable grounds” for believing that they might be “disloyal to the Government of the United States.” These reasonable grounds included “[m]embership in, affiliation with or sympathetic association with any foreign or domestic organization . . . designated by the Attorney General as . . . communist, or subversive.” In the end, no actual Communists were exposed as a result of this program.14 A key element of the program was the list of suspected subversive organizations compiled by the Attorney General’s office with the help of the FBI, a list which quickly became a central feature of the developing red scare. The Attorney General’s List of Subversive Organizations, usually

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shortened to “the Attorney General’s List” was first published in December 1947. Officially the sole purpose of the list was to provide helpful information to the loyalty board about suspected federal employees. However, historian Robert J. Goldstein points out that the evidence indicates that it was also intended as a weapon against suspected subversives, with Attorney General Clark listing the “continuous study and public listing by the Attorney General of subversive organizations under the President’s executive order” as part of an overall eight-point program designed to “isolate subversive movements in this country from effective interference with the body politic” and render them “completely ineffective as a fifth column.” Under circumstances that are still somewhat obscure, the decision was made to publish the list, making those listed on it broadly known. Once available to the general public, it quickly became part of loyalty screenings, not only of federal employees, but also of state and municipal government screenings, and even private businesses, with organizations like CBS News using it to screen their employees. Part of the problem for those listed was that there were no clear criteria for being included and no hearings were held to allow suspect groups to clear themselves of the imputation of subversion. Furthermore, actual members of the proscribed groups were not the only ones in danger: a small donation to the wrong organization, getting one’s name on the wrong mailing list, associating with someone— a spouse, a relative or a friend—who was in some way associated with one of the listed organizations could cause a person to lose their job.15 Consciousness of the list permeated American society: for example, in 1951, a University of Connecticut student, involved in a hostile exchange of letters in the college newspaper with another person, asked his opponent in print, “How many organizations do you belong to or have you belonged to that are listed as subversive by the attorney general?” The student did not know and had no way of knowing whether his opponent had any such associations (he did not), but the question itself was a weapon, a tactic to discredit the other person, an unsupported innuendo of the type that characterized what would come to be known as McCarthyism.16 In the Truman administration’s new loyalty program, crafted in haste and without care as a quick effort to ward off conservatives and to beat them to the loyalty punch, a staff of some 3,000 investigators would subject all federal employees and all applicants for federal employment to a preliminary investigation for any “derogatory” information; if anything deemed suspicious were uncovered, there would be a much more thorough investigation conducted by the FBI, interviewing employers, employees, friends, neighbors, looking into the person’s associations, writings and

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associations to discover the person’s beliefs and intentions toward the United States. A dossier would be compiled containing all this which would be turned over to a loyalty board. If the board concluded that there were “reasonable grounds” to doubt the loyalty of the individual, a formal hearing would be held. The person, now a suspect of sorts, was entitled to legal counsel but had no right to confront any witnesses or even to know their identity; he or she might not even know what charges had been made against them or what had sparked those charges. “Was it a petition I signed? A public meeting I attended? Did I say something to somebody? Maybe I criticized the government and someone misunderstood what I meant. Who could it have been? Or did my name get on the wrong mailing list? What organization could it have been?” There was no way to get answers to these questions. The acceptance of information from anonymous informers meant that anyone, someone who misunderstood you in a conversation, a malicious neighbor, someone who heard an unfounded rumor, could ruin your life. And even if a person were not fired or denied employment, simply to have it known that you had been suspected and investigated could put a pall of suspicion over you in the eyes of your employer, your colleagues, your friends and your neighbors. A central element of the program was using a person’s associations as an indication of disloyalty, that is, not only the organizations to which they might belong, but also publications to which they subscribed; in other words, the program had as its central feature the principle of “guilt by association.” The reasoning was that if a person belonged to an organization or subscribed to a publication that the personnel in the Attorney General’s office deemed to be subversive of American democracy, then it was logical to conclude that that person must be an enemy of American democracy. And if this person were against American democracy, then it was logical to conclude that, even if he or she had not done so already, they would, given the opportunity, act to subvert American democracy. Therefore, the government was justified in denying this person employment or firing him or her if they were already employed. And so, with the institution of this program we find the first substantial effect of the red scare, that is, people starting to be afraid to speak their minds lest they find themselves unemployed and socially ostracized. One federal employee told social scientists investigating the impact of the loyalty program, “If the communists like apple pie and I do, I see no reason why I should stop eating it, but I would.” In this statement we see the most pernicious effect of the “guilt by association” dilemma: it was not just the wrong group that one might have donated to, the wrong petition one might have signed; what about ideas? The Communists spoke up against racism; America was

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entering an era where speaking up for racial equality could get a person branded as a Communist. Communists spoke in favor of unions; speaking in favor of unions could get a person accused of being a Communist. Communists were atheists; being an atheist could get a person branded as a Communist. The developing red scare was not only closing in on Communists; it was also closing in on two fundamental American freedoms, the freedom of thought and the freedom of speech. One of the chief ironies of Truman’s loyalty program is that the president himself did not see domestic communism as a major threat to the United States; in fact, he wrote to former Pennsylvania Governor George Earle, “People are very much wrought up about the Communist ‘bugaboo’ but I am of the opinion that the country is perfectly safe so far as Communism is concerned—we have too many sane people.”17 As White House Counsel Clark Clifford later wrote, much of the pressure to create the program came from FBI Director Hoover and Attorney General Tom Clark, who “constantly urged the President to expand the investigative authority of the FBI.”18 Meanwhile, in addition to the formidable challenges he faced in foreign policy, the new and accidental president, Harry Truman, had substantial problems at home. President Roosevelt had returned to the theme of economic justice in his final years, calling in his 1944 State of the Union Address for “steeply graduated taxes” to pay for an “economic Bill of Rights” that would commit government to “guarantee everyone a job, an education, and clothing, housing, medical care, and financial security against the risks of old age and sickness.” And Roosevelt had taken one very large step in this direction by supporting the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944. Championed by the American Legion and dubbed by American Legion publicist Jack Cejnar the “G.I. Bill of Rights,” this legislation offered demobilized veterans a package of benefits unprecedented in American history in its generosity; these included a year of unemployment compensation, tuition and living expenses for education, whether at a university, high school or vocational school, low-cost mortgages, low-interest loans to start a business and extensive health care benefits. Veterans enthusiastically took advantage of these opportunities with some 2,300,000—many of whom would otherwise never have had the opportunity—attending colleges and universities;19 moreover the housing market received a potent shot in the arm, 20 percent of all new homes built after the war were purchased by veterans. This was big government at its biggest and with powerful results; a Congressional report published in 1988 found that some 40 percent of those veterans who had attended college would not otherwise have been able to go and calculated that the extra education acquired by those veterans yielded $6.90

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in taxes for every dollar spent on them.20 The resulting creation of wealth, spread through the entire American economy, would help to bring a period of unprecedented national prosperity in the decades that followed. Now Truman had to decide on the path he would follow: would he attempt to build on Roosevelt’s liberal legacy or would he seek to return the Democratic Party to a more conservative path? He had been a loyal New Dealer during FDR’s lifetime and it soon became apparent that he meant to continue that way; on September 6 in a message to Congress he straightforwardly embraced Roosevelt’s economic Bill of Rights in its entirety, pledging himself to the goal of full employment. Moreover, he put himself on record as supporting minority rights, calling for permanent status for the Fair Employment Practices Committee established by President Roosevelt whose purpose had been to forbid “discrimination in the employment of workers in defense industries or government because of race, creed, color, or national origin.” Soon he would establish himself even more firmly as a champion of racial justice, going on to support antilynching legislation, the abolition of the poll tax and, finally, using his presidential powers to integrate the armed forces. However, Truman’s economic plans were headed for stormy waters: by the end of 1945 the GDP was falling while labor unions, representing some 27 percent of the labor force and restless after having patriotically restrained themselves from acting to get higher wages and better working conditions during the war years, took action to make up for lost time; the year 1946 saw more than 5,000 strikes by some five million workers, and industries affected included steel, coal, auto, electricity and the railroads. Prices were rising, important consumer commodities like meat were in short supply and much of the voting public was inclined to blame Truman and militant unions for these developments. The many newspapers controlled by conservative press-baron William Randolph Hearst turned to red-baiting, telling the public that these strikes represented a “clear and distinct revolutionary pattern . . . timed to serve Russia’s political interests”21 while the Chamber of Commerce in the first of what would be a series of pamphlets on the dangers of communism warned the public that Communists had “striven successfully to infiltrate the American labor movement.”22 Also, the public’s fear of domestic communism was heightened by the first postwar spy incidents; in 1945 it was discovered that secret government documents had been leaked to Amerasia, a leftwing journal that dealt with US/Asian relations. That same year a 22-member Soviet spy ring, conspiring to steal information about the atom bomb, was exposed by the Canadian Government. Americans were now alerted to the fact that the Soviet Union had spies working in the United States and, spies or not, most Americans believed that Communists should be kept

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out of government employment. For the first time charges of communism became a major feature of a national campaign in the off-year elections of that year, with conservative Republicans on the attack, essentially charging their Democratic opponents with treason. Nebraska Republican Senator Hugh Butler declared that “if the New Deal is still in control of Congress after the election, it will owe that control to the Communist Party.”23 The chairman of the Republican National Committee, B. Carroll Reece, climbed on board the bandwagon, claiming that there were “pink puppets in control of the federal bureaucracy,” informing the American public that “Democratic party policy as enunciated by its officially chosen spokesmen . . . bears a made-in-Moscow label” and that the “choice which confronts Americans this year is between Communism and Republicanism.”24 The man known as “Mr. Republican,” Robert Taft (who, as historian Alonzo Hamby has written “tended to use as synonyms such words and phrases as Communist, left-winger, and New Dealer”25), charged that Democrats were “appeasing the Russians abroad and fostering Communism at home,” House Republican leader Joe Martin pledged to give priority to “cleaning out the Communists, their fellow travelers and parlor pinks from high positions in our Government,” and Representative Charles Vursell characterized the New Deal as standing for “confusion, control, corruption and communism.” The smear tactics that were increasingly adopted by conservative politicians as a routine tool in their repertoire of political tactics—the persistent accusations from the very highest placed conservatives that loyal Americans were somehow traitors—worked; with Truman’s popularity rating at 32 percent and the Republicans campaigning on mocking slogans like “Had enough?” and “To err is Truman”, the GOP gained decisive control of both houses of Congress, picking up 54 seats in the House and 11 in the Senate and winning control of both houses of Congress for the first time since 1928. Moreover, this pattern of political discourse, with conservatives on the offensive attacking their opponents as “un-American”, and moderates and liberals on the defensive, would set the tone for American political life on the national, state and local levels for many years to come. It is important to stress here that the charge being made was not simply that one’s opponent was wrong or misguided; it was that he or she was consciously or unconsciously (as a dupe) betraying the United States to the Communists. The immediate postwar period, as we have already seen, witnessed much industrial strife and a substantial portion of an inconvenienced voting public had turned against the unions. The chief purpose of Truman’s loyalty program had been to outflank the conservative Republicans and Democrats in order to take control of the Communist issue as a political issue.

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However, this was a tactic that, whenever employed by liberals, consistently failed since the conservatives were always happy to come back with a more extreme position than liberals would willingly embrace. In this case, however, the first conservative response was not directly aimed at federal employees but rather at a key Democratic constituency and an outstanding conservative concern, the CIO. Now, after the 1946 elections, conservatives were in control of both houses of Congress: they saw their chance to start reversing the pro-labor tide that had developed with the New Deal and the Wagner Act. In 1947 there were more than 250 bills pending in Congress relating to unions; however, the one crafted by Fred Hartley (R-NJ), well known for his violent opposition to unions (he described the Wagner Act as “illconceived and disastrously executed”), rose to the top of the heap and was believed by conservatives to balance what they thought to be the “dominance” of labor created by the Wagner Act with a newly prescribed set of employers’ rights. The strength—or viability, for that matter—of a union depends on the employees of a given company working as a unit on their own behalf; a strike—the workers’ final weapon in a labor dispute—can only succeed if the business loses access to the labor it requires for its operation. The bill that emerged from Congress—Taft-Hartley—was geared to undermine the possibility of this kind of solidarity. For example, one of its chief provisions was to outlaw the “closed shop,” that provision in managementlabor contracts that required employees to be part of the union and pay dues. The “union shop,” which required new workers to join the union, was still permitted but was strongly undercut by allowing states to pass “right-to-work” laws allowing employees to decide as individuals whether or not to join an existing union. This, along with the prohibition of secondary strikes—where one union would refuse to handle the goods of a business that was being struck by another union, thus greatly magnifying the pressure on an employer to come to terms—, clearly undercut the unified action required for unions to be effective while a prohibition on monetary donations to federal political campaigns was aimed at the Democratic candidates who tended to be the beneficiaries of such donations. In addition, there was a clause in the Act that denied access to the benefits of the National Labor Relations Act to unions whose officers did not sign affidavits affirming that they were not Communists. This clause— which was used as a selling point for the legislation by its proponents— was opposed even by many conservative union representatives, who understood that it could be used to undermine unions generally. It would also serve to push out some of the most energetic and experienced

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organizers, thus hurting the cause of labor generally. Finally, it would split the CIO, forcing the organization to purge its Communist unions; this, in turn, caused a division that led to the abandonment in 1948 of its great drive to organize the South; with this vanished the hope of bringing millions of African-American and Southern white workers into the labor movement. Overall Taft-Hartley was the most effective anticommunist legislation of the era, as almost all Communists resigned from CIO unions since they knew they would go to jail if they lied on the oaths required by the legislation. Another important component of the conservative attack on unions was the Dies Committee, resuscitated and renewed as the House Committee on Un-American Activities (more commonly known as the House Un-American Activities Committee or HUAC). The original committee, under Dies, had been limited by the political errors of its chairman who had not only alienated the president and the Justice Department, but who, seeking to establish his committee’s primacy in hunting subversives, had been foolish enough to criticize J. Edgar Hoover. Dies soon learned where the true power lay when he was privately given to understand that the FBI was in possession of evidence that he had accepted a bribe. Dies immediately pulled back and, in fact, though he retained the chairmanship, he avoided HUAC hearings from then until he left Congress.26 The 1946 elections had brought in new conservative majorities, which would turn HUAC into a major political force, a political weapon that would use the issue of domestic subversion to strike at centrist and liberal Democrats through some of their major constituencies, including unions and educators. Back in 1952 political scientist Robert K. Carr wrote as cogent an analysis of HUAC as any that has appeared since. In his book The House Committee on Un-American Activities, 1945–1950 Carr observed that traditionally Congressional investigating committees had three functions: (1) to get information that will help Congress to formulate good legislation, (2) to hold administrative agencies to account when necessary and (3) to attempt to influence public opinion.27 While HUAC engaged in all three of these, it was the third, the effort to influence the public—especially to alert the public to the “red threat” that allegedly menaced Americans in their workplaces, their schools, their places of recreation—that most concerned it. Therefore, HUAC did not, for the most part, act as a vehicle for the formulation of new legislation—only one substantial bill ever emanated from it—but rather became a permanent investigating committee, seeking, as Carr notes to “set the standards of American thought and conduct with respect to orthodoxy and heresy in politics”

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while also setting itself up as an enforcer of these standards by exposing those it considered to be political deviants and then letting the private sector do the work of punishing them, mostly by denying them employment. Having sidelined Dies, J. Edgar Hoover became an indispensable aid in empowering HUAC, now under the chairmanship of J. Parnell Thomas. The FBI made its vast resources available to the Committee and the first target was one that was bound to reap a rich harvest of publicity: Hollywood. There were quite a few Communists employed in various aspects of making movies and FBI files show that the agency had begun investigating the film industry during the Second World War, with J. Edgar Hoover worrying about the ability of motion pictures to influence American public opinion in favor of communism and the Soviet Union (not necessarily one and the same thing). In fact, once the United States had entered the Second World War, the Roosevelt administration, very interested in fostering friendly public feelings toward a USSR that was now a vital ally in the fight against the Nazis, encouraged the studios to make movies friendly to the Soviet Union. So, for example, the movie Song of Russia, based on Ambassador Joseph E. Davies’ best-selling 1941 memoir about his stint as US ambassador to Moscow from November 1936 to June 1938, was scripted by Communist Howard E. Koch, but the script did not depart from the book in its most egregious misrepresentation of reality, the Moscow show trials in which the defendants—who in truth were guilty only of possibly being able to stand in Stalin’s way— were depicted as traitors on behalf of the Nazis (which they were not). Shortly after the picture’s release, the Los Angeles branch of the FBI warned J. Edgar Hoover: This picture will no doubt lend support to the activities of the Communist Party at present time. Its membership is increasing and its undercover activities are increasing. It is conceded that the motion picture is a very powerful propaganda instrument and its ability to reach a very large percentage of the people makes it a most potent factor in molding opinion.28

And here is where the problem lay: Hoover and the other red scare antiCommunists operated under some very questionable assumptions: first, they assumed that American minds were made of passive stuff, like clay, easily molded, easily misled, especially by Communists who were, as Hoover’s book called them, “masters of deceit;” second, though red scare anti-Communists assumed that Communists were conscienceless liars, they invariably accepted Communist boasts about their own strengths at

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face value. This had been true as far back as 1920 when Hoover had been predicting the radical revolution that had failed to materialize. That was a lesson that had not been learned and Hoover would continue to exaggerate the danger of Communist infiltration to the very end. In his zeal to obtain information, Hoover would continually use illicit means— opening mail, illegal wire-taps and bugging, and “black bag jobs,” that is, breaking and entering with occasional burglary. The Supreme Court ruled on the illegality of these methods several times, but this only drove Hoover to be more circumspect in his approach. Moreover, he had the authority of the president of the United States behind him; Franklin Roosevelt, anxious to have full information regarding potential Nazi sabotage, had in 1940 informed Attorney General Robert Jackson that he was convinced that the Supreme Court never intended to exclude necessary measures when they related to “grave matters involving the defense of the nation.” When Truman became president, Hoover briefed him on his arrangement with Roosevelt and Truman, new to the position and possibly in these early days somewhat overawed by the FBI director, agreed to continue the arrangement. The limitation Hoover faced—and it was a severe one—was that information gathered by illegal means could never be introduced as evidence in a court of law; however, as the members of HUAC were about to discover, that information could, nonetheless, be invaluable in other ways. Also, Hoover, despite his liking and admiration for Roosevelt, came to the conclusion that liberals were a danger to his version of “Americanism,” and when he outlined the scope of the danger to the American Legion in September 1946, he included among those who were “ready to do the Party’s work” their “satellites, their fellow travelers and their so-called progressive and liberal allies.”29 In fact, years later when examining the activities of the FBI, the United States Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, more commonly known as the Church Committee, found that Hoover’s real concern regarding liberals was that they were too interested in uncovering the illegal methods of gathering information that his agency routinely used.30 Hoover’s partisan use of his position went beyond insinuation; during the 1948 presidential campaign Hoover kept Republican candidate Thomas E. Dewey supplied with information intended to help defeat Truman31 and in the 1952 campaign Hoover supplied Republicans with the (false) information that Democratic candidate Adlai E. Stevenson had been arrested both in Illinois and in Maryland for homosexual acts.32 Hoover was a vindictive man; he was angry with Truman because he had not acted on information Hoover had supplied him indicating that the

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candidate for president of the World Bank, Harry Dexter White, was a Soviet spy and he had a special grudge against Stevenson who, as a new governor of Illinois had told a reporter that he would not pick an FBI agent as head of the state police because “FBI agents are not renowned administrators.” Hoover was informed of this comment in a memo on which he noted, “Keep this in mind. H.” And he did. From then on the FBI kept tabs on Stevenson, collecting minutiae, especially any tidbit of information that could possibly connect him to Communists or communism. Hoover understood the power of information, even if unusable in court (because of being gotten illegally) or inaccurate. Historian Albert Fried writes, “Hoover and his assistants routinely fed slanderous data to favored outlets: newspaper columnists, ideological yokemates in various walks of life, and grand inquisitors, McCarthy among them.”33 It was Hoover, widely accepted as the ultimate authority on American Communists, who was most responsible for painting the picture of the Party and its members that would dominate the American imagination. Magnifying the dangers, he told the members of HUAC, it did not matter that the CPUSA was small, for the “greatest menace of communism” lay in the fact that “for every party member there are ten others ready, willing, and able to do the party’s work.” What was his authority for this statement? It was “the claims of communists [whose ‘basic tactics’ he characterized in the same speech as ‘deceit and trickery’] themselves.” Moreover, the number of Communists in the Party was “relatively unimportant because of the enthusiasm and iron-clad discipline under which they operate.” He then went on to observe that when Communists took over in Russia in 1917, there was “one communist for every 2,277 persons” in the country while in the United States there was currently one for every 1,814. What he did not mention was that in 1917 Russia was an impoverished agrarian country in the middle of a disastrous war, experiencing political and social collapse with a thoroughly alienated army while in 1947 the United States was emerging from a victorious war as the world’s most prosperous country and was politically stable; in other words, the comparison was superficial and foolish. In his ghostwritten book Masters of Deceit Hoover painted the picture of the party member that would become stereotypical: through relentless indoctrination, he wrote, the Party had the ability to turn its members into automata, unquestioningly obedient to whatever orders the Party might issue. Widely recognized as the highest authority on communism in the United States, Hoover’s descriptions of communism and Communists became widely accepted as a correct representation. While it is likely that the CPUSA would have liked to have had such completely devoted members and while it is possible that they did have some,

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nonetheless, the evidence strongly suggests that there were not many such mindlessly obedient Party members. The turnover in party membership— in part because of the great demands put upon members—was very high with the average member lasting a mere three to four years before quitting.34 The fact that the Party had such difficulty hanging on to members suggests: (1) that they were hardly the human robots that Hoover portrayed them as and (2) that the Party’s appeal was quite limited, even on the far left of American politics. This new stereotype of the robotic, brainwashed fanatic was quite different from the old portrait of the foreign-born, bearded, wild-eyed anarchist bombthrower; it might be fairly easy to pick out the latter in a crowd, but one of the defining qualities of this new villain was that he or she could be anyone—your fellow worker, your employee, your brother or sister, someone you thought you knew well but who has turned out to be a cog in an alien machine, bent on taking away your business, your house, your life and turning you into one of them or even killing you. This was the nightmare of the Red Menace. And it cannot be dismissed as mere fantasy; what had happened in the USSR and much of eastern Europe, what would happen in China, had much that was nightmarish about it. The question was this: was it reasonable to think that it might happen in the United States? Hoover clearly believed that it was, telling the members of HUAC, I feel that once public opinion is thoroughly aroused as it is today, the fight against Communism is well on its way. Victory will be assured once Communists are identified and exposed, because the public will take the first step of quarantining them so they can do no harm . . . . This Committee renders a distinct service when it publicly reveals the diabolic machinations of sinister figures engaged in un-American activities.35

In other words, it was an intrinsic part of Hoover’s vision that the public be a vital element in containing the Red Menace, but not in the vigilante role it had taken in the First Red Scare: no, police actions should be left to the policing apparatus of the state. The word was spread throughout the country in local presses: “Don’t try to be a ‘private eye.’ Leave it to the FBI” and “If you think you’ve spotted a traitor or a spy or a saboteur— tell it to the FBI and leave the rest to the G-men.”36 The new model for dealing with subversion was hammered out in HUAC’s Hollywood probe. The underlying idea was the one that had been articulated by Hoover: allow government agents or agencies like HUAC to expose suspected subversives and then let the people in the

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suspects’ lives—especially their employers—punish them by ostracizing them and denying them work. When on October 20, 1947 the Los Angeles Times reported the commencement of HUAC hearings into Communist influence on the film industry, the paper played its role in helping the Committee by publicizing a “star-studded” cast—Hollywood, with its famous and glamorous stars, was bound to generate loads of publicity. For 10 days the Committee heard the testimony of witnesses, first the “friendly” ones who gladly cooperated with the investigation, then the “unfriendlies,” those alleged to be Communists or to have been Communists. When the Committee confronted the unfriendly witnesses, those witnesses did not know that it was armed with information supplied by the FBI (which had launched an investigation of its own into suspected Hollywood subversives as early as 1942), some of it gained through illegal means such as break-ins and illegal wiretaps. Ultimately 10 witnesses, most of them screenwriters who became known collectively as the “Hollywood Ten” and all identified by the FBI as Communists, became the focal points for the Committee. What set them apart was their unwillingness to answer the question, “Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?” on the grounds that the question violated their First Amendment free speech rights. Initially the movie industry had not taken the investigation very seriously; despite the general political conservatism of the studio owners, the studios were not terribly interested in the political views of the employees who helped generate Hollywood’s profits. However, the Committee had come armed with significant powers including the ability to subpoena witnesses and hold people in contempt of Congress, and as it began to dawn on Hollywood moguls that studios that continued to hire suspected subversives might themselves be regarded as disloyal and that movies produced by studios regarded as disloyal might suffer at the box office, industry attitudes changed. When contempt of Congress charges were filed against the Hollywood Ten, the movie executives responded by issuing the “Waldorf Statement,” a press release issued from a meeting at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, declaring that henceforth the studios would not hire anyone suspected of being a Communist; this was the beginning of an entertainment industry blacklist that would last until the 1960s. If nothing else, HUAC had established that it meant business: in November 1947, the Ten were cited for contempt of Congress; they went to trial, were all found guilty and were sentenced to a year’s imprisonment and a $1,000 fine. Moreover, except for Edward Dmytryk, who agreed to name people he knew as Communists to the Committee, they all found

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themselves barred from work in the film industry for years to come. Some, like screenwriter Dalton Trumbo who wrote the screenplays for the successful movies Exodus and Spartacus (neither of which were notable for turning Americans into Communists), were able to work using aliases, but for the others, their careers in the film industry were at an end. Important precedents had been set by these events: members of the Hollywood Ten had sought to protect themselves from having to testify by invoking the First Amendment with its freedom of speech guarantees; however, the Supreme Court denied their right to do so. This meant that in the future, witnesses before Congressional and other committees who did not wish to testify would have to fall back on the Fifth Amendment’s protections against self-incrimination; however, while this might protect them against punishment by courts, it generally automatically branded them as “Fifth Amendment Communists.” After all, if they had nothing to hide, why decline to testify? Moreover, the Court decided that any witness who was willing to discuss his or her own past associations could not invoke the Fifth Amendment selectively to avoid incriminating others. This meant that to avoid “ratting out” others—an act many found profoundly morally repugnant—, one had to “take the Fifth” in response to all questions, giving the appearance that one was still a Communist. As Senator Joseph McCarthy would put it, “A witness’s refusal to answer whether or not he is a Communist on the ground that his answer would tend to incriminate him is the most positive proof obtainable that the witness is a Communist.”37 And the usual consequence of “taking the Fifth” for actors, for professors or for any others who came under suspicion and were brought before government committees to testify under oath became dismissal from one’s employment; the private sector took over the task of punishing those “exposed” by the public sector, i.e., government. Moreover, the person who chose to protect him or herself this way was now forced into silence: the most outlandish insinuations could be launched at them by mischievous committee members and witnesses could only respond by invoking his or her right against self-incrimination. HUAC would return to Hollywood in 1951, but the film industry was not its only concern. In the years to come it would investigate labor unions, educational institutions and educators, charitable institutions and more. And while those researches would never uncover anything that truly endangered the United States, they did hit pay dirt in one particularly important instance, the case of Alger Hiss. This story actually had begun years earlier, in September, 1939 when Whittaker Chambers, a writer for Time magazine who also was an exCommunist, came to President Roosevelt’s internal security adviser, Adolf

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Figure 4.1 Senator Joseph McCarthy standing at microphone with two other men, probably discussing the Senate Select Committee to Study Censure Charges (Watkins Committee) chaired by Senator Arthur V. Watkins. Source: Courtesy of Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, LC-DIG-ds-07186.

Berle, and warned him that there were more than a dozen people in the service of the federal government who were functioning as spies for the Soviet Union. However, neither Berle nor the FBI took Chambers very seriously. Then, in 1945, another former Communist, Elizabeth Bentley, walked into the FBI office in New Haven, Connecticut, to tell the agency a confused and confusing story about Soviet spies in the US Government. There were few specifics in what she said, and the FBI again did not follow up; however, when Bentley returned two months later, she confessed that she herself had been “involved in Soviet espionage,” and now the agency paid careful attention. Like many American Communists, Bentley had joined the Party because she saw it as the nation’s most effective antifascist organization. In 1938 she met an important Soviet intelligence agent, Jacob Golos, who became her lover. Bentley started providing Golos with

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information that she had access to through work she was doing with the Italian Government. Soon Bentley was acting as Golos’s assistant and courier and after Golos suffered a heart attack in 1941, she took over the job of supervising the network of spies that he had developed. Eventually she named more than 80 Americans who she claimed were working for the Russians. The effect of Bentley’s confession was greatly enhanced when a program called Venona, a top secret Army effort to break the formidable codes in Soviet cables, met with success. Many Soviet spies and contacts were uncovered, among them quite a few who had been named by Bentley. The urgency of the situation was highlighted when in 1945 a cipher clerk in the office of the Russian Embassy in Ottawa, Canada by the name of Igor Gouzenko defected and provided extensive information about Soviet spying activities, including efforts to get access to critical information about the atomic bomb. Gouzenko revealed a Soviet espionage ring that included 23 Canadian officials and led authorities to Allen Nunn May, a British nuclear physicist who had passed information to the Russians along with samples of enriched uranium 235 and 233; May, in turn, gave the FBI information that took them to an American spy ring. The Venona project also would lead the FBI to Justice Department employee Judith Coplon, who was tried and convicted of espionage (in a second trial she would be released when it was revealed to the court that the FBI had used illegal methods of getting evidence). The fresh material from Venona and Gouzenko led the FBI to pay more careful attention to Bentley, who, in the end, identified more than a hundred spies working in six government agencies. Perhaps most shocking of the names she mentioned was that of Harry Dexter White, highly placed in the Treasury Department. The agency also came back to Whittaker Chambers, whose accusations they had ignored back in 1939. By July 1948 Hoover was ready to move on the information he had acquired and he arranged for Bentley and Chambers to testify publicly before HUAC. Much had happened in the previous year to supercharge the political tension: Truman’s loyalty program had been instituted along with the publication of the Attorney General’s list; in February 1948 Communists had taken over in Czechoslovakia, leading a shocked Congress to overcome its reservations and approve $5 billion to fund the first year of the Marshall Plan; then, in June Stalin had made a move toward getting control of Germany by starting a blockade of the country’s old capital city, Berlin, and Truman had boldly responded by ordering that the city be supplied via an airlift. On the domestic front, indictments had been issued against 11 leaders of the Communist Party, including the Party’s general secretary,

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Eugene Dennis, on grounds of violating the Smith Act by advocating the violent overthrow of the US Government (J. Edgar Hoover had been the strongest advocate of the use of the Smith Act to prosecute accused Communists and between 1949 and 1956 more than a hundred Communist leaders would be tried and sentenced to prison under this law); then in July Congress passed the McCarran rider to the Smith Act, giving the secretary of state unrestricted power to dismiss any employee of the Department of State or of the Foreign Service. Under these conditions when the public learned that Whittaker Chambers had accused two highly placed government officials, Harry Dexter White and former Roosevelt adviser, Director of the Office of Special Political Affairs and current president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Alger Hiss, of being Communists who passed information to the Soviets, the effect was explosive. White denied all charges before the Committee, but his case did not go far since he died of a heart attack three days later. The Alger Hiss controversy, however, would play out over decades. Hiss denied having ever been a Communist until the day he died. Prominent Democrats, including Secretary of State Dean Acheson, Supreme Court Justices Felix Frankfurter and Stanley Reed, former Democratic presidential candidate John W. Davis and future candidate Adlai Stevenson hastened to support him; to them, he was the government official who had argued against Stalin’s bid to have each of the 16 Soviet Republics have their own vote in the UN General Assembly. Surely this was not the act of one who was pro-Soviet, much less a spy? To conservatives, however, Hiss presented an opening for an indictment of the entire Roosevelt administration as being tainted in its dealings with Communism. Hadn’t Hiss been among the advisers FDR had consulted at Yalta? And, conservatives would soon be asking, hadn’t the Yalta Treaty “sold out” millions of eastern Europeans and all of China to Communist slavery? Meanwhile, Congressman Richard Nixon—armed with information secretly fed to him by the FBI—was especially assiduous in his efforts to prove that Chambers’ accusations were well-founded.38 Hiss claimed Chambers’ allegations were lies, and challenged him to repeat them outside Congress where Chambers would be vulnerable to slander charges; when Chambers repeated his charges on Meet the Press, then a radio program, Hiss filed a civil suit against him. To most Americans the spy issue had come out of the blue; however, as far back as the 1930s the Soviet Union, driving hard to industrialize in its five-year plans, was working to ferret out industrial secrets of the United States and as the decade wore on, military espionage was added to the agenda. The CPUSA was an important element in Soviet espionage,

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producing fake US passports for Soviet agents, setting up American business fronts, providing safe houses for KGB (the Soviet spy agency) officers, and acting to spot possible recruits as spies. The role and nature of the Party has been a matter of great dispute over the years, perhaps, in part at least, because the word “party” itself tends to suggest a single, uniform entity, partly because the propaganda issued by the Party tended to portray it as a single, uniform entity and partly because the FBI, HUAC and other anti-Communist groups and individuals tended to take Party propaganda as factual and then acted as agents spreading the Party’s image of itself and its members to the general public. However, the Party, like any other group, was composed of individuals who had their individual motivations, their individual degrees of commitment and their individual degrees of willingness to subsume their personal identities in the Party. The number of members who were involved in espionage compared to the total membership was relatively small—never more than in the hundreds. How many would have been willing to have become spies? There is no way to know: perhaps many, perhaps few. When J. Edgar Hoover and other red scare anti-Communists spoke of why people might become Communists, they usually ascribed it to a pathology of some sort; it was unimaginable to them that people might become Communists because they believed that there were injustices in America that the current system would never address. Still, it seems reasonable to assume that most Americans who became Communists—no matter how misguided we may consider them to have been—did so for altruistic reasons; Communists generally seem to have been people who saw only what they believed to be the injustices of American society—racism, sexism, an indifference to the problems of poverty—and who had no faith that the existing system would ever remedy those. Racism, for example, is still with us, but in 1933 24 African-Americans were lynched while 10 years later in Detroit white mobs attacked African-American neighborhoods, killing 25 people. Jim Crow laws were still common, with many states forbidding people of different races to marry or have sexual relations, enforcing segregation in schools, in housing, in transportation. The social will to address these issues seemed negligible. American Communists often stood in the forefront of efforts to achieve racial equality, to get aid for the unemployed and to organize workers for higher pay and better working conditions. However, Communists were misguided in believing that the nation they took as their model—the Soviet Union—offered anything better. It is estimated that some six to nine million people were murdered by the Stalinist state with many millions more imprisoned. Basic freedoms—free speech, the freedom to disagree with the government, the free practice of one’s religion, the freedom to assemble with others, the freedom to

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form an independent trade union, etc.—were unthinkable under a government that ruled by fear. As time went on, it took a greater and greater willingness to shut one’s eyes to evidence to continue to believe that the USSR was some kind of workers’ paradise in the making, but there were always some thousands of people (a mere drop in the bucket in the United States, whose population was some 150,000,000) whose need to believe was so great that they could accomplish the task. And there is no reason to suppose that if by some fantastic chance communism had replaced American capitalism that things would have been any better in the United States than they were in Russia. Still, the Communist leadership unquestionably took and followed orders from Moscow and some hundreds of American Communists were willing to engage in espionage to the detriment of their own country: this—a hostile and powerful foreign state with some well-placed Americans willing to assist it—was the genuine “Red Menace.” And generally, the notion of America as vulnerable to subversion from within was gaining more traction than it ever had before. Early on the FBI tended to be ineffective in its response, missing genuine espionage while worrying about Communist subversion through unimportant groups such as the Cambridge (Massachusetts) Youth Council.39 After 1941 the issue was complicated by the fact that the Soviet Union had become an ally of the United States against Germany; on the one hand, the lend-lease program by which American goods, from food to tanks, were made available to the Russians also, made it much easier for Russian agents to gather information while on the other hand, President Roosevelt was reluctant to strain the alliance with Moscow by clamping down on the CPUSA or by alarming the public by looking into allegations that Party members were at work in government agencies. The biggest military secret—the atom bomb—became an object of interest to the Russians in 1942. A Russian nuclear physicist, Georgy Flyorov, noticed that Western physics journals had ceased publishing articles on nuclear fission; deducing that the Americans must be making a bomb, he alerted Stalin who, consequently, knew about the bomb’s existence long before Harry Truman did. Until now, Moscow had looked on the United States mostly as a useful source of information in the war with Germany, but now America itself emerged as a new kind of threat in Stalin’s eyes and the Soviet Union mounted an intense effort to get information that would help it build its own nuclear device. The 1945 defections of Igor Gouzenko and Elizabeth Bentley had alerted American intelligence and then the White House to the dangers that Soviet spies posed to American secrets. By late 1945 Truman was aware of accusations against many government employees, including

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highly-placed and influential people such as Assistant Secretary of the Treasury Harry Dexter White, White House aide Lauchlin Currie and Office of Strategic Services (OSS) executive assistant Duncan Lee. And it was in the summer of 1949 that the FBI discovered that vital material related to the construction of the atom bomb had been turned over to the USSR, leading to the arrests of German-born British scientist Klaus Fuchs, Harry Gold, David Greenglass and Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. All these revelations made the Hiss case all the more portentous; to many conservatives it was confirmation of their worst suspicions concerning the New Deal and New Dealers. In the months to come Hiss would be convicted on perjury charges, but while all this was still playing out, a presidential election campaign was in progress. Nobody thought that sitting President Harry Truman had much of a chance against his Republican challenger, Thomas E. Dewey: the Democrats had done poorly against Republicans in 1946 and a December 1946 poll showed Truman with a mere 35 percent approval rating for his performance as president. Moreover, he was plagued with desertions from both his right and left flanks: when Minnesota liberal Hubert Humphrey succeeded in placing a strong civil rights plank in the Democratic Party platform, Southern Democrats left the Party en masse to form a new States’ Rights Party, generally known as the Dixiecrats. Meanwhile, Truman’s very liberal former Secretary of Commerce, Henry Wallace, headed a leftwing challenge to Truman, the new Progressive Party. As Truman’s hardline, anti-Soviet foreign policy had developed, Wallace, himself vice president before Truman, had become increasingly disaffected, believing that were the United States merely to be willing to engage in frank and open discussions with the USSR, grounds for peaceful coexistence could be found. Moreover, Wallace voiced no objection to American Communist support for his new party and as the campaign went on Communists exercised increasing control over it. Even though Wallace realized that the association of his cause with Communists was hurting it, he believed that to repudiate the CPUSA would be to surrender to the kind of red-baiting that he despised. Though there was much to be admired about the Wallace stance—such as his uncompromising and brave espousal of equal rights for African-Americans—, as a result of accepting Communist support, according to the most recent chronicler of the Progressive Party, Wallace inadvertently encouraged American militarism inasmuch as liberal Democrats who were opposed to Truman’s international approach were forced into the Truman camp so as not to be tarnished by Wallace’s Communist associations.40 The Truman campaign bore its share of blame for the red-baiting which it claimed to deplore when it espoused the tactic and took steps,

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as Clark Clifford put it, “to identify [Wallace] and isolate him in the public mind with the Communists.”41 Helping Truman was a new group of liberals that had emerged in militant opposition to the old Popular Front approach embodied by Wallace, the Americans for Democratic Action (ADA). The founding meeting of 130 people included political activists, academics, housewives, labor union leaders and former New Dealers, but its most important—because most prominent and influential—members included, former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt, theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, economist John Kenneth Galbraith, historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Minneapolis mayor Hubert H. Humphrey, black newspaper publisher John Stengstacke, attorney Joseph Rauh, labor leader Walter Reuther and journalists Joseph and Stewart Alsop. Later, celebrities like Ronald Reagan, Frank Sinatra and Bette Davis would join the ranks. Domestically, the ADA’s program was not far from Wallace’s, favoring strong government action to defend and extend existing New Deal programs and to develop a more extensive social safety net for all Americans. To this it added, as did Wallace, a strong stand in defense of the civil rights of African-Americans. However, from the beginning the ADA was strongly and outspokenly anti-Communist; it denounced Wallace as being too rigid and dogmatic in his general approach to issues and denounced him most of all for his accommodationist approach toward the USSR and his toleration of Communists among his followers. Moreover, ADA liberals did not propose to generate benefits for all by the redistribution of resources from the rich to the poor; rather, they put their faith in an ever growing economy that would generate ample wealth to allow the rich to stay rich while making the poor less poor. Thus all would benefit without the necessity of unpleasant inter-class friction. Few actually expected Truman to win the election of 1948—the most famous photo of the campaign showed the victorious president holding up a copy of the Chicago Tribune, put out the night before the election with the large and premature headline “Dewey Defeats Truman.” But Roosevelt’s New Deal coalition of labor, Africans-Americans, Jews and farmers held together, giving Truman 49.5 percent of the vote to Dewey’s 45.1 percent; 303 electoral college votes to 189 for Dewey. The election also gave the Democrats control of both houses of Congress. Emboldened by these results and, in his January 5, 1949 State of the Union address, building on Roosevelt’s January 11, 1944 State of the Union address in which he had espoused a new economic bill of rights for all Americans, Truman now proposed a program of strong social welfare initiatives that came to be known as the “Fair Deal.” This included: the repeal of the Taft-Hartley Act; new civil rights measures including the abolition of poll taxes, an anti-lynching law and a permanent Fair

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Employment Practices Committee (FEPC); federal housing programs to guarantee good quality housing for every family in America; a large scale expansion and extension of unemployment benefits; federal aid to education, a large tax cut for low-income earners, a farm aid program, increased public housing, an immigration bill, new TVA-style public works projects, the establishment of a new Department of Welfare, an increase in the minimum wage from 40 to 75 cents an hour, expanded Social Security coverage, a comprehensive federal health-care program and federal national health insurance and a $4 billion tax increase to reduce the national debt and finance these programs. In the end most of Truman’s legislative proposals were blocked by an alliance of Republicans and conservative Democrats. However, he was able to use presidential executive orders to end discrimination in the armed forces and to deny government contracts to firms that practiced racial discrimination. And where he could secure Republican support, he put through significant programs, as in public housing where Congress funded slum clearance and the construction of 810,000 units of low-income housing over a period of six years under the 1949 National Housing Act. Conservatives by this time had acquired another source of bitter complaint as well: while the New Deal had stalled in the late 1930s, America’s entry into the Second World War had created an urgent need for new government income. Conservatives wanted to fund the war through a national sales tax. Sales taxes are known as regressive taxes because, being the same for everyone, they hit people with less money harder than they do people with more. Roosevelt, however, was able to push through higher income tax rates until, by the war’s end, wealthy Americans were paying a 94 percent rate on annual income over $200,000. Meanwhile, the American economy was thriving as never before: by 1953, unemployment had almost disappeared; 62 million Americans had jobs, a gain of 11 million in seven years. The minimum wage had gone up, Social Security benefits had been doubled and 8 million veterans had attended college by the end of the Truman administration as a result of the G.I. Bill, which subsidized the businesses, training, education and housing of millions of returning veterans. Farm income, dividends and corporate income were at all-time highs, and there had not been a failure of an insured bank in nearly nine years. Poverty was also significantly reduced, with one estimate suggesting that the percentage of Americans living in poverty had fallen from 33 percent of the population in 1949 to 28 percent by 1952.42 Incomes had risen faster than prices, which meant that real living standards were considerably higher than seven years earlier.

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CHINA When Truman considered the expansion of communism in the world, his general analysis was identical to that of FDR; he argued that one of the “most dangerous weapons” in the hands of Communists was the “false appeal to people who are burdened with hunger, disease, poverty, and ignorance.” If deprivation and ignorance were root causes of the spread of communism, then clearly the removal of those causes must be “the best defense of the free world” offering “the plain people of the world a way to do what they want most to do—improve their conditions of life by their own efforts.”43 Pursuing this logic, in his inaugural address in January 1949 among the many proposals Truman floated was one to offer technical assistance to the undeveloped nations of the world; as it was the fourth foreign policy objective mentioned in his speech, it became known as Point 4. However, foreign and domestic developments continued to combine to create an atmosphere that was not conducive to the exercise of calm reason. As Truman sought to implement new programs, a long contest in China between the Communist forces led by Mao Zedong (Mao Tsetung) and the anti-Communist forces of Jiang Jieshi (Chiang Kai-Shek) drew to a close with the victory of the Communists. To many Americans this was a particularly painful blow because for many years churchgoing Americans had set their sights on China as a special target for missionary activity; American churches and Christian organizations had devoted much time, energy and resources to evangelizing the country. And the situation had seemed especially hopeful for Christians inasmuch as the leader of the Nationalist Chinese was himself a pious Christian. By 1949 Americans had had a long history with China. American missionaries had penetrated China in the 1830s and very soon China had become the largest mission field for American churches. The aspiration that missionaries and their supporters held for China—a country with an ancient and very rich and sophisticated culture of its own—was an odd one, essentially that it become the Asian twin of the United States, spiritually, culturally and politically. Moreover, they were able to persuade themselves that this was the heartfelt aim of the Chinese themselves. During the Second World War the United States had maintained a somewhat uneasy alliance with the Nationalist Chinese. On the one hand, Roosevelt had tried to bolster Chiang’s prestige, including him among the “Big Four” allies along with Britain, the Soviet Union and the United States. On the other hand, the American military adviser assigned to Chiang, General Joseph W. Stilwell, found himself appalled at the waste, corruption and incompetence that he witnessed in the Nationalist Army. Stilwell also became convinced that Chiang was much more interested in

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fighting the Chinese Communists than the invading Japanese and in his exasperation—with the support of State Department China experts John Paton Davies, John Stewart Service and John Carter Vincent—Stilwell suggested that the more efficient and highly motivated Communist forces be mustered against Japan. The war’s end found Chiang squarely facing off with the Chinese Communists under the leadership of Mao Zedong. The Truman administration was anxious to have a China strong enough and united enough to forestall the expansion of Soviet influence in the Far East. Civil war would create exactly the opposite effect and so the US response was to try to create some kind of rapprochement between the Kuomintang (the Chinese Nationalist Party or KMT) and the Communists. The hope was that Chiang could be induced to move to create a genuinely democratic China while the Communists, with the prospect of meaningful participation in the political process, might disarm. These goals represented a wild misunderstanding of the character and goals of both sides in this conflict, neither of whose ultimate plans had any place for the existence, to say nothing of the participation, of the other. However, hoping to effect this hoped-for reconciliation, Truman sent recently retired US Army General George C. Marshall to try to broker a peace, a peace that neither side truly desired since both had goals that were absolute and not subject to compromise. After two years of hard, but futile, work Marshall gave up and Communists and Nationalists resumed fighting. Over time the United States poured in some $3 billion in economic and military assistance to the Nationalist Government, only to see the Communists repeatedly defeat the Nationalists. Truman’s exasperation with Chiang was limitless; as he later recalled, I discovered after some time that Chiang Kai-shek and the Madame [Chiang’s Wife] and their families, the Soong family and the Kungs, were all thieves, every last one of them, the Madame and him included. And they stole seven hundred and fifty million dollars out of the thirty-five billion that we sent to Chiang.44

And, as Dean Acheson wrote to Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Tom Connally in March 1949, “There is no evidence that the furnishing of additional military materiel would alter the pattern of current developments in China.” Interestingly, Chiang himself seemed to agree on this point. In a speech made in June 1947 he admitted that [r]egardless of what aspect we discuss, we hold an absolute superiority; in terms of the troops’ equipment, battle techniques

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and experience, the Communists are not our equal. . . . And we are also ten times richer than the Communist army in terms of military-supply replacements, such as food, fodder, and ammunition.

Yet, he went on, To tell the truth, never, in China or abroad, has there been a revolutionary party as decrepit (tuitang) and degenerate (fubai) as we [the Guomindang] are today; nor one as lacking spirit, lacking discipline, and even more, lacking standards of right and wrong as we are today. This kind of party should long ago have been destroyed and swept away!45

By 1949, in the eyes of the United States, the situation in China had become hopeless and US aid to the Nationalists was wound down as Truman and his advisers came to see a Communist victory as inevitable. Anticipating this result, in August 1949 the administration released a report entitled “United States Relations with China” laying out the reasoning behind US China policy. More widely known as the “China White Paper,” what constituted explanations to the administration came off as excuses to Chiang’s powerful American allies, many of them loosely allied in what has been dubbed “The China Lobby.” This group, mostly composed of conservative Republicans, included among others Alfred Kohlberg, an importer of Chinese lace; Senator William F. Knowland, Republican of California; Senator Styles Bridges, Republican of New Hampshire; Walter H. Judd, Republican of Minnesota; former New Dealer Thomas Corcoran; William Loeb, publisher of the New Hampshire Union Leader; and Henry R. Luce, the publisher of Time, Life and Fortune. The theory that these conservatives were developing was one that sought to weave a fabric from a variety of seemingly disconnected threads: the catastrophic Soviet expansion of influence into eastern Europe and the “loss” of China; perhaps they came together in the agreements made at Yalta. And perhaps the dark force engineering the dramatic expansion of communism was none other than Alger Hiss. And perhaps Hiss did not act alone in the State Department; who knew how many traitors were, like worms devouring a corpse, eating away at the United States from within? Senator Homer Capehart of Indiana expressed these suspicions dramatically: How much more are we going to have to take? Fuchs and Acheson and Hiss and hydrogen bombs threatening outside and New Dealism eating away at the vitals of the nation! In the name of Heaven, is this the best America can do?46

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The Anti-Communist Network Historian Ellen Schrecker has described an important aspect of the red scare that she has dubbed the “Anti-Communist Network.” This was an informal coalition that had taken shape by the 1940s. Though it included liberals, it was dominated by the political right. The most important component of the network was vehemently anti-labor segments of the business community. Congressional institutions like HUAC and the Senate Subcommittee on Internal Security (SISS) were vastly influential and Schrecker includes elements of law enforcement, including the FBI, military intelligence, local and state police and private detective agencies, some, like the FBI and police “red squads,” formed specifically to fight communism. The presence of communists in the CIO gave its competitor, the American Federation of Labor, an incentive to join the ranks of red-baiters, and citizens’ groups like the American Legion, the Daughters of the American Revolution and the Minute Women of the USA were also active participants. Time magazine, the Hearst press and Robert McCormick’s Chicago Tribune were among the organs that gave the network a voice loud enough to be heard all over the country. Then there were lobbying groups like the China lobby and, later, the Vietnam lobby. The Catholic Church was another important group; hostile to the atheistic component of communism to begin with, the Spanish Civil War and, later, the Soviet takeover of eastern Europe’s Catholic countries with the accompanying suppression of religion in those countries. Some former communists and former fellow-travelers became important members of the network, especially valuable because of their inside knowledge. The components of the coalition worked together and frequently socialized with one another, sharing information at all levels. As Schrecker writes: The interconnections within the network were striking. Some of Hoover’s top aides became key officials within the American Legion. Former FBI agents worked for HUAC. Father John Cronin, the Catholic Church’s leading anti-Communist, wrote an influential pamphlet for the Chamber of Commerce in 1946 and then served as the liaison between the FBI and HUAC member Richard Nixon. These professionals, because they were organized, committed, and strategically placed, were to have a disproportionate influence over the ideological and institutional development of McCarthyism.47

NOTES 1 2

Paul Bullock, “‘Radicals and Rabbits’: Richard Nixon’s 1946 Campaign against Jerry Voorhis,” Southern California Quarterly, Vol. 55, No. 3 (Fall, 1973), 350. Bullock, “‘Radicals and Rabbits,” 351.

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3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18

19 20

21 22

23 24 25 26

Quoted in Bullock, “Radicals and Rabbits,” 320. Fawn Brodie, “Richard Nixon, This Is Your Life: Once Last Chance to Kick Tricky Dick,” Mother Jones, Vol. 6, No. 8 (Sept./Oct. 1981), 42. Bullock, “Radicals and Rabbits,” 324. Irwin Gellman, The Contender, Richard Nixon: The Congress Years, 1946–1952 (New York: The Free Press, 1999), 331. Roger Morris, Richard Milhous Nixon: The Rise of an American Politician (New York: Holt, 1990), 340–341. Bullock, “Radicals and Rabbits,” 342. Stephen E. Ambrose, Nixon: The Education of a Politician, 1913–1962 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988), 140. Stewart Alsop, Nixon & Rockefeller: A Double Portrait (New York: Doubleday, 1960), 188. Tom Wicker, One of Us: Richard Nixon and the American Dream (New York: Random House, 1991), p. 45. Ambrose, Nixon, 142. David M. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929–95 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), xxxiv. Robert H. Ferrell, Harry S. Truman: A Life (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1994), 301. David Caute, The Great Fear: The Anti-Communist Purge under Truman and Eisenhower (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1978), 284. The Connecticut Daily Campus, December 10, 1951, 6. Ted Morgan, Reds: McCarthyism in Twentieth-Century America (New York: Random House, 2003), 304. Robert Justin Goldstein, “Prelude to McCarthyism: The Making of a Blacklist,” Prologue Magazine, Vol. 38, No. 3 (Fall, 2006). www.archives.gov/publications/ prologue/2006/fall/agloso.html. December 1988 Report of Congressional Subcommittee on Education and Health of the Joint Economic Committee. Subcommittee on Education and Health of the Joint Economic Committee, A CostBenefit Analysis of Government Investment in Post-Secondary Education under the World War II GI Bill, December 14, 1988. M.J. Heale, American Anticommunism: Combating the Enemy Within, 1830–1970 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 135. Committee on Socialism and Communism, Communist Infiltration in the United States: Its Nature and How to Combat It (Washington, DC: Chamber of Commerce of the United States, 1946), 18. Stephen M. Feldman, Free Expression and Democracy in America: A History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 433. David A. Horowitz, Beyond Left and Right: Insurgency and the Establishment (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997), 218. Alonzo Hamby, Liberalism and Its Challengers: FDR to Reagan (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 113. Curt Gentry, J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets (New York: W.W. Norton, 1991), 242.

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27 28 29 30

31 32 33 34

35 36 37

38

39 40 41 42 43

44 45 46 47

Robert K. Carr, The House Committee on Un-American Activities, 1945–1950 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1952). John Sbardellati, J. Edgar Hoover Goes to the Movies: The FBI and the Origins of Hollywood’s Cold War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012), 52. Lewis Hartshorn, Alger Hiss, Whittaker Chambers and the Case that Ignited McCarthyism (Jefferson, NC: McFarland Books, 2013), 10. Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, “Final Report of the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, United States Senate: Together with Additional, Supplemental, and Separate Views” (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1976), 66. Ronald Kessler, The Bureau: The Secret History of the FBI (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2002), 103. Kessler, The Bureau, 103. Albert Fried, McCarthyism: The Great American Red Scare: A Documentary History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 6. Harvey Klehr, John Earl Haynes and K. M Anderson (Kirill Mikhailovich), The Soviet World of American Communism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 348. Hoover, HUAC Testimony, 44. The Times Recorder from Zanesville, Ohio, February 19, 1951, 4; Lebanon Daily News from Lebanon, Pennsylvania, February 15, 1951, 8. Quoted in Ellen W. Schrecker, The Lost Soul of Higher Education: Corporatization, the Assault on Academic Freedom and the End of the American University (New York: The New Press, 2010), 51. Athan G. Theoharis, Chasing Spies: How the FBI Failed in Counterintelligence but Promoted the Politics of McCarthyism in the Cold War Years (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2002), 122. Katherine A.S. Sibley, Red Spies in America: Stolen Secrets and the Dawn of the Cold War (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004), 75. Thomas W. Devine, Henry Wallace’s 1948 Presidential Campaign and the Future of Postwar Liberalism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013.) John C. Culver and John Hyde, American Dreamer: The Life and Times of Henry A. Wallace (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2002), 466. Christopher Pierson and Francis G. Castles, eds., The Welfare State Reader (Cambridge: Polity, 2006), 202. Harry S. Truman, “Statement by the President on the Point Four Program,” April 18, 1951. Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project. www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=14065. Merle Miller, Plain Speaking: An Oral Biography of Harry S. Truman (New York: Berkley Publishing Corp., 1974), 289. Lloyd E. Eastman, “Who Lost China? Chiang Kai-shek Testifies,” The China Quarterly, No. 88 (Dec., 1981), 658. Quoted in Robert D. Dean, Imperial Brotherhood: Gender and the Making of Cold War Foreign Policy (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2003), 73. Ellen W. Schrecker. “The Growth of the Anti-Communist Network” from The Age of McCarthyism: A Brief History with Documents (Boston: St. Martin’s, 2001).

CHAPTER 5

The Red Scare at Full Tide

n August 12, 1954, an extraordinary scene was played out on the floor of the US Senate; Hubert Humphrey, a liberal Democrat from Minnesota, introduced an amendment to a bill, an amendment labeling the Communist Party of the United States “the agency of a hostile foreign power,” “an instrumentality of a conspiracy to overthrow the Government of the United States,” and “a clear, present, and continuing danger to the security of the United States.” On that basis, Humphrey proposed penalties for membership under the Internal Security Act of 1950: fines of up to $10,000, or imprisonment for five years, or both. Full of fire, Humphrey declared:

O

I want Senators to stand up and answer whether they are for the Communist Party or against it. I am tired of reading headlines about being “soft” toward communism. I am tired of reading headlines about being a leftist and about others being leftists. I am tired of people playing the Communist issue as though it were a great overture which has lasted for years. . . . This amendment will make the Communist Party, its membership and its apparatus illegal. It would make membership in the Communist Party subject to criminal penalties. . . . I do not intend to be a half patriot. I will not be lukewarm. The issue is drawn.1

Other liberals stood behind him, co-sponsoring the bill, with Wayne Morse of Oregon explaining, “What is sought to be done by the amendment is to remove any doubt in the Senate as to where we stand on the issue of Communism,” while Mike Mansfield added, “I think the time has arrived for all of us to stand up and be counted. I will not be lukewarm. . . . Either Senators are for recognizing the Communist Party for what it is, or they will continue to trip over the niceties of legal technicalities and details.”2

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This was a very odd time for liberal Democrats to be taking a vigorous stand—outlawing a political party—that threatened the civil liberties of American citizens. Communist Party membership had tumbled from its 1944 high to a pitiful 5,000 members and of these it is estimated that almost one out of three—some 1,500—were FBI informants. In fact, J. Edgar Hoover later told a State Department member, “If it were not for me there would not be a Communist Party of the United States. Because I’ve financed the Communist Party, in order to know what they are doing.”3 Furthermore, by this time the great scourge of the liberals, Senator Joseph McCarthy, had already destroyed his own potency by his abysmal performance on a widely televised and widely watched set of hearings to investigate his charges of Communist infiltration into the Army. By June McCarthy’s favorable ratings in the Gallup Poll had fallen from 50 percent to 34 percent. Karl Marx is often very slightly misquoted as having written that history repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. However, Humphrey’s Communist Control Act of 1954 seems more like a farce repeating itself as yet another farce. Ostensibly Humphrey’s purpose in proposing his amendment was to kill the bill to which it was to be attached, a bill sponsored by John M. Butler (R-MD) that sought to weaken unions by giving the Subversive Activities Control Board (SACB) the power to determine if an organization was “Communist-infiltrated” and, if it was, to remove its standing and legal protections as a labor organization. The idea behind Humphrey’s amendment was that it would accomplish a number of wonderful things: first of all, as Humphrey implied in his comments, it would kill the idea that Democrats were “soft” on communism; also, it was known that the White House and FBI director Hoover and many conservatives were against making the CPUSA illegal on the grounds that this would threaten the effectiveness of existing anti-communist legislation and might also drive the CPUSA underground where it might be harder to keep track of its 5,000 members; this opposition plus the possible presidential veto which the amendment might draw (just before congressional elections) could make it look as though the conservatives were the ones who were soft on communism—and both liberals and conservatives hated the idea of anybody ever thinking that they were soft on any subject whatsoever. And finally, making membership in the CP a criminal act would free people from irresponsible smear tactics; if one were accused of being a Communist, it would be a matter for the courts to decide and the accused would have all the legal rights of an accused person in defending him or herself; moreover, any would-be accuser would be rendered more careful since such an accusation could make him or her subject to libel and slander action.

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Figure 5.1 Nevada Senator. Washington, DC, April 24. An informal picture of Senator Pat McCarran, Democrat of Nevada. Source: Courtesy of Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, LC-USZ62-117816.

However, just four years earlier, liberals—again under the leadership of Hubert Humphrey—had attempted a similar, apparently clever maneuver in an effort to head off Senator Pat McCarran’s Internal Security Act of 1950, adding an emergency detention plan for the internment of suspected subversives, should the president declare an internal security emergency. The idea was that this idea of putting Americans into concentration camps was so extreme that it would kill the entire bill; however, McCarran, nothing daunted, simply added the amendment to his bill and pushed the whole thing through. The liberals might have privately opposed the bill but they did not have the courage to vote against it. Given that experience, one can only imagine that, with elections coming on, it must have been a sort of blind panic that made liberals believe that what had failed so abysmally before might succeed now. The Humphrey bill did meet the expected opposition from conservatives, but they merely passed a version of the amendment that deprived the Communist Party of the rights, privileges and immunities of a legal body

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Pat McCarran Patrick Anthony McCarran was born in Reno, Nevada in 1876 to Irish immigrants. Starting his adult life as a rancher, he became a lawyer, a judge and, after some 30 years in politics, a US Senator. Nevada was rich in silver and since the Democratic Party had long been the party that espoused silver coinage, McCarran ran as a Democrat, getting elected in 1932 on the ample coattails of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Having arrived in Washington, McCarran promptly turned against the New Deal, seeking to defeat Roosevelt’s emergency banking legislation. From that time onward he was a reliable conservative who denounced the New Deal’s expansions of federal power as Bolshevistic. His biographer, Michael Ybarra, writes, Years before Joe McCarthy ever opened his mouth in public, McCarran believed—really believed—that the Democratic Party was controlled by the Communists and that one mysterious person especially had managed to exert a malign influence that could be felt at the highest levels of government.4 Getting to the bottom of this imagined plot was one of his great ambitions, telling a friend, “If I . . . eventually find that one, I will have served my country well.” McCarran was capable, ruthless and bigoted. An anti-Semite and a xenophobe, he was a leader in preventing millions of war refugees—including a host of Holocaust survivors—from finding refuge in America. He was an advocate for his version of things American which, given the fact that he was such an outspoken admirer and supporter of Spain’s dictator, Francisco Franco, that he had earned the nickname the “Senator from Madrid,” did not necessarily include democracy. McCarran, unlike McCarthy, was a power in the Senate as an effective legislator. The institutional bases for that power were his chairmanships of the Judiciary Committee (which has a critical role in the appointment of federal judges and also oversees much of the legislation that passes through the Senate) and of the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee that approved the budgets of the State, Justice, Commerce and Labor Departments. These positions represented far more raw power than McCarthy would ever enjoy. The Senate Appropriations Subcommittee, McCarran wrote to his daughter, “is the most powerful subcommittee in the US Senate because it controls the money for these departments so vital to the government. One can raise merry havoc with these departments by the control of their purse strings.”5 A modern senator of the same party from the same state, Harry Reid, described McCarran thus when discussing the Nevada airport named after him:

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Pat McCarran was one of the most anti-Semitic— some of you might know my wife’s Jewish — one of the most anti-black, one of the most prejudiced people who has ever served in the Senate. It’s not a decision I’m going to make, but if you ask me to give my opinion, I don’t think his name should be on anything.6

while stripping away the penalties for membership in the Party. Despite the fact that none of the goals of proposing his amendment had been achieved, Humphrey declared his assent, saying, Maybe we did not strike as strong a blow as Hubert Humphrey would have liked to strike in the bill, but we have not injured the laws which are now on the books. . . . We have closed all of the doors. These rats will not get out of the trap.7

Many prominent liberals were appalled: Adlai Stevenson condemned it, as did the Nation, the New York Post and the ACLU. Journalist Murray Kempton wrote: Every great name in the pantheon of liberalism in the United States Senate was on the list of those who voted to make simple membership in the Communist Party a felony . . . Real politik has all but killed the liberals in this country, and we might as well drink the death brew at the wake. . . . The recent record of the Democratic Party on civil liberties is at least as bad as that of the Republicans. And liberals are its architects.8

And Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., attacked the legislation in a piece in the New York Post, writing, “the Democrats succeeded triumphantly in placing their party to the right of Joe McCarthy, of Pat McCarran, of Judge Harold Medina.”9 He also wrote personally to Humphrey, telling him, It is absurd to say that the Communist Party presents a greater threat today than it did in 1946 when you and I in our various ways were trying to awaken the liberal community to the Communist danger. It is absurd to say that the Communist Party presents a greater threat today than it did in 1936. Yet the republic survived without resort to drastic measures in the thirties and forties; . . . . We licked a strong Communist movement to a

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frazzle by democratic means. For us now to say before the world that we no longer can cope with Communism by these means . . . at a time when U.S. Communism has faded to a whisper—all this seems to me a confession of weakness, which can only persuade the rest of the world that we have indeed gone mad.10

Thus—when there was the least possible excuse or need for it—passed what was in the end a toothless bill proposed and supported by selfproclaimed civil libertarians that, in the name of the defense of liberty, sought to provide, as historian Mary McAuliffe wrote, “the legal means to regulate and limit political expression to what was considered acceptable and safe to the current majority.”11 And thus the Second Red Scare ended, not with a bang but a whimper.

MCCARTHY COMES TO WASHINGTON But there had been a climax before this anticlimax. The buildup of the Second Red Scare began on February 9, 1950, when Senator Joseph McCarthy burst into the collective American consciousness with a speech he gave to the Republican Women’s Club in Wheeling, West Virginia in which he declared that he had in his possession, indeed, in his hand, a list of spies working at that very moment in the US State Department. In terms of his place in history, McCarthy is an odd figure; historian after historian has noted the fact that he was at best irrelevant to any genuine effort to unearth Communists in government or anywhere else. He exposed no Communists who had not already been identified by other agencies though he harassed a good many people who were not Communists. And yet, because of his willingness to make outlandish and grotesquely inflated accusations, sometimes against people with impeccable records of public service like General George C. Marshall, and because of his genius for self-promotion he was able to become the poster child for the paranoid segment of anti-communist opinion that insisted that a terrible subversive communist danger existed even after virtually all Communists in government service had been expelled. Before he made his Wheeling speech, McCarthy had been an inconsequential politician who had early demonstrated that he was not very scrupulous when it came to promoting his own political career. Politically ambitious, when the Second World War broke out, he had left his career as a judge to volunteer for the Marines, calculating that credentials as a veteran would be important to future office seekers. As an intelligence officer at Guadalcanal he volunteered for about a dozen missions as a tail-

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gunner; this gives the appearance of being daring but, as a fellow marine noted, “It was . . . quite safe—there weren’t any Jap planes or anti-aircraft gunners around.”12 During his service he sustained a leg injury that he claimed had occurred when his plane had crash-landed; however, when newsman Robert Fleming, curious about the fact that McCarthy had never been awarded a Purple Heart, dug into the matter, he discovered that McCarthy’s “wound” was a minor injury incurred while engaged in horseplay. Moreover, “Tail-Gunner Joe” had then written himself a letter of commendation, forged his commanding officer’s signature and managed to get it countersigned by Admiral Chester Nimitz to boot. When Fleming revealed these facts in print, McCarthy characteristically labeled the journalist and his newspaper “pro-Communist.”13 Returning to his native Wisconsin, McCarthy challenged incumbent Robert La Follette, Jr. for the Republican nomination for the US Senate and immediately started to demonstrate the political style for which he would become famous, smearing the staunchly anticommunist La Follette as being pro-Communist and receiving significant support from the Wisconsin State Journal, a publication that told its readers: We don’t know what a “liberal” is, but there may yet be some who consider themselves such as adherents to the Roosevelt line, the New Deal pronouncements, the philosophies of class against class, the watery pink of Big Government totalitarianism.14

McCarthy also capitalized on his war experience, selling himself to the public as “Tail-Gunner Joe.” Winning the nomination and then the election, McCarthy became prominent mostly for feathering his own nest with $20,000 from a grateful Pepsi-Cola for his work in helping the company avoid sugar rationing (earning him the nickname of “The Pepsi-Cola Kid” from disdainful fellow senators) and another $10,000 from businessmen in the new prefabricated housing industry, grateful to McCarthy for fighting public housing for veterans while arguing that the prefabricated home would do the trick. He had gained some attention when, with an eye to the many German voters in Wisconsin, he took up the cause of German soldiers who had been convicted of a massacre of US prisoners of war, but not of the sort that most politicians would want. This was an inauspicious beginning for an ambitious politician, but McCarthy’s speech to the Republican women would change all that, and quickly. There is some fuzziness about the circumstances under which McCarthy became a specialist in anti-communism. As one of his most prominent biographers writes, “He was by no means a leading G.O.P.

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spokesman on anti-communism and was, in fact, almost completely ignorant on the subject,”15 but when he took up the cause, it was, “as he once admitted frankly to his old friend Mark Catlin, almost strictly for political profit.”16 The same author believes that in the end McCarthy became a “True Believer” and not a mere opportunist. The truth is that we will never know for sure. What we do know is that on February 9, 1950 McCarthy gave a speech about the growing danger of world communism to the Republican Women’s Club in Wheeling, West Virginia that rocketed him into national prominence. McCarthy’s weapons were words, not legislation (his concrete achievements in that area were nil). The Wheeling speech is often characterized as a “routine” conservative Lincoln Day speech, but in truth it was an artfully-constructed presentation, not just in the way that it very effectively expressed the vision and contained all the themes that fueled and would fuel the red scare, but also in the way that its plausible arguments and the flow of its logical structure carried its audience to McCarthy’s key conclusion. One of McCarthy’s great skills was in expressing the anxieties of his audience and then aiming them in the desired direction. He began his speech innocuously enough by expressing a laudable wish for peace; however, he found himself regretting the fact that, despite victory in a recent war, Americans could not relax and celebrate a secure peace; no, the “mutterings and rumblings of an invigorated god of war” were to be heard “from the Indochina hills . . . into the very heart of Europe itself.” And humanity was confronted with a horrific possibility that people had never before faced, “the exploding of the bomb which will set civilization about the final task of destroying itself.” Why despite the coming of peace and the achievement of victory did Americans still face this danger? Because they were, whether they realized it or not, still engaged in combat. And here he made his central point, i.e., that the present combat was not the usual political rivalry between states for material and political gains; no, this was a war between “two diametrically opposed ideologies,” a “final, all-out battle between communistic atheism and Christianity.” Many, perhaps all, of his audience would have been familiar with Revelation in the New Testament and its prediction of a final “all-out battle” between good and evil, the forces of God and the forces of Satan. These references form the vital undercurrent of McCarthy’s speech with McCarthy casting himself, not as a mere politician, but as a prophet. And Marxism, and its offshoot, communism, played directly into his hands here as those ideologies also foretell a final showdown between good and evil— only in this materialistic mirror version of the Christian apocalypse the good that will triumph is the working class and the evil to be vanquished

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is the exploiting bourgeoisie along with capitalism itself. McCarthy himself pointed this out when he, accurately, quoted Lenin’s introductory speech at the 1919 Congress of the Russian Communist Party where he said, it is inconceivable for the Soviet Republic to exist alongside of the imperialist states for any length of time. One or the other must triumph in the end. And before that end comes there will have to be a series of frightful collisions between the Soviet Republic and the bourgeois states.17

All this on both sides is cast in stark dualistic terminology; as McCarthy noted, it is a battle of opposed ideologies, not a political battle. And he did not cast it as a battle between freedom and slavery. In fact, the words “freedom” and “liberty” do not appear in McCarthy’s speech; apparently they were not the issue—the survival of Christianity (“Christ,” “Christian” and “Christianity” appear eight times) was. Moreover, in this stark battle between good and evil, evil seemed to be winning. In case his audience was not sufficiently worried, McCarthy went on to paint a vivid statistical picture of humanity’s dismaying political/religious trajectory: Six years ago, at the time of the first conference to map out the peace, there was within the Soviet orbit, 180,000,000 people. Lined up on the anti-totalitarian side there were in the world at that time, roughly 1,625,000,000 people. Today, only six years later, there are 80,000,000,000 people under the absolute domination of Soviet Russia—an increase of over 400 percent. On our side, the figure has shrunk to around 500,000. In other words, in less than six years, the odds have changed from nine to one in our favor to eight to one against us.

All this was the setup; then McCarthy got to the main point, changing his focus from the external enemy to the treacherous agent of that enemy who lurks among us, quoting an anonymous “great historical figure” as saying “When a great democracy is destroyed, it will not be from enemies from without, but rather because of enemies from within.” And now the focus on these “enemies from within” narrowed as McCarthy moved to identify the villains of his piece and his real target; not foreign invaders, not the “less fortunate” or “members of minority groups,” but rather—and most outrageously—“those who have had all the benefits that the wealthiest Nation on earth has had to offer—the finest homes, the finest college education and the finest jobs in government we can give.” And the focus narrowed even more, finally alighting on the precise location of treason, the State

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Department, for “[t]here the bright young men who are born with silver spoons in their mouths are the ones who have been most traitorous.” Finally, to give full credibility to the picture he had painted, McCarthy got down to specifics, identifying some of those whom he deemed to be traitors. There was only a contemporaneous newspaper account of his speech and in that he is recorded as having said that 205 “members of the Communist Party . . . are still working [in] and [are] shaping the policy of the State Department;”18 the number he later entered into the Congressional Record was a more modest 57. Norman Yost, an editor on the local Wheeling newspaper in 1950 later recalled that the reporter he sent down to cover the speech wrote that McCarthy had said that there were 194 Communists and, not trusting the number, went to see McCarthy himself. When Yost asked if there were indeed 194 Communists in the State Department, McCarthy “looked at me and said ‘194! 294! 394! What’s the difference? They’re there!’” But the fact that he had mentioned a specific number was precisely what mattered; though there had been previous accusations by conservatives of liberal treachery in high places, this was the first to seem unambiguous, to specify numbers and to assert that there were names attached to those numbers. In other words, to many people—including reporters—McCarthy’s speech made the accusations sound real and alarming. It turns out that at that point, at least, McCarthy had no secret source of anonymous “good, loyal Americans in the State Department” as he claimed; rather, he had been working from the results of an in-house security investigation authorized in 1946 by Truman’s secretary of state, James F. Byrnes. This report had listed a number of employees, most of whom had been dismissed, not for being Communists, but as security risks. The distinction between Communists and “security risks” is critical since many people who were definitely not Communists were considered to be security risks; people suffering from problems with gambling or alcohol, homosexuals (whose sexual activities were, at that time, illegal) were all considered to be security risks, either because they were believed to be untrustworthy or they were considered to be susceptible to blackmail. The impression McCarthy gave and meant to give was that all these people (whose names he would not immediately reveal) were Communists or Communist sympathizers tolerated by a lax or perhaps disloyal administration. To bolster the appearance of accuracy of his accusations, he went on to name five people—John Service, Gustavo Duran, Mary Jane Keeney, Julian Wadleigh and Alger Hiss—as Communists in the State Department. Of the five, two—Service and Duran—were not and had never been Communists. Wadleigh had already left the State Department and his past was no secret, he having recently authored a series of pieces

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in the New York Post entitled “Why I Spied for the Soviet Union.” That left Keeney and Hiss who were, in fact, bona fide Communists; however, McCarthy played no role in the exposure of either one but merely capitalized on the work of HUAC and the FBI. Two of the five were entirely innocent of any connection to subversion and these public accusations had real effects. The State Department’s Loyalty Security Board examined Service’s record and found no evidence of his being either disloyal or a security risk, yet in the end, despite multiple exonerations, the Eisenhower administration fired him. Service’s wife, Caroline, remembered, McCarthy frightened Americans. He frightened the public. I was frightened. Now I’ll tell you. I wasn’t frightened in China. I wasn’t frightened the year I spent alone in India. I wasn’t frightened traveling around the world. But I was frightened by McCarthy. I thought what is he going to do to us? What is he going to do to our children?19

Finally, in his speech McCarthy arrived at his real target, not the individual victims of his rhetoric, innocent and not so innocent, but the administration that tolerated or even participated in “high treason.” For was not the traitor Hiss a central negotiator at the conference of the Big Three—the United States, the Soviet Union and Great Britain—at Yalta and at Yalta didn’t the United States give away eastern Europe and the Far East to the Communists? Though this is not a history of the Cold War, we must pause to give some brief consideration to the Yalta Conference, for the accusations of betrayal associated with it lie close to the center of postwar red scare anticommunism. It is understandable that many Americans—especially PolishAmericans and Catholics—would be bitterly unhappy about the Soviet takeover of eastern Europe but, oddly, it was the success of Communists in China that played the larger role in the red scare. Here six events stand out: (1) the Yalta Agreement of 1945, (2) the Amerasia Affair, which broke in June of 1945, (3) the resignation of Ambassador Patrick J. Hurley in November of 1945, (4) the failure of the Marshall Mission in 1946 and 1947, (5) the “spy ring” revelations of the ex-Communists and the conviction of Alger Hiss and (6) the war in Korea.

Yalta As the Second World War was drawing to its end, knowing that they were winning the war in Europe, President Roosevelt had met with British

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Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin at Yalta in the Crimean Peninsula to discuss how Europe would be reorganized in the wake of the defeat of the Axis powers. After the war’s end, when eastern Europe and China fell to Communists, a chief theme of attacks on both the Roosevelt and Truman administrations by conservatives like McCarthy was that at Yalta they had “lost” and “betrayed” both eastern Europe and China. It seems reasonably clear that in order to lose something, you first must have it; if any of the Big Three ended the war in possession of Poland and eastern Europe, it was the Soviet Union whose troops occupied those areas. To prise something free from someone who has it, one must have some leverage, something either to force the other person to give it up or something they want that one can use for bargaining purposes. In fact, the Soviet Union held most of the cards here. Roosevelt very much wanted something from the Soviet Union—its entry into the war against Japan would save American lives. He also hoped to establish a postwar world order through a new international institution—what would become the United Nations—that would avert catastrophic wars like the two World Wars with their 30 million deaths. For such an institution to have any hope of success and to be in any way meaningful, Soviet support and participation was critical. The United States had little to bargain with: the Russians had their troops in place and, the American sole possession of the still secret atomic bomb was not a useful bargaining tool since (1) it was a secret, and (2) no one yet knew whether it would work. The Joint Chiefs of Staff were urging the president to reach an agreement with Stalin, for they believed that should an invasion of Japan be necessary, without Russian aid the United States might face a million casualties or more. As James F. Byrnes, an important member of the US delegation, put it, “[i]t was not a question of what we would let the Russians do, but what we could get the Russians to do.”20 Along with Stalin’s commitments to enter the war against Japan and join the United Nations, Roosevelt and Churchill received his promise that, while future governments of European states bordering the Soviet Union would be “friendly” to the USSR, he would allow free elections in all the liberated territories. This was a promise Stalin would break. One controversial result of the Yalta meeting was a secret protocol that gave way to significant Russian demands in Asia: in return for Stalin’s agreeing to break his nonaggression pact with Japan and to enter the Pacific war within three months of Germany’s surrender, along with a promise to enter into a friendship treaty with Chiang Kai-shek’s government, the Russians were to receive the return of all Russian-controlled territory seized by Japan, a sphere of influence in Manchuria, Soviet domination

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of Outer Mongolia and shared Sino-Soviet control of Manchurian railroads. China expert John Paton Davies (ironically, later to be a casualty of the red scare) believed these concessions to be an important error, opening the possibility of a Soviet-occupied Manchuria becoming a base of operations for the Chinese Communists.

Amerasia Following the Yalta Agreement, the Amerasia Affair was a critical early development in building up toward the red scare, bringing public attention to the possibility of subversive activity in the United States. Amerasia was a scholarly journal of Far Eastern affairs. Following up on a tip, on March 11, 1945 agents for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) broke into the New York offices of the publication and found hundreds of classified documents. Eventually the investigation was handed over to the FBI which surreptitiously and illegally broke into the office of Amerasia as well as the homes of two men suspected of handing over classified documents, installing bugs and phone taps. Following this, on June 6, 1945, the FBI raided the Amerasia offices and seized 1,700 classified documents; six men, including China expert John W. Service, were arrested. There was no evidence that any of the documents had been handed over to any foreign government and so, rather than seeking indictments under the Espionage Act, the Justice Department moved to get indictments for unauthorized possession and transmittal of government documents. In the end, a grand jury indicted four of the six; in the case of Service, the grand jury voted unanimously against indicting him since he had merely passed on some non-sensitive copies of his own reports on China of a type that diplomats often shared with reporters. This would not protect him, however, from eventually being hounded out of the State Department. In the end, the case mostly fell apart because of the illegal means by which the FBI got its information. However, these actions were not made public and a veil of mystery hung over the matter, facilitating its usefulness for politicians like McCarthy who ominously implied that a massive cover-up had been perpetrated by a treacherous government.

Resignation of Hurley Additional attention was drawn to the Far East when on November 26, 1945, the US Ambassador to China, Patrick S. Hurley, publicly announced his resignation. He took the unorthodox step of making a public statement to the press, which included charges of disloyalty against a number of

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Foreign Service officers. Hurley was strong in his support of the Nationalist Government and had come to see any questioning of the viability of Chiang Kai-shek’s regime as a sign of disloyalty. He also claimed that his subordinates had undermined his own efforts to bring the two sides in the looming Chinese civil war together. Moreover, he claimed that “[a] considerable section of our State Department is endeavoring to support communism generally as well as specifically in China.”21

The Marshall Mission Hurley’s public and incendiary remarks turned Truman against him and the president quickly looked for a capable replacement to try to reconcile the rival sides in China. His choice was the man he admired perhaps more than any other, General George Catlett Marshall. Truman’s goal, as he stated in a memo to Marshall, was the “unification of China by peaceful, democratic methods.” Marshall arrived in China on December 20, 1945, hoping to broker an agreement that would lead to a unity government that could act to shield China from Soviet domination. With great difficulty, he was able to negotiate a ceasefire between Reds and Nationals that went into effect January 10, 1946. Then he returned to Washington to lobby for more financial aid and in his absence the ceasefire disintegrated. Chiang believed, all evidence to the contrary, that he could win a military victory against his Communist rivals. A new National Assembly was convened that excluded the Communists and the Nationalist forces went on the offensive. The Communists gave the appearance of being more open to compromise and by this time the incompetence of the Nationalist military had been well established. Both Marshall and Truman came to the conclusion that to give further military aid to Chiang’s regime was simply to throw good money after bad and they were both too wise to contemplate actual US military intervention. It seems unlikely that any real and lasting rapprochement could have been brokered under any conditions; the goals of each side were too much in mutual opposition and there really was no middle ground.

Alger Hiss Finally, there was the Hiss Affair. The exposure of Alger Hiss as a Communist gave credence to the worst fears aroused by Amerasia: here was an actual Communist in the State Department. Might not he have been whispering treasonous plots into President Roosevelt’s all too interested ear? Ross Y. Koen, an historian of the period who would himself

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fall victim to McCarthyism, not by being called a Communist, but by having his work suppressed, aptly noted that many Americans had a “tendency to believe, when their hopes were not fulfilled, that they had been betrayed.”22 And indeed, the Yalta Agreement would later be labeled a “sellout” by red scare anti-communists; the main point here is that whether these agreements were wise or misguided, the primary intention behind them, from the American side, was to save American lives. Alger Hiss was indeed present at Yalta, but he was hardly the eminence grise that conservatives—including McCarthy in this speech—later made him out to have been; he was a junior member of the delegation who had no contact whatsoever with Roosevelt and no voice on European or China policy. He served as an adviser to Secretary of State Stettinius, concentrating on arrangements for the proposed United Nations; moreover, Charles Bohlen, Roosevelt’s interpreter at both the Teheran and the Yalta Conferences, stated that Hiss had “actually led the opposition in the American delegation to Stalin’s proposal to give the Soviet Union two additional seats in the UN General Assembly.”23 So these events made up the raw material for McCarthy’s tale of treason in Wheeling and, the tale having been told, the press took up the story. Reporters pressed McCarthy for more details, but as Robert Fleming recalled, though McCarthy told them, “‘I’ve got a sock full of shit and I know how to use it’ . . . He didn’t give us a thing – not a damned thing.”24 Buoyed by the publicity he was receiving, McCarthy pushed matters further by sending President Truman a telegram, demanding that the President address the issue of what had now been reduced to 57 unnamed “card-carrying members of the Communist Party” working in the State Department or face the prospect of the Democratic Party being identified as a “bedfellow of International Communism.” McCarthy’s biographer, David M. Oshinsky, pinpoints what made McCarthy stand out from others who had made accusations of treason in high places: “Would a United States State Senator go this far out on a limb without hard evidence? Would he dare to make fraudulent charges that could so easily be unmasked?”25 Though it was widely recognized in the Senate that McCarthy’s charges represented more smoke than fire (conservative Republican leader, Robert Taft called it a “perfectly reckless performance”),26 given how widely they had been publicized, Democrats decided that it was necessary to deal with them and an investigating subcommittee was put together under the leadership of conservative Democrat Millard Tydings of Maryland, head of the Armed Services Committee, well known for his staunch anti-communism and a war hero to boot. The object was to expose McCarthy as a fraud and to put him away for good.

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Now, under the hostile spotlight of a committee dominated by Democrats, McCarthy was on the spot to produce specific information, to put up or shut up, so to speak. McCarthy quickly acquired a lead investigator in the person of Donald A. Surine, a one-time employee of the FBI. McCarthy, desperate for real information, went to Richard Nixon for access to HUAC’s secret files and then to conservative newspaper magnate, William Randolph Hearst. Later, Hearst remembered, “Joe never had any names. He came to us. ‘What am I gonna do? You gotta help me.’ So we gave him a few good reporters.”27 A team of rightwing figures gathered to support McCarthy in his hour of need. They included the former staff director of HUAC, J.B. Matthews, the central figure of the “China Lobby,” Alfred Kohlberg, ex-Communist informers, Louis Budenz and Freda Utley, and a group of writers from the rightwing press. McCarthy also was a beneficiary of J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI. As a public official Hoover by this time had more or less “gone rogue.” Ostensibly the subordinate of both the attorney general and the president, he no longer felt bound to obey either. He had become alienated from Attorney General Tom C. Clark over Clark’s refusal to countenance Hoover’s plan to detain thousands of suspected American citizens in the event of a crisis with the Soviet Union. And Truman had developed a deep suspicion of the FBI, believing, as Treasury Secretary John Snyder said, “Mr. Hoover had built up a Frankenstein in the FBI.”28 The real break came on July 26, 1947, when Truman signed the National Security Act, an enactment that cut the FBI out of the increased efforts to pursue the Cold War while giving the CIA much greater powers. Hoover had envisioned and passionately desired a larger role, not a small one, and from this time, as White House adviser Stephen Spingarn said, “Hoover did his thing. He wasn’t taking orders from Truman or anybody else, least of all the Attorney General of the United States.”29 The matter was personal for, according to FBI agent William Sullivan, “Hoover’s hatred of Truman knew no bounds.”30 Going forward Hoover hid his plans from his superiors and, as one chronicler of the FBI writes, “took action outside the law and beyond the boundaries of the Constitution.”31 He also leaked information to political favorites, mostly conservative Republican opponents of the Truman administration. McCarthy had developed a personally friendly relationship with Hoover; in 1947, soon after arriving in Washington, McCarthy had taken care to make Hoover’s acquaintance, dropping by the FBI to pay his respects. The two sometimes dined together and they shared excursions to the track. So Hoover, hostile to the Truman administration, friendly to conservatives and a rabid red scare anti-Communist, seemed a logical

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ally; soon after the Wheeling speech, McCarthy called Hoover, admitted he’d been making up statistics and asked for information from the FBI that could back him up. Hoover disliked the fact that McCarthy was using specific numbers in his accusations, but was nonetheless willing to help. What he didn’t understand was that it was precisely this specificity that was the source of McCarthy’s power. However, helping McCarthy was not easy; as one FBI agent noted, “We didn’t have enough evidence to show there was a single Communist in the State Department, let alone 57 cases.” Still, FBI agents spent many hours searching the files for information to funnel to McCarthy. Also, the FBI Crime Records division supplied him with speechwriters and two of his aides, Roy Cohn and G. David Schine. It was an FBI man who taught McCarthy how to use the newspapers, how to release a story just before press deadlines so that reporters would have no time to get rebuttals. By the time any rebuttals could be printed, it would be too late: the initial impression would have been made and would dominate. Hoover also taught McCarthy to scrap the phrase “card-carrying Communist,” an accusation that usually could not be proved, and to substitute “Communist sympathizer” or “loyalty risk,” terms which, being much more vague only required some slight association with communism; even the signing of a petition or a subscription to a newspaper or magazine with some organization on the Attorney General’s List would do. Hoover supplied McCarthy with information against people whom Hoover himself deemed to be enemies: President Truman, Eleanor Roosevelt, Adlai Stevenson, newsman James Wechsler and Hoover’s institutional rival and enemy, the CIA.32 Despite all this help, the early rounds of the hearings went poorly for McCarthy. His charges and his numbers had transformed again, now into “81 loyalty risks” and he brought up new names and made allegations for which he could provide no evidence. Challenged on this point, he responded, “I don’t answer accusations. I make them.” His list of “security risks” was haphazard, including both genuine security risks who were already gone from government employment and others like David Demarest Lloyd, a speechwriter and administrative assistant to President Truman who came to the White House with strong anti-Communist credentials from his time working for ADA. One of his cases, case number 14, was Joseph Panuch, former Deputy Under Secretary of State for Administration, whose work McCarthy had praised just two weeks earlier. Strong witnesses like Dorothy Kenyon and United States Ambassadorat-Large Philip Jessup made McCarthy look a fool as they persuasively rebutted his allegations. Then, perhaps under the influence of Freda Utley, McCarthy turned to the “loss” of China and the supposed treachery of the “China Hands,” a group of State Department officers, including

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John S. Service, John Paton Davies, John Carter Vincent and O. Edmund Clubb, with special knowledge of and extensive experience in China. These men had uniformly been skeptical of the ability of Chiang Kaishek’s regime to prevail against either the Japanese or his Communist adversaries; on that basis, they recommended a policy that would seek to pressure the Guomindang to institute reforms and that would include the Chinese Communists (whose troops were much more effective in battle than those of the Nationalists) in the fight against Japan. Service was already vulnerable, despite his having been exculpated by the grand jury in the Amerasia Affair; ignoring the evidence, red scare antiCommunists like Kohlberg and Utley were convinced that a deep, dark cover-up had been perpetrated. In truth the reason that the Amerasia case fell apart was the fact that Hoover’s FBI had used illegal means to get evidence—but Service would not have been implicated in the end anyway. So far, McCarthy’s performance had been unimpressive, with not one exposure of a previously unknown Communist. Then McCarthy told reporters that he would reveal “the top espionage agent in the United States, the boss of Alger Hiss.” Privately he told reporter Jack Anderson that this supposed kingpin was scholar Owen Lattimore, an expert on the Far East. He went on, Anderson remembered, with “a Gothic tale about Communist spies who had been landed on the Atlantic coast by an enemy submarine and who hastened to Lattimore for their orders.”33 Then, on March 21, Anderson recorded, McCarthy named Lattimore in a secret session of the Tydings Committee with “a finality that was awesome in its bridge-burning: ‘. . . [Lattimore was] definitely an espionage agent . . . one of the top espionage agents . . . the top Russian spy . . . the key man in a Russian espionage ring.’ Propelled by the gambler’s bravura, he raised the bid even higher: ‘I am willing to stand or fall on this one’” (Anderson’s ellipses).34 Lattimore was a man with a distinguished career; he was a Far East policy specialist, head of the School of International Relations at Johns Hopkins, had, from 1933 to 1941, been editor of the journal Pacific Affairs (published by the Institute of Pacific Relations), had been FDR’s China adviser in 1941, had served as US adviser to Chiang Kai-shek (receiving a letter of praise from the Generalissimo for his work), had accompanied Vice President Henry Wallace on a tour of China and Russia in 1944, had been on the staff of the Office of War Information and had written many books. But he had never worked at the State Department, and he was neither a spy nor a Communist. He is still often called a “fellow traveler” by historians, but that mischaracterizes his political stance as well. He had written critically of the Soviet Union (one mark of actual fellow travelers was their uncritical stance toward the Russians) and had seen his

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most recent book attacked by the Communist press. Lattimore made some serious errors—outstanding among these were his initial belief and public statement that Stalin’s purge trials were justified. In this instance, Lattimore was simply and horribly wrong, yet there is nothing in his record to indicate that he was pro-Soviet; he consistently wrote and spoke against both Russian and Chinese domination of less-developed nations like those of central Asia. Indeed, Lattimore’s chief sins regarding the Far East, were: (1) that he argued that the Chinese Communists were not simply Soviet puppets, (2) that he maintained, whether the United States liked it or not, because of simple proximity the Soviet Union would inevitably be a force in Asia, and (3) he embraced a policy based on autonomy for the countries of Central Asia. In other words, he argued that these countries should be free of Russian domination, of Chinese domination and of American domination. In the “those who are not for us are against us” political atmosphere of the time and of some decades to come, to most people the notion that any country should be free of both American and Soviet domination was simply incomprehensible; it had to be one or the other. Moreover, to suggest that the United States might be anything other than a beneficent force in any context whatsoever was to leave oneself open to charges of disloyalty. Lattimore did make it clear to those who cared to notice that he preferred the American way, arguing that the profit motive and the market system were best suited to developing Asian economies. He believed that the United States had “the clearest power of attraction for all of Asia” and should vigorously pursue its own national interests in Asia in competition with the Chinese and Russians. Moreover, he argued that “We need political stability and economic prosperity in China so that we can invest our capital there safely and sell our products in an expanding market.”35 His critics ignored those parts of his work and focused on the fact that he also believed that Third World nations should be allowed to develop in their own ways, free from American domination. Lattimore wanted the United States to escape the ideological lenses that he saw as limiting and hampering its ability to pursue its own interests as well as its ideals. He argued that less developed countries could be made allies, and very reliable allies, but they cannot be made puppets. In all of them, the passion that runs through men’s veins is a passion for freedom from foreign rule. All of them are repelled by any policy that looks like restoration of colonial rule.36

So this was the man McCarthy sought to portray as the eminence grise at the State Department, “the voice for the mind of [Secretary of State]

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Acheson.” However, as McCarthy biographer Thomas Reeves observes, Acheson had never even heard of Owen Lattimore until these hearings when “McCarthy put his name in headlines.”37 McCarthy also had little evidence to support his other charges but that did not deter him; for example, he leaked one witness’s false testimony to the newspapers before the man had even given it. The result was that the incorrect claims appeared in the press and made their mark on the public before they could be disproven. In more than five hours on the witness stand, Lattimore turned out to be what one observer called, “an extremely tough and challenging witness,” rebutting McCarthy’s charges, exposing his distortions of evidence and mocking him for retreating from labeling Lattimore Russia’s “top espionage” to the charge that Lattimore’s opinions “paralleled” those of the Communists. Lattimore was forthright in arguing that the United States simply did not have the capacity to prop up the Chinese Nationalist Government, nor could it successfully maintain “little Chiangs” in South Korea and other Asian nations. He affirmed his advocacy of what he argued was a realistic policy toward the Chinese Communists, encouraging their nationalism with the aim of keeping them as free of Soviet domination as possible. And, he added, “My analysis may be partly wrong or wholly wrong. But if anybody says it is disloyal or un-American, he is a fool or a knave.”38 Despite his braggadocio, McCarthy declined to call Lattimore a Communist or a spy outside the Senate walls where he would lose his immunity from a libel suit. And overall things were going badly for McCarthy until his supporter, J.B. Matthews, managed to persuade exCommunist Louis F. Budenz to testify. Budenz—who was now making a career from his insider knowledge about the Communist Party—had had a great deal to say about the Communist threat, both in extensive interviews with the FBI and in public forums, and Owen Lattimore had never been mentioned in his testimony. Moreover, Assistant FBI Director D. M. Ladd expressed his doubts about Budenz’s credibility, reporting, “It should be borne in mind that Budenz apparently is inclined to make sensational charges which the press interprets as startling new information when, in fact, the information is old and not completely substantiated by actual facts.”39 However, in the public eye and in the minds of many politicians, Budenz was one of the great authorities on American communism. Now he testified that, though Lattimore was not a Soviet agent or a member of the Party, he was active in framing US foreign policy in ways favorable to the Soviet Union. There was nothing to these charges or to any of those that McCarthy had leveled against Lattimore, and in the end the

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Professional Witnesses One especially unusual feature of the second red scare was the existence of a class of person who in other times in other cultures tended to skulk in the shadows: these were the “professional witnesses” or paid informers. With a flood of employee loyalty cases, both at the federal and state levels, congressional and state investigative committee hearings, Smith Act prosecutions and deportation hearings, witnesses who could give expert testimony and name many names were in high demand. The most useful were those who could identify those who had been members of or sympathetic to suspect organizations; the more names such an individual could name, the more valuable and in demand he or she would be. Thus people like former undercover agent, Matthew Cvetic, ex-Communist Louis Budenz, Harvey Matusow, Elizabeth Bentley, Herbert Philbrick and Whittaker Chambers appeared before many committees, becoming practiced performers in the process. It did not take long for these people to realize that there was good money to be made through their testimony: there were payments from the Department of Justice, witness fees from federal and state agencies along with the possibility of turning one’s story into articles for magazines and newspapers, books or even movies. Thus, along with his witness fees, professional informer Louis Budenz earned $20,000 from Collier’s magazine for a 1948 series of articles, $9,000 in royalties for his first book, This is My Story and more money from lectures. Whittaker Chambers’ book, Witness, became a Book-of-the-Month Club selection and was serialized in the Saturday Evening Post while Herbert Philbrick’s I Led Three Lives: Citizen, “Communist,” Counterspy was made, not only into a movie, but also into a television series. A problem for these media stars was the necessity to keep coming up with new material if they were to keep the engagements and money coming in. Generally, at the beginning of their new careers they were interviewed exhaustively by the FBI; it can be assumed that FBI agents who wanted to know everything the witness knew, generally achieved their goal. And yet the witness was then asked to testify as an expert before a variety of committees, all of whom were hungry for new and exclusive information to justify their researches. And so some of them like Harvey Matusow, Matt Cvetic and Louis Budenz moved from the truth to lies to keep up the demand for their services. Thus, frivolously and carelessly, reputations, careers and lives were ruined.

Tydings Committee’s majority report made clear that they believed Lattimore against McCarthy and Budenz. The report concluded generally that McCarthy’s charges were a “fraud and a hoax” and that the State Department’s security program was effective. Before the hearings, Tydings was reported to have said, “Let me have [McCarthy] for three days in public hearings, and he’ll never show his

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face in the Senate again,” but he had underestimated his quarry. Never one to be abashed, shamed or silenced, McCarthy himself was undeterred by the Committee’s findings. In fact, he told the American Society of Newspaper Editors, he expected such charges from “the Reds, their minions, and the egg-sucking phony liberals” and he had only contempt “for the pitiful squealing of those who would hold sacrosanct those Communists and queers who have sold 400 million Asiatic people into atheistic slavery” and that “the most loyal stooges of the Kremlin could not have done a better job of giving a clean bill of health to Stalin’s fifth column in this country.” 40 He was backed up by fellow Republicans, one of whom, William E. Jenner, accused Tydings—with what can most charitably be described as outrageous hyperbole—of being guilty of “the most brazen whitewash of treasonable conspiracy in our history.”41 By this time McCarthy had discovered an important truth: if one kept hurling new accusations every day, it did not much matter whether they were true or false or whether there was evidence to substantiate them; the press kept publishing the charges, leaving a significant portion of the public with the impression that where there was so much smoke, there must be quite a fire. So, if McCarthy was the loser in the committee hearings, he was the winner inasmuch as the publicity of the hearings had established him in the eyes of the rightwing press and much of the public in the role of “head commie hunter.” Not all Republican senators were pleased; Margaret Chase Smith, a Republican from Maine, disturbed by McCarthy’s approach to politics gave a speech—a “Declaration of Conscience”—on June 1, 1950 in which she attacked McCarthy’s methods, saying, “The American people are sick and tired of being afraid to speak their minds lest they be politically smeared as ‘Communists’ or ‘Fascists’ by their opponents.” She was joined in this repudiation by six other Republican senators; McCarthy’s response was to mock them as “Snow White and the six dwarfs.” Within a short time this technique of scatter shot accusations with carelessness regarding their basis in fact had acquired a name: “McCarthyism.” And it quickly found its way into American politics as McCarthy went to work on behalf of some of his fellow Republicans in the 1950 midterm elections. McCarthy was particularly active in favor of John Marshall Butler who opposed Millard Tydings in his bid for a fifth term in Maryland, absurdly accusing the conservative Tydings of “protecting Communists” and “shielding traitors.” The low point of this dirty campaign is generally considered to be the doctored photograph McCarthy’s staff published showing Tydings seemingly chatting with Communist leader Earl Browder; to be sure, the word “composite” was printed below the picture, but in such a way as to make it easy to overlook.

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Tydings lost by some 40,000 votes and though it is by no means certain that McCarthy’s opposition did the trick, most journalists and politicians believed that it had. Certainly part of what made life difficult for Democrats that year was the onset of the Korean War: on June 24 North Korean Communist troops had invaded the southern part of the peninsula, making the fact of global Communist expansion even more immediate and helping to resurrect the “loss” of China as an issue in American politics. Moreover, the earlier conviction of Alger Hiss for perjury along with the news reports (on February 11, the same day McCarthy sent his telegram to Truman) that Manhattan Project scientist Klaus Fuchs had confessed to passing atomic bomb secrets to the USSR and the arrest, conviction and ultimate execution of Julius Rosenberg for passing classified information to the Soviet Union bolstered the credibility of McCarthy’s charges against the State Department. However, with McCarthy campaigning for other Republicans, all of whom won their elections (as did many he had not campaigned for; the Republicans generally swept the elections), politicians were left with the impression that McCarthy was an ally to be valued and an antagonist to be feared.

MCCARRAN While McCarthy’s chief political activity was “exposing” Communists, that is, carelessly accusing people of disloyalty, other red scare anti-Communists engaged in the more substantive work of framing legislation to strike at supposed subversives and while forcing liberals into a corner where they would have to weaken themselves with their liberal constituents by abandoning a strong position on civil liberties or stand firm on civil liberties and weaken themselves by risking the taint of being “soft on Reds.” In 1947 while the federal government had been prosecuting the CPUSA leaders, Senator Karl Mundt of South Dakota introduced a bill along with Representative Richard Nixon of California that sought to put crippling controls on the Communist Party. The Mundt-Nixon bill would have made it unlawful to work or conspire toward the establishment in the United States of a foreign-controlled, totalitarian government (that is, the Soviet Union), barred Communists from federal employment, denied passports to Communists (so that they could not travel to Moscow for orders and advice), required all organizations which the attorney general had determined were Communist or Communist fronts to register, report their finances, the names and addresses of their leaders and, in the case of Communist organizations, supply complete membership lists and required that wrappers on publications mailed out by such organizations be plainly

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labeled as coming from a Communist source while radio broadcasts would have to carry announcements of their Red sponsorship. On May 21, 1948, the bill passed the House of Representatives with a huge majority: 319–38. However, there was strong opposition to the proposal, even from some conservative sources; Time magazine, usually a reliable ally in conservative causes, labeled the bill “Logical but not Practical”42 while others argued that the bill could be used to destroy labor unions or radical groups but could also ensnare innocent citizens in its grasp. This resistance combined with the opposition of the president caused the bill to die in the Senate. In September 1950, 74-year-old Pat McCarran, the immensely powerful chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee and a deeply conservative Democrat, re-introduced the Mundt-Nixon bill, combining it with the provisions of four other internal security measures into a new bill, the McCarran Internal Security Act. In addition to the provisions of the earlier act, the new legislation would establish a Subversive Activities Control Board to investigate persons suspected of engaging in subversive activities or otherwise promoting the establishment of a “totalitarian dictatorship.” Alien members of such groups would be barred from becoming citizens and members who were citizens might lose their citizenship. Liberal Democrats led by Douglas, Kilgore, Lehman and Hubert Humphrey, seeing little prospect of defeating the McCarran bill and fearful themselves of the possible electoral effects of being labeled “soft on Communism,” came up with a bizarre plan to head off the bill; they proposed as a substitute that in the event that the president should declare an “internal security emergency,” an emergency detention plan for the internment of suspected subversives would come into effect. The idea was that this bill, which would set aside the right of habeas corpus, would: (1) take the place of the McCarran bill, making that go away, and (2) would then be defeated because of its extreme measures and doubtful constitutionality. In the event, McCarran, along with other conservatives, denounced the Democrats’ proposal as “a workable blueprint for the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat in the United States totalitarianism,”43 slipped in a provision reestablishing habeas corpus and then simply added this new bill to his own. Hubert Humphrey, the liberal, bizarrely attacked McCarran from the right, saying: I have never seen such solicitude on the part of so-called anticommunists for the communists. If we are in war and these despicable traitors decide to blow up every building we have, if they decide to destroy every means of communication, every port facility, and every dock, Mr. President, do you know how they

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would get protection? They would have it through the writ of habeas corpus, under this bill.44

Finally, almost all the liberals, terrified in an election year of the power of the ongoing red scare, voted for a bill that they claimed to despise and it passed with a vote of 70 for and 7 against. President Truman had no such qualms and vetoed it, saying: We can and we will prevent espionage, sabotage, or other actions endangering our national security. But we would betray our finest traditions if we attempted . . . to curb the simple expression of opinion. This we should never do . . . for it would make a mockery of the Bill of Rights and of our claim to stand for freedom in the world. The course proposed by this bill would delight the Communists, for it would make a mockery of the Bill of Rights and of our claims to stand for freedom in the world.45

That same day the House, without further debate, overrode his veto by a vote of 286–48 while the Senate, after a last ditch effort by a small group of liberals to hold it off, overrode with 31 Republicans and 26 Democrats in favor of the legislation and five members of each party opposed. The bill succeeded in its unstated purpose of demoralizing and silencing the left but, as the conservative US Chamber of Commerce commented in October, 1967: After all, in its 17-year life it never controlled a subversive. It never has accomplished anything at all. This witch hunt had a fast start and a short life. The Act of Congress establishing it was so full of fault, principally in its violations of the Constitution, that the Board soon became inoperable.46

When the Supreme Court held in its landmark decision of November 15, 1965, that the Act was unenforceable because of the required registration of members of the Communist Party, the law was effectively killed. All that, however, was in the future. In 1950 McCarran was looking to give his bill teeth and to that end he got Senate authorization for the Special Subcommittee to Investigate the Administration of the Internal Security Act and Other Internal Security Laws (usually shortened to Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, SISS or simply the McCarran Committee) a committee with a broad mandate to investigate “the extent, nature and effects of subversive activities” in the United States. Now the Senate had its own version of HUAC. The new subcommittee’s first

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mission was to try to establish that Communists were influencing American foreign policy and its first major investigation was into the Institute of Pacific Relations. This was a critical moment in ramping up the “Who lost China” debate and the subcommittee paid most attention to the man who had eluded McCarthy, Owen Lattimore. At issue was a revival of the charge that the “China Hands,” China experts Lattimore, John Stewart Service, John Carter Vincent and John Paton Davies had molded US foreign policy, leading the United States to drop its support for the supposedly democratic Chiang Kai-shek in favor of the Communists led by Mao tse-tung. Lattimore had been editor of the journal Pacific Affairs published by the Institute of Pacific Relations (IPR). As editor Lattimore’s goal was to put out a publication that would be a “forum of controversy.” As a result, he was “continually in hot water, especially with the Japan Council, which thought I was too anti-imperialist, and the Soviet Council, which thought that its own anti-imperialist line was the only permissible one . . .”47 Despite his own published warnings against allowing Soviet expansion into China (writing “Above all, while we want to get Japan out of China, we do not want to let Russia in. Nor do we want to ‘drive Japan into the arms of Russia.’”), this policy of encouraging contributions from scholars with widely differing points of view, including Marxists, laid Lattimore open to attack, even though he only ever published one article by a Soviet contributor (the only one ever sent to him). McCarran, in essence, was out to “get” Lattimore. In an oral history Warren Olney, an assistant attorney general in the Eisenhower administration, characterized the subcommittee’s treatment of Lattimore as “entrapment” of Mr. Lattimore. To begin with, he was not called to testify until the subcommittee had heard mostly anti-Lattimore witnesses for six months. Louis Budenz—who, as Joseph Alsop pointed out in his newspaper column, had not mentioned Lattimore once in 3,000 hours of answering FBI questions, who in 1947 had told a State Department investigator that he “did not recall any instances” that identified Lattimore as a Communist; and who in 1949 had told his editor at Collier’s magazine that Lattimore had never “acted as a Communist in any way”48—now claimed that Lattimore was both a Communist and a Soviet agent. Ex-Communist and professional witness Harvey Matusow testified that “Owen Lattimore’s books were used as the official Communist Party guides on Asia.” As he subsequently admitted in his autobiography, “Once again, I told a complete falsehood.”49 Brought to testify, Lattimore was questioned in minute detail on the basis of voluminous IPR records that had been seized by the SISS; any lapses of memory were treated as attempts to perjure himself. Lattimore had asked

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to have access to the seized records so that he could refresh his memory, saying that “the present method of questioning gives me somewhat the feeling of a blind man running a gauntlet.” This request was refused: as Lattimore’s attorney, Thurman Arnold, wrote in his autobiography, the purpose of the questioning was not “to obtain information, but for the purpose of entrapment.” And indeed, McCarran was able to trip Lattimore up with respect to a few minor dates and meetings. Over 12 days of tense testimony, McCarran and Lattimore frequently got into shouting matches as the witness refused to accord the chairman the deference which he considered his due. Lattimore was repeatedly ordered to respond to complicated and potentially incriminating questions with a simple yes or no. In the end, in the McCarran Committee’s final report, it was found that Lattimore had been “from some time beginning in the 1930s, a conscious articulate instrument of the Soviet conspiracy,” and that on “at least five separate matters” Lattimore had not told the whole truth. Moreover, getting to its main point, the report stated that the Institute of Pacific Relations, through “a small core of officials and staff members” sought to “popularize false information, including information originating from Soviet and Communist sources.” Furthermore “Owen Lattimore and John Carter Vincent were influential in bringing about a change in United States policy in 1945 favorable to the Chinese Communists”, that “John Carter Vincent was the principal fulcrum of IPR pressures and influence in the State Department” and finally, “but for the imaginations” of a group in the IPR, “China would be free.”50 Based on the McCarran Committee’s recommendation, in 1952, Lattimore was indicted on seven counts of perjury, the chief claim being that he had lied when he had denied that he had ever been a follower of the Communist line or a promoter of Communist interests. The FBI had already concluded in five different evaluations that there was no case against him. Ultimately, federal judge Luther Youngdahl dismissed the charges as “formless and obscure,” declaring that a trial based on them would make “a sham of the Sixth Amendment” which requires that a defendant be advised specifically of the charges against him or her. No incriminating evidence had been found against Lattimore despite an enormous government effort, including tens of thousands of man-hours expended collecting documents, wiretapping, shadowing, questioning and holding hearings. The FBI alone accumulated an almost 40,000-page dossier on him, yet J. Edgar Hoover, was finally forced to admit that “it does not appear that facts . . . depict Lattimore as a dangerous individual.” The SISS went on to conduct extensive investigations into other areas including subversion in the federal government, particularly in: the Department of State and Department of Defense; immigration; the United

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Nations; youth organizations; the television, radio and entertainment industry; the telegraph industry; the defense industry; labor unions; and educational organizations. Unchecked in his power, McCarran continued to intimidate uncooperative witnesses, having their backgrounds checked by vice squads, threatening homosexuals with exposure and threatening witnesses with contempt charges. Of particular importance was the secret tie McCarran formed with the central figure of the red scare, FBI head, J. Edgar Hoover. Hoover found McCarran to be much more reliable and stable than McCarthy and, as Ybarra writes, The FBI would act as a kind of private detective agency for SISS, investigating suspects and furnishing leads, while the committee would launder information for the bureau, publicly pillorying suspected subversives against whom a court case could not be made.51

MCCARTHY, APEX Meanwhile, the other prominent actor on the anti-Communist stage, Senator McCarthy, was far from quiescent. Riding high on the election results and confident in his new power, McCarthy now took aim at the Truman administration, first attacking Secretary of State, Dean Acheson, and then singling out Truman’s secretary of defense, the widely revered former Chief of Staff of the United States Army, George C. Marshall. On June 14, 1951, in a long diatribe directed against him, McCarthy characterized Marshall—who had, at President Truman’s request, led a failed mission to try to get Chiang Kai-shek and the Chinese Communists to work together against the Japanese invaders—as the “instrument of a Soviet conspiracy,” as the man who was responsible for the “loss” of China to communism. McCarthy had already learned that the more outlandish his allegations, the more attention they received from the press and now he went all out, distorting events and facts, drawing sinister conclusions from loosely related, or completely unrelated events to paint a picture of “a conspiracy so immense and an infamy so black as to dwarf any previous venture in the history of man.” And he went on to ask, What is the objective of the great conspiracy? I think it is clear from what has occurred and is now occurring: to diminish the United States in world affairs, to weaken us militarily, to confuse our spirit with talk of surrender in the Far East and to impair our

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will to resist evil. To what end? To the end that we shall be contained, frustrated and finally: fall victim to Soviet intrigue from within and Russian military might from without.52

The man behind all this was not Harry Truman. No, Truman was just a naïve dupe. Rather, it was the Secretary of Defense, George Catlett Marshall. And McCarthy’s chief, his only, evidence that Marshall was an evil conspirator was that McCarthy believed that Marshall had made consistently wrong decisions, while “if Marshall were merely stupid, the laws of probability would dictate that part of his decisions would serve this country’s interest.”53 It is generally agreed that this constituted the low point of a not very elevated career; yet, despite the outrageousness of the attack, conservatives like Robert Taft did not repudiate McCarthy—for now at least—as he went after Truman as being “both stupid and stubborn” and went after the Democrats as “Commie-crats.”54 He was too valuable an attack dog. As Harvey Klehr, John Earl Haynes and Fridrikh Igorevich Firsov wrote in their book The Secret World of American Communism: In McCarthy’s hands, anti-Communism was a partisan weapon used to implicate the New Deal, liberals, and the Democratic Party in treason. Using evidence that was exaggerated, distorted, and in some cases utterly false, he accused hundreds of individuals of Communist activity, recklessly mixing the innocent with the assuredly guilty when it served his political purposes. With passions against communism as strong as they were, McCarthy’s demagoguery and that of others like him found a ready audience for several years. Some innocent people were ruined by the irresponsible use of unverified charges and even faked evidence concocted for political gain. In addition, much of the legal attack on the CPUSA in the 1950s was excessive, inspired by political pandering to strong public anti-Communist emotions, and of doubtful constitutional propriety.55

Truman decided not to run for re-election in 1952, a presidential election that saw war hero, former General Dwight D. Eisenhower, running as a Republican against the Democratic governor of Illinois, Adlai Stevenson. Campaigning in Wisconsin, Eisenhower found himself faced with the unavoidable question of how to relate to fellow Republican, McCarthy. Given McCarthy’s attack on Eisenhower’s former boss and colleague, Marshall, this posed a particularly thorny challenge: should he risk repudiating and alienating McCarthy (and his followers), especially on his

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home turf? Or should he speak up in defense of his mentor? The initial draft of Eisenhower’s speech included a strong defense of Marshall, but, fearful of losing Wisconsin, not only did he excise all mention of the General, but, McCarthy-style, he argued that the loss of China and eastern Europe was due to Communists who had infiltrated the Truman administration.56 This failure to defend Marshall was widely noted and condemned in the press; Truman—who revered Marshall—was appalled, later saying that Eisenhower was “just a coward.”57 McCarthy supported Eisenhower, most prominently with an astounding television speech in which he charged that Stevenson and five “advisers” were “sympathetic to Communism and had aided the Communist cause.” The speech became famous for McCarthy’s “accidentally on purpose” mistake, saying, “Alger . . . I mean, Adlai.” In any case, the speech in its totality was a vintage McCarthy smear. As journalist Edwin Bayley describes it: he said that all of these charges were supported by public documents, and the occasion was advertised as McCarthy’s “documentation” speech. The television audience certainly got the impression that documents backed up his charges; many in the audience probably also got an impression that McCarthy was actually calling these people Communists. Later studies proved that although the charges were related to the public documents McCarthy cited, in most cases the documents did not prove, and often disproved, the charges.58

However, the point was not to be believed by everybody. McCarthy himself was involved in a re-election campaign against Fairchild and his main objective with the Stevenson speech was to dominate the headlines and shut out his opponent. And here he succeeded brilliantly. Bayley writes, In Wisconsin the story of the speech was a banner headline in almost every daily paper. It enabled McCarthy to dominate the news right up to the day of the election, as he amplified his charges, as others attacked him, and as he replied to his attackers. Fairchild was forgotten.59

When Eisenhower won the election with narrow Republican majorities in both houses, it was generally assumed that McCarthy would ease off his campaign against Communists in government. The Republican leadership in the new Congress gave McCarthy a chairmanship as a reward for his contributions to the party, but it was over the Senate Committee

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Figure 5.2 Roy M. Cohn, head-and-shoulders portrait, facing right. Source: Courtesy of Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, LC-DIG-hec-26549.

on Government Operations, an area where—as Senate Majority Leader Robert Taft said—“he can’t do any harm.” The administration reached out to McCarthy by appointing an ally, R.W. Scott McLeod, to head the State Department’s security program. However, the domestic Communist threat had become McCarthy’s stock-in-trade; it was the issue that had brought a previously obscure senator into the limelight and McCarthy was not about to surrender all the attention he had been getting. Using the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations as his vehicle, with the assistance of his new chief counsel, Roy Cohn, McCarthy set to work, beginning with an investigation into allegations of Communist influence in the Voice of America, the official broadcasting service of the US Government. McCarthy would customarily question witnesses in closed door sessions and then, if they seemed suitable for his purposes, bring them back to public sessions in front of television cameras and the press. Turning up the heat, McCarthy sent Roy Cohn and his friend, G. David Schine, on an overseas trip to examine State Department libraries

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Roy Cohn and David Schine take a trip Roy Marcus Cohn was McCarthy’s chief assistant in the last part of his career. A brilliant young lawyer, the 23-year-old Cohn rose up quickly in Washington circles, playing a major role in the 1951 espionage trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Impressed by Cohn’s performance, J. Edgar Hoover recommended him to McCarthy, who in 1953 took him on as his chief counsel for the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. In turn, Cohn persuaded McCarthy to use his friend, 25-year-old G. David Schine—son of a multimillionaire hotel-owner—as the subcommittee’s consultant on psychological warfare, a position for which Schine had no identifiable qualifications except, perhaps, the fact that he had written a self-published, error-filled tract entitled “Definition of Communism.” Cohn and Schine became a pair of boys perpetually out on the town and despite Cohn’s oft-expressed intense homophobia (Cohn himself was a closeted gay man his whole life) and the centrality of homophobia to his boss’s (McCarthy) anticommunist rhetoric, it was widely rumored that they were lovers. In the spring of 1953, the two left for Europe to investigate the US Information Service posts, foreign offices of the US Information Agency. These posts represented America abroad and in addition to showing movies and sponsoring speakers, they contained libraries of American literature. As soon as the State Department got word of the trip, it ordered the posts to get rid of any literature that could even minutely be connected to subversion; still Cohn and Schine found some 30,000 offending volumes, including not only detective novels by Dashiell Hammett, the works of W.E.B. Du Bois and John Steinbeck (all admitted radicals, even if it remains difficult to see Hammett’s detective stories as in any way subversive), but also of nineteenthcentury writers Herman Melville and Henry Thoreau. Europe “laughed its head off,” reporter Richard Rovere later wrote, but the effects were serious: what really damaged the whole American complex in Europe was the shame and anger of the government servants who had witnessed the whole affair. I must have talked with a hundred people in Bonn, Paris, Rome, and London who told me their resignations were written, signed, stamped, and ready for mailing or delivery. . . . Morale sank very low so low, indeed, that I was surprised to note, among government people in Europe, a willingness to denounce McCarthy in extravagant language and to ridicule Cohn and Schine. This was most unlike Washington at the time, and the explanation I was given was that very few people cared any longer whether they held their jobs or not.60

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for books whose authors might be considered subversive. In fact, the State Department had begun getting rid of any and all books that McCarthy might possibly consider offensive as soon as it learned that they were to be investigated and by the time Cohn and Schine arrived there was little to be found. That did not stop the two from making the lives of overseas personnel miserable; the behavior while abroad of McCarthy’s two agents was reckless and disrespectful, earning them the mockery of the European press and depressing morale among US Government workers abroad. Even the president, ever reluctant to “get into the gutter with that guy” as he put it, felt obliged (without ever naming McCarthy) to tell Americans: “Don’t join the book burners . . . Don’t be afraid to go in your library and read every book.” And McCarthy was not afraid to beard the president himself. Provided with classified documents by secret allies, he challenged Eisenhower’s choice of Russian specialist Charles E. Bohlen as the US ambassador in Moscow; charged that the CIA had been infiltrated by the KGB; and he attacked the State Department yet again. As his approval rating in the polls soared from 34 percent in the summer of 1953 to 50 percent in December, few could be found—and that included the president himself—with the courage or the will to confront him.

MCCARTHY: NADIR There were signs of vulnerability, however; McCarthy appointed J.B. Matthews—the man who had been so useful to HUAC in its early days— to the position of staff director for his subcommittee. However, it soon came out that Matthews had written an article entitled “Reds and Our Churches” for the July 1953 issue of the rightwing publication The American Mercury in which he alleged that the “largest single group supporting the Communist apparatus in the United States is composed of Protestant Clergymen.”61 Matthews had written “Reds in the White House” and “Reds in Our Colleges” without arousing major controversy, but now he had gone too far and, with a majority of his own subcommittee demanding Matthews’s dismissal, McCarthy let him go. What finally brought McCarthy down was his decision to take on the US Army; in the fall of 1953, he announced that he had uncovered a spy ring operating in a Signal Corps Center at Fort Monmouth in New Jersey. This was, in fact, pouring old wine into new bottles since both HUAC and Army Intelligence had both looked into the matter with no result. All that McCarthy was able to come up with was the completely unrelated case of Irving Peress. Peress was an Army dentist with leftwing associations

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who had refused to take a loyalty oath and, on loyalty forms, had written “federal constitutional privilege” in response to questions about membership in subversive groups. Army Intelligence looked into his background and recommended his removal. However, due to the inefficiencies of a very large bureaucracy the process moved very slowly; in the meantime, Peress applied for a promotion, the accompanying recommendation that he be disapproved along with the security information in his file were not examined and, based on his professional qualifications, he was promoted to the rank of major. Peress himself later suggested that “[s]omebody was eating lunch or making a telephone call when my promotion passed across their desk. I slipped through.”62 In McCarthy’s telling of it, the fact that a dentist who might be a Communist had slipped through the Army’s bureaucracy and, worse yet, had been promoted represented a terrible and dangerous breach of security in a system that had no clear guidelines for handling such cases and no means of tracking possible security risks. He called Peress to testify before a closed hearing of his subcommittee where Peress consistently took the Fifth Amendment in response to questions about his politics. Following this, Peress applied for immediate discharge and the Army compounded its sins by giving him an honorable discharge. During the course of these hearings, McCarthy consistently referred to Peress as “a traitor to the country as part of the Communist conspiracy.” “Who promoted Peress?” McCarthy wanted to know and the question became a kind of slogan, even appearing on bumper stickers in Wisconsin. In his quest for the answer, McCarthy called Peress’s commanding officer, decorated Second World War hero Brigadier General Ralph W. Zwicker, before his subcommittee and demanded that Zwicker give him the names of all the officers who had been involved in Peress’s promotion and discharge. Zwicker was advised by the Army’s counsel, John G. Adams, not to answer and he followed that advice. McCarthy’s response was to badger Zwicker, insulting him by inferentially comparing his intelligence— unfavorably—to that of a five-year-old child and declaring him “not fit” to wear the uniform of the US Army. Unbeknownst to McCarthy, the storm clouds were beginning to gather above his head. Early in 1950 McCarthy had started investigating the CIA for possible Communist double agents. This was one of the few investigations he made that had some facts behind it and Director Allen Dulles was aware of the problem. However, at Dulles’ request, Eisenhower, concerned about the security of sensitive information in the hands of a reckless senator and also about maintaining the viability of the CIA itself in the face of possible damaging disclosures, demanded that McCarthy stop issuing subpoenas

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against the agency. More than that, Dulles launched a Hoover-style blackbag operation against McCarthy, having agents break into his office to plant phony reports whose use would discredit him. 63 Then, when Eisenhower failed to take a strong public position against McCarthy, former Democratic presidential nominee Adlai Stevenson made a nationally televised speech denouncing the Republican Party as “half Eisenhower, half McCarthy.” This, along with McCarthy’s attacks on the Army and on a general—Zwicker—who had served under him, finally shook Eisenhower from his stance of dignified disengagement and brought him to the conclusion that he had to switch to a more active strategy of feeding McCarthy the rope with which to hang himself. With the president’s support, Secretary Dulles removed McCarthy ally Scott McLeod from his position in the State Department. More importantly, he had Vice President Nixon make a televised response to the Stevenson speech in which Nixon also, without naming him, criticized his “reckless talk and questionable methods.” This speech was page one material in the newspapers and was widely understood to be a presidential repudiation of McCarthy. The White House, however, was not the only source of antiMcCarthy movement: Senator Ralph Flanders of Vermont, a Republican, had decided that enough was enough and he began what would amount to a campaign against McCarthy. Speaking to the Senate, Flanders painted a mocking picture of McCarthy, saying, “He emits his war whoops. He goes forth to battle and proudly returns with the scalp of a pink Army dentist.” And on the evening of the same day “A Report on Senator Joseph R. McCarthy” aired on the CBS television program See It Now, hosted by journalist Edward R. Murrow. After showing film clips of McCarthy in action, Murrow concluded: No one familiar with the history of this country can deny that congressional committees are useful. It is necessary to investigate before legislating, but the line between investigating and persecuting is a very fine one, and the junior Senator from Wisconsin has stepped over it repeatedly. His primary achievement has been in confusing the public mind, as between the internal and the external threats of Communism. We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. We must remember always that accusation is not proof and that conviction depends upon evidence and due process of law. We will not walk in fear, one of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason, if we dig deep in our history and our doctrine, and remember that we are not descended from fearful men—not from men who

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feared to write, to speak, to associate and to defend causes that were, for the moment, unpopular.64

The series devoted two programs to McCarthy after which he was given an opportunity to respond; rather than defend himself, he went on the offensive, labeling Murrow “the leader and the cleverest of the jackal pack which is always found at the throat of anyone who dares to expose individual Communists and traitors” and accusing Murrow of colluding with VOKS, the “Russian espionage and propaganda organization”. Rather than raising the intended doubts about the popular Murrow, this attack damaged McCarthy’s popularity. Meanwhile, the Army had set on a course of action that ultimately would bring McCarthy down by opening an investigation into McCarthy staff member, David Schine. In November 1953, Schine had been drafted into the Army. Cohn sought, with McCarthy’s help to get him exempted from service, and, when that did not work out, to have him commissioned as an officer. With Schine duly enlisted as a private, Cohn pressed the secretary of the Army, Robert Stevens, to give Schine special privileges with the result that Schine was issued special equipment: mittens rather than gloves, special boots with straps and buckles, a fur-lined hood and other luxuries. Moreover, Schine was allowed to leave the base on weekends to “work on committee business.” The Army’s report listed 44 counts of improper pressure, among the most glaring being Cohn’s threat, if Schine were to be sent overseas, to make sure that Stevens was “through” and to “wreck the Army.” Schine himself did not mean much to McCarthy, but Roy Cohn was vital to him; by this time McCarthy had a very serious drinking problem—“a quart or more a day” according to David Oshinsky—and he desperately needed Cohn to do much of the committee work. McCarthy claimed that the Army’s investigation of Schine was retaliation for McCarthy’s investigation of the Army, especially his questioning of General Zwicker. It was given to McCarthy’s own committee, the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, to resolve these conflicting claims. Since McCarthy was one of the parties involved in the dispute, conservative Republican Senator Karl Mundt, a McCarthy ally, was chosen as chair of the committee. John G. Adams was the Army’s Counsel with Joseph Nye Welch of the Boston law firm of Hale & Dorr acting as Special Counsel. Behind the scenes, McCarthy was facing a very serious problem: J. Edgar Hoover, disturbed by McCarthy’s increasing recklessness, had cut him off from FBI files. As one aide of Hoover’s later commented, “McCarthy was never anything more than a tool of Mr. Hoover’s.

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He used him when he was useful and then, later, dumped him when he wasn’t.” Now McCarthy was fighting blindfolded, blinded by the lack of information from his old sources and blinded by the enormous quantities of alcohol he was consuming, morning and night. Beginning on April 22, 1954, an unprecedented political drama was playing itself out before the cameras and it was critical to the outcome that it was televised; an estimated 80 million viewers saw some part of the proceedings and many were simply glued to their television sets for the next 36 days. Almost none of the television audience had ever seen McCarthy in action, and most did not find it an edifying sight. Welch highlighted McCarthy’s dishonest tactics, exposing as fakes a doctored photograph of Schine seemingly (but not actually) alone with Army Secretary Robert T. Stevens (meant to exaggerate Schine’s importance) and a forged memo from FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, to Major General Alexander R. Bolling warning of subversives in the Army Signal Corps. Interrupting proceedings constantly, calling out in a monotone “Point of order!”, to many McCarthy seemed a reckless, dishonest bully, an impression that was immeasurably enhanced when he sought to portray a lawyer who worked in Welch’s Boston practice as tainted by Communist associations in his past. Striking back at McCarthy for an attack that could possibly destroy the career of a young man who had long since left behind his very brief connection to what had been a Communist front, Welch exclaimed “Until this moment, Senator, I think I never gauged your cruelty or your recklessness.” Unrelenting, McCarthy continued the attack on Fisher at which point Welch interrupted with words that became famous: “Let us not assassinate this lad further, Senator. You’ve done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?” Emotionally tone deaf, McCarthy pressed on against Fisher. Welch finally cut him off, calling for the chairman to call the next witness. The gallery broke into applause, leaving McCarthy, bewildered, asking his staff, “What did I do? What did I do?” The effect of this performance on public opinion was decisive: in Gallup polls of January 1954, 50 percent of those polled had a positive opinion of McCarthy. By June, that number had fallen to 34 percent with the same polls showing those with a negative opinion of McCarthy increasing from 29 percent to 45 percent. As a political force, McCarthy was spent. Nobody wields power alone; a person is only as socially and politically strong as their base of support. McCarthy had had fairly strong public support but his performance on television had weakened that dramatically. Just as important, he had been a political asset for his fellow Republicans while the Democrats had held

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the White House; with a Republican president, he was no longer needed but could be tolerated. However, he had attacked that president and had brought unfavorable publicity to himself through his performance in the hearings. Moreover, in the midterm elections of 1954 Democrats swept into control of both the House and the Senate. McCarthy was a decided liability to his party and all but the furthest on the political right abandoned him. He was censured by the Senate and was ignored by the press. “This,” McCarthy indignantly told reporters as the Senate moved to condemn his behavior, “is the most unheard-of thing I ever heard of.” Following his censure, his physical decline was rapid; his alcoholism consumed him and he died at the age of 48 on May 2, 1957. It was with McCarthy’s exposure on television that the red scare began to ebb. The irrationalities of red scare anti-communism would live on, hardened into institutional, social and cultural patterns, but the initial impetus that created those patterns, the red scare itself, was over. Because it was over, bit by bit those patterns would be open to challenge and alteration. When Democrats took back control of Congress in the 1954 elections, Eisenhower, who saw the GOP divided between “Progressive Moderates and Conservative Rightists,” blamed the results on the “dyed-in-the-wool reactionary fringe” of the party.65 A critical point in the end of the red scare was reached on Monday, June 17, 1957, when the Supreme Court handed down for four decisions dealing with Communist subversive activities in the United States, ruling against the government in each case. Dismayed, J. Edgar Hoover dubbed the day “Red Monday.” Among the results stemming from these decisions were: 1. The Smith Act was weakened, with advocacy, i.e., speech, being judged to be protected by the First Amendment while action was not. As Associate Justice Hugo Black wrote in his concurring opinion, “The First Amendment provides the only kind of security system that can preserve a free government – one that leaves the way wide open for people to favor, discuss, advocate, or incite causes and doctrines however obnoxious and antagonistic such views may be to the rest of us.” This would open the door for the vigorous debate of the 1960s regarding America’s involvement in Vietnam. 2. It was held that there were limits of Congress’s power to investigate people’s beliefs and associations. This meant that the intrusive interrogations of investigating committees such as HUAC and SISS now had limits placed on them. It is worth remembering here that the chief power of these committees came, not from the consequences that they themselves could impose on recalcitrant witnesses, but from

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the fact that the employers of those witnesses were likely to fire them, taking away their ability to feed and house themselves and their families. Conservatives were dismayed by these decisions, with J. Edgar Hoover calling them “the greatest victory the Communist Party in America ever received,” while the U.S. News & World Report dubbed them “treason’s greatest victory.” Senator William Jenner (R-IN) said, “No conceivable combination of votes in Congress could have done as much damage to our legislative barriers against communism and subversion as the Supreme Court of the United States has done by its recent opinions,” and he introduced a bill to limit the appellate jurisdiction of the Court.66 However, other prominent voices spoke up in favor of the rulings. Herbert Brucker, editor of the Hartford, CT, Courant and chairman of

John Henry Faulk Through most of the 1950s the anticommunist blacklist prevailed in radio entertainment, enforced primarily by the group AWARE, Inc., a for-profit organization that offered the “service” to advertisers and radio and television networks of investigating entertainers to make sure that their pasts were free of communist taint. The entertainers’ union, the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (AFTRA) had been dominated by leaders who supported and enabled AWARE, but in 1955, Texas-born radio star, John Henry Faulk, along with a group of other liberals, organized a “middle-of-the-road” group which was able to wrest control of the union away from the conservatives. Their platform included a rejection of the blacklist in the entertainment industry. Challenged in this way, AWARE turned its attention to Faulk, listing him in a pamphlet as engaging in “un-American” activities. Faulk’s sponsor, Libby’s Frozen Foods, withdrew its advertising from his program Johnny’s Front Porch and CBS fired him; moreover, he found himself unable to get other work. However, instead of taking steps to mollify AWARE, Faulk struck back, suing the organization and two of its founders. After a long trial with many delays, a jury awarded Faulk $3.5 million, much more than he had requested. Even though the sum was later reduced to $500,000 by an appeals court, AWARE was broken by the award, and the blacklist was broken with networks and witch hunting organizations put on notice regarding the financial dangers of targeting entertainers. It is worth noting that after obtaining his FBI file through the Freedom of Information Act, Faulk discovered that J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI had been “aiding and supporting the other side the whole time.”67

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the Freedom of Information Committee of the American Society of Newspapers Editors argued that the rulings had not “cut down by one bit [Congress’s] priceless investigative power where that power is used, not to intimidate the individual in a field that belongs to the courts, but to gather information on which to base legislation.” He went on to praise the rulings for limiting harassment of government employees and teachers for their opinions, protecting people’s right not to “squeal” on colleagues of long ago and outlawing convictions on the basis of “faceless informers.”68 A sea change had occurred: despite loud noises, Congress did nothing to reverse these decisions and even Hoover’s FBI signaled that it understood that things were changed. Now, when it went after those it deemed adversaries, it would do so through a new medium, its secret and illegal COINTELPRO programs. However, although many argue that the Supreme Court started the demise of the red scare, it was, in fact, a change in the political-cultural environment of America generally that made the Red Monday decisions possible. This book began with a discussion of student fears about the red scare and how it might hurt them; furthermore, my own survey of a variety of college newspapers found a lively discussion and strong concerns among students about red scare issues starting around 1947 with the HUAC investigation of Hollywood.69 However, in 1954 these letters and editorials suddenly stopped. The entire issue simply disappeared. It took a while for anyone to notice, but in January, 1954, an editorial in the University of Connecticut’s Connecticut Campus offhandedly observed, “McCarthyism is virtually a dead issue on college campuses.”70

NOTES 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

John B. Gilmour, Strategic Disagreement: Stalemate in American Politics (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995), 111. Cong. Record, 83 Cong., 2 Sess., 14210, 14215 (Aug. 12, 1954) Anthony Summers, Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1993), 224. Michael J. Ybarra, Washington Gone Crazy: Senator Pat McCarran and the Great American Communist Hunt (Hanover, NH: Steerforth, 2004), 537. Ybarra, Washington Gone Crazy, 265. Las Vegas Sun, August 25, 2012, 1. Mary S. McAuliffe, “Liberals and the Communist Control Act of 1954,” The Journal of American History, Vol. 63, No. 2 (Sept., 1976), 360. Murray Kempton, New York Post, August 24, 1954, 34. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., New York Post, August 24, 1954, 33. William W. Keller, The Liberals and J. Edgar Hoover: Rise and Fall of a Domestic Intelligence State (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), 66. McAuliffe, “Liberals and the Communist Control Act of 1954,” 351–367.

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12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19

20

21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44

David M. Oshinsky, A Conspiracy So Immense: The World of Joe McCarthy (New York: Free Press, 1983), 32. Oshinsky, A Conspiracy So Immense, 32–33. Wisconsin State Journal, July 31, 1946, 4. Thomas C. Reeves, The Life and Times of Joe McCarthy: A Biography (New York: Stein and Day, 1982), 201. Reeves, The Life and Times of Joe McCarthy, 202. V. I. Lenin, Speeches at the Eighth Party Congress (Rockville, MD: Wildside Press, 2008), 15. Oshinsky, A Conspiracy So Immense, 109. Jewell Fenzi, “Interview of Caroline S. Service,” Foreign Affairs Oral History Collection, Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training, Arlington, VA, www.adst.org., January 10, 1987, 24. Cyril E. Black, Robert D. English, Jonathan E. Helmreich and James A. McAdams, Rebirth: A Political History of Europe since World War II (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2000), 61. Ed Cray, General of the Army: George C. Marshall, Soldier and Statesman (New York: W.W. Norton, 1990), 555. Ross Y. Koen, The China Lobby in American Politics (New York: Macmillan, 1960), 63. S.M. Plokhy, Yalta: The Price of Peace (New York: Viking Press, 2010). Oshinsky, A Conspiracy So Immense, 111. Oshinsky, A Conspiracy So Immense, 112. Oshinsky, A Conspiracy So Immense, 114. Oshinsky, A Conspiracy So Immense, 117. Tim Weiner, Enemies: A History of the FBI (New York: Random House, 2012), 151. Weiner, Enemies, 160. Michael J. Ybarra, Washington Gone Crazy, 392. Weiner, Enemies, 160. Curt Gentry, J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets (New York: WW Norton, 1991), 378–379. Robert P. Newman, Owen Lattimore and the “Loss” of China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 215. Newman, Owen Lattimore, 215. Newman, Owen Lattimore, 124–125. Newman, Owen Lattimore, 299. Thomas C. Reeves, The Life and Times of Joe McCarthy: A Biography (New York: Stein & Day, 1982), 268. Oshinsky, A Conspiracy So Immense, 148. Newman, Owen Lattimore, 270. James Cross Giblin, The Rise and Fall of Senator Joe McCarthy (Boston: Clarion Books, 2009), 104. Nelson Lichtenstein, Walter Reuther: The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1997), 378. Time, May 31, 1948, Vol. 51, No. 22, 17. Ybarra, Washington Gone Crazy, 523. Ybarra, Washington Gone Crazy, 530.

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45 46 47 48 49 50

51 52

53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64

65

66 67

68 69

70

Ybarra, Washington Gone Crazy, 528. Frank Wilkerson, ‘The Era of Libertarian Repression,” Akron Law Review, Vol 7, No. 2, Winter 1974, 280–309, 289–290. Owen Lattimore, Studies in Frontier History: Collected Papers, 1928–1958 (London: Oxford University Press, 1962) 18. Victor Navasky, Naming Names (New York: Viking Press, 1980), 13. Harvey Matusow, False Witness (New York: Cameron & Kahn, 1955), 103. U.S. Congress, Senate. Committee on the Judiciary. Institute of Pacific Relations: Report of the Committee on the Judiciary, 82nd Cong., 2nd sess. (Washington: GPO, 1952), 214ff. Ybarra, Washington Gone Crazy, 547. Joseph McCarthy, Major Speeches and Debates of Senator Joe McCarthy Delivered in the US Senate, 1950–1951, Reprint from the Congressional Record (New York: Gordon Press, 1975), 305. McCarthy, Major Speeches and Debates, 305. Chicago Daily Tribune, September 15, 1951, 15. Harvey Klehr, John Earl Haynes and Fridrikh Igorevich Firsov, The Secret World of American Communism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), 16–17. See Stephen E. Ambrose, Eisenhower: Soldier and President (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991), 282–284. Merle Miller, Plain Speaking: An Oral Biography of Harry S. Truman (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1972), 130. Edwin R. Bayley, Joe McCarthy and the Press (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1981), 104. Bayley, Joe McCarthy and the Press, 104. Richard H. Rovere, Senator Joe McCarthy (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1959), 199–205. J.B. Matthews, “Reds and Our Churches,” The American Mercury, July 1953, 3–14. New York Times, April 4, 2005, pg. B4. Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA (New York: Doubleday, 2007), 121–122. Edward R. Murrow, “A Report on Senator Joseph R. McCarthy,” See It Now (CBS-TV, March 9, 1954), transcribed July 20, 2006 by G. Handman from DVD, The McCarthy Years (Edward R. Murrow Collection), www.lib.berkeley.edu/ MRC/murrowmccarthy.html. Cited in Julian E. Zelizer, “When Liberals Were Hawks: Liberal Militarism, the Republican Right, and the Cold War,” pp. 12–13, https://www.princeton.edu/ csdp/events/Congress/ZelizerHoC.pdf. William E. Jenner, Congressional Digest, May 1958, Vol. 37 Iss. 5, 142. “Blacklisted Entertainer John Henry Faulk Recalls McCarthyism,” Bryant Gumbel, correspondent, NBC Today Show. NBCUniversal Media. July 11, 1983. NBC Learn. Web. February 3, 2015. Bridgeport Post, July 6, 1957, 16. These included the University of New Hampshire, the University of Virginia, the University of North Carolina, the University of Connecticut, the University of Massachusetts, Notre Dame and McCarthy’s own alma mater, Marquette. The Connecticut Campus, January 9, 1956, 2.

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Culture Wars

he red scare was far from being only a matter for legislatures, federal agencies and the courts. The issues that confronted those bodies were matters most Americans might read about in the daily newspaper or hear about on the radio or television and then dismiss from their minds as someone else’s problem. A 1954 study found that “[t]he number of people who said that they were worried either about the threat of Communists in the United States or about civil liberties, was even by the most generous interpretation of occasionally ambiguous responses, less than 1%!”1 However, despite this apparent lack of concern, McCarthyism permeated areas of life such as religion, education, consumerism, race relations, medical care and sexuality in both direct and indirect ways that could be quite intimate, giving evidence that under the proper circumstances an organized and determined minority, however small, can often have an outsized and decisive effect on the lives of a passive majority. Perhaps no incident captures the dampening effect of the red scare on Americans’ independence of thought more vividly than an event that occurred in Madison, Wisconsin, on July 4, 1951. John Patrick Hunter, the newest reporter on the staff of the Capital Times, a Wisconsin newspaper that had consistently opposed McCarthy, was told by his boss to “dream up a Fourth of July story.” Catching sight of a copy of the Declaration of Independence that hung on a wall of the office, he was inspired to try an experiment; he typed up the preamble to the Declaration along with six of the ten Constitutional amendments that constitute the Bill of Rights. Then, he added the Fifteenth Amendment, the one that declares that “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” Putting all this in the form of a petition, Hunter went to Madison’s Vilas Park where families were celebrating the Fourth.

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Hunter approached 112 people, asking them to sign his petition. Most declined to sign for fear that they could lose their jobs or face other repercussions for signing anything at all while 20 accused Hunter of being a Communist trying to get them to sign a Communist petition. Hunter remonstrated with one of these, pointing out that the petition opened with a passage from the Declaration of Independence. She retorted, “That might be from the Russian Declaration of Independence, but you can’t tell me that it is ours.” Of 112 Americans, just one man, a Madison insurance agent who recognized the sources of the petition, agreed to sign. When printed, the story caused a national stir. President Truman called the Capital Times founder, editor and publisher William T. Evjue to congratulate him on the story. Truman was dismayed by what had happened, saying, in a speech given in Detroit, Never, not even in the bitterest political campaigns—and I have been through many a one—have I seen such a flood of lies and slander as is now pouring forth over the country. . . . Now, listen to this one: this malicious propaganda has gone so far that on the Fourth of July, over in Madison, Wisconsin, people were afraid to say they believed in the Declaration of Independence. A hundred and twelve people were asked to sign a petition that contained nothing except quotations from the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights. One hundred and eleven of these people refused to sign that paper—many of them because they were afraid it was some kind of subversive document and that they would lose their jobs or be called Communists. . . . Now that’s what comes of all these lies, and smears and fear campaigns. That’s what comes when people are told they can’t trust their own government.2

On the other hand, Senator McCarthy congratulated the citizens of Madison for refusing to sign a petition “put out by the communist editor of a communist newspaper.” So the red scare was not simply a matter confined to national and local legislatures, to Washington, DC and state capitals; it was, perhaps, most disruptive and intrusive in its local manifestations. And it derived much of its power from the intellectual fuzziness almost all Americans had about what communism actually was and who might properly be labeled a Communist. A famous 1954 study of American attitudes toward political nonconformity found that only 13 percent of those queried had ever known someone whom they suspected to be a Communist and when that 13 percent were asked the grounds for their suspicions, they tended to give answers like:

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“He was always talking about world peace.” – Housewife, Oregon. “I suspect it from his conversation and manner. He was welleducated and had a high disregard for the mentality of others.” – Lawyer, Georgia. “Just his slant on community life and church work. He was not like us.” – Bank vice-president, Texas. “Didn’t believe in the Bible and talked about war.” – Laborer, Arkansas. “My husband’s brother drinks and acts Common-like. Sometimes I kind of think he is a communist.” – Housewife, Ohio. “I just knew. But I wouldn’t know how to say how I knew.” – Farmer, Kansas.3

Former Vice-President Henry Wallace, testifying before the Senate’s Committee on the Judiciary in 1948, observed that When I campaigned for the Democrats in the northern United States, in 1946, I found every Democratic Congressman, to the best of my recollection, called a Communist. It was part of a stock in trade of the Republican Party at that time to call every Democratic Congressman a Communist.4

He went on to comment, “Today it is standard practice: anybody you don’t like is a Communist. It is true in the smaller towns of the United States they don’t know what “Communist” means. The word has become almost meaningless on that account.”5 The man questioning Wallace, Senator William Langer (R-ND), added that he had “something like a hundred letters in [his] office where Senator Robert A. Taft is called a Communist because he advocated this public housing bill, the Ellender-Wagner-Taft bill, which shows to what extremes prejudiced people can go.”6 Now Robert Taft was a conservative’s conservative—nicknamed “Mr. Republican”—and the fact that so many people could imagine that he was a Communist because of his support of a public housing bill is not a trivial or merely laughable thing. We can see the consequences of this political confusion in a 1951 letter to the editor written by a student at the University of Virginia to the campus newspaper, the Cavalier Daily: “To a young and pliable mind it isn’t even a jump, but merely a short step from being a little liberal to communism.”7 Surely, the term “a little liberal” would include Presidents Roosevelt and Truman along with a host of other well-respected Democratic politicians who were firm enemies

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The Outer Limits Today debates continue about the safety of a variety of health issues, debates about matters such as childhood vaccines and genetically modified organisms in food, where the scientific community seems to have reached a consensus of acceptance while a perhaps small but vocal segment of the public continues to challenge that consensus. In the 1950s there were debates that were superficially similar inasmuch as many of them concerned matters of health; however, what made those earlier conflicts markedly different was the element of political paranoia at work among the dissenters. The fluoridation of water, for example, was alleged to be a Communist plot by Russians and Communist sympathizers who supposedly had insinuated themselves into positions in the Public Health Service, and on state Boards of Public Health. Major George Racey Jordan warned the Westchester County American Legion Convention at Mamaroneck, New York, that “[t]he future defenders of America at West Point and Annapolis are getting a Russian prescribed dose of fluoride poison in their tap water,” and that fluoridation is “a very secret Russian revolutionary technique to deaden our minds, slow our reflexes and gradually kill our will to resist aggression . . .”8 Some rightwingers viewed the Salk polio vaccine with intense suspicion, believing it to be a vehicle for Communists to poison American children; many also believed that psychiatry’s main purpose was to put loyal American patriots into psychiatric hospitals; then there were those who, believing that America’s religious and civil traditions were being undermined by a worldwide conspiracy of atheistic Communists, saw the United Nations as an institution expressly designed to undermine American sovereignty, thereby delivering the country into the hands of world communism. In October, 1951, John T. Wood, a Republican Congressman from Idaho, warned that UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) had infiltrated America’s public school system and added that Communism is merely one of the instruments used by the real conspirators to frighten us into surrendering our national sovereignty to a world government in which we will be hopelessly outnumbered and outvoted, just as we are now in the United Nations. This constituted, he emphasized, the “greatest subversive plot in history.”9 And, finally, there was Ada White of the Indiana Textbook Commission who in 1953 demanded the removal of all references to that bold medieval robber, Robin Hood, from textbooks used by the state’s schools, claiming that there was a Communist directive in education now to stress the story of Robin Hood because he robbed the rich and gave it to the poor. That’s the Communist line. It’s just a smearing of law and order and anything that disrupts law and order is their meat.10 The contemporary successor to Robin’s nemesis, the Sheriff of Nottingham, was appalled, assuring the world that “Robin Hood was no communist.”

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of communism. And, in fact, there were no opponents of communism more vehement than those supposed to be ideologically closest to them— Socialists like Norman Thomas. This lack of clarity regarding the meaning and significance of a widely-used and politically-charged term is important—confusion regarding what a Communist actually was lay at the heart of the red scare insofar as that confusion allowed the “Communist label” to be stuck on people who were not Communists at all, often adversely affecting, not only individuals, but entire communities.

RELIGION As we saw in Chapter 5, McCarthy’s Wheeling speech framed the struggle with Russia in religious rather than political terms and indeed, communist atheism seems to have been even more worrisome to many Americans than the absence of political and personal freedom under communist regimes. In a country well-known for its intense religiosity with two spiritual “Great Awakenings” under its historical belt, the 1950s stood out, in terms of numbers at least, as a period of intense American piety. Higher percentages of Americans believed in God and attended church than at any previous time in US history. Gallup polls had recorded church attendance dropping to a low of 35 percent in 1942, but by 1957 that number had sprung up to 50 percent and by 1953 the number professing a belief in God was at a whopping 99 percent with 83 percent affirming that the Bible was the “word of God.” Protestant and Catholic churches saw attendance swell, as did Jewish synagogues. Sixty-nine percent of Americans approved adding the phrase “under God” to the “Oath of Allegiance” and in 1957 82 percent believed that “religion can answer all or most of today’s problems.”11 Public displays of religion were ubiquitous, whether it was President Eisenhower praying before cabinet meetings or famous athletes praying before games and other public events. On Fridays the children’s television show, The Howdy Doody Show would end with the host, Buffalo Bob, telling the kids to be sure to “worship at the church or synagogue of your choice” and Bishop Fulton Sheen’s Life Is Worth Living was the most watched program of the 1950s. With 94 percent of Americans believing in the power of prayer, there were magazines and books that could tell you the right way to pray, whether it was for health, wealth or, in the case of a publication entitled Pray Your Weight Away, weight loss. Recent scholarship has brought a new perspective to light on this religious outburst, making it clear that this was not a spontaneous development coming from the hearts and minds of ordinary Americans,

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but rather a carefully orchestrated response to the New Deal by American businessmen working hand in hand with conservative clergy and American politicians. The 1930s had not been kind to the business leaders of the US economy. The practices of lending institutions had been blamed for much of the financial instability that brought on the Depression and organizations that represented capitalists such as the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) had come into disrepute along with their businessman members. President Roosevelt had attacked many business practices—“business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering”—as “the old enemies of peace” and had lambasted those businessmen who attacked the New Deal as “economic royalists” who regarded the federal government as “a mere appendage to their own affairs.” When business interests sought to counter popular New Deal programs and the New Deal’s support of labor unions with appeals to Americans’ self-interest and attacks on the president, Roosevelt cheerfully defied them, declaring that “[n]ever before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me—and I welcome their hatred.”12 In explaining his programs, Roosevelt, a practicing Episcopalian, embraced religion and often made use of religious language. He told Americans that: [i]t is my deep conviction that democracy cannot live without that true religion which gives a nation a sense of justice and of moral purpose. Above our political forums, above our market places stand the altars of our faith—altars on which burn the fires of devotion that maintain all that is best in us and all that is best in our Nation.

On the other hand, he could use religion as a whip, condemning antiNew Deal businessmen who had “made obeisance to Mammon.”13 Politically liberal clergymen backed him up, portraying the new welfare state as simply “the Christian thing to do.” The head of the Federal Council of Churches claimed the New Deal embodied basic Christian principles such as the “significance of daily bread, shelter, and security.”14 So it was a demoralized group of prominent businessmen who in 1939 gathered at a meeting of the US Chamber of Commerce to listen to a speech by H.W. Prentis, the 56-year-old head of the Armstrong Cork Company, but by the time he was finished, it was an excited group of businessmen who had heard him urge them to a renewed offensive against

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the New Deal and their nemesis, organized labor, launching an offensive which would seek to appropriate religion as a primary weapon. Prentis told his audience that “[e]conomic facts are important, but they will never check the virus of collectivism. The only antidote is a revival of American patriotism and religious faith.”15 Then in December 1941, 5,000 industrialists meeting in New York City at the Waldorf Astoria hotel for the annual meeting of the NAM listened to the ideas of a speaker who had been brought by Prentis, Rev. James W. Fifield, Jr., a Congregationalist minister. Fifield excited his audience with his attack on the New Deal’s “encroachment upon our American freedoms.” He struck a new theme, insisting that Christianity and capitalism, far from being opposed, were political soulmates, first and foremost. He convinced the attending businessmen that clergymen could be the means of regaining the upper hand in their war with Roosevelt. The foot soldiers in the war against the regulatory state of the New Deal and unions would be men of God who could give voice to the same conservative complaints as business leaders but who would be above the suspicion that they might be motivated by self-interest; however, the bills for this crusade would be paid by businessmen. Conservative clergymen began to push back against claims that business had somehow sinned and that the welfare state was doing God’s work. They used their ministerial authority to argue that New Dealers were the ones who were violating the Ten Commandments. In countless sermons, speeches and articles issued in the years after Fifield’s address, these ministers claimed that under Democrats a creed of “pagan statism” had been born: the federal government had become a “false idol”, elevated above God and the programs of the New Deal—social security, minimum wages, the empowerment of unions, poverty programs paid for by a graduated income tax—had encouraged Americans to covet the wealth of the affluent and seek to steal it. Christianity, it was taught, centered on an individual’s relationship with God; this gave individualism a sacred aspect which accorded well with the seeming individualism of the market. The collectivism of communism and socialism, then, were anti-God and, in this iteration, insofar as liberals supported any programs that resembled anything supported by Communists and Socialists—like strong unions and the legitimation of a strong role for government in guaranteeing a decent standard of living for American citizens—, liberalism must be anti-God as well. These arguments conveniently skirted the fact that while the market might still be a matter of individuals pursuing their self-interest, they were doing so in increasingly unindividualistic ways and what had become a central institution of modern capitalism, the corporation, was a form of collective ownership that was itself completely the creation of

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governments insofar as no corporation can exist without a charter granted by government. This counteroffensive of business coincided with the outbreak of the Cold War and was accompanied by a general perception, on the part of liberals as well as conservatives, that communism itself seemed to be a kind of materialistic religion with its sacred founder, Karl Marx, his prophets, Lenin and Stalin, and its sacred canon, the written works of Marx and Lenin. Its adherents seemed to be motivated by the kind of selfless fanaticism that would be associated with a religious creed. It was not difficult to believe that such a phenomenon could only be defeated with something that offered a counterbalance, i.e., religion itself. What emerged from this reasoning was a remarkable series of programs that represented a coalition of businessmen, government officials and clergy to create a top down revival of faith in the American public. Western history is rife with bloody conflicts between those adhering to different creeds; however, in this drive of the 1950s, the core idea was that it did not matter what might be your creed—Baptist, Episcopalian, Catholic, Methodist or Jew—as long as you worshipped God. A series of drives, the Freedom Train, the Religion in American Life (RIAL) campaign of 1949, the Crusade for Freedom, the Committee to Proclaim Liberty and the Foundation for Religious Action in Social and Civil Disorder, brought together leaders of Standard Oil, General Electric, U.S. Steel, Republic Steel, Gulf Oil, Hughes Aircraft, United Airlines and Paramount Pictures, businessmen like Conrad Hilton, Henry Ford III, Conrad Hilton of Hilton Hotels, James L. Kraft of Kraft Foods and J. C. Penney, the presidents of both the US Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers with media giants like Walt Disney, Cecil B. DeMille and Henry Luce, celebrities like Ronald Reagan, Jimmy Stewart, Bing Crosby and Gloria Swanson, religious figures like Billy Graham, Norman Vincent Peale and Bishop G. Bromley Oxnam and major politicians like Presidents Truman and Eisenhower, all urging Americans to go to weekly worship as one of the most effective ways to combat the communist menace. Meanwhile, companies like the Utah Power & Light Company published full-page advertisements asking “How many ‘Independence Days’ have we left?”; this particular ad requested readers to “pray for help in maintaining man’s closeness to God, in preserving man’s God-given rights and responsibilities against those who would make you dependent upon a socialistic, all-powerful government.” And on “Independence Sunday,” in 1951 the Committee to Proclaim Liberty sponsored a contest among clergymen; tens of thousands participated, giving sermons on the topic of “Freedom Under God.” They sounded a common alarm, the

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danger to self and salvation posed by the welfare state. Reverend Kenneth W. Sollitt of Mendota, Illinois, won the competition, warning that “America stands at the crossroads.” “The one road leads to the slavery which has always been the lot of those who have chosen collectivism in any of its forms, be it communism, socialism, the Welfare State—they are all cut from the same pattern.” Another contestant warned that “the growing acceptance of the philosophy of the Welfare State is a graver peril to freedom in America today than the threat of military aggression.”16 The most prominent of the ministers who conjoined godliness with the values and interests of capitalists was Billy Graham who, in the US Chamber of Commerce’s magazine, Nation’s Business, opined, “Thousands of businessmen have discovered the satisfaction of having God as a working partner.”17 On the other hand, Graham gave unions short shrift, telling a crowd in 1952 that the Garden of Eden had “no union dues, no labor leaders, no snakes, no disease.” He was similarly worried about government programs for those in need, programs which he generally labeled “socialism”. In fact, his positions were so thoroughly aligned with the interests of business that a columnist for the London Daily Herald dubbed him “the Big Business evangelist.”18 As early as 1943 the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) President Harold Joh Ockenga had announced “America’s destiny to evangelize the world,” and as part of the effort to do so, a new organization had been created, Youth for Christ, to spread the Gospel to Europe and throughout the world. By the mid-1950s there were Youth for Christ (YFC) teams on every continent, in dozens of countries working to save souls, especially against the atheistic, and therefore satanic, ideology of communism. It was from this movement that Billy Graham emerged as a superstar of American evangelicalism. He was young, clean cut, good looking, earnest, honest, articulate and the time was right. The notion that America was a country specially chosen by God was nothing new: John Winthrop had famously claimed such a special role for Bostonian Puritans and historian Bernard Bailyn has written that “by [1776] Americans had come to think of themselves as in a special category, uniquely placed by history to capitalize on, to complete and fulfill, the promise of man’s existence.”19 The United States emerged from the Second World War as the most prosperous and mightiest nation the world had ever seen, and many Americans believed the victory and the prosperity were signs of America’s special destiny as God’s chosen nation. However, the Soviet threat was also seen by many as a religious challenge, with Harry Truman himself declaring that “unless America has a spiritual revival, America is done for.”20 Truman believed that all the world’s nations had a stark choice between the American way and the Soviet way, excluding

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any middle way. Graham echoed this worldview in fervent anti-communist sermons preached to masses of worshipers, both in his “crusades” and on his television program Hour of Decision (broadcast on three different networks to an audience of some 20 million viewers). Graham told proud and pious Americans, “Ladies and gentlemen . . . we have a way of life to offer the entire world.”21 Now, regarding that world, our western European allies were capitalistic but in Graham’s eyes those countries had not been saved; they were materialistic, sophisticated, semi-socialistic and sinful and God had shown his opinion of those qualities by the devastation unleashed upon them in two world wars. British evangelicals had even been so elastic in their views as to integrate Darwin and evolution into their theology, but American evangelicals remained steadfast in their belief that the world had been created in six days with all species—especially humanity—in their present forms from the very beginning. And Europeans, who had lived with various forms of the welfare state since Otto von Bismarck first introduced it to Germany in the 1880s, were remarkably blasé about government programs that conservative evangelicals saw as socialistic or even communistic. Where 84 percent of Americans believed in heaven, a tepid 39 to 65 percent of Europeans did, depending on their country. Moreover, the British were much more at ease with government programs, with 47 percent of the public believing that their welfare state (much more extensive than that of the United States) was either just right or not socialistic enough. And the French, asked if they preferred American or Soviet global domination, were split about 25 percent to 26 percent with the larger percentage in favor of the USSR!22 The European social and political climate allowed Europeans to discuss and debate communism and to try to develop a reasoned approach to it while in the United States a rigid rejection, not only of communism, but of any attempt at rapprochement with the Soviet Union was the only response political orthodoxy would allow. After all, there is no room for discussion about the Devil except for how to defeat him. Graham was far from alone in positing communism as a religious challenge. To his right among evangelicals and fundamentalists stood leaders such as Bob Jones, John Rice, Billy James Hargis and Carl McIntire. These also attacked unions and all government regulation with Hargis accusing the Federal Communications Commission of being Marxist and the AFL-CIO of having ties to the Kremlin. Norman Vincent Peale, pastor of Marble Collegiate Church in New York City, was less extreme. Peale spread his anticommunist message in personal appearances and broadcasts but was best known for his book The Power of Positive Thinking (1952). He was politically conservative, belonging to rightwing organizations that

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included the Committee for Constitutional Government (a group opposed to Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal), and, after the Second World War, Spiritual Mobilization which battled against “pagan statism.” Peale’s strongly anti-communist magazine, Guideposts, found its first audience among businessmen who sought to discourage unionism among their workers. To Graham’s left and apart from the business/preacher coalition stood Catholic Bishop Fulton Sheen, who, with a weekly television audience of 10 million, urged an even-handed balance of power between capital and labor. Farther left stood theologian and Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) founding member, Reinhold Niebuhr. With earthly hellfire threatening in the novel form of the possibility of nuclear annihilation, many embraced Graham’s message of conversion and repentance. One argument widely made, by conservatives and liberals alike, was that communism was itself a form of religion, offering a Final Judgement (the coming Revolution) with a promise of materialistic salvation—a classless society. What seemed to be looming—in progress in fact—was not a routine political contest between nations but rather Armageddon itself. With this in mind, Truman saw a value in adopting religion as a weapon in the Cold War, saying, “Democracy’s most important weapon is not a gun, a tank, or a bomb. It is faith — faith in the brotherhood and dignity of man under God.”23 And Eisenhower (who had not been baptized until he became president) came to see his role as president “not only as the political leader, but as a spiritual leader of our times.”24 “Without God,” he said, “there could be no American form of government, nor an American way of life. Recognition of a Supreme Being is the first, the most basic, expression of Americanism.”25 In keeping with this view he opened all cabinet meetings with silent prayer and encouraged what became an annual tradition of Congressional prayer breakfasts. And it was during these years that the words “under God” were added to what had always been a secular Pledge of Allegiance while Congress adopted the phrase “In God We Trust” as the national motto to be added to coins and bills. So effective were the drives, the campaigns, the sermons and the slogans that to many conservative Americans, including, as we have already seen, Senator McCarthy, the essence of the struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union was not a struggle between freedom and slavery but rather a struggle between godly capitalism and godless communistic atheism; in this scenario American Communists, Socialists and liberals were cast as the fifth column, or, in religious terms, the political equivalent of witches, the Devil’s minions living amongst us. McCarthy, however, was not nearly as important as more substantial political figures like Harry

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Truman, Dwight Eisenhower and his Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, men who, by portraying the US/USSR confrontation in apocalyptic terms, committed the country to rigid policies that would see us supporting ruthless dictators in Latin America, Africa and Asia in the name of God and democracy, see us helping remove democratically elected leaders in the name of God and democracy and see us sacrificing 50,000 young Americans in a losing war fought in the name of God and democracy.

EDUCATION If, in the eyes of conservatives, the war between the United States and “world communism” was religious, then education—especially at the secondary and college levels—was one of the most important battlefields of that war. And among the most prominent warriors on that battlefield were conservative women, powerfully identifying with their role as mothers with a vital imperative to defend the minds of their own and the nation’s youth from contamination by leftwing ideas. The number of American youngsters in school had increased dramatically during the early twentieth century: while in 1890 only 6 percent of 14 to 17-year-olds were attending secondary school, by 1930 more than half were and conservative parents were starting to get worried about what their children were being taught there. Much of educational theory had been influenced by the thought of progressive philosopher John Dewey who had rejected most of the approach to education—rote memorization, drill and a passive role for students—that had characterized earlier eras. Conservatives and the progressive Dewey agreed in seeing individualism as a vital attribute of human beings, but where conservatives saw individualism as an inherent characteristic to be defended against society’s incursions, Dewey saw it as something created by society. Schools, then, had a vital role to perform in taking unformed children and helping to transform them into thinking, self-motivated, fulfilled individuals. It was the job of expert educators to motivate children to take the role of active participants—often working in groups—in their own educations, with teachers acting more as guides than as authority figures. In this context schools would use the students’ own interests and contemporary issues as vehicles for a learning process that children would perceive and understand as being vitally relevant to their lives. By the 1940s the thinking associated with progressive education had become dominant in American pedagogy, but, as school districts across the country began to institute curricula and practices in accordance with the new theories, resistance, some among educators but even more among

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parents, began to appear. As it developed, there was much about progressive education that was open to question and Dewey himself turned against the approach, arguing that his theories had, to a large extent, been misunderstood and misapplied. Furthermore, influential progressive educators like Harold O. Rugg and George Counts also had a broader agenda, seeing schools not only as producers of individuals but as “a major, perhaps the principal, force for social change and social justice.”26 It was this, above all, that provoked the wrath of conservatives who believed in limited government that for the most part restricted itself to supporting institutions of capitalism that were presumed to be already productive of social justice. Conservative women, often acting as members of groups such as the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) or the Women’s Patriotic Conference on National Defense or smaller groups such as American Women Against Communism, were prominent in the resistance to the new approach with rightwing activist Elizabeth Dilling deploring “years of Red materialistic ‘progressive education’ and Freudian sex filth.”27 Many conservative mothers, then, were not only concerned that their children might be guinea pigs for relatively untried educational theories, they were also concerned that their own and others’ children’s patriotism was being undermined by subversive teachers in a subversive system. Conservative women tended to believe that as mothers they had a special role to play in safeguarding the nation’s youth from corrupting ideas; and they tended to believe that the young needed special protection on the grounds that their as yet unformed minds were particularly vulnerable to the wiles of leftwing plotters. Conservatives generally believed that one of the vital functions of education was to teach children to respect authority and approach the American past with an uncritical reverence. Anne Rogers Minor, a president of the DAR, expressed the vision of conservative women very clearly when she said, “Next to our homes, our schools are the fountainhead of the Republic.” What was to be taught? “Character and patriotism and obedience to law — these are the essentials of training in the schools.” Given these priorities, the character of the teachers in those schools was the essential point: “Better the man or woman who teaches truth and integrity, orderliness and obedience, loyalty and love of country, than the most brilliant mind you can hire with money.” Moreover, where the Progressive educator would agree with Thomas Jefferson in his exhortation to “[f]ix reason firmly in her seat, and call to her tribunal every fact, every opinion,” Mrs. Minor warned: We want no teachers who say there are two sides to every question, including even our system of government; who care

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more for their “academic freedom of speech” and opinion (so called) than for their country. Academic freedom of speech has no place in school, where the youth of our country are taught and their unformed minds are developed. . . . Guard well your schools, lest the life of the nation be poisoned at its source. In the hands of our teachers lie the character and sound Americanism of our children, and the kind of men, women, and citizens they will grow up to be.28

Several specific areas of conflict concerning the control of education emerged over the course of the twentieth century: first, there was the question of what should be taught, especially which textbooks were “American” enough; then, there was the question of who should be allowed to teach—most urgently, whether Communists should be allowed to teach, but, as we see from Mrs. Minor’s speech, whether anyone except super patriots should teach; and finally, who should be in charge of local school systems. It was a series of social studies textbooks by Harold O. Rugg of Teachers’ College, Columbia University, that brought the controversy over “un-American” textbooks to the fore. These books, which combined history, geography, sociology, economics and political science in a wellwritten and more lively treatment than many older texts, also raised questions about the performance of capitalism, praised organized labor, discussed the horrors of slavery and lauded the contributions of women and immigrants to American history. Rugg’s books—adopted by most school districts by 1930—were not propagandistic, but they did represent a departure from the traditional uncritical portrayals of American history. Conservatives were appalled, with Elizabeth Dilling (herself a Nazi sympathizer and anti-Semite) calling Rugg a pro-Soviet propagandist and the Hearst newspapers labeling his work anti-American and subversive. In 1940 the American Legion Magazine published an attack on Rugg entitled “Treason in the Textbooks” while assault appeared in Nation’s Business under the title “Our ‘Reconstructed’ Educational System.” The American Legion article summed up Rugg’s supposed agenda as “‘Catch ‘em young!’ That’s the motto of the radical and communistic textbook writers who all too evidently have been in control of the field.”29 Rugg was a liberal who envisioned educators as specialists in social engineering who, during the Great Depression, would be able to chart a middle way between the problems of capitalism and socialism; he was not, however, a Communist and he was explicitly critical of Stalinism. Still, the attacks were devastating and school districts across the United States stopped using the Rugg textbooks.

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The American Historical Association’s 1934 report on the teaching of social sciences in the public schools met with attacks similar to those on the Rugg series; it argued that the teaching of social studies must reflect a “thoroughly realistic and independent understanding of contemporary society . . . its tensions, its contradictions, its conflicts, its movements, and its thought,”30 in other words, the realities of Depression America rather than the idealized views desired by the DAR. And many listened when rightwinger Allen Zoll of the National Council for American Education, an organization whose main purpose was to “eradicate from our schools Marxism, Socialism, Communism and all other forces that seek to destroy the liberty of the American people,” sounded the alarm with a pamphlet entitled “Progressive Education Increases Delinquency: Progressive Education is Subverting America” in which he wrote, “So-called progressive education denies the necessity of every factor necessary for our survival as a free people . . . it spawns its millions mentally conditioned only for the collectivist state.”31 Alarmed conservative women started searching further afield; Elizabeth Dilling’s survey of books in the University of Michigan Library turned up a host of “vicious, obscene, Communist books, the books by radicals like Goodwin B Watson, Harold Rugg, John Dewey, and a host of little ‘tin god’ Marxist intellectuals who vaunt their anti-Christian, anti-American, anti-moral garbage in pompous verbiage.”32 Conservatives, observed historian Henry Steele Commager, demanded an “unquestioning acceptance of . . . America as a finished product, perfect and complete.”33 The DAR did its own survey of books, finding only two American history texts that it deemed acceptable, Charles F. Home’s The Story of Our American People and Frederick J. Haskin’s The American Government Today; both taught students that the United States was the best of all nations, guided by a “divine purpose.” Though favored by the DAR and the American Legion and distributed by them to thousands of libraries and youth centers, educators found them to be inadequate to the purpose of actually educating students and ignored them. The DAR also gave students awards for patriotic essays and compiled a list of public schools that promulgated “the ideals and principles of true Americanism,” schools that taught students to “venerate [America’s] great men and its great deeds.” The few that made the grade, most of them in the Appalachian South, emphasized patriotic and Christian values along with instructing children to fill traditional gender roles in traditional ways. Meanwhile rightwing groups like the Minute Women of the U.S.A. and the National Council for American Education harassed liberal administrators in the school systems as coddlers of subversion, scoring outstanding successes in driving them from their positions in Pasadena, CA, and in Houston, TX (see sidebar, “The Minute Women.”)

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The Minute Women The Minute Women of the U.S.A. was founded in Connecticut in 1949 by Belgian-born sculptress Suzanne Silvercruys Stevenson. Members were mostly upper-middle-class, usually Republican, women “prepared to devote their time to supporting right-wing candidates for office, harassing speakers held to be communistic, bombarding elected officials with letter and telephone calls, and maintaining a surveillance of local communities for signs of ‘un-American activities.’ ”34 The Minute Women were unusual in that members were instructed to conceal the fact that they belonged to the group. Stevenson believed that they would be more effective if they presented themselves as concerned citizens, acting individually and spontaneously. Their positions included opposition to “socialized” medicine,” opposition to progressive education and opposition to racial integration. Along with anti-communist and anti-New Deal literature, the Minute Women recommended racist and anti-Semitic material to their members. By 1952 the organization claimed 50,000 members in 47 states. The group’s modus operandi was the key to its effectiveness. When a local official or speaker was held to be too leftwing, persons in charge were bombarded with so many complaining phone calls or letters that often they would cancel the planned speech. Supporters of the target were rarely so well organized. Minute Women would attend public meetings, scattered through the audience and seemingly acting as outraged individuals rather than as members of an organized group. One result was a wave of repression in the classroom. The Minute Women worked successfully to ban textbooks they found to be objectionable; classrooms were monitored, even at the university level, and teachers believed to be teaching anything subversive (such as racial integration) were intimidated by being brought before investigating committees.

Teachers, with their extensive access to young and presumably impressionable minds, were regarded with special suspicion by the far right. Mrs. Minor had noted that It is alleged that there are over eight thousand teachers in our schools who are not loyal to the Government and Constitution of these United States and who are using their opportunities to teach disloyal doctrines and to throw discredit upon the ideals and principles of our National Government.35

The federal government had little power over the nation’s schools, so it was at the state and local levels, in state and municipal legislatures and

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school boards, that the efforts to protect students from subversion took place. Along with the prohibitions against teaching students un-American ideologies, one of the chief devices enacted in most states was loyalty oaths for teachers. This had started in the wake of the Big Red Scare during the 1920s but became most widespread after the Second World War when the discovery of Americans working as spies for the Soviet Union created an enhanced fear of “the enemy within.” The American Legion (which, with its auxiliary, numbered nearly four million members) and the DAR were very active, pressuring state legislatures to pass new laws. By 1950 26 states required teachers to sign loyalty oaths, pledging to support the state and federal constitutions and, in many cases, to promote patriotism. Thirty-three states had passed laws allowing the dismissal of teachers deemed to be disloyal. In a new development, several state legislatures, taking HUAC as their model set up “little HUACs” of their own, investigating committees whose purpose was to expose teachers who were or had been members of the Communist Party or Popular Front organizations. Applauding these local efforts, HUAC supported these committees with documents and expert witnesses. One popular guide to subversion in America was Elizabeth Dilling’s Red Network: A “Who’s Who” and Handbook of Radicalism for Patriots (1934), which listed 460 organizations and 1,300 individuals alleged to be tainted by Red association. For anyone looking for accurate information, the book was a poor source since, along with Communists, it included anti-communist Socialists, anti-communist liberals, civil rights activists and trade unions. Conservatives were especially worried about college students since, in the words of one DAR member, they were not “capable of mature thinking and accept [radical propaganda] without careful analysis.”36 Conservative legislators agreed: just after the war Republicans took control of the state of Washington’s legislature and they proceeded to set up a commission to investigate “un-American” activities within the state. The University of Washington came into the commission’s cross-hairs and as a result of hearings conducted in 1948 the University, despite the opposition of the faculty tenure committee, fired three tenured professors— two of whom were self-confessed Communists with the third judged to be “evasive” on the subject. The first issue regarding teaching was whether or not Communists were fit to teach at all: those who thought not argued that teachers who were Party members had accepted an obligation, as members, to inject Communist propaganda into their classes. Also, they contended that since proper teaching entailed exposing students to multiple and often

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opposing points of view, Communists—holding dogmatically to one point of view—could or, rather, would not properly perform this function. As Raymond B. Allen, President of the University of Washington, wrote in the wake of the firing of faculty members on his campus, “I am now convinced that a member of the Communist Party is not a free man. . . . A teacher must . . . be a free seeker after the truth.”37 Moreover, since Communists were required to follow the ever-shifting Party line, Communist teachers would do this as well. This, as philosopher Sidney Hook put it, placed these teachers in a position in which [i]n the social sciences Communist party teachers taught in 1934 that Roosevelt was a Fascist; in 1936, during the Popular Front, a progressive; in 1940, during the Nazi-Stalin Pact, a warmonger and imperialist; in 1941, after Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, a leader of the oppressed peoples of the world.

Hook went on to argue, Whether with respect to specific issues Communist teachers have been right or wrong in these kaleidoscopic changes is not the relevant question. What is relevant is that their conclusions are not reached by a free inquiry into the evidence. To stay in the Communist party, they must believe and teach what the party line decrees.38

The Socialist leader, Norman Thomas, supported this view, arguing that “[h]e who today persists in Communist allegiance is either too foolish or too disloyal to democratic ideals to be allowed to teach in our schools.” There is rich irony in the fact that this anti-communist argument made by leftists—rejecting Communists as teachers because they can only present one side of an issue—is diametrically opposite to the DAR rejection of leftwing educators because, as quoted above, “We want no teachers who say there are two sides to every question.” Responding to Hook, also in the New York Times Magazine, Professor Alexander Meiklejohn countered that Hook was mistaken, that a Communist teacher could legitimately be regarded as one who did think for him or herself since they had, presumably joined the Communist Party because they agreed with its positions; these views might be offensive but the preservation of intellectual freedom required that the holders of them not be punished for their beliefs. In fact, the University of Washington’s president, the self-declared defender of freedom, had “gone over to the enemy,” copying the totalitarian Russians in their tactics toward dissent

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in the belief that “suppression is more effective as an agency of freedom than is freedom itself.” Meiklejohn went on to lament that [t]he most tragic mistake of the contemporary American mind is its failure to recognize the inherent strength and stability of free institutions when they are true to themselves. Democracy is not a weak and unstable thing which forever needs propping up by the devices of dictatorship.39

For the most part it was Hook’s point of view that prevailed. Though the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) might take the position that membership in the Communist Party was not grounds for dismissal, state legislatures pursued radical professors and applied powerful pressure on the institutions of higher education whose budgets they controlled to do the same. These actions were politically safe since, as a poll conducted for the Fund for the Republic showed, around 90 percent of Americans believed that an admitted Communist teacher should be dismissed. So Illinois’s legislature, prodded by Elizabeth Dilling and businessman Charles B. Walgreen, searched for subversives at the University of Chicago (labeled a “haven for Communist, Socialists, [and] Anarchists” by rightwinger Nelson Hewitt) and rightwing groups, big ones such as the DAR and the American Legion (which pushed politicians to take action against accused subversives at Indiana University and Sarah Lawrence), and smaller ones like the Minute Women of the U.S.A., Milo McDonald’s American Education Association, Colonel Augustin Rudd’s Guardians of American Education, Lucille Cardin Crain’s Educational Reviewer and Zoll’s National Council for American Education (NCAE) effectively pressured legislatures into investigating educational institutions. With financial backing from wealthy rightwing businessmen, Zoll’s group exposed supposed subversives by producing pamphlets with titles like “American Higher Education. Its Betrayal of Trust and Faith,” “How Red Is the Little Red Schoolhouse?” and “They Want Your Child,” along with the “Red-ucator” series that published lists of supposedly subversive professors at Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Smith (whose president, Benjamin F. Wright, Zoll attacked for having opposed the Mundt bill requiring the registration of all Communist Party members), Sarah Lawrence, the University of Chicago and the University of California. A great deal of the effectiveness of red scare anti-communists in muzzling moderate and/or liberal representation in the schools came from the symbiotic relationship among local, informal networks. Thus, in Houston in 1952 when a highly qualified, but liberal, deputy superintendent of

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schools was hired, a combination of rightwing citizens’ groups including the Minute Women of the U.S.A. (see sidebar, “The Minute Women”) acted as storm troopers to drum Ebey out of his job and out of the city. The Minute Women were given their text by Zoll and his ilk and they were backed by powerful local elites, including conservative school administrators and school board members, oil company executives, newspaper owners and lawyers, who feared the erosion of their power through the expansion of the federal government’s power, the growth of labor unions and the civil rights movement. Ebey described himself as “violently anticommunist” and his actual “sins” in the eyes of his persecutors were his support of the New Deal and of racial integration, both of which were abhorred by local conservatives who equated them with communism; the combination of forces arrayed against him was sufficiently powerful to force Ebey from office. In March 1949 the University of California’s Board of Regents, under pressure from the state legislature, required all faculty members to take a loyalty oath that included the affirmation “that I am not a member of the Communist Party or under any oath, or a party to any agreement, or under any commitment that is in conflict with my obligations under this oath.” The California regents fired 31 professors who refused to take the oath. In the face of staunch resistance by Chancellor Robert M. Hutchins (who espoused “absolute and complete academic freedom”), a Chicago investigation came up with nothing against the University’s faculty. All in all, the record of the universities in defending their faculty members who refused to take loyalty oaths or who took refuge behind their Fifth Amendment rights when called to testify was not glorious; Rutgers, New York University, the University of Kansas City and others dismissed them while others, including Harvard, Cornell and MIT, suspended them without pay while federal and state charges were being processed. Robert Maynard Hutchins of the University of Chicago claimed at the time that “[t]he entire teaching profession of the U.S. is now intimidated.” As Ellen Schrecker, the foremost historian of the red scare in the universities, summed it up: [The] figures speak for themselves; and what they say contradicts the traditional notion that, during the McCarthy era, the nation’s universities, in the words of John P. Roche, “stood like fortresses” and protected civil liberties better than any other American institutions. Of course, the academy said that it was protecting civil liberties better. But, if we view McCarthyism as a two-stage process in which an official investigator—a

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congressional committee or the FBI, for example—identifies political undesirables and then a public or private employer applies economic sanctions against the people so identified, then it is hard to see in what ways, other than rhetorical, the academic world differed from the rest of American society.40

THE CONSUMERS’ MOVEMENT While conservative women put a special emphasis on their roles as mothers and while they extended that role into the public sphere as the selfappointed protectors of young minds, liberal women came to a renewed appreciation of the fact that American women—though still limited in the public sphere—had access to power and influence in America’s markets through their roles as consumers. In both cases, women played prominent roles, it being widely accepted that women had a special importance in matters affecting the home and family. The fact that the relationship between seller and buyer and producer and consumer is one of interdependence and also that that interdependence can be exploited to the benefit of one side or the other has long been understood in the United States. The birth of the nation was preceded by consumer boycotts as American patriots applied indirect pressure on the British Parliament to change its policy on taxing Americans by vowing not to import and not to purchase British goods. Women, many organized as the Daughters of Liberty, played a key role, making goods like cloth that otherwise would have had to have been purchased from British merchants. Many years later, in 1891, social reformers Jane Addams and Josephine Lowell, understanding that producers would have no choice but to be responsive if consumers were well informed and well organized, chartered the National Consumers League. It was led by Florence Kelley and was dedicated to using the purchasing power of consumers to better the conditions under which working-class men, women and children labored. In the early 1930s the Depression brought on a new wave of consumerism. The new consumer organizations took two main forms: one followed the earlier example of the National Consumers League, stressing the power of the consumer as a tool to implement a broad social agenda that included such issues as better conditions for workers, the high cost of living and racial equality. The most prominent reforming group of this type was the League of Women Shoppers (founded in 1935). The other type, most prominently represented by the group Consumers’ Research, did not seek to reform capitalism or aid those in need but rather emphasized

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a more narrow goal of protecting individual consumers as consumers through product testing and by educating them regarding the products they purchased. National and local organizations sprang up, hosting conferences and publishing a variety of magazines. The movement was powerful enough to give rise to business opposition which included business-sponsored “consumer” organizations and business-sponsored “consumer” magazines; for obvious reasons, these were less than hard-hitting. Many businessmen believed the literature of the movement to be “basically communist propaganda” and saw the purpose of even the attempt to inform consumers as “to further the establishment of a ‘production for use’ society, to overthrow capitalists, but to have the overthrowing done by an army of embattled consumers and housewives rather than by the traditional revolutionary agent—Marx’s proletariat.”41 Part of the power of consumerism derived from a new economic analysis of the Depression: the older school of analysis argued that the root cause was overproduction; the supply of goods was greater than the demand for them and, therefore, the cure lay in businesses lowering prices and cutting back production, even though that meant laying off workers and some businesses going bankrupt. However, a newer school of thought—bolstered by the economic theories of John Maynard Keynes and finding supporters in some prominent people, including Hugo Black, Stuart Chase, John Dewey, Horace Kallen, Robert Lynd, Persia Campbell, Caroline Ware—argued that underconsumption was the root cause of the Depression. In other words, it wasn’t that businesses had produced too much but rather that consumers were unable to purchase all that was being produced. The solution according to many of these people was a political economy oriented toward and driven politically by the power of organized consumers. As economist Stuart Chase wrote, “Up to 1930 or thereabouts we lived in the age of the producer. His interests were paramount. We are now entering an age when the consumers’ interests are going to be paramount.”42 This emphasis on the consumer was considered by some to be a remedy for virtually all of society’s ills: the problems of society came from the divisions in society, bosses against workers, big business against small business, white against black; however, columnist Dorothy Thompson wrote, “We have workers, we have employers, but as consumers we really are one people.”43 A bitter strike at the company Consumers’ Research (CR), which had fired three employees who helped organize its workers, precipitated a break between the individualistic product researchers and the women and men who were committed to altering capitalism through social action.

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One of the most important organizations to appear on the social action side was the League of Women Shoppers (LWS); founded in 1935 by upper- and middle-class women who sought to aid the labor movement by investigating labor disputes and supporting women strikers in boycotts and picketing, the LWS now emerged as an alternative model of consumer action to that of CR. The League sought to embody a type of feminism that did not challenge role models (inasmuch as it was specifically built on the power of women as shoppers, not as wage-workers) yet claimed substantial and potentially transformative power for women in the sociallyaccepted role of housewife, responsible for important family, as well as personal, purchases. The group had broad goals, stating, “We work for high wages, low prices, fair profits, progressive taxation, adequate health protection and housing for all and the ending of racial, religious, or sex discrimination in employment.” Its motto was “Use Your Buying Power for Justice” and the first edition of its newspaper declared that “We want all women who BUY to become BUY CONSCIOUS. Women should look into the conditions under which the products they buy are made and sold.”44 By the late 1930s the LWS had acquired some 25,000 members in 14 cities. Many socially prominent women were drawn to the LWS and the organization sought to exploit its star power. Its members were also not afraid to be playful in a serious cause: so when members protested the Harrington Hotel’s layoff of 16 waitresses, to attract publicity, members picketed dressed in furs and gowns while another picket line was crewed by women on roller skates. However, behind these tongue-in-cheek demonstrations, there was plenty of unspectacular hard work for members staffing committees on living standards, education, collective bargaining and legislation. Out of these efforts came conferences on housing, household employment and other issues important to working-class women, a 13-part radio series on consumer and labor issues and many other concrete actions including support for African-American led campaigns to urge consumers not to “buy where you can’t work.” Moreover, LWS members were appointed to boards implementing minimum wage laws for women and, occasionally, were asked by the National Labor Relations Board to monitor union elections or mediate labor disputes. There were other important consumers’ groups of the period: Consumers’ Union (best known today as the publisher of Consumer Reports) set itself up as a leftwing alternative to CR, identifying itself as unabashedly “pro-labor” and criticizing CR for “neglecting all consideration of the place of the worker in the so-called consumer-oriented society.”45 As its first publication argued, “All the technical information in the world will

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not give enough food or enough clothes to the textile worker’s family living on $11 a week.” Another important organization was the Consumers’ National Federation, founded as an umbrella organization to amplify the power of a host of organizations by bringing them together. Included were: individual groups like LWS and women’s clubs; gender, labor and racial justice organizations such as the Women’s Trade Union League, the Amalgamated Clothing Workers and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP); and Communistaffiliated groups such as the International Workers’ Order, the National Negro Congress and the Progressive Women’s Council. There was, obviously, a strong feminist dimension to the concerns and activities of the LWS and many of these other consumer groups. First of all, the members were women who were daring to take an outspoken role in social and economic policy; despite the fact that women could vote and hold public office, the America of the 1930s, 40s and 50s was still an America that was struggling (as it still is to some extent today) with the question of the legitimacy of the public role of women. Even some members of the LWS had to be persuaded that picketing did not have to be “unladylike” before they could feel comfortable standing out in the street carrying signs. Then, taking this public stance, women were seeking to exercise, not mere influence, but economic coercion through their role as shoppers; the woman who did not work for wages was nonetheless economically vital to the operation of the American economy in her role as a very important consumer—after all, if there are no buyers, there can be no sellers. Additionally, most of these groups were advocating specifically for the rights of women in the workplace and in the home. Finally, their view of the market tended to downplay the divisiveness of competition while stressing the market’s ability to bring and bind people together: all people were shoppers and all shoppers had a common interest in good products sold at fair prices; moreover, all shoppers had an interest in maintaining the good wages that allowed them to continue to function as shoppers. Organized consumers who used market forces to counterbalance the power gained by organized capital by its use of market forces posed a threat to business profits and organized consumers who actively supported labor unions posed even more of a threat to businessmen who already felt pressured by the New Deal’s unprecedented recognition of union rights. It did not take long for businessmen, conservative politicians and conservative press barons William Randolph Hearst and Colonel Robert McCormick to begin red-baiting the consumer movement. On its front page McCormick’s Chicago Tribune labeled the LWS a “Communist-front” group while Hearst-owned publicans employed undercover agents to

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investigate consumer activists and to attend LWS meetings undercover; the results ended up in the files of the Dies Committee which, in a report written by J.B. Matthews, alleged that the League of Women Shoppers, the Consumers’ National Federation and 12 other consumer groups were a “Consumers’ Red Network” of Communist “transmission belts.” In a strange procedure, Matthews testified before a subcommittee consisting of one person, Martin Dies. Then Dies released the Matthews report to the press on a Monday, usually a slow news day which meant that allegations of consumer communism would get plenty of attention. And just to make sure, Matthews’s evidence was distributed to major advertisers by Hearst’s Good Housekeeping magazine. The media gave ample publicity to Matthews’s charges and from this point on the consumer movement was a target for HUAC as well as state and municipal watchdogs such as the California Committee on Un-American Activities and the New York City Council, both of which took Matthews’s charges as truth. Another point of attack against the consumer groups was their female constituencies: the publication of Consumers Research, Consumers’ Digest, mocked LWS with a misogynistic article entitled “Halfway to Communism with the League of Women Shoppers,” portraying tea-drinking “matrons” dashing off to picket. And the article derided the women as dilettantes, not genuinely committed to their cause: “The fashion forecasters, however, predict . . . it will in time be fashionable to be a lady once again.” This rhetoric paired the stereotype of the supposed fickleness (and, therefore, inferiority) of women with the contempt for those born with “silver spoons in their mouths” (privileged, with airs and, therefore, not truly American) characteristic of the attacks on Dean Acheson. The consumer movement did indeed have its share of wealthy and well-connected women, but people like Eleanor Roosevelt were hardly lightweights and they were indeed serious in their commitments and their purpose. Moreover, the consumer movement was not Communist controlled; it did, however, have the same problem that so many liberal groups had insofar as: (1) in the Popular Front days, it had been willing to work with Communists in pursuit of its goals and (2) it advocated for the issues that all leftwing groups, including Communists, advocated for, i.e., strong unions, political and social equality for people of color, government programs to help the needy, etc. It would continue to be an argument of the political right that if one held any views espoused by Communists, one must be either a Communist, or a fellow-traveler, or a Communist “dupe” oneself. So, to a conservative businessman, a member of the consumerist movement must be a Communist while to a Southern conservative, an advocate of equal rights for African-Americans must be a Communist. Lost in this were the two critical defining points, i.e., to

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be a Communist, one had to reject the market economy and its foundational institution, private property, and one had to reject democracy as the path to a classless society. The continuous assaults and investigations took their toll, both on individuals and on the organizations. The League of Women Shoppers saw members fall away and eventually the organization disappeared as did the Consumers’ National Federation. The Consumers’ Union took the lesson, and preserved its existence by moderating its positions and program and moving away from the political left. Along with this, perhaps a more important victory, from a conservative point of view, was that the issues espoused by these groups—housing, health care—were now tainted with the supposed communism of the women who had worked on the behalf of poor and working-class people. Also, unions had been deprived of an important ally and had been further isolated in the process. And the most important threat—militant and wellorganized consumers who, through their buying power, could challenge powerful corporations—had been entirely neutralized and would not arise seriously again until the Carter administration (when it would be decisively defeated again).

HEALTH CARE Anti-communism bolstered by the red scare also could be made to serve specific private interests. When Harry Truman moved to institute national health care for the United States, the American Medical Association promptly went to work to scuttle the plan with red-baiting as its main tool to accomplish the purpose. Among industrialized nations, America came very late to nationalized government-sponsored health care for its citizens. On March 23, 2010, President Barack Obama signed into law America’s first comprehensive national health care act, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. Germany had instituted a form of national health insurance in 1883 with Austria, Hungary, Norway, Britain, Russia and the Netherlands following suit before 1913. Meanwhile, by 1912 Sweden, Denmark, France and Switzerland had all acted to subsidize the health care provided by mutual benefit societies formed by workers themselves. During the early 1900s there seemed to be some movement in the same direction in the United States as Theodore Roosevelt’s Progressive Party incorporated a vague endorsement of a “system of social insurance” to protect “home life against the hazards of sickness, irregular employment and old age.” However, the victors of 1912, Woodrow Wilson and the

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Democratic Party, felt no pressure to follow through on a program not their own and government-sponsored health insurance did not emerge again as a national topic until, in 1934, Franklin Roosevelt established a Committee on Economic Security (CES) to explore a government role in health care in the United States as part of the Social Security Act of 1935. Roosevelt feared, however, that this inclusion might prove to be the undoing of the proposed law, possibly leading to its defeat, and so health insurance was omitted in the bill that was submitted to Congress. Then, in 1937, he made another tentative movement toward a program by chartering a Technical Committee on Medical Care to look into a possible program. The Committee’s 1938 report included five elements that would appear in all the national health care bills of the next decade, i.e., expansion of the maternal and child health program, federal grants for hospital construction, grants to the states to pay for medical care of the “medically indigent,” i.e., those too poor to pay medical bills, a voluntary program of grants to states that wanted to set up statewide health insurance programs for the general public and a disability program. None of these were pursued by FDR, though, as the 1938 elections ate away at his Congressional base of support, giving birth to a conservative coalition of Republicans and conservative Democrats powerful enough to frustrate any expansion of the New Deal. Nothing daunted, in 1939 liberal Senator Robert Wagner introduced a bill to amend the Social Security Act by providing a number of new services including basic hospital care, with states acting as the administrators. The public support was there, with a majority of Americans supporting national health insurance and even most doctors being on board. However, the bill was referred to committee and the conservative coalition in Congress made sure that it died there. In 1943 and then in 1945, Senators Wagner, James Murray (D-MT) and Representative John Dingell (D-MN) introduced new bills which Republicans, backed by the American Medical Association (AMA), the American Hospital Association (AHA), Protestant and Catholic Hospitals, the American Dental Association (ADA), the American Bar Association, the Chamber of Commerce, the National Grange and the American Farm Bureau Federation, denounced as “socialism” and killed. Then Harry Truman became president, and resolved to have at it again; in November 1945, the war just over, Truman endorsed a national program that would create a national universal mandatory health insurance plan run by the federal government. Under Truman’s proposal patients would have the right to choose their own doctors and the doctors would be free to join or refuse to take part in the federal plan. A full-time federal board of medical and lay members working with state and local officials

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would supervise the program with state and local officials having full charge of the actual operation. To pay for the program, a special tax would be imposed on wages and salaries starting with 1/2 to 1 percent of the first $4,800 of income up to an amount of 4 percent, “properly divided between subscriber and employer.” Medical fees would be paid from the government fund to doctors, dentists, nurses and hospitals at a rate mutually agreeable to them and the insurance system. As Truman explained: Under the plan I suggest, our people would continue to get medical and hospital services just as they do now — on the basis of their own voluntary decisions and choices. Our doctors and hospitals would continue to deal with disease with the same professional freedom as now. There would, however, be this allimportant difference: whether or not patients get the services they need would not depend on how much they can afford to pay at the time. . . . None of this is really new. The American people are the most insurance-minded people in the world. They will not be frightened off from health insurance because some people have misnamed it “socialized medicine.” I repeat — what I am recommending is not socialized medicine. Socialized medicine means that all doctors work as employees of government. The American people want no such system. No such system is here proposed.46

National polls showed a robust 58 percent approval rating for the idea and Wagner, Murray and Dingell promptly submitted legislation to Congress. However, the opposition, though representing a minority of the American public, was formidable; a great part of the medical profession, businessmen and Congressional conservatives were determined to stop things from proceeding further. Senator Robert Taft (R-OH) declared, “I consider it socialism. It is to my mind the most socialistic measure this Congress has ever had before it.”47 Most of the organized health care interests opposed the Truman plan, but by far the most formidable of these was the AMA which had long stood against not only government provided insurance but also private insurance and even group practice. And, foreshadowing future tactics, when in 1932 the Committee on the Costs of Medical Care, a group made up of prominent personages in the fields of medicine, public health, social work, education and public affairs, issued a report supporting group practice for doctors and voluntary health insurance for their patients, the AMA labeled group practice a system of “medical soviets.”48

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Though the AMA was a democratically run organization, like many such groups it was dominated by a minority of especially committed members (like the Popular Front groups dominated by Communists) who, in this case, were conservative. The group also profited from alliances with the various interests that depended on private markets and private medical care; so, for example, the AMA received large contributions from pharmaceutical firms to fight health insurance and benefitted from the revenues from pharmaceutical advertising in AMA journals. Alarmed, the AMA claimed that Truman’s proposal was “the first step in a plan for general socialization not only of the medical profession, but all professions, this news, and labor” and charged that Truman White House staffers were “followers of the Moscow party line.” A telegram was sent out asking members for donations, telling them, “OBVIOUSLY THIS IS THE BEGINNING OF THE FINAL SHOWDOWN ON COLLECTIVIST ISSUE. NOT ONE DAY DARE BE LOST . . . DO NOT UNDER ESTIMATE THE CRISIS . . . FIGHT FOR PERSONAL FREEDOM AND PROFESSIONAL INDEPENDENCE.”49 Among the vital principles endangered was the “sacred doctor-patient relationship;” any government involvement would drive an impersonal and uncaring wedge between the doctor and his or her patient. Also, though not explicitly stated, what was at stake was the idea that only a doctor can determine what his or her services are worth. Republicans gained control of Congress in 1946 and, for the time being at least, all hope of passing health legislation was at an end. Republicans charged that national health insurance was part of a larger socialist scheme and the House Subcommittee on Publicity and Propaganda concluded that “known Communists and fellow travelers within Federal agencies are working diligently with Federal funds in furtherance of the Moscow party line.”50 There was a particular focus on one federal employee who had written a positive account of socialized medicine in New Zealand. The Federal Security Administrator immediately ordered an FBI investigation which later cleared him of any communist affiliations. 1948 was a presidential election year and, given a Gallup poll public approval rating of 36 percent perhaps the only person who believed Truman would win was Harry Truman himself. During the campaign, Oscar Ewing, head of the Federal Security Agency, had released a report— widely publicized and reported—that exposed the nation’s poor health and high levels of preventable deaths, concluding that the only remedy was a national (compulsory) health insurance system. Truman renewed the promise to pass national health insurance, in part to blunt Henry Wallace’s Progressive Party appeal to the Democratic left wing. To the

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surprise of most, Truman won and brought in a Democratic Congress with him; suddenly, with the support of the Committee for the Nation’s Health (whose leaders included Eleanor Roosevelt, Chester Bowles and Abe Fortas), the AFL, the CIO, Americans for Democratic Action, the Physicians Forum, the National Farmers Union, the American Veterans Committee, the Consumers Union, the railroad unions and the American Association of Social Workers, national health insurance seemed to be an achievable goal. The AMA swiftly moved into action, hiring a San Francisco public relations firm, Whitaker and Baxter, to put together a PR campaign to thwart Truman. The campaign began with the AMA charging members an extra $25 to build a war chest of $1.5 million. Clem Whitaker and Leone Baxter had already shown themselves to be capable in their work, successfully helping the California Medical Association to defeat an effort by liberal Republican Governor Earl Warren of California when he sought to create a state-sponsored health plan in 1945. One piece of advice that the firm had given the California doctors was that “you can’t beat something with nothing”; they pushed the doctors to accept the principle of voluntary insurance. Then, with a positive agenda to pursue, they used the doctors as foot soldiers to call on the leaders of community organizations and public officials and to approach businesses and private groups for endorsements. The Warren plan went down in defeat. Now Whitaker and Baxter put together a “National Education Campaign” whose core purpose was to forge a perceived identity between “national health insurance” and “socialized medicine.” They printed and distributed millions of pamphlets and made wide use of the press and radio; they organized letter writing campaigns to members of Congress, sponsored petitions protesting “socialized medicine,” sent out physicians as speakers and, as they had done in fighting Warren, used the doctors themselves to speak to their patients as well as people in business, the press and government in opposition to the Truman plan. In 1949 alone 54,233,915 leaflets, pamphlets and booklets were distributed, many of them to doctors who put them in their waiting rooms, discussed the dangers of socialized medicines while treating their patients, wrote letters on the subject to their patients and sent patients pamphlets along with their bills for treatment. One especially committed doctor even bombed his community with 50,000 leaflets dropped from his private airplane. Back in 1932 the AMA had opposed even voluntary insurance, editorializing in a 1932 edition of the Journal of the American Medical Association that the forces behind it, “the great foundations, public health officialdom, social theory – even socialism and communism” were “inciting to revolution.”51 Now that was changed; the message the campaign put

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out was that “The Voluntary Way Is the American Way;” the physiciancontrolled Blue Shield plans were just good old American private enterprise in action while the Truman plan was the wedge for the end of American freedom. In what may have been its most outrageous ploy, Whitaker and Baxter published a pamphlet in the form of questions and answers under the title of “The Voluntary Way Is the American Way.” In it appeared this astonishing entry: Q. Who is for Compulsory Health Insurance? A. The Federal Security Administration. The President. All who seriously believe in a Socialistic State. Every left-wing organization in America . . . . The Communist Party.

And later on: Q. Would socialized medicine lead to socialization of other phases of American life? A. Lenin thought so. He declared: Socialized medicine is the keystone to the arch of the Socialist State.

The AMA operated with the support of important groups such as the major welfare organizations of the Catholic Church, the American Dental Association, the American Pharmaceutical Association, the Blue CrossBlue Shield Commissions, the US Chamber of Commerce, the American Legion, the American Farm Bureau Federation and the General Federation of Women’s Clubs. Most importantly, doctors jumped on board, with people like Dr. James B. Sanford telling an audience that national health care was “part of a world revolution” and was “the first step in complete socialization of the entire country.”52 Dr. William Calvert Chaney told his colleagues that “The Wagner-Murray-Dingell health bills have been written by so-called internationalists who are either Communist or closely allied to the Communist Party.”53 And in the active imagination of Dr. Edward T. Brady, the opinion attributed to Lenin expanded to “Lenin . . . has repeatedly emphasized the importance of socialized medicine as one of the cornerstones and fundamental prerequisites of the Communist state.”54 Newspapers across the country took up this theme with the Chicago Herald America solemnly warning its readers that “Lenin—the god of the communists—is quoted as saying: ‘Socialized medicine is the keystone to the arch of the socialist state’” and the New York State Bar reporting in alarm that “On the highest socialistic authority, socialized medicine is

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considered a real major step in the direction of the socialist state. Said Lenin: ‘socialized medicine is the keystone to the arch of the socialist state.’”55 Senator Murray asked the librarians of the Library of Congress to verify the quotation, but they could not find it in the writings or speeches of Lenin. No one else has ever been able to either for the simple reason that he never said it. However, that made no difference to the effectiveness of the campaign; as Representative Dingell said: The campaign of misrepresentation directed against health insurance by the American Medical Association, with an expenditure within the fortnight of $1,110,000 for advertising . . . indicates that this plan of slander and untruth will reach proportions which may well prove dangerous not only to the cause of health insurance, but to every liberal committed to the idea.56

Overall, over the course of three and a half years, the campaign cost $4,678,000. The effect of this campaign was overwhelming; the budget of the Committee for the Nation’s Health—the main group behind Truman’s plan—was just over $100,000 and by 1949 the support for national health insurance had dropped from 58 to 36 percent. Dismayed, Truman asked, “I put it to you, is it un-American to visit the sick, aid the afflicted or comfort the dying? I thought that was simple Christianity.” In fact, doctors were not the united group portrayed by the AMA, but most doctors were politically inactive and those who opposed the organization did so at the risk of being subjected to disciplinary measures such as being refused staff privileges at hospitals with beds being denied to their patients. According to an article in the Yale Law Journal, “[d]efiance of AMA authority means professional suicide.”57 The 1950 elections were seen as critical by both proponents and opponents of national health care. To keep funds available for the battle, the AMA made the $25 assessment on members a permanent annual requirement and through extensive advertising in local trade magazines and newspapers, and the purchase of countless radio hours, Whitaker and Baxter continued to relentlessly hammer home the message that national health care was socialized health care. Working to defeat the supporters of national health insurance, doctors formed political action committees and made thousands of phone calls and sent out thousands of letters as part of a campaign that cost some $2.25 million. The AMA asked businessmen to join in sponsoring advertisements, a request that brought in a further $2 million.

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Truman responded by going on the road to make speeches to business and community groups in support of his program. But when the Korean War broke out in June of 1950, the president was forced to give all his attention to that emergency. The AMA and Whitaker and Baxter took advantage of this to issue a flood of radio spots and newspaper/magazine ads costing over $1 million and when election results came in in November, Democrats found that they had lost some of the most important advocates of national health insurance from Congress. Truman made no further serious effort to push the program and as McCarthyism took hold of the country, Democrats, especially those up for re-election, backed off from support of any program that could remotely be labeled “communistic.” National health insurance languished and died in committee in both the Senate and the House of Representatives, not to emerge again until Lyndon Johnson successfully pushed through the more limited program, Medicare, in the early 1960s.

HOMOSEXUALS In February 1950, the same month and shortly after Joseph McCarthy made his breakthrough speech in Wheeling, West Virginia, testifying before a Senate investigative committee, Deputy Under Secretary of State John Peurifoy, seeking to demonstrate what a good job the State Department was doing of purging itself of possible security risks, proudly announced that 91 employees suspected of homosexuality had recently been dismissed. The response was not what Peurifoy had anticipated: far from receiving a congratulatory pat on the back for his vigilance, the reaction was one of widespread horror that there were so many homosexuals in the State Department. In an age in which gay relationships are becoming increasingly socially accepted, it is becoming more and more difficult for people to understand the revulsion and disgust with which they were once viewed by mainstream America. The politest designation for homosexual activity was “perversion,” designating the taking of something “normal,” i.e., heterosexuality, and twisting it to an unnatural purpose. More usual was the language of Senator Wherry, who called it a “loathsome vice.” Generally speaking, homosexuality was considered, at best, as a form of mental illness. Little, if any, distinction was made between gay men and women, on the one hand, and child molesters and rapists, on the other. The fact that relationships between homosexuals were relationships between consenting adults made no difference at all.

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And gay Americans were, in many ways, in the most difficult position of all the groups in the United States that experienced discrimination; there were quite a few Caucasian Americans who were willing to speak up for African-American rights, quite a few men who embraced women’s rights but almost no heterosexuals were willing to speak up for gay rights and the negative social response to homosexuality was so powerful that any gay American who wanted to keep their employment or who simply wanted to be safe from physical assault had to keep their sexuality under wraps. In the hands of conservative politicians homophobia played a useful role as part of their arsenal of weapons to be wielded against Democrats. The underlying logic went like this: homosexuality and communism were united in that both were forms of deviation; therefore, if you were a homosexual, you might well be a Communist. Democrats were halfway to being Communists or perhaps even crypto-Communists because they supported government programs to help the needy such as Social Security or public housing rather than relying on markets to take care of all social issues; therefore, since they supported some things that Communists supported, Democrats were probably also homosexuals. Hence the wellknown statement McCarthy made to journalists, “If you want to be against McCarthy, boys, you’ve got to be a Communist or a cocksucker.” And we’ve already made reference to McCarthy’s response to the Tydings Committee’s finding, when he lashed out at “the Reds, their minions, and the egg-sucking phony liberals” and “the pitiful squealing of those who would hold sacrosanct those Communists and queers who have sold 400 million Asiatic people into atheistic slavery.”58 And, if one wanted to be more concise, simply throwing together the words “Commies, pinkos and pansies” could act as a quick summation of the supposed intimate relationship between communism and liberals. Sadly, Democrats themselves played into these associations with liberals as when Harvard professor Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., characterized communism as “something secret, sweaty and furtive like homosexuals in a boys’ school.”59 The foolishness of this thought process is clear when stated straightforwardly which was why the supposed connections were almost always implied. Until the Second World War no connection had ever been made between national security and homosexuality. During the war the military instituted a policy of dishonorable discharge of those found to be homosexual, and doctors and psychologists began to categorize people according to their sexual preferences, with homosexuals being labeled “deviants,” who, at best, were suffering from what Sigmund Freud thought was “arrested development.” Through most of the 1950s having a sexual preference for one’s own sex was considered by medical experts to be an

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illness whose “scientific” treatment could include electroshock therapy, drugs, lobotomies and castration. The State Department found itself to be especially vulnerable to charges of being a “nest of perverts.” Americans, through their collective experience, their books and their movies, had developed a rigid view of masculinity. A real man was strong, unemotional (or, at least, undemonstrative) and intensely independent and individualistic. The movies were rife with such types, i.e., the tough guys played by Humphrey Bogart, Gary Cooper and John Wayne. The pinnacle of masculinity was the “loner,” the guy who did it all on his own, relying on no one else (except, occasionally, on the love of a good woman, or, as in High Noon, her love and her well-aimed shot at a bad guy). In the Western Shane, the farmers (who are under pressure from the cattlemen for their land and water) are all acceptable as men, but the superior man is the mysterious gunslinger, Shane, who comes into town alone and leaves it alone. So powerful were these associations that many believed that John Wayne—who never fought in a war and who certainly was never a cowboy—really was the strong, laconic character he portrayed in movie after movie and it is possible he believed it himself. By contrast, the typical diplomat seemed to fall short on the “manliness” scale. To begin with, a diplomat’s job meant talking more than doing. On top of that, a diplomat, rather than being a straight-talker who pulled no punches, had to be, well, diplomatic—polite, inoffensive (for the most part). The stereotypical member of the diplomatic corps was the scion of privilege, a graduate of an Ivy League school who dressed in formal clothing with striped pants (somehow the striped pants seemed to be a real point of irritation for the enemies of the State Department). To those who believed in the hypermasculine image of the movies, these servants of the state seemed “overcivilized,” weak and, worst of all, effeminate. So McCarthy charged that the State Department was riddled with “the prancing mimics of the Moscow party line,” “pretty boys” and “Communists and queers,” all of them led by Dean Acheson, the “Red Dean,” a man “with a lace handkerchief, a silk glove and . . . a Harvard accent.”60 The Cold War rivalry between the United States and the USSR gave rise to increased concerns about security risks and among those concerns was the worry that somehow homosexuals employed by the US Government might be particularly vulnerable to blackmail. It was a particular area of interest for FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, whose agents gathered massive amounts of material on suspect individuals, including “sex deviates.”

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In the wake of a war where it was widely accepted that weakness in the form of “appeasement” had been critical in handing Hitler an early advantage and in the context of a cold war in which each side had the means to cause unthinkable devastation on the other and in which it was widely accepted that weakness would hand the advantage to an adversary bent on enslaving humanity, we can see that weakness, quite reasonably, was seen as a very bad thing indeed. Conservatives and liberals alike agreed that a strong society was composed of strong citizens, hard-working, frugal and tough. In American culture (as in much of the world) strength was considered masculine and weakness was connected with femininity; homosexual men were seen as “effeminate,” that is, men who were woman-like and therefore weak, and, because they were men and not women, they were seen as “unnatural” and decadent—literally a symptom of decay or things falling apart. We find this fear reflected eloquently in a May 13, 1971 exchange between President Richard Nixon (a man who longed to be very, very tough) and his aides, in which Nixon was bemoaning the fact that the hard line rejection of homosexuality seemed to be weakening in America. Nixon said, “[Y]ou know what happened to the Greeks. Homosexuality destroyed them. Sure, Aristotle was a homo, we all know that, so was Socrates.” He continued, asking, “Do you know what happened to the Romans? The last six emperors were fags.”61 In Nixon’s mind America was in danger and if, for example, gay men were sometimes serving in the military, that did not mean that gay men could have martial qualities; it just meant, to the culture of the time, that there were dangerous elements of decay in the military where Americans could least afford it. The State Department, with its careful ways of talking, its members’ “fancy clothes,” seemed the antithesis of this straightforward, straight shooting American way. Moreover, aside from their presumed personal shortcomings, it was widely and uncritically assumed that gay government employees were particularly vulnerable to blackmail; once discovered to be homosexual by Soviet agents, a gay man or woman could be threatened with exposure unless they turned spy. The issue of homosexuality, then, had been turned into an issue of national security and it seemed an obvious necessity to expel homosexuals from government employment. The State Department’s own conclusions demonstrate the profound illogicality of the accepted attitudes toward this issue: We believe that most homosexuals are weak, unstable and fickle people who fear detection and who are therefore susceptible to the wanton designs of others.

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We have no evidence, however, that these designs of others have caused a breach of the security of the Department. Yet the tendency toward character weaknesses has led us to the conclusion that the known homosexual is unsuited for employment in the Department.62

And, in fact, no homosexuals have been found to have acted on behalf of foreign nations against the United States during the Cold War. Though McCarthy was prolific in his smears against homosexuals, the key figure in taking action against them was Senator Kenneth Wherry. Along with McCarthy, during the Tydings hearing Wherry had demanded that the scope of inquiry be widened to include “sexual perversion within the Government.”63 That did not happen, but the issue continued to be raised with Republican Chairman Guy Gabrielson sending out newsletters with the dire warning that “the sexual perverts” who had “infiltrated our Government” were “perhaps as dangerous as the actual Communists.”64 Wherry put out rumors that the Soviet Government had a list of American homosexuals in government employment and Republican Congressman Cliff Clevenger worried about “a cell of perverts hiding around Government” who would be protected by “the sob sisters and thumb-sucking liberals.”65 After a preliminary investigation of his own, Wherry proposed an investigatory committee to “make a full and complete study and investigation” and report “results of the study” and remedial “recommendations for legislation.” The committee that emerged from this was chaired by septuagenarian Clyde Hoey (D-NC). The committee’s final report asserted—without having found any supporting evidence—that homosexuals were vulnerable to blackmail, that Soviet intelligence agents were under orders to find weak spots in the private lives of US Government employees, and that all governmental agencies “are in complete agreement that sex perverts in Government constitute security risks.”66 By 1950, as historian David K. Johnson notes, the public seemed almost as worried about gay civil servants as communist ones. Letters came in like the one addressed to Wherry thanking him for saving America from “Sodomites” and “sissies” in the “Red State Dept.” Bending to the mounting pressures, the State Department, and other federal agencies went looking for the “homosexuals and other moral perverts” among their employees and altogether in the 1950s some seven to ten thousand real or suspected homosexuals lost their jobs. Moreover, gay men and women, already under immense social pressure because of their sexual orientation, were subjected to an intensified fear concerning their employment and their safety. Few had the courage or the will to defend them. There was at least one notable exception, however; CBS news commentator Eric

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Sevareid told his viewers that homosexuality had “nothing to do with loyalty or disloyalty,” sought to dispel “misunderstandings” about homosexuals and urged the Senate not to engage in another witch-hunt. This “Lavender Scare” was integrated into the ongoing conservative project of rolling back the New Deal; conservatives constructed a picture of Democratic administrations that were soft on gays (and even the word “soft” was geared to imply effeminacy); the Fair Deal was snidely twisted into the “Fairy Deal.” J. Edgar Hoover, deeply conservative himself, sought to help Eisenhower in his 1952 campaign by spreading false rumors that Democratic candidate Adlai Stevenson had been arrested in New York on a morals charge. During the same political campaign, Walter Winchell, a popular columnist and radio personality, told his audiences—referring to the first male-to-female transsexual—that a “vote for Stevenson is a vote for Christine Jorgensen.” New Deal/Fair Deal liberalism, which FDR had characterized as being as traditional as neighbors helping each other out in times of need was thus cast by conservatives as a fatal movement away from the “traditional” self-reliance of the strong, red-blooded (heterosexual) American male, toward an effete (homosexual) citizenry, weak and incapable of fending for itself, dependent, rather, on “handouts” from a “nanny” government.

RACE In the American South the issue of communism was inextricably bound up with the goal of keeping African-Americans segregated and subservient. In fact, it would not be inaccurate to say that there was no real red scare as such in the South but rather an effort on the part of white Southerners to stave off an intensified postwar drive for racial integration by attempting to discredit civil rights activism as communistic. The two issues became so inextricably bound together in the minds of some white Southerners that we even find photographs of white demonstrators carrying signs proclaiming “RACE MIXING IS COMMUNISM.” Communism had never been strong anywhere in the United States, but of all the regions of the country, it was weakest in the South. In North Carolina, for example, in the years 1955, 1956 and 1957 the FBI reported the state’s Communist Party membership to be dwindling from 58 to 37 to 30. An imminent danger to the nation indeed!67 Jeff Woods, one of the leading historians of anti-communism in the South, has made the case that Southern anti-communism of the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s fit into a long held fear of outside intervention into local institutional racism, i.e., first black slavery and then discriminatory Jim

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Crow laws. Furthermore, he and others have shown that a well-to-do, white, Southern elite systematically fanned and exploited racial prejudices and Southern nationalism as a method to control, not only the AfricanAmerican population, but also the poor whites of the region. The Roosevelt administration made a feeble beginning toward the erosion of white supremacy through New Deal policies; in 1941, to ward off a proposed march on Washington sponsored by A. Philip Randolph and other African-American leaders, Roosevelt issued Executive Order 8802 which established a federal Fair Employment Practices Committee. The law required that private businesses contracting with the federal government not discriminate on the basis of race in hiring. White Southerners were outraged, with Mississippi Congressman John E. Rankin exclaiming, “Oh! This is the beginning of a Communistic dictatorship the likes of which America never dreamed!”68 And the notorious racist Senator Theodore G. Bilbo (D-MS) denounced “old lady Roosevelt, Harold Ickes and Hank Wallace, together with all the Negroes, Communists, negro lovers and advocates of social equality who poured out their slime and money in Mississippi.”69 By the mid-1940s—perhaps in response to the legitimate demands of returning African-American veterans who had, after all, put their lives in danger in the service of their country, and, in part, in revulsion against the racism of Nazi Germany—legal segregation had started to come under severe pressure: the Supreme Court first banned the white-only political primaries that effectively kept African-Americans out of the political process and then, in 1948, the Court ruled that racially discriminatory property covenants were unenforceable; the United Nations Human Rights Charter rejected racial discrimination. Moreover, in 1946 Harry Truman had issued Executive Order 9008, creating the President’s Committee on Civil Rights and then in 1948 followed that up with a presidential order to desegregate America’s armed forces; finally, to add insult to injury, Harry Truman had gotten himself re-elected president. Meanwhile, backing up his Civil Rights Committee, Truman had come out in favor of a permanent Fair Employment Practices Commission, anti-lynching legislation, anti-poll tax laws and measures to end discrimination in interstate transport facilities. White Southerners bombarded the White House with mail calling the proposals communistic and Rankin denounced “the smearing Communists who creep into every Bureau and every commission that is appointed and attempt to undermine and destroy everything our people have fought for and everything we hold dear.”70 Along with these political threats to institutionalized racism came an economic one: inspired by the large jump in industrial workers in Southern states (from 1.6 million before the war to 2.4 million by the summer of

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1945), the CIO aspired to organize them, in the hope of defeating the fervently anti-union Southern elite of planters, bankers, industrialists and merchants. The CIO leadership believed it had cause for optimism, having seen its own Southern membership grow to 225,000 during the war while its rival the AFL had grown even more. With the war’s end, unions were feeling their oats, representing an unprecedented 35 percent of the nation’s civilian workforce. And, as an organization that had committed itself to integration, the CIO hoped to bring not only strong unions but also desegregation to the South. Black Southerners—and especially veterans—were primed for action, believing that the claim for equality for those who had put their lives on the line to defeat racist fascism were irrefutable. And so, openly appealing for their support, the CIO launched Operation Dixie, a campaign to unionize the Southern textile, lumber and tobacco industries. White Southern employers had long responded to union drives with racism, red-baiting and physical violence. Now they raised a howl about Operation Dixie, outside agitators, racial integration, communism and an attack on Christian and American values. While their racism was no doubt sincere, their opposition to unions grew from their determination to keep their workers, white as well as black, under control, and a longheld conviction that cheap labor was essential both for their businesses’ profitability and for attracting new business to the region. Many Southern employers relied heavily on African-American labor, and during the New Deal, as the price for their support for the Wagner Act, Southern members of Congress had insisted that agricultural workers and domestic workers— overwhelmingly black—be excluded from protection. Furthermore, African-Americans were not only useful as cheap labor; in industries such as textile production (which did not hire blacks), white workers could be and were threatened with replacement by African-Americans should they seek to organize or go on strike. The employers, newspapers, courts, police and legislatures of the South all combined to ensure that unions remained weak. Operation Dixie was the largest labor organizing drive the South had ever seen, costing a million dollars to support 200 organizers. The CIO worked closely and shared leadership responsibilities with the Birminghambased Southern Conference for Human Welfare (SCHW), an organization committed to improving social justice and civil rights and instituting electoral reform in the region by repealing the poll tax. The campaign was integrated and openly solicited the involvement of African-Americans. Operation Dixie was met by a massive campaign funded by Southern businessmen, landowners and politicians, seeking to rescue the “Southern way of life” based on segregation and cheap labor. The Southern States

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Industrial Council charged in its publication, Militant Truth (distributed in a special “labor edition” of 100,000 copies), that the CIO’s goal was “to arouse class-hatred and race-hatred for the purpose of creating strikes, riots, bloodshed, anarchy, and revolution.”71 Harding College in Arkansas budgeted $450,000 to spread anti-labor literature. Racist and anti-union propaganda proliferated while city councils and state legislatures passed antiunion ordinances that outlawed picketing, required organizers to be licensed and banned the union shop. In Georgia Ku Klux Klan members assaulted African-American workers; in Columbia, South Carolina they beat up white organizer John Riffe; in Bemis, Tennessee textile union organizer Lowell Simmons was shot dead; in Chattanooga and South Carolina crosses were burned. Leaflets circulated asking “Shall We Be Ruled by Whites or Blacks?” The passage of Taft-Hartley was the finishing touch in defeating Operation Dixie; within a year of its passage, 7 of the 13 Southern states passed “right to work” laws and with the loss of federal support for the right to organize, the CIO found itself unable to overcome the obstacles posed by new state anti-labor legislation. Taft-Hartley’s anti-communist provisions pushed the CIO to break once and for all with its Communistled unions, thus depriving it of some of its best and most dedicated organizers as well as its connection with the SCHW which refused to abandon its commitment to Popular Front cooperation with Communists. With the pressures of the red scare mounting, erstwhile Democratic allies were drifting rightward and Southern members of Congress, backed by the news media and slanted reports from HUAC gained public traction with arguments that the groups supporting unionization and civil rights were subversive and pursuing the interests of the Soviet Union. In 1948, the Democratic Party itself split over these issues with the secession of a group of Southern politicians who, protesting the pro-civil rights policies of the Truman administration, formed the States’ Rights Democratic Party, usually known as the Dixiecrats. However, the demands of outspoken African-Americans along with the terms of the Cold War itself were putting pressure on the federal government to take an active interest in racial justice: America portrayed itself to the world as the champion of freedom against Soviet/Communist slavery; but most of the world’s newest nations—battlegrounds of US/Soviet influence—were populated by people of color, the very people denounced as unalterably inferior by white racists. How did it look when an African diplomat came to Washington, DC, a Southern city, and could not book a room in a “whites only” hotel? American racism was a potent propaganda tool for the Soviet Union when talking to the peoples of Africa

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and Asia and if the United States was to gain the upper hand, it would be necessary to repudiate that racism. On their home turf white Southerners responded to the civil rights movement with intimidation and physical violence. These were accompanied by what might be termed an outreach movement, seeking support outside the South by connecting civil rights with Communist subversion of the American Way. In the end, their argument came down to the same kind of false equivalency we have seen used so many times already by rightwing anti-communists: Communists supported racial equality and so did reforming individuals and organizations such as the NAACP; therefore, race reformers must be Communists. The situation for those fighting for racial equality was complicated by the fact that, while most white Americans had long been indifferent if not hostile to black equality, the Communist Party had been one of the most vocal and active proponents of black civil rights since the 1920s. Back in 1931 the CPUSA had taken up the case of the Scottsboro Boys, nine black teenagers who had been charged with raping two white prostitutes on a train traveling through the South. As was usually the case when black males were charged with sexual crimes against white women, eight of the young men were swiftly tried, found guilty by all-white juries and condemned to death. Over a thousand national guardsmen were required to save the accused from lynching. Few white Americans thought to take an active role in the defense of the condemned men, but the CPUSA took on the cases as a major project, distributing leaflets, holding demonstrations and publicizing the matter in Europe where non-Communist intellectuals like Albert Einstein and novelist Thomas Mann spoke out on behalf of the accused. Mail from around the world poured into Alabama, protesting the convictions. State officials blamed the Communists for fomenting trouble between the races where there had never been any before. The CPUSA’s legal branch, the International Labor Defense, announced that it would defend the boys on appeal and in the end there were seven retrials leading to two Supreme Court decisions. Meanwhile, the NAACP had also involved itself in the case, procuring the services of famed lawyer, Clarence Darrow, for the young men. However, the International Labor Defense (ILD) edged the NAACP out of the case and pursued the case with public demonstrations which, though they served the purposes of the Party, are generally thought to have ill-served the defendants.72 Black membership in the Communist Party was not large and never exceeded 8,000 at any time. Still, the effort to connect civil rights advocacy with Communist subversion ran from the federal government down to

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the states. In its early years HUAC was led by a series of white Southerners. And one of the most influential members, John Rankin, a hater of AfricanAmericans, Jews and liberals, who did not chair the committee but had great influence on it, declared that all the “racial disturbances you have seen in the South have been inspired by the tentacles of this great octopus, communism, which is out to destroy everything.”73 In the Senate, HUAC’s counterpart, the SISS, was headed by James Eastland (D-MS) who declared that the civil rights movement was a conspiracy directed by the Kremlin. When criticizing the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education, he put it this way: these decisions [for integration] were dictated by political pressure groups bent upon the destruction of the American system of government, and the mongrelization of the white race . . . the Court has responded to a radical pro-communist political movement in this country . . . This thing is broader and deeper than the N.A.A.C.P. It is true that N.A.A.C.P. is the front and the weapon to force integration . . . It is backed by large organizations with tremendous power, who are attempting with success to mold the climate of public opinion, to brainwash and indoctrinate the American people to accept racial integration and mongrelization. . . . In general they are church groups, radical organizations, labor unions and liberal groups of all shades of Red.74

Both HUAC and the SISS found an ally in their activities in the FBI’s J. Edgar Hoover, himself the product of the Southern city of Washington, DC. During the 1930s and 1940s Hoover had the FBI investigate an assortment of black organizations, including the Civil Rights Congress, the Southern Conference for Human Welfare, the National Negro Congress and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Hoover could not publicly ally himself with HUAC and SISS, but he could and did leak confidential reports to them on an ongoing basis. And both these committees, along with Hoover, fed information, including lists of names and affiliations, to Southern state investigators and legislators seeking to squelch the civil rights movement. On the state level, Southern legislatures mimicked the models provided by federal organizations, forming their own “little HUACs” and investigatory agencies; these state and local agencies collected data and established files on civil rights activists, hoping to expose Communists. They received information from the FBI and HUAC and shared it with each other, seeking to expose the NAACP, the SCEF, the SRC and the

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Highlander Folk School as Communist fronts and hoping thus to discredit the civil rights movement. The main target was the largest and most effective organization promoting African-American rights, the NAACP. This group had not only been effective in making some dents in the legal structure of Jim Crow, but also inspired black Americans to get involved in the difficult and sometimes dangerous struggle for equal citizenship. State governments took note and took aim: drawing on material provided by HUAC and SISS alleging the NAACP’s Communist associations, by the end of 1956 Alabama, Louisiana, and Texas had banned the organization’s actions outright, while Virginia, Georgia, Florida, South Carolina, North Carolina and Mississippi passed laws and launched investigations designed to damage its effectiveness. Above all, it was the 1954 decision of the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education declaring that separate education of the races in public schools was unconstitutional that gave the South notice that Jim Crow was under full attack. Up until this time, white Southerners had suffered little interference with their maintenance of a racially segregated society; now the country’s highest court had declared that white and black children must be educated together and the response was a region-wide resistance among Southern whites. New resistance groups—White Citizens’ Councils—sprang up across the South, drawing a more middleand upper-class membership than the Ku Klux Klan. Though less violent in language and, ostensibly, in deed, the Citizens’ Councils were identical to the Klan in fundamental beliefs. As the annual report of the Association of Citizens’ Councils of Mississippi put it: The state of this nation may rest in the hands of the Southern white people today. If we white Southerners submit to this unconstitutional judge-made law of nine political appointees, the malignant powers of mongrelization, communism and atheism will surely destroy this nation from within. Racial intermarriage has already begun in the North and unless stopped will spread to the South. . . . Integration represents darkness, regimentation, totalitarianism, communism and destruction. Segregation represents the freedom to choose one’s associates, Americanism, state sovereignty and the survival of the white race.75

White Southern segregationists hoped to enlist national support for the continuation of Jim Crow by invoking red scare forces, but the violence of their actions—especially nationally televised footage of Birmingham, Alabama’s police attacking non-violent protesters (including school-

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children) with billy clubs, dogs and high power fire hoses, set at levels strong enough to take the bark off a tree—did their cause so much harm that President John F. Kennedy later said, “The Civil Rights movement should thank God for [Birmingham Police Chief] Bull Connor. He’s helped it as much as Abraham Lincoln.”76

NOTES 1 2 3 4

5 6 7 8 9

10 11

12

13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21

Samuel A. Stouffer, Communism, Conformity, and Civil Liberties: A Cross-Section of the Nation Speaks Its Mind (Garden City, NY: The Country Life Press, 1955), 59 Harry Truman, “Address in Detroit at the Celebration of the City’s 250th Anniversary,” July 28, 1951. Stouffer, Communism, Conformity, and Civil Liberties, 176–178. US Congress, Senate, Committee on the Judiciary: Hearings before the Subcommittee on H.R. 5852, An Act to Protect the United States against UnAmerican and Subversive Activities, 80th Cong., 2nd sess. (Washington, DC: U.S. GPO, 1948), 286. Control of Subversive Activities, Hearings Before the Committee on the Judiciary, United States Senate (Washington: U.S. GPO, 1948), 268. Control of Subversive Activities, 268. Cavalier Daily, April 19, 1951, 2. Morris Davis, “Community Attitudes toward Fluoridation,” The Public Opinion Quarterly, Vol. 23, No. 4 (Winter, 1959–1960), 474–482. Quoted in Randle J. Hart, “The Greatest Subversive Plot in History? The American Radical Right and Anti-UNESCO Campaigning,” Sociology, Vol. 48, No. 3 (2014), 554–572. Indianapolis Times, November 12, 1953, 1. Jay Douglas Learned, Billy Graham, American Evangelicalism and the Cold War Clash of Messianic Visions, 1945–1962, Ph.D. diss., University of Rochester, 2012, 288–290. Franklin D. Roosevelt: “Address at Madison Square Garden, New York City,” October 31, 1936. Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project. www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=15219. Kevin Kruse, One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America (New York: Basic Books, 2015), 6. Kruse, One Nation Under God, 79. Kruse, One Nation Under God, 6. Kruse, One Nation Under God, 32. Kruse, One Nation Under God, 37. Kruse, One Nation Under God, 37. Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1967), 20. Learned, Billy Graham, 62. Learned, Billy Graham, 137.

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22 23 24 25

26 27

28

29 30

31 32 33 34 35 36

37 38 39 40 41

42 43 44 45

Jay Douglas Learned, Billy Graham, 90. Jonathan P. Herzog, The Spiritual-Industrial Complex: America’s Religious Battle against Communism in the Early Cold War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 79. Herzog, The Spiritual-Industrial Complex, 174. Seth Jacobs, America’s Miracle Man in Vietnam: Ngo Dinh Diem, Religion, Race, and U.S Intervention in Southeast Asia, 1950–1957 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 68. Herbert M. Kliebard, The Struggle for the American Curriculum, 1893–1958 (New York: Routledge, 2005), 24. Christine K. Erickson, “‘We Want No Teachers Who Say There Are Two Sides to Every Question’: Conservative Women and Education in the 1930s,” History of Education Quarterly, Vol. 46, No. 4 (Winter, 2006), 497. Anne Rogers Minor, “Address at the 32nd Continental Congress of the Daughters of the American Revolution,” Daughters of the American Revolution Magazine, Vol. LVII, No. 5 (May, 1923), 270. O.K. Armstrong, “Treason in the Textbooks,” American Legion Magazine, Vol. 29, No. 3 (September, 1940), 8. American Historical Association, Investigation of the Social Studies in the Schools: Conclusions and Recommendations of the Commission (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons: 1934), 55. Andrew Hartman, Education and the Cold War: The Battle for the American School (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 115. Erickson, “We Want No Teachers,” 497. Henry Steele Commager, “Who Is Loyal to America?” Harper’s Magazine, Vol. 195, No. 4168 (Sept., 1947), 195. M.J. Heale, American Anti-Communism: Combating the Enemy Within, 1830–1970 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 174. Minor, “DAR Address,” 270. Christine K. Erickson, “‘We want no teachers who say there are two sides to every question’: Conservative Women and Education in the 1930s,” History of Education Quarterly, Vol. 46, No. 4 (Winter, 2006), 494. Raymond B. Allen, “Communists Should Not Teach in American Colleges,” Educational Forum, Vol. 13, No. 4 (May, 1949), 433–440. Sidney Hook, “Should Communists Be Permitted to Teach?” New York Times Magazine, February 27, 1949, 7. Alexander Meiklejohn, “Should Communists Be Permitted to Teach?” Or “Professors on Probation,” New York Times Magazine, March 27, 1949, 10. Ellen Schrecker, “Academic Freedom and the Cold War,” The Antioch Review, 1 July 1980, Vol.38(3), 16. Lawrence B. Glickman, “The Strike in the Temple of Consumption: Consumer Activism and Twentieth-Century American Political Culture,” The Journal of American History, Vol. 88, No. 1 (June, 2001), 108. Glickman, “The Strike in the Temple of Consumption,” 104. Glickman, “The Strike in the Temple of Consumption,” 105. Glickman, “The Strike in the Temple of Consumption,” 113. Lawrence B. Glickman, Buying Power: A History of Consumer Activism in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 212.

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46

47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57

58 59 60 61 62 63

64 65 66

67 68

69 70

Harry S. Truman: “Special Message to the Congress Recommending a Comprehensive Health Program,” November 19, 1945. Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project. www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ ws/?pid=12288. James A. Morone, Theodor J. Litman and Leonard S. Robins, Health Politics and Policy (Albany, NY: Delmar Publishers, 1991), 105. Richard Harris, A Sacred Trust (London: Pelican Books, 1969), 8. Monte M. Poen, Harry S. Truman Versus the Medical Lobby: The Genesis of Medicare (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1979), 85. Poen, Harry S. Truman Versus the Medical Lobby, 105. David F. Drake, Reforming the Health Care Market: An Interpretive Economic History (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1994), 200. Clark Porteous, “Doctors Asked to Fight Socialized Medicine,” Journal of the Tennessee State Medical Association, Vol. XLII, No. 1 (January, 1949), 1. Porteous, “Doctors Asked to Fight Socialized Medicine,” 4. Porteous, “Doctors Asked to Fight Socialized Medicine,” 123. David Blumenthal and James A. Morone, The Heart of Power: Health and Politics in the Oval Office (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 92. Blumenthal and Morone, The Heart of Power, 93. David R. Hyde and Payson Wolff, “The American Medical Association: Power, Purpose and Politics in Organized Medicine,” Yale Law Journal, Vol. 63, No. 7 (May, 1954), 953. James Giblin, The Rise and Fall of Senator Joe McCarthy, 104. K. A. Cuordileone, Manhood and American Political Culture in the Cold War (New York: Routledge, 2004), 28. Cuordileone, Manhood and American Political Culture, 46. Naoko Shibusawa, “The Lavender Scare and Empire: Rethinking Cold War Antigay Politics,” Diplomatic History, Vol. 36, No. 4 (Sept., 2012), 751. Shibusawa, “The Lavender Scare and Empire,” 73. Randolph W Baxter, “‘Homo-Hunting’ in the Early Cold War: Senator Kenneth Wherry and the Homophobic Side of McCarthyism,” Nebraska History, Vol. 84 (2003), 125. Baxter, “‘Homo-Hunting’ in the Early Cold War,” 125. Baxter, “‘Homo-Hunting’ in the Early Cold War,” 125. David K. Johnson, The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 114. Gregory S. Taylor, The History of the North Carolina Communist Party (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2009), 205 Sarah Hart Brown, “Communism, Anti-Communism and Massive Resistance: The Civil Rights Congress in Southern Perspective,” in Before Brown: Civil Rights and White Backlash in the Modern South, Glenn Feldman, ed. (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2013), 185. Dewey W. Grantham, The South in Modern America: A Region at Odds (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2001), 196. Jeff Woods, Black Struggle, Red Scare: Segregation and Anti-Communism in the South, 1948–1968 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University, 2004), 35.

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71 72

73 74

75 76

Woods, Black Struggle, Red Scare, 33. See Douglas O. Linder, “Without Fear or Favor: Judge James Edwin Horton and the Trial of the ‘Scottsboro boys’ (Essays on the Trials of the Century),” UMKC Law Review, Vol. 68, No. 4 (Summer, 2000), 549–583. Woods, Black Struggle, Red Scare, 28. 168 Citizens’ Councils of America Literature, 1947–1969, Special Collections, University of Arkansas Libraries, Fayetteville, Arkansas. Series V. Items 1–15, Acc.No.66, Loc.146, 5. Thomas R. Waring, “Councils Spark New Life into Republic’s Principles,” The Citizens’ Council, December 1955, 2. “Theophilus Eugene Connor,” Dictionary of American Biography (Supplement 9: 1971–1975) (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1994).

Epilogue: Consequences

he greatest consequences of the red scare did not manifest in domestic affairs; after all, a mere six years after McCarthy’s fall, the moderately liberal John F. Kennedy was elected president and after his assassination in 1963, Lyndon B. Johnson brought the country into what was perhaps the most liberal period in its history. The New Deal had flourished under the negative pressure of the Great Depression, but the sharp left turn represented by the War on Poverty was more voluntary insofar as its policies were enacted during a period of great national prosperity when there was no outstanding need for anything to be done. Furthermore, much of that legislation was in response to a grassroots campaign of protest whose leaders and followers showed little sign of having been intimidated into silence by any lasting trauma of McCarthyism. No, the lasting effects of the red scare were felt most directly in foreign policy; however, those effects ricocheted, so to speak, from distant lands— especially the Southeast Asian country called Vietnam—back into American politics in powerful and destructive ways that no American politician could have foreseen. It is not uncommon—in fact it seems to be usual—for the leaders of powerful nations to believe that the possession of great military might confers the ability to manipulate and remold less powerful polities into whatever form may be desired. Imposing new political forms and new values on the less mighty often seems to be seen as almost a right and an obligation of the possession of power. And so it was for the United States at the end of the Second World War. It faced a world that had been largely colonized by European powers which, in many of those places like South America where they had been forced out or withdrawn, had left political and social chaos behind them. And in those places where the Europeans hung on—Africa and much of Asia—they faced rising resistance from

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native populations who had never asked for, and in any case had received precious few of, the “blessings” of European civilization. The postwar world was dominated by two messianic nations, both of which claimed to reject colonialism and to seek to return colonized areas to their rightful owners, the people who lived there. The Soviet Union was, as it had always been, committed to spreading the blessings of communism to the entire world and the United States was committed to spreading the blessings of capitalism to one and all. However, neither nation was content to spread only its economic system; each also sought to spread its social values, including either religion (the United States) or irreligion (the USSR). And these cultural aspirations would be as critical to the failures of each nation’s plans as anything else. Moreover, each of these two great powers also sought to expand their power and influence as well as seeking to benefit the powerful economic interests that supported their political establishments. This quite often meant interference with the internal politics of smaller nations and the imposition of American or Soviet “solutions” on them. And the actions that emerged from these motives often had tragic consequences, not only for the smaller countries that suffered the interference, but also for the great powers whose leaders believed they were pursuing their own national interests. For the United States in the postwar era the threat—real, imagined or invented—of possible communist takeover became the standard excuse for interventions. It began in Iran in 1953. President Truman had authorized the creation of the CIA in 1947 and while that agency carried out covert actions under his authority, Truman allowed no overthrows of foreign regimes. This changed under Eisenhower. In August, 1953, a coup, orchestrated by the CIA, overthrew the popular regime of Dr. Mohammad Mossadegh, beginning a prolonged period of extremely repressive rule under the Shah Mohammad Reza, which ended only with the overthrow of his government and the institution of the current regime which, since its inception, has been the avowed enemy of the United States. As prime minister, Mossadegh had been working to reduce the power of the Shah and the Iranian aristocracy and to improve conditions for the majority of Iranians. In foreign policy he tried to steer a neutral course between the two great Cold War adversaries, the United States and the USSR. Domestically, taking a position as both an advocate of Islam and of democracy, seeking to make the Shah a constitutional monarch, he showed a willingness to work with any group that was willing to support his policies, including the Communists. The reforms he sought included unemployment compensation for sick and injured workers, rent control and freeing peasants from forced labor on the landlords’ estates. The most

EPILOGUE: CONSEQUENCES

controversial of the actions he had taken—at least on the international level—was to nationalize the country’s oil resources, previously under the control of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. To Mossadegh oil was a vital resource belonging to the Iranian people which had been bartered away by a monarchy that represented nothing except its own selfish interests. The British portrayed Mossadegh as part of a communist threat to the region (which he was not) to an easily influenced Eisenhower administration that saw world politics exclusively through the lens of the Soviet threat. Fearing that Iran might become another satellite of the Soviet Union, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and CIA Director Alan Dulles colluded with the British to overthrow Mossadegh and replace him with the unrestrained and completely undemocratic rule of the Shah, Mohammad Reza. Under his aegis, a police state was created with American backing, marked by close links between the Iranian intelligence service (the Savak) and the CIA. And, along with generous compensation, the British oil company, now called British Petroleum, received a 40 percent share of Iranian oil production along with American oil companies which received another 40 percent. Would Iran have developed democratically if the United States had not intervened? There is no way to know, but we can be sure that the reputation of America was deeply sullied among Iranians with America being set up to be eventually cast as “the Great Satan.” As Mossadegh’s biographer, Christopher de Bellaigue writes, From an American perspective, the tragedy of Mossadegh is that the United States allowed itself to become Britain’s accomplice and triggerman. . . . Until then, Iranian nationalists such as Mossadegh had regarded the US as a force for good in the world. . . . Nowadays, America and Britain are vilified in equal measure.1

This was a memory that would not fade among Iranians as the United States embraced a repressive and unpopular monarch closely in friendship. Any possibility of a friendly or even neutral relationship with the government that replaced him disappeared. Fariba Zarinebaf, a historian at Northwestern University, said the most profound long-term result of the 1953 coup may be that it led many Iranian intellectuals to conclude that although Western leaders practiced democracy at home, they were uninterested in promoting it abroad. Moreover, she believes that “[t]he growing disillusion of Iranian intellectuals with the West and with Westernstyle liberal democracy was a major development in the 1960’s and 70’s that contributed to the Islamic revolution.”2

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Accusations of communism were also a key part of the CIA operation that overthrew Jacobo Arbenz, president of Guatemala. In Guatemala it was the holdings of United Fruit, an American company that controlled vast amounts of land leased at rock bottom prices and held tax free from a corrupt military dictator, 85 percent of which was lying unused, that was at issue. Seeking to better the lot of an impoverished peasantry, Arbenz expropriated almost 250,000 acres of the uncultivated land and, offering compensation to the company, began distributing the land to peasants and workers. Again, as with Mossadegh, the Eisenhower administration portrayed Arbenz as a communist danger. The CIA bankrolled mercenaries, supposedly a “liberation army,” who overthrew Arbenz and replaced him with a military junta. The interests of United Fruit were safe as were the interests of the Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, who was a major shareholder in the company and had been a member of the firm that was its legal counsel, and his brother, CIA director, Allen Dulles, was also a major shareholder. Also protected were General Robert Cutler, the head of the National Security Council, who was the former Chairman of the Board of United Fruit, and other members of the US Government who had personal interests in the company. The new president, Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas was grateful to his sponsors, saying to Vice President Richard M. Nixon, “Tell me what you want me to do, and I will do it.” Stephen G. Rabe, a historian from the University of Texas at Dallas and author of Eisenhower and Latin America: The Foreign Policy of Anticommunism characterized the Guatemalan intervention as the most important event in the history of U.S. relations with Latin America. It really set the precedent for later interventions in Cuba, British Guiana, Brazil and Chile. The tactics were the same, the mindset was the same, and in many cases the people who directed those covert interventions were the same.

According to Rabe, “The C.I.A. intervention began a ghastly cycle of violence, assassination and torture in Guatemala.”3 Having installed friendly dictators in Iran and Guatemala, the Eisenhower administration’s commitment to promoting democracy in those countries was quickly forgotten. To the administration these seemed to be outstanding successes, accomplished with little expenditure of money, time or human life. And in the aftermath, to defeat world communism and promote democracy the United States went on to intervene in the Congo, Indonesia, the Philippines, Lebanon and Syria; however, though communism was kept at bay what America always seemed to end up

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supporting were dictators who were often as brutal as any communist could have been. These actions sullied America’s reputation in the world, bringing into doubt the Americans’ self-proclaimed mission as the defenders of freedom and they also sowed the seeds for the installation of hostile regimes such as the current Iranian one. However, the most damaging effects on American politics came as a ricochet from the red scare through US involvement in Vietnam. Vietnam had long been a French colony with a population made up chiefly of poor peasant farmers, many of them tenant farmers who, in addition to paying half of their crops as rent, had to provide their own tools, livestock and huts. By the time all the additional expenses were factored in, the peasant kept roughly one third of his crop. The overriding desire of the peasantry, then, was for ownership of the land they worked. The French had been driven out by the Japanese during the Second World War and an indigenous resistance to Japanese rule began under the leadership of Communist Ho Chi Minh. When the war ended with Japan’s defeat and the French returned to take their place as foreign rulers, communist-led resistance simply changed its focus to the old colonialists. Roosevelt was generally opposed to colonialism and was, therefore, opposed to allowing the French to retake control of their old Southeastern colonies; rather, he favored some form of trusteeship that would prepare Indochina for self-government. However, Roosevelt’s death made his preferences a moot point; Truman took charge of foreign policy and, partly to resist the expansion of what was regarded as “monolithic world Communism” and partly to get France’s cooperation against the Soviet Union in Europe, acquiesced to France’s regaining control of her old colonies. Additionally, Truman started providing aid to the French against the Vietnamese resistance. The Eisenhower administration intensified economic and military assistance to France in the face of advances by the Vietnamese Communists, stating its commitment to “permitting these states to pursue their peaceful and democratic development” and that it was “convinced that neither national independence nor democratic evolution exist in any area dominated by Soviet imperialism.” The two fallacies in this statement are: (1) that the Vietnamese Communists were dominated by the Soviet Union and (2) that the administration actually cared any more in this case than it had in Iran and Guatemala about “democratic development.”4 Dwight D. Eisenhower was the one American president who might have been able to make a clean break from the issue of Vietnam without suffering major political repercussions. However, to have done so—had he thought that disengagement was correct—would have required some

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political courage since vengeful Democrats (who had been charged with the “loss of China”) along with the right wing of his own party would have jumped at the opportunity to blame the French withdrawal from Vietnam on a weakness of anti-communist resolve.5 Perhaps Eisenhower’s status as a Republican, a military man and a war hero who was immensely popular might have insulated him from the political consequences of allowing events to take their own course; however, there is nothing to indicate that he saw this as the proper course of action (or inaction). In the wake of the French disaster at Dien Bien Phu a peace conference was held in Geneva, Switzerland; the Geneva Accords that emerged from this temporarily divided Vietnam into northern and southern zones to be administered by the Vietminh and the French respectively until the country was united under one government after general elections conducted under international supervision in the summer of 1956. Though the Eisenhower administration publicly announced support for the Accords, convinced, as was everyone with any information on the subject, that Ho Chi Minh would gain an overwhelming victory, it made immediate plans to establish the southern zone as an independent country, this despite the fact that the Accords declared that the “military demarcation line [separating the two zones] is provisional and should not in any way be interpreted as constituting a political or territorial boundary.”6 The assumption guiding the Americans was, as always, that the Vietnamese Communists represented yet another facet of monolithic “world Communism”; this, however, was incorrect. Soviet documents that became available after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989 show that the Russians wanted a peaceful resolution to the Indochinese situation and were using what influence they had with Hanoi to accomplish this. Meanwhile the Chinese, far from acting as puppets of the USSR, were competing for Communist leadership, especially in Southeast Asia, and were aiding the Vietminh as a means toward that end. The Vietnamese Communists were taking advantage of the Sino/Soviet rivalry to get what military support they could from each by playing them off against each other.7 Meanwhile there were important American voices warning Eisenhower against involvement in Indochina. The Joint Chiefs of Staff cautioned that non-communist military forces would be useless without a “stable civil government” and that South Vietnam was “devoid of decisive military objectives.” Defense Secretary Charles E. Wilson urged Eisenhower to “[g]et out of Indochina completely and as soon as possible.” He foresaw “nothing but grief in store if we remained in this area.” And General J. Lawton Collins, sent to assess the military prospects, told the president that his candidate for the non-communist leadership, Ngo Dinh

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Diem, was not up to the job and that unless someone better could be found, the United States “should withdraw from Vietnam.”8 The White House, however, put all its chips on Diem, a man who was in no way qualified for the burden he shouldered. First of all, Diem had held no public office for more than 20 years; he was not well known in Vietnam and he had no significant base of support. The Vietnamese emperor Bao Dai noted in his memoirs that Diem suffered from “messianic tendencies” and had a “difficult temperament” and, to make matters worse, he was a bigoted Catholic who sought to rule a country that was 90 percent Buddhist. To American policy-makers, however, it was the fact that Diem was a Christian that marked him as an outstanding candidate for leadership in Vietnam. To begin with, as we have already seen, East Asian State Department experts had been purged by both the Truman and Eisenhower administrations which, consequently, were operating in a vacuum of knowledge about the region. Senator Mike Mansfield, one of Diem’s main backers and generally esteemed to be the Senate’s premier expert on the Far East, acknowledged, “I do not know too much about the Indochina situation. I do not think that anyone does.” And later on, Robert S. McNamara, Secretary of Defense under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, admitted that while Kennedy had been able to turn to experts on the Soviet Union when dealing with the Berlin Crisis in 1961 and the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, there were “no senior officials in the Pentagon or State Department with comparable knowledge about Southeast Asia.” He went on to write that: [t]he irony of this gap was that it existed largely because the top East Asian and China experts in the State Department—John Paton Davies, Jr., John Stewart Service, and John Carter Vincent [and Edmund Clubb]—had been purged during the McCarthy hysteria of the 1950s. Without men like these to provide sophisticated, nuanced insights, we—certainly I—badly misread China’s objectives and mistook its bellicose rhetoric to imply a drive for regional hegemony. We also totally underestimated the nationalist aspect of Ho Chi Minh’s movement. We saw him first as a Communist and only second as a Vietnamese nationalist.9

Given this lack of knowledge, one might suppose that American policymakers would proceed cautiously. However, all that was left in the State Department after the red scare purges was a rigid anti-Communist dogma, an attitude of racist condescension toward the peoples of Asia (considered to be incapable of governing themselves and therefore requiring a “strong

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man” like Diem to lead them in the proper direction) and an unthinking bias in favor of Christian leaders as leaders for countries overwhelmingly not Christian in their demographic makeup. Given these attitudes and given a conviction that overwhelming technological superiority could bend any situation to their will, the men who formulated US foreign policy were prepared to step boldly and unflinchingly into the quagmire. Since they were marching blind, they did not have any knowledge that might have been useful to them; for example, they did not know that, given the fact that Vietnam had a long history of fighting against Chinese attempts at hegemony, it was highly unlikely that the Vietnamese Communists would allow themselves to be made into a Chinese satellite; their belief in the monster called “monolithic world Communism” also blinded them to the fact that the Soviet Union’s geographical distance would make it difficult, if not impossible, for the Russians to subject independentlyminded Vietnamese Communists to their will. In the Eisenhower administration, the key player was Secretary of State John Foster Dulles whose worldview was shaped by the dualistic religious view of the world that we have already noted as a key element in the thinking of McCarthy and other red scare proponents. As Indian leader Jawaharlal Nehru told reporters, “I like and respect the American Secretary of State, but I must admit that it is difficult to talk to him without God getting in the way.”10 In his 1950 book, War or Peace Dulles claimed that “Soviet communism starts with an atheistic godless premise. Everything else flows from that premise.”11 On the other hand, he wrote, “Those of us who have the advantage of being Christians are in a unique position to understand the moral law, to see its relevancy, and to give leadership to the peoples of the world.”12 Other influential people agreed: Senator H. Alexander Smith, praised by the Eisenhower administration as an “expert on the Far East,” declared that the key to a “final and lasting victory,” over communism was “convincing the minds of men of the eternal values of freedom under the guiding hand of God. . . . May we pray and strive that our United States will be a beacon of light guiding the suffering, groping people of Asia to join the Great Crusade.”13 Diem in particular had standing behind him the alliance of influential politicians, publishers, journalists and others called the American Friends of Vietnam (but more often known as the Vietnam Lobby). Vietnam lobbyist Henry Luce trumpeted Diem as “The Tough Miracle Man of Vietnam” in Life Magazine. The New York Herald Tribune picked up the theme, dubbing him a “Miracle-Maker from Asia,” while the journal Foreign Affairs suggested history might find in Diem “one of the great figures of twentieth century Asia.”14

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However, despite all these vaunted virtues, no one, including US policy-makers, believed that Diem had a chance against Communist Ho Chi Minh in an open and free election. In mid-1955, Diem announced that he did not intend to honor the Geneva Accords and the Eisenhower administration stood ready to assist him with massive amounts of aid as he canceled the scheduled elections. South Vietnam as a nation was America’s creation and so was its prime minister, with Diem, as CIA operatives reported, “so wholly dependent on American support that he would have fallen in a day without it. . . . What he did was inspired by Americans, planned by Americans, and carried out with close American guidance.”15 Not unnaturally, many Vietnamese saw Diem as an American pawn; however, he was not. Had he been, it might have been better for both himself and the Vietnamese over whom he ruled. Vietnamese peasants might have benefitted from land reform and a benevolent regime, even if not one of their own choosing. However, Diem was not inclined to take advice from anyone, including his sponsors, and before long the American ambassador, Elbridge Durbrow, was sending back reports of a corrupt and incompetent government that used torture and extortion to gain its ends. In a country whose population was composed of roughly 90 percent peasants, most of them very poor and whose overwhelming desire was to own the land they farmed, the Communists outflanked the Diem regime by distributing land to peasants in the areas it controlled while Saigon, dominated by absentee landlords, high-ranking military officers, Catholic government officials and people in the professions, made at best feeble efforts in that direction. The Communists, believing private ownership of property to be the root of all evil, had no intention of allowing the peasants to keep real ownership of the land, but the peasants did not understand that; mostly they understood that one side was giving them land while the other side was not. Consolidating his power in an “Anti-Communist Denunciation Campaign,” Diem silenced oppositional newspapers and had thousands of people jailed with frequent and arbitrary executions. Moreover, Diem loaded his government and military with Catholic politicians and officers while instituting anti-Buddhist policies. However, Diem was anti-communist and Christian and that was good enough for the Eisenhower administration to continue with its staunch support. Now, having actually been created by the United States, South Vietnam was, in a sense, “America’s to lose,” and subsequent presidents did not dare withdraw for fear of the accusations of being “soft on Communism” that were bound to come from the far Right. Eisenhower’s

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successor, John F. Kennedy, spoke privately of withdrawing from Vietnam once safely re-elected in 1964, but feared that if he did so prematurely, he would have “another Joe McCarthy red scare” on his hands.16 In any case, he did not live to get the chance. He was succeeded by Lyndon Baines Johnson whose main ambition was to pass the collection of domestic programs that he called “the Great Society.” Francis M. Bator, who served as deputy national security adviser to Johnson during 1965–1967 has argued that Johnson was convinced that had he sought to extricate the country from Vietnam, the Great Society would never have emerged from Congress. Johnson believed that any president has a two-year window of opportunity to pass significant legislation and he was determined to get through the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, Medicare and a host of other programs to address poverty, racial discrimination and education. As Bator suggests, and as was unquestionably true, Democratic politicians of Johnson’s generation were traumatized by what “Who lost China?” had done to Truman. I would guess that Johnson feared that reneging on the Eisenhower/Kennedy commitment would destroy his presidency as Truman’s had been destroyed, and destroy the Great Society program with it.

He goes on to say, Johnson thought that hawkish Dixiecrats and small-government Republicans were more likely to defy him—by joining together to filibuster the civil rights and social legislation that they and their constituents detested—if he could be made to appear an appeaser of communists who had reneged on Eisenhower’s and Kennedy’s commitment of U.S. honor.17

And so the legacy of the red scare and the fears generated by the red scare caused an American president to make choices that led to more than 58,000 US military fatalities, some 300,000 physically wounded, 2,387 “missing in action” and a host of veterans who bore psychological scars from the combat. At home a massive protest movement grew up. The American Army that fought in Vietnam was made up of civilian draftees; many of those subject to the draft were college-educated and not sympathetic to the mentality “Theirs not to reason why; theirs but to do and die.” They were very much wondering why they were being asked to “do and die” and many of them did not find the proffered answers to be satisfactory. As they became dubious of the notion that we were fighting in Vietnam to protect democracy, young Americans who had already been introduced

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to the idea of demonstrating by the civil rights movement found it natural to transfer that tactic to resistance against the US involvement in Vietnam, with protests building until on November 15, 1969, as many as half a million people staged what is believed to be the largest antiwar protest in United States history in Washington, DC. The war was splitting the country and the Democratic Party. On the one hand protesters had come to believe that the war constituted a national crime and increasingly demonstrated their contempt, not only for the war, but for the United States itself. A younger generation—many of them the children of the middle class—signaled its alienation from what it termed “the Establishment” and its more conservative elders by young men growing long hair and sprouting facial hair, while the young of both sexes smoked marijuana, experimented with hallucinogenic drugs, espoused a “sexual revolution” and, in some cases, espoused radical politics and a political revolution. Meanwhile, many members of an older generation and young people who were more conservative saw a broad movement that seemed distinctly “un-American.” Everything that to one group symbolized the greatness and freedom of America—capitalism, the flag, the military, that version of American history that cherished the United States as the “land of the brave and home of the free”—was derided by the antiwar movement. Liberals—now generally viewed by conservatives as comprising the far left—were condemned by radicals as hypocritical supporters of a status quo that oppressed the poor, women, minorities and oppressed the rest of the world. Given the general American tendency to believe that where there was a villain there must be a hero, there were those in “the Movement” who elevated Ho Chi Minh and even the leader of Communist China, Mao Zedong, to heroic stature. America, the all-good, or Amerika, the evil: there seemed to be no middle ground and a bitter split came to characterize national politics that has never healed. Where once a president could count on support in foreign policy from members of both parties, now there was division; the Democratic New Deal coalition fell apart as Republican politicians found themselves able to attract working-class voters who were disgusted by the appearance, beliefs and actions of the counterculture. The monetary demands of a widening war sapped the life from Johnson’s Great Society programs and finally, when liberal George McGovern became the Democratic nominee against Richard Nixon in 1972, the demands for doctrinal purity on the part of the various groups that supported McGovern led to internecine bickering that sabotaged the campaign and created the opening for conservatives to start treating the word “liberal” as a sort of obscenity—the “L” word.

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NOTES 1 2 3 4

5 6

7 8 9 10

11 12 13 14 15 16 17

Christopher de Bellaigue, Patriot of Persia, Muhammad Mossadegh and a Tragic AngloAmerican Coup (New York: Harper, 2012), xviii. Quoted in Stephen Kinzer, “Revisiting Cold War Coups and Finding Them Costly,” New York Times, November 30, 2003. Quoted in Kinzer, “Revisiting Cold War Coups.” U.S. Congress, Senate, Committee on Foreign Relations, 90th Congress, 1st Session, Background Information Relating to Southeast Asia and Vietnam (3rd Revised Edition) (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, July 1967), 44. Zelizer, When Liberals Were Hawks, 12. Mike Gravel, “Geneva Conference: Indo China,” in The Pentagon Papers: The Defense Department History of United States Decision-Making on Vietnam (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971), 1: 573. See I.V. Gaiduk, The Soviet Union and the Vietnam War (Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1996), passim. Edward Cuddy, “Vietnam: Mr. Johnson’s War. Or Mr. Eisenhower’s?” The Review of Politics, Vol. 65, No. 4 (Autumn, 2003), 359. Robert McNamara, In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam (New York: Random House, 1995), 32–33. Seth Jacobs, America’s Miracle Man in Vietnam: Ngo Dinh Diem, Religion, Race, and U.S. Intervention in Southeast Asia, 1950–1957 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press), 2004, 72. Jacobs, America’s Miracle Man, 74. Jacobs, America’s Miracle Man, 75. Jacobs, America’s Miracle Man, 33. Jacobs, America’s Miracle Man, 221. Jacobs, America’s Miracle Man, 26. A. J. Langguth, Our Vietnam: The War 1954–1975 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000), 208. Francis M. Bator, “No Good Choices: LBJ and the Vietnam/Great Society Connection,” Diplomatic History, Vol. 32, No. 3 (June, 2008), 326, 329.

Documents

DOCUMENT 1

Henry L. Myers (R, Nebraska) Speech of 1920

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he following is an excerpt from a speech given to the Senate by Senator Henry L. Myers, Republican of Montana, during the first big red scare in 1920. In it Myers discusses his views on the connection between domestic radicalism and the new Soviet Union. The widespread sympathy or semi-sympathy in this country with the Soviet Government of Russia is alarming. It appears to pervade all classes of people and all ranks of society. It appears to have some hold in colleges and schools. It has adherents in the ranks of fashion. It has some adherents among the well-to-do and intelligent. It is astounding that some people who appear to be educated, intelligent, native Americans will express more or less sympathy with the Soviet Government of Russia. I have encountered some of it which has amazed me. ... I believe there are many people who expressed feelings of leniency for or sympathy with the Soviet Government of Russia who do not know anything about it, do not know what it is. I believe there are millions of people in this country who are indifferent to it, who have no knowledge whatever of the character of that Government.

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All the while emissaries in this country of that Government are “boring from within” and injecting insidious poison of their virus into the veins of our body politic, misleading credulous people and doing incalculable harm. I think the American people need to be aroused. The people appear to be asleep to the dangers that are in their very midst in which are daily growing. I think the people of the United States should be awakened from their lethargy and made to know something of the Government which is daily being loudly praised in this country as superior to our own time-tried and tested Government. The despots of Russia are doing their best to spread their vile system of anarchy to the entire world. They boast of it. Their minions have invaded this fair country and their seed sown here is bearing fruit. In the last few months 3000 arrests of radical Reds, agitators, and undesirable aliens have been made by agents of the Department of Justice, with a view to their deportation. I have no doubt all of them are highly undesirable and are guilty of disloyal activities. I have no doubt this country would be better off if all of them were deported to the countries from which they came or tied in bags and dumped into the middle of the ocean. ... The activities of those who would undermine and overturn our Government are undoubtedly increasing. They appear to go on with little check or hindrance. In my opinion the country is honeycombed underneath the surface with the vicious activities of hydra headed monsters and cunning plotters, who are scattering the poison of their malignant virus and working day and night for the overthrow of the best Government which the world has ever seen, where more liberty is given to the masses, more freedom to its citizens, more rights to its workingmen, more privileges to the whole populace than in any other Government under the sun. In my opinion this country is reeking and seething with imaginations of disloyalty, sedition, and Bolshevism. There proponents are becoming bold. They have defenders and sympathizers in high places. What is the remedy? The Attorney General of the United States says there is not sufficient law to combat these conditions, to prevent their growth, to punish such deadly malefactors. He says the country is in need of more efficient and drastic laws to enable the Government to fight its insidious flows and preserve its safety. Very well, I say, then, let us enact more law. Let us have laws that are adequate and sufficiently drastic. Selfpreservation is the first law of nature as applied to nations as well as individuals. Months ago the Senate passed a bill known as the Sterling sedition bill, to give the officials of the Government more power in suppressing and punishing sedition and disloyalty, intended to save us from those in our midst who our, with safety to themselves, “boring from

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within.” The House of Representatives has not yet passed that bill nor any other of its kind. I hope it may yet do so, but time is fleeting and the danger grows. What the Congress of the United States needs is some of the backbone evinced by the New York Legislature when it expelled from its membership five men who had been proven to the satisfaction of the disk of the legislature disloyal to their country. I honor the New York Legislature for its brave and patriotic act. ... It is said by some who oppose the proposed legislation that it would be a blow at liberty; that it would invade the right of free speech and the right of freedom of the press. I believe in liberty and in freedom of speech and press but I do not believe in that liberty or that freedom of speech or press which is licensed to advocate the overthrow by force or violence, plotting or scheming, of the best and freest Government ever established by man. The truth is, for Bolshevism there is neither cause nor justification. It cannot be remedied by human agencies. Bolshevism is simply held in the hearts of men and women; it is hell in the hearts of people or natural criminals. It cannot be removed from their hearts by human means. The only effective eradicater of the seeds of Bolshevism in the hearts of people there can be is by act of God. What this country needs and what the world needs more than anything else is a great revival of religion. If men and women everywhere had in their hearts the spirit of the Savior of mankind, there would be no Bolshevism. That, though, cannot be brought about by legislation. However, legislation can, by gripping the situation and providing drastic laws for prevention and punishment, deter people from acts of Bolshevism, disloyalty, and sedition, and from teaching their vile doctrines, or punish them after committing such acts and teaching such doctrines, and thereby keep within the bounds of safety this criminal spirit. Many people are good only through fear of the law. Many a man would commit acts of robbery or other lawlessness if not deterred by fear of punishment at the hands of the law. Nobody but God can take out of a wicked man’s heart the criminal instinct, but the law can prevent them from exercising it, or as a deterrent to others, punish him if he does exercise it. Congress should take hold of the situation firmly, without fear or favor. It can remedy it. The conditions of which I speak will continue and will increase unless our government takes hold of them with a firm hand and adopt stern repressive measures for its own protection, especially the legislative branch of the Government. We whipped the Redskins to obtain possession of this country, we whipped the Red Coach to achieve its independence, and we must not let the red-hearted and red-handed

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overthrow it. “Down the Reds” has been our practice. It should now be our motto. These red malefactors and enemies of good government should be made to feel the stripes and see the stars – the stripes and stars of the glorious American flag. Source: Congressional Record, 66th Congress, 2nd session (April 28, 1920), pp. 6207–6212.

DOCUMENT 2

Franklin D. Roosevelt – Address at the Democratic State Convention, Syracuse, N.Y. September 29, 1936

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his speech was given when Roosevelt was running for re-election in 1936. His opponents had taken to using red-baiting tactics against him, some even comparing him to Lenin. Ladies and gentlemen: ... Tonight you and I join forces for the 1936 campaign. The task on our part is twofold: First, as simple patriotism requires, to separate the false from the real issues; and, secondly, with facts and without rancor, to clarify the real problems for the American public. There will be—there are—many false issues. In that respect, this will be no different from other campaigns. Partisans, not willing to face realities, will drag out red herrings as they have always done—to divert attention from the trail of their own weaknesses. This practice is as old as our democracy. Avoiding the facts—fearful of the truth—a malicious opposition charged that George Washington planned to make himself king under a British form of government; that

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Thomas Jefferson planned to set up a guillotine under a French Revolutionary form of government; that Andrew Jackson soaked the rich of the Eastern seaboard and planned to surrender American democracy to the dictatorship of a frontier mob. They called Abraham Lincoln a Roman Emperor; Theodore Roosevelt a Destroyer; Woodrow Wilson a selfconstituted Messiah. In this campaign another herring turns up. In former years it has been British and French—and a variety of other things. This year it is Russian. Desperate in mood, angry at failure, cunning in purpose, individuals and groups are seeking to make Communism an issue in an election where Communism is not a controversy between the two major parties. Here and now, once and for all, let us bury that red herring, and destroy that false issue. You are familiar with my background; you know my heritage; and you are familiar, especially in the State of New York, with my public service extending back over a quarter of a century. For nearly four years I have been President of the United States. A long record has been written. In that record, both in this State and in the national capital, you will find a simple, clear and consistent adherence not only to the letter, but to the spirit of the American form of government. To that record, my future and the future of my Administration will conform. I have not sought, I do not seek, I repudiate the support of any advocate of Communism or of any other alien “ism” which would by fair means or foul change our American democracy. That is my position. It always has been my position. It always will be my position. There is no difference between the major parties as to what they think about Communism. But there is a very great difference between the two parties in what they do about Communism. I must tell you why. Communism is a manifestation of the social unrest which always comes with widespread economic maladjustment. We in the Democratic party have not been content merely to denounce this menace. We have been realistic enough to face it. We have been intelligent enough to do something about it. And the world has seen the results of what we have done. ... Why did that crisis of 1929 to 1933 pass without disaster? The answer is found in the record of what we did. Early in the campaign of 1932 I said: “To meet by reaction that danger of radicalism is to invite disaster. Reaction is no barrier to the radical, it is a challenge, a provocation. The way to meet that danger is to offer a workable program of reconstruction, and the party to offer it is the party with clean hands.” We met the emergency with emergency action. But far more important

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than that, we went to the roots of the problem, and attacked the cause of the crisis. We were against revolution. Therefore, we waged war against those conditions which make revolutions—against the inequalities and resentments which breed them. In America in 1933 the people did not attempt to remedy wrongs by overthrowing their institutions. Americans were made to realize that wrongs could and would be set right within their institutions. We proved that democracy can work. I have said to you that there is a very great difference between the two parties in what they do about Communism. Conditions congenial to Communism were being bred and fostered throughout this Nation up to the very day of March 4, 1933. Hunger was breeding it, loss of homes and farms was breeding it, closing banks were breeding it, a ruinous price level was breeding it. Discontent and fear were spreading through the land. The previous national Administration, bewildered, did nothing. And the simple causes of our unpreparedness were two: First, a weak leadership, and, secondly, an inability to see causes, to understand the reasons for social unrest—the tragic plight of 90 percent of the men, women and children who made up the population of the United States. It has been well said that “The most dreadful failure of which any form of government can be guilty is simply to lose touch with reality, because out of this failure all imaginable forms of evil grow. Every empire that has crashed has come down primarily because its rulers did not know what was going on in the world and were incapable of learning.” ... Wise and prudent men—intelligent conservatives—have long known that in a changing world worthy institutions can be conserved only by adjusting them to the changing time. In the words of the great essayist, “The voice of great events is proclaiming to us. Reform if you would preserve.” I am that kind of conservative because I am that kind of liberal. Source: Franklin D. Roosevelt, “Address at the Democratic State Convention, Syracuse, N.Y.,” September 29, 1936. Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project. www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=15142.

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DOCUMENT 3

A Texas Congressman Speaks on the Sit Down Strikes and Organized Labor aury Maverick was a liberal, ardently pro-New Deal congressman from Texas. Here he speaks about his observations of the “sit down” strikes in the automobile industry and repudiates the assertions that they were communist-controlled.

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UNITED AUTO WORKERS HOLD CONVENTION IN DETROIT Mr. Speaker, about 10 days ago I visited Detroit and addressed the United Auto Workers of America, which was Saturday, June 5, 1937. This was one of the most interesting trips I have ever made, and which I shall describe before I include a copy of my address. Arriving in Detroit, I found a thousand automobile workers in General Motors plants from all over the country were meeting to consider their agreement with General Motors and to appoint a committee to negotiate for them. It was like any national convention, although it represented only one single union of one automobile corporation. Think of it! This is a whale of a big union. They have 350,000 members at present, and more are joining daily. There was a great crowd in a hall downtown, and I walked among the men, having to push my way through at one point. I thought that I was bumping my way through a hall crowded with granite pillars, the men were so hard and strong. Before I arrived at the platform, from the number of southerners who spoke to me, it seemed as if half of them were from the South. Since then, upon investigation, I find that probably 30 or 40 percent of them are actually from the South. I stayed around Detroit for a couple of days and had the pleasure of meeting a great many of the automobile workers. If there ever was an authentic American movement it is this organization. As for any “foreign” ideas of any kind these men have none whatever. Of course, I presume that there may have been a Communist here and there, but not any more Communists than you would find anywhere else. There are all kinds of men in the movement. But, on the whole, they were the finest looking bunch of men that I have ever seen in the United States of America.

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I have seen other organizations where men have been starved down; others where the people were erratic, some who were crackpots, some that were neurotic. But these were all strapping, fine, clean, decent young American men, most of them between 21 and 35 years of age. ... This is a major sweep—this movement of the United Automobile Workers and the C.I.O.—it is a major move of the citizens of the United States of America. It is in the cards! We hear a lot of propaganda against organization, but whenever you hear it just realize where it comes from. Sensible Americans will not be moved by this misleading propaganda. People who try to organize are called all kinds of names—radicals, Communists—and are said to be un-American. Let me tell you, it always makes me sick when somebody says that because a man wants to get a decent living for his wife and children, “Oh, he is a Communist.” Well, I want to know, since when came the time that an American couldn’t stand up on his hind legs and fight like hell for his rights? [Applause.] Unionism, my friends, is good Americanism and true democracy. Let us review some labor and business history of the past year and a half. Who was it that defied the Government of the United States of America? Well, when Congress—the Congress you elected—enacted the Wagner law, and when the President—the President you elected [applause]—signed the law, 57 of these big, big Liberty League lawyers [boos] got together, representing the great corporations. And what did they do? They told the big corporations that the law was unconstitutional and void and to violate it. Yes; they told them to violate the Wagner law, the law of the land, the law of the United States of America—for it was only a labor law! I ask you, did any lawyers of organized labor order that any law be destroyed and broken? Have they told unions to violate the law? No! There hasn’t been anything like that. Now, let’s follow what happened to the Wagner Labor Act. Those 57 lawyers, the biggest ones in America—they claim for themselves—had “declared”, in their arrogance, the law to be unconstitutional, and said that it should be violated. In the meantime, the President of the United States suggested that the judiciary be reformed. What happens? Along comes the Supreme Court of the United States and says that the law is constitutional and that the big corporations must obey it! These 57 big corporation lawyers “held it unconstitutional” in advance, defied the law of the land, and conspired to break these laws.

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WORKERS HAVE AS MUCH BRAINS, AND BETTER LEADERSHIP Listen to this: You people have your rights. You are free-born Americans, and if you have any inferiority complex get rid of it. You have just as much brains, you have just as much sense, and you have better leadership than the industrialists of this country. [Applause.] Sometimes you do not believe this. But the “upper crusters” always try to make the people believe that they’re dumb and are being betrayed by their own leaders; and when I say that you have the brains and you have better leadership you know I am telling you the truth. Source: Extension of Remarks of Hon. Maury Maverick of Texas in the House of Representatives, Thursday, June 17, 1937, Congressional Record Seventy-Fifth Congress, First Session.

DOCUMENT 4

J. Edgar Hoover, “Speech Before the House Committee of Un-American Activities” (March 26, 1947) n this speech to HUAC conservative J. Edgar Hoover, widely regarded at the time as America’s foremost authority on the Communist threat, shows, as does McCarthy’s Wheeling speech, the centrality of religion in 1950s anticommunism as he wove together the generally acknowledged danger of subversion with a slightly more subtle attack on liberals and unions.

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The Communist Party. My feelings concerning the Communist Party of the United States are well known. I have not hesitated over the years to express my concern or apprehension. As a consequence, its professional smear brigades have conducted a relentless assault against the FBI. You

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who have been members of this committee also know the fury with which the party, its sympathizers and fellow travelers can launch such an assault. I do not mind such attacks. What has been disillusioning is the manner in which they have been able to enlist support often from apparently wellmeaning but thoroughly duped persons. ... As Americans, our most effective defense is a workable democracy that guarantees and preserves our cherished freedoms. I would have no fears if more Americans possessed the zeal, the fervor, the persistence, and the industry to learn about this menace of red fascism. I do fear for the liberal and progressive who has been hoodwinked and duped into joining hands with the communists. I confess to a real apprehension so long as communists are able to ensure ministers of the gospel to promote their evil work and espouse a cause that is alien to the religion of Christ and Judaism. I do fear so long as school boards and parents tolerate conditions whereby communists and fellow travelers, under the guise of academic freedom, can teach our youth a way of life that will eventually destroy the sanctity of the home, that undermines faith in God, that causes them to scorn respect for constituted authority and sabotage our revered Constitution. I do fear so long as American labor groups are infiltrated, dominated or saturated with the virus of communism. I do fear the palliation and weasel-worded gesture against communism indulged in by some of our labor leaders who should know better but who have become pawns in the hands of sinister but astute manipulations for the communist cause. I fear for ignorance on the part of our people who may take the poisonous pills of communist propaganda. I am deeply concerned whenever I think of the words of an old-time communist. Disillusioned, disgusted and frightened he came to us with his story and concluded, ‘God help America or any other country if the Communist Party ever gets strong enough to control labor and politics. God help us all!’ The communists have been, still are, and always will be a menace to freedom, to democratic ideals, to the worship of God, and to America’s way of life. I feel that once public opinion is thoroughly aroused as it is today, the fight against communism is well on its way. Victory will be assured once communists are identified and exposed because the public will take the first step of quarantining them so they can do no harm. Communism, in reality, is not a political party. It is a way of life–an evil and malignant way of life. It reveals a condition akin to disease that spreads like an epidemic; and like an epidemic, a quarantine is necessary to keep it from infecting the nation.

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Source: House Committee on Un-American Activities, Investigation of Un-American Propaganda Activities in the United States, Testimony of J. Edgar Hoover, Director Federal Bureau of Investigations, 80th Cong., 1st sess., March 26, 1947. In H.R. 1884 and H.R. 2122, Bills to Curb or Outlaw the Communist Party of the United States, Part 2, pp. 33–50.

DOCUMENT 5

The Nixon-Mundt Bill R#5852, engineered by Representative Karl Mundt (SD) and thenRepresentative Richard M. Nixon (CA), was passed by the House on May 21, 1948 by 319 to 58. It denied passports to Communist Party members, required that members of the Party register with the Attorney General and that federal employees could not participate in the Communist Party and could not “knowingly hire” any Communist Party members. It never passed the Senate but its provisions were eventually incorporated into Senator Pat McCarran’s (NV) Internal Security Act of 1950. The opening paragraphs of the proposed law outline the red scare anticommunist logic for legal restriction of Communists.

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H. R. 5852, AN ACT TO PROTECT THE UNITED STATES AGAINST UN-AMERICAN AND SUBVERSIVE ACTIVITIES, MAY 27, 28, 29, AND 31, 1948 NECESSITY FOR LEGISLATION Sec. 2. As a result of evidence adduced before various committees of the Senate and House of Representatives, Congress hereby finds that — (1) The system of government known as totalitarian dictatorship is characterized by the existence of a single political party, organized on a dictatorial basis, and by an identity between such party and its policies and the government and governmental policies of the country in which it exists, such identity being so close that the party and the government itself are for all practical purposes indistinguishable.

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(2) The establishment of a totalitarian dictatorship in any country results in the ruthless suppression of all opposition to the party in power, the complete subordination of the rights of individuals to the state, the denial of fundamental rights and liberties which are characteristic of a representative form of government, such as freedom of speech, of the press, of assembly, and of religious worship, and results in the maintenance of control over the people through fear, terrorism, and brutality. (3) There exists a world communist movement which, in its origins, its development, and its present practice, is a world-wide revolutionary political movement whose purpose it is, by treachery, deceit, infiltration into other groups (governmental and otherwise), espionage, sabotage, terrorism, and any other means deemed necessary to establish a communist totalitarian dictatorship in all the countries of the world through the medium of a single world-wide communist political organization. (4) The direction and control of the world communist movement is vested in and exercised by the communist dictatorship of a foreign country. (5) The communist dictatorship of such foreign country, in exercising such direction and control and in furthering the purposes of the world communist movement, establishes or causes the establishment of, and utilizes, in various countries, political organizations which are acknowledged by such communist dictatorship as being constituent elements of the world communist movement; and such political organizations are not free and independent organizations, but are mere sections of a single world-wide communist organization and are controlled, directed, and subject to the discipline of the communist dictatorship of such foreign country. (6) The political organizations so established and utilized in various countries, acting under such control, direction, and discipline, endeavor to carry out the objectives of the world communist movement by bringing about the overthrow of existing governments and setting up communist totalitarian dictatorships which will be subservient to the most powerful existing communist totalitarian dictatorship. (7) In carrying on the activities referred to in paragraph (6), such political organizations in various countries are organized on a secret, conspiratorial basis and operate to a substantial extent through organizations, commonly known as “communist fronts,” which in most instances are created and maintained, or used, in such manner as to conceal the facts as to their true character and purposes and their membership. One result of this method of operation is that such political organizations are able to obtain financial and other support from persons who would not extend

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such support if they knew the true purposes of, and the actual nature of the control and influence exerted upon, such “communist fronts.” (8) Due to the nature and scope of the world communist movement, with the existence of affiliated constituent elements working toward common objectives in various countries of the world, travel of members, representatives, and agents from country to country is essential for purposes of communication and for the carrying on of activities to further the purposes of the movement. (9) In the United States those individuals who knowingly and willfully participate in the world communist movement, when they so participate, in effect repudiate their allegiance to the United States and in effect transfer their allegiance to the foreign country in which is vested the direction and control of the world communist movement; and, in countries other than the United States, those individuals who knowingly and willfully participate in such communist movement similarly repudiate their allegiance to the countries of which they are nationals in favor of such foreign communist country. (10) In pursuance of communism’s stated objectives, the most powerful existing communist dictatorship has, by the traditional communist methods referred to above, and in accordance with carefully conceived plans, already caused the establishment in numerous foreign countries, against the will of the people of those countries, of ruthless communist totalitarian dictatorships, and threatens to establish similar dictatorships in still other countries. (11) The recent successes of communist methods in other countries and the nature and control of the world communist movement itself present a clear and present danger to the security of the United States and to the existence of free American institutions and make it necessary that Congress enact appropriate legislation recognizing the existence of such world-wide conspiracy and designed to prevent it from accomplishing its purpose in the United States. Source: Control of Subversive Activities, Hearings before the Committee on the Judiciary, United States Senate, 80th Congress, Second Session on H.R. 5852, An Act to Protect the United States against Un-American and Subversive Activities, May 27, 28, 29 and 31, 1948, United States Government Printing Office, Washington, DC, 1948.

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DOCUMENT 6

“I’m No Communist” by Humphrey Bogart ovie star Humphrey Bogart was a member of the Committee for the First Amendment, a group formed in September 1947 by non-communist New Deal liberal Democratic actors in support of the Hollywood Ten during the hearings of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). On October 27, 1947, members of the group flew to Washington, DC to protest HUAC hearings. However, when it became clear that the members of the Hollywood Ten actually were Communists and that his opposition to HUAC was putting his own career in jeopardy, Bogart wrote this article in a successful attempt to put distance between himself and the Ten.

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As the guy said to the warden, just before he was hanged: “This will teach me a lesson I’ll never forget.” No, sir, I’ll never forget the lesson that was taught to me in the year 1947, at Washington D.C. When I got back to Hollywood, some friends sent me a mounted fish and underneath it was written, “If I hadn’t opened my big mouth, I wouldn’t be here.” The New York Times, the Herald Tribune and other reputable publications editorially had questioned the House Committee on UnAmerican Activities, warning that it was infringing on free speech. When a group of us Hollywood actors and actresses said the same thing, the roof fell in on us. In some fashion, I took the brunt of the attack. Suddenly, the plane that had flown us East became “Bogart’s plane,” carrying “Bogart’s group.” For once, top billing became embarrassing. And the names that were called! Bogart, the capitalist, who always had loved his swimming pool, his fine home and all the other Hollywood luxuries, overnight had become Bogart the Communist! Now there have been instances of miscasting, but this was the silliest. I refused to take it seriously, figuring that nobody else would take it seriously. The public, I figured, knew me and had known me for years. Sure, I had campaigned for FDR, but that had been the extent of my participation in politics. The public, I figured, must be aware of that and must be aware that not only was I completely American, but sincerely grateful for what the American system had allowed me to achieve.

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It was in that comfortable frame of mind that I reached New York City. I first learned how wrong I was in my reasoning through a newspaper pal of mine, Ed Sullivan. He and I have been friends for close to twenty years and when we met, at Madison Square Garden during a big charity show, he called me aside and bawled the life out of me. “Stop it, Ed,” I told him. “Supposed I have lost a few Republicans—likely as not, I’ve picked up a few Democrats.” Sullivan looked at me as if I had two heads. “Look, ‘Bogie’,” he said, “this is not a question of alienating Republicans or Democrats – this is a question of alienating the Americans. I know you’re okay. So do your close friends. But the public is beginning to think you’re a Red! Get that through your skull, ‘Bogie’.” Me a Red! That was the first inkling I had of what was happening. Impossible though it was to comprehend that anyone could think of me as a Communist, here was an old friend telling me just that. If it had begun and ended there, okay. But it didn’t. Letters began to arrive. There were local newspaper stories and word of mouth spreading rumors across the country. Something had to be done quickly. But what? I was in the position of the witness who suddenly is asked, “Have you stopped beating your wife?” If he answers “Yes” or “No” he is a dead pigeon. Let me set it down here, that in this crisis, the newspapermen and the radio commentators of the country were standouts. A few of them, polishing apples for the managing editors, acted like imbeciles, but the bulk of them went to my defense. My first statement turned the tide. It read: “I’m about as much in favor of communism as J. Edgar Hoover. I despise Communism and I believe in our own American brand of democracy. Our planeload of Hollywood performers who flew to Washington came East to fight against what we considered censorship of the movies. The ten men, cited for contempt by the House of UnAmerican Activities Committee were not defended by us. We were there solely in the interests of freedom of speech, freedom of the screen and protection of the Bill of Rights. We were not there to defend Communism in Hollywood or Communism in America. None of us in that plane was anything but an American citizen concerned with a possible threat to his democratic liberties.” We may not have been very smart in the way we did things, may have been dopes in people’s eyes, but we were American dopes! Actors and actresses always go overboard about things. Perhaps that’s why we play benefit shows night after night, why we contribute money so freely to causes we believe just and good, why we volunteer out time and services to help sell bonds or just sell America to the rest of the world. So why is

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it that as loyal American citizens and taxpayers, we shouldn’t raise out voices in protest at something we believe to be wrong? It was our belief, and it still is, that the House Committee easily could have identified the very small percentage of communists in Hollywood through the records of the FBI. There was no necessity for the vaudeville show – the Klieg lights, newsreels, coast to coast radio broadcasts – and the dirtying of many good names with no right to speak in their own defense. It seems to me that the thing to be kept in mind is this: On the left, in America, we have the Communists, not many, but tightly organized. On the right, we have the bulk of our population, who believe with me, that cures can be effected within the framework of our democracy. In the middle, however, there are a great many Americans, liberal in thought, who are stoned by the unthinking, who don’t realize that these liberalminded folks are pure Americans. Let’s realize that these liberals are devoted to our democracy. ... In the final analysis, this House Committee probe has had one salutary effect. It cleared the air by indicating what a minute number of Commies there really are in the film industry. Though headlines may have screamed of the Red menace in movies, all the wind and fury actually proved that there’s been no Communism injected on American movie screens. Source: Photoplay Magazine, May, 1948, p. 53. Reprinted with permission of The Estate of Humphrey Bogart, Bogart LLC.

DOCUMENT 7

Harry Truman: The Red Scare Threat Defined

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he preamble to the American Legion’s constitution pledges to “foster and perpetuate a one hundred percent Americanism.” In this speech—which was broadcast nationwide—to the conservative Legion Truman spoke of protecting the freedoms of all Americans as constituting “true Americanism.” Then he went on to warn of the dangers posed to freedom by red scare anticommunists.

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[T]rue Americanism is under terrible attack today. . . . It is being undermined by some people in this country who are loudly proclaiming that they are its chief defenders. These people claim to be against communism. But they are chipping away at our basic freedoms just as insidiously and far more effectively than the Communists have ever been able to do. These people have attacked our basic principle of fair play that underlies our Constitution. They are trying to create fear and suspicion among us by the use of slander, unproved accusations, and just plain lies. They are filling the air with the most irresponsible kinds of accusations against other people. They are trying to get us to believe that our Government is riddled with communism and corruption—when the fact is that we have the finest and the most loyal body of civil servants in the whole world. These slander mongers are trying to get us so hysterical that no one will stand up to them for fear of being called a Communist. ... In a dictatorship everybody lives in fear and terror of being denounced and slandered. Nobody dares stand up for his rights. We must never let such a condition come to pass in this great country of ours. Yet this is exactly what the scaremongers and the hate mongers are trying to bring about. Character assassination is their stock in trade. Guilt by association is their motto. They have created such a wave of fear and uncertainty that their attacks upon our liberties go almost unchallenged. Many people are growing frightened—and frightened people don’t protest. Stop and think. Stop and think where this is leading us. The growing practice of character assassination is already curbing free speech and it is threatening all our other freedoms. I daresay there are people here today who have reached the point where they are afraid to explore a new idea. How many of you are afraid to come right out in public and say what you think about a controversial issue? How many of you feel that you must “play it safe” in all things—and on all occasions? I hope there are not many, but from all that I have seen and heard, I am afraid of what your answers might be. For I know you have no way of telling when some unfounded accusation may be hurled at you, perhaps straight from the Halls of Congress. Some of you have friends or neighbors who have been singled out for the pitiless publicity that follows accusations of this kind—accusations that are made without any regard for the actual guilt or innocence of the victim. That is not fair play. That is not Americanism. It is not the American way to slur the loyalty and besmirch the character of the innocent and

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the guilty alike. We have always considered it just as important to protect the innocent as it is to punish the guilty. We want to protect the country against disloyalty—of course we do. We have been punishing people for disloyal acts, and we are going to keep on punishing the guilty whenever we have a case against them. But we don’t want to destroy our whole system of justice in the process. We don’t want to injure innocent people. And yet the scurrilous work of the scandalmongers gravely threatens the whole idea of protection for the innocent in our country today. Perhaps the Americans who live outside of Washington are less aware of this than you and I. If that is so, I want to warn them all. Slander, lies, character assassination—these things are a threat to every single citizen everywhere in this country. And when even one American—who has done nothing wrong—is forced by fear to shut his mind and close his mouth, then all Americans are in peril. It is the job of all of us—of every American who loves his country and his freedom—to rise up and put a stop to this terrible business. This is one of the greatest challenges we face today. We have got to make a fight for a real 100 percent Americanism. You Legionnaires, living up to your constitution as I know you want to do, can help lead the way. You can set an example of fair play. You can raise your voices against hysteria. You can expose the rotten motives of those people who are trying to divide us and confuse us and tear up the Bill of Rights. No organization ever had the opportunity to do a greater service for America. No organization was ever better suited or better equipped to do the job. Source: Harry S. Truman: “Address at the Dedication of the New Washington Headquarters of the American Legion,” August 14, 1951. Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project. www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=13878.

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DOCUMENT 8

Speech of Joseph McCarthy, Wheeling, West Virginia, February 9, 1950

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his is an excerpt from the speech that launched McCarthy’s career as a “red hunter.”

The great difference between our western Christian world and the atheistic Communist world is not political, gentlemen, it is moral. For instance, the Marxian idea of confiscating the land and factories and running the entire economy as a single enterprise is momentous. Likewise, Lenin’s invention of the one-party police state as a way to make Marx’s idea work is hardly less momentous. Stalin’s resolute putting across of these two ideas, of course, did much to divide the world. With only these differences, however, the east and the west could most certainly still live in peace. The real, basic difference, however, lies in the religion of immoralism . . . invented by Marx, preached feverishly by Lenin, and carried to unimaginable extremes by Stalin. This religion of immoralism, if the Red half of the world triumphs—and well it may, gentlemen—this religion of immoralism will more deeply wound and damage mankind than any conceivable economic or political system. Karl Marx dismissed God as a hoax, and Lenin and Stalin have added in clear-cut, unmistakable language their resolve that no nation, no people who believe in a god, can exist side by side with their communistic state. Karl Marx, for example, expelled people from his Communist Party for mentioning such things as love, justice, humanity or morality. He called this “soulful ravings” and “sloppy sentimentality.” ... Today we are engaged in a final, all-out battle between communistic atheism and Christianity. The modern champions of communism have selected this as the time, and ladies and gentlemen, the chips are down— they are truly down. Six years ago, . . . there was within the Soviet orbit, 180,000,000 people. Lined up on the antitotalitarian side there were in the world at

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that time, roughly 1,625,000,000 people. Today, only six years later, there are 800,000,000 people under the absolute domination of Soviet Russia— an increase of over 400 percent. On our side, the figure has shrunk to around 500,000,000. In other words, in less than six years, the odds have changed from 9 to 1 in our favor to 8 to 5 against us. This indicates the swiftness of the tempo of Communist victories and American defeats in the cold war. As one of our outstanding historical figures once said, “When a great democracy is destroyed, it will not be from enemies from without, but rather because of enemies from within.” ... The reason why we find ourselves in a position of impotency is not because our only powerful potential enemy has sent men to invade our shores . . . but rather because of the traitorous actions of those who have been treated so well by this Nation. It has not been the less fortunate, or members of minority groups who have been traitorous to this Nation, but rather those who have had all the benefits that the wealthiest Nation on earth has had to offer . . .the finest homes, the finest college education and the finest jobs in government we can give. This is glaringly true in the State Department. There the bright young men who are born with silver spoons in their mouths are the ones who have been most traitorous. ... I have here in my hand a list of 205—a list of names that were made known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping policy in that State Department. One thing to remember in discussing the Communists in our Government is that we are not dealing with spies who get 30 pieces of silver to steal the blueprints of a new weapon. We are dealing with a far more sinister type of activity because it permits the enemy to guide and shape our policy. As you know, very recently the Secretary of State proclaimed his loyalty to a man guilty of what has always been considered as the most abominable of all crimes—being a traitor to the people who gave him a position of great trust—high treason. Source: U.S. Senate, “State Department Loyalty Investigation Committee on Foreign Relations,” Congressional Record of the Senate, 81st Congress, 2nd Session, February 20, 1950, pp. 1954–1957.

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DOCUMENT 9

Roy Cohn’s Descent on the Libraries of Europe

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areer Diplomat Hans N. Tuch describes his memories of encountering Roy Cohn and David Schine during their European trip.

To the Editor: A minor error in your Aug. 3 obituary of Roy Cohn prompts me to write and to add my recollection of the notorious visit to Europe by the “junketeering gumshoes”—Roy Cohn and G. David Schine—in April 1953. First the correction: The phrase “junketeering gumshoes” was not, as reported, coined by Peter Kaghan but by Theodore (Ted) Kagan, at the time deputy public affairs officer at the U.S. High Commission in Bonn and, in that capacity, one of my superiors. I was the America House (U.S. Cultural Center) director in Frankfurt and, because of geography, became the initial target of the Cohn-Schine anti-Communist crusade in Europe. I was informed that the Congressional investigators would be arriving at the Frankfurt airport and would probably want to visit the America House with its extensive library of American books and periodicals. I was the only American official at the America House and as a relatively junior officer was eager to be supported by a more senior Foreign Service officer in what I anticipated could become an ordeal. Both my consul general and his deputy were conveniently off on an Easter weekend vacation. Fortunately, a friend, Henry Dunlap, who was in charge of all the America Houses in Germany, called from Bonn and offered to come to Frankfurt to be at my side, suggesting that what I needed was a witness to everything that would be said. I gladly accepted. Mr. Cohn and Mr. Schine arrived shortly after lunch, followed by a gaggle of reporters, creating a commotion in the normally subdued reading-room atmosphere of the cultural center. Mr. Cohn immediately asked where I had hidden the Communist authors in the library. I replied that, to the best of my knowledge, there were no Communist authors in the library. He then asked where I kept the Dashiell Hammett books. I led him to the shelf where “The Maltese Falcon” and “The Thin Man” [both non-political detective novels—JM] were. He turned to the reporters and announced triumphantly that

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this was proof that there were indeed Communists represented in the American library. We proceeded to the periodicals section, and Mr. Cohn asked where the anti-Communist magazines were. I pointed out those that I considered anti-Communist, showing him the Jesuit periodical America, Business Week and others, including Time and Newsweek. He dismissed Time [generally viewed as a conservative publication—JM] by saying that the magazine was a swear word to him. He asked, did we have the American Legion Monthly? When I said no, he countered that we obviously didn’t have any anti-Communist magazines. Just before departing—the visit lasted over half an hour—Mr. Cohn and Mr. Schine were stopped by a reporter who read them the reference to “junketeering gumshoes,” which had just come over the wires. Both appeared angry and wanted to know who had made the statement. Finally, a young United Press reporter, Marshall Loeb, asked Mr. Cohn, “Sir, when are you going to burn the books here?” Mr. Cohn replied that was not his purpose in coming to Europe. Mr. Loeb persisted, saying that his office had sent him to watch the two investigators burn books, “you know, just like the Nazis did in 1933.” Mr. Cohn got really angry at this and berated the reporter. Mr. Loeb calmly replied: “Mr. Cohn, if you aren’t going to burn any books here, you don’t interest me,” and walked away. Source: Hans Tuch, New York Times’ August 17, 1986. Reprinted with permission of Hans Tuch.

DOCUMENT 10

McCarthy vs. General Zwicker

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his is the February 18, 1954 interchange between McCarthy (referred to below as “The Chairman”) and Brigadier General Ralph Wise Zwicker that many historians believe finally motivated Eisenhower (under whom Zwicker had served) to move albeit surreptitiously, against McCarthy, sealing the senator’s fate.

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The CHAIRMAN. Do you think, General, that anyone who is responsible for giving an honorable discharge to a man who has been named under oath as a member of the Communist conspiracy should himself be removed from the military? General ZWICKER. You are speaking of generalities now, and not on specifics—is that right, sir, not mentioning about any one particular person? The CHAIRMAN. That is right. General ZWICKER. I have no brief for that kind of person, and if there exists or has existed something in the system that permits that, I say that that is wrong. The CHAIRMAN. I am not talking about the system. I am asking you this question, General, a very simple question: Let us assume that John Jones, who is a major in the United States Army General ZWICKER. A what, sir? The CHAIRMAN. Let us assume that John Jones is a major in the United States Army. Let us assume that there is sworn testimony to the effect that he is part of the Communist conspiracy, has attended Communist leadership schools. Let us assume that Maj. John Jones is under oath before a committee and says, “I cannot tell you the truth about these charges because, if I did, I fear that might tend to incriminate me.” Then let us say that General Smith was responsible for this man receiving an honorable discharge, knowing these facts. Do you think that General Smith should be removed from the military, or do you think he should be kept on in it? General ZWICKER. He should be by all means kept if he were acting under competent orders to separate that man. The CHAIRMAN. Let us say he is the man who signed the orders. Let us say General Smith is the man who originated the order. General ZWICKER. Originated the order directing his separation? The CHAIRMAN. Directing his honorable discharge. General ZWICKER. Well, that is pretty hypothetical. The CHAIRMAN. It is pretty real, General. General ZWICKER. Sir, on one point, yes. I mean, on an individual, yes. But you know that there are thousands and thousands of people being separated daily from our Army. The CHAIRMAN. General, you understand my question General ZWICKER. Maybe not. The CHAIRMAN. And you are going to answer it. General ZWICKER. Repeat it. The CHAIRMAN. The reporter will repeat it. (The question referred to was read by the reporter.)

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General ZWICKER. That is not a question for me to decide, Senator. The CHAIRMAN. You are ordered to answer it, General. You are an employee of the people. General ZWICKER. Yes, sir. The CHAIRMAN. You have a rather important job. I want to know how you feel about getting rid of Communists. General ZWICKER. I am all for it. The CHAIRMAN. All right. You will answer that question, unless you take the fifth amendment. I do not care how long we stay here, you are going to answer it. General ZWICKER. Do you mean how I feel toward Communists? The CHAIRMAN. I mean exactly what I asked you. General; nothing else. And anyone with the brains of a 5-year-old child can understand that question. The reporter will read it to you as often as you need to hear it so that you can answer it, and then you will answer it. General ZWICKER. Start it over, please. (The question was reread by the reporter.) General ZWICKER. I do not think he should be removed from the military. The CHAIRMAN. Then, General, you should be removed from any command. Any man who has been given the honor of being promoted to general and who says, “I will protect another general who protected Communists,” is not fit to wear that uniform, General. I think it is a tremendous disgrace to the Army to have this sort of thing given to the public. I intend to give it to them. I have a duty to do that. I intend to repeat to the press exactly what you said. So you know that. You will be back here, General. Source: Hearing before the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the Committee on Government Operations, United States Senate, Eighty-Third Congress, First Session, September 28, 1953, pp. 152–153.

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DOCUMENT 11

Students and Professors on Communist Teachers in the Classroom tudent newspapers often featured informal “man-in-the-street” polls; this is one from the University of Massachusetts in 1949. Note that the students tend to be less worried about Communist teachers than the professors. Also note that many who answered did not want their names printed. Also included are some professors’ responses to a question about an investigation conducted by Louis Wyman, attorney-general for the state of New Hampshire, into possible Communist activities at the University of New Hampshire.

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University of Massachusetts: Daily Collegian Poll Asks for Opinions About Red Teachers in U.S. Colleges: Should Communist Party Members be allowed to Teach in American Colleges? This question, asked recently in a Collegian poll, brought various reactions and answers from the students and faculty members. Many were willing to give their answers but did not wish their names mentioned. Below are some of those people who are willing to be quoted: Dr. T. C. Caldwell, Professor of History: They should not be allowed to teach because a party member is pledged to a policy and a point of view which would interfere with objective scholarship. Academic freedom and a party member are not reconcilable. Lois Abrams, ’49: Yes, the student should be exposed to all views and from there on let him draw his own conclusions. Mr. Robert Lane, Instructor in English: No—If they are honest Communists it must be difficult for them to be honest teachers. “Red” Grant, ’50: Yes—any person who holds an honest and confirmed opinion should have in opportunity to express it, but there must be a person capable of giving the other side of the question.

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Dr. H. W. Cary, Professor of History: No—they are acting as agents of a foreign government. Barb Curran, ’50: Yes—people in college should be mature enough to be able to weigh the facts and decide for themselves. Larry Ruttman, ’52: Yes and no—If Communists were not allowed to teach, some might argue that all such action would be an infringement upon the right of free speech, but it is also clearly evident that the government is correct in protecting itself against revolutionary movements when a clear and present danger manifests itself. Mr. Edward Driver, Instructor in Sociology: They should not be allowed to teach. A method should be developed of adequately determining whether or not there are Communists, aside from those who profess to be. Ed Neville, ’49: Yes—maybe they have got something and the students should hear it and compare it with non-Communistic ideas and make up their own mind. Diana Gallotta, ’50: Yes and no—I believe in academic freedom. We must remember, however, that the Communistic program aims at world communism, at the destruction of national governments, and the organization of an international order on a communistic basis. L. F. Gardner, ’49: No—A government should not allow a party to exist which believes in the overthrow of that government. Source: University of Massachusetts: Daily Collegian, April 7, 1949, pp. 1 and 2. * * * University of Massachusetts: Daily Collegian Laura Stoskin Students Voice Views on Question of Commies Teaching in US Schools A poll taken of UM students on the controversial question “Should Communists Be Allowed To Teach in American Schools?” brought the following answers. Eliot H. Cohen ’52: I believe that Communists should be allowed to teach because it would give to the student body a broader viewpoint. Renie Frank ’51: I don’t think Communists should be allowed to teach in the U.S., for a true Communist cannot help but voice the opinions of

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the Party line, and therefore his students won’t have the ability to criticize and appreciate all forms of government. Lorraine Selmer ’51: Yes, you have to know something about every political faction, so that you yourself can decide which is the road for you to follow. Bettina Hollis ’53: No. If the U.S. is to remain a democracy Communists must be kept from teaching in colleges, the most strategic spot to start influencing American minds. Elliot Schreider ’50: Yes. He would be teaching only what he’s qualified for, and if a person is going to be influenced by Communism he will be influenced despite the efforts on one teacher. Students should hear Norman Thomas to learn what Communism really is. Bill Lawson ’51 (Stockbridge): No. A teacher has great control over a class and has direct influence on student life. Dave Averka ’51 (Stockbridge): No. Indirectly they would influence students toward Communism. Pete Mason ’51 (Stockbridge): No. If they were teaching in American schools they would probably introduce Communistic ideas into their subject matter, and by allowing them to teach, the U.S. would actually be aiding the Russian cause. Helen Mitchell ’50: Yes, a government worthy of remaining intact, such as ours, should have citizens under it which could understand and evaluate any teachings from any party. Carol Sullivan ’52: I think Communists should be allowed to teach as long as they do not voice their political opinions. “Penny” Tickelis ’52: No, because having Communists as teachers might undermine the youth on campus, and destroy their democratic spirit. Although it might be interesting, as well as educational to have a Communist as a teacher, the college student, especially during this post war era, might easily be influenced. Hy Edelstien: Yes. Who’s afraid of the big bad wolf? Jean Small ’51: I don’t think Communists should be allowed to teach, because their principles are entirely against all that democracy stands for. Source: University of Massachusetts: Daily Collegian, October 20, 1949, p. 2.

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* * * University of New Hampshire: New Hampshire Faculty Opinions Vary on Merits of Communist Investigation By Jack Paul Asked by The New Hampshire for comments on the current investigation of “subversive activities” throughout the state of New Hampshire with particular reference to Durham, seven top members of the University staff spoke on widely diversified aspects of the matter, but raised no objections about the manner in which Attorney General Louis Wyman was conducting the inquiry. Several of the opinions diverged sharply into various channels of personal belief. In replying all seven men spoke seriously, and most of them selected their words with care. One called it an “extremely delicate issue,” and warned that a single misquoted word or phrase could change the entire “flavor” of a man’s comments. The poll included at least one representative from each of the three colleges: Liberal Arts, Technology, and Agriculture. Supplying background information for this article, Mr. Eddy, Assistant to the President and Director of University Development, emphasized the fact that the current probe included all educational institutions within the state. and did not “pin point” UNH. He had no comment on when the investigation would be held. “It is up to the Attorney General, according to his plans and procedure. Mr. Eddy added that the University “stands ready to cooperate with any legally authorized investigation. As we have said in the past, we have nothing to hide.” The poll: J. T. Holden, Prof. of Government: “The legislature of any free government is the legitimate voice of the people; and every government has the ultimate right and duty to preserve its constitutional integrity. In America, at both the state and national level, this is the basic role of the leg legislature. And so it is in New Hampshire. When, therefore, the General Court of this state finds, or even believes, that communism or the threat of communism is to be found within any government agency, it must, as the legitimate tool of the people do something about it. The choice of means is its alone. Individuals and groups may differ whether there is a threat or not, or whether the means selected are politically sound

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or not. But there can be no question, I believe, on the ultimate authority of the court to do something. If the General Court does not reflect the opinion of the citizens, the citizens have the ways and means to change the personnel in the General Court. I would say, therefore, that if we do not believe in what the General Court is doing, let us not attack the power of the General Court, because it is the basis for our free society.” G. H. Daggett, Asso. Prof. of English: “I am opposed to it. I wholly respect the General Court and the Office of the Attorney General. But as a citizen of New Hampshire and of the United State I feel that his investigation is unconstitutional both in spirit and in letter. However it is to be handled, it is apparently to be an inquisition into the political opinions and affiliations of individual citizens. Such an inquiry, it seems to me, is contrary to both the ideals and the methods of democracy. We cannot save democracy in general by destroying it in particular.” H. V. Jones Jr., Asst. Prof. of History: “Although I certainly do not wish to have any subversive person teaching in this, or in any other school, I am always fearful lest investigations of this sort harm innocent people. I hope that in this investigation no harm will be done to those faculty members whose views and ideas may be unpopular, but not subversive. In particular I hope that newspaper publicity, especially in the State, will be so conducted so as not to injure the reputation of a truly fine university.” D. C. Babcock, Prof. of Philosophy: “I have no quarrel with the investigation, and believe that co-operation with it is in order. This does not mean that I consider it necessary. But since the state of New Hampshire believes it to be in order, and as I am an employee of the State, I cannot deny their right to know where my colleagues and I stand on questions vital to society. On the other hand, I regret that the State has felt this to be necessary since, in my opinion, the frequent raising of the question does not help the professional morale of a teacher, and tends to put the emphasis in the wrong place and to obscure the primary importance of the preservation of our Western tradition of individual freedom.” H. A. Iddles, Prof. of Chemistry: “I think the plan of investigation in this state is a very desirable one; for the Attorney General should be able to keep it on a high plane. And certainly those connected with education in New Hampshire should fully co-operate in any such investigations.” F. A. Scott, Prof. of Physics: “I see no objections to investigations of that sort.” H. C. Grinnell, Dean of the College of Agriculture: “In as much as public opinion seems to support investigations of educational institutions, surely

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we should not take a negative attitude here at UNH. If I were put on the stand I would not dodge any question that was asked. I would say that any faculty member who refused to respond should be subject to considerable criticism or, possibly, eventual expulsion.” Source: University of New Hampshire: New Hampshire, October 8, 1953, p. 7. * * * University of Virginia: Cavalier Daily Editorial. Kindergarten KU KLUX KLAN. The following editorial originally appeared in the Minnesota Daily; it is reprinted here, because we feel that it is indicative of the current trend in this country towards mass conformity, McCarthyism, and away from many of the American concepts of individual liberty. It is even more significant because there is a group of students here— largely first-year men—who desire to establish a chapter of Students for America at this University. The avowed purpose of these self-appointed vigilantes is to search out and expose any leftists, Marxists, Communist, fellow-travelers, etc. among the students and faculty of the University. These first-year men are to take it upon themselves to determine who is and who is not “un-American” through their own junior-grade imitation of McCarthyism. We feel that this sort of kindergarten Ku Klux Klan is out of place at this University. “. . . Somewhere in our high schools, this year’s freshman in high school students in the classes behind them have either been misinformed, or not informed at all, about the basic concepts of our way of life. Proof of this comes in a poll Purdue University recently took of the high school age group . . . The results are startling. For instance: . . . Fifty-eight percent of the high school students polled think police are justified in giving a man the third degree to make him talk. . . . Only 45 said newspapers should be permitted to print the news freely except for military secrets. . . . Thirty-three percent said that persons who refused to testify against themselves should either be made to talk or be severely punished. . . . Twenty-five percent . . . would prohibit the right of people to assemble peaceably. . . . Twenty-six percent believe that police should be allowed to search a person or his home without a warrant.

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It’s not a healthy situation to have young people rejecting constitutional guarantees of freedom at a time when these liberties are threatened by demagogues and dictators. Freshman who hold these beliefs should examine them carefully during the next four years. We hope that during your intellectual and social development here you will come to be an ardent defender of the civil liberties some of you now disapprove . . .” Minnesota Daily, University of Minnesota Source: University of Virginia: Cavalier Daily, November 10, 1953, p. 2. * * * The University of Massachusetts: Daily Collegian Editorial by Pauline Stephan, editor The Issue: Academic Freedom With the University about to be investigated for Communist influence the issue of academic freedom should be foremost in the minds of all students. It is not a one-sided issue, nor is it one which can be easily labeled right or wrong. Today, if any person is charged with having Communist beliefs he has been seriously condemned in the public eye. Even a later vindication of the charges, or an open proof that they were false, does not erase the original stigma. As a result, the individual concerned must often face serious consequences—he is the subject of severe social pressure, he is a social outcast, he loses his position or his prestige. How Do You Feel About This Controversy? 1. Does a legislator in Washington, acting in a political atmosphere and thinking along political lines, have the moral right to make unproved accusations against academic, or any other institutions while he is fully cognizant of the implications involved? Considering the temper—and tempo—of the times, is he not ethically responsible for proof of his accusations before he publicizes them? 2. Can any individual—in our case, educator—be compelled to state his political beliefs? Can he not legitimately hold any political beliefs (other than a plot to overthrow the government) and rely on constitutional guarantee of freedom to protect him?

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3. If an individual is requested to make public his own political beliefs, can he be expected to implicate associates or even to mention them, in the light that a mere mention, in these times, will often have a serious effect? On The Other Hand: 4. College students today will be America’s leaders tomorrow. Is it not logical, then, for today’s government leaders to want to be certain that these students are not adversely influenced in their education? A professor may have great influence on his students. It is natural for a country’s leaders to want this to be a beneficial influence. 5. Remembering the thousands of his countrymen who have recently given their lives in Korea to prevent the spread of Communism, can any true American feel justified in claiming “I do not care to testify” when his beliefs are challenged—even though he is protected by the constitution? We are not suggesting that either side is right. We are merely presenting the arguments—you decide—who is more justified. Source: The University of Massachusetts: Daily Collegian, December 18, 1953, p. 2.

DOCUMENT 12

The AMA Battles Truman his is an excerpt from one of the pamphlets the San Francisco public relations firm, Whitaker and Baxter, put out on behalf of the American Medical Association to discredit President Truman’s proposed national health care plan.

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A YEAR OF DECISION The decisions and actions of the American people in 1950 will have a vital effect on the future of our Nation. Basic questions of transcending importance are at issue in Congress—and also will be at issue in the 1950 Congressional elections.

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Freedom at Stake The way the people settle those issues, through their legislators in Washington and by expression of their opinions at the ballot boxes, may determine the ultimate fate of American freedom—whether it endures as our most precious heritage, or perishes beneath the oncreeping wave of socialistic controls by expanding Government. THE KEY ISSUE The most significant of all the issues before the 1950 forum of public opinion is the Federal Security Agency’s proposal for a system of National Compulsory Health Insurance—Government-controlled medical care. This plan, which was blocked by an upsurge of public protest in 1949, is the most sweeping attempt yet made in this country toward central control of the personal lives of Americans. Politics in the Sick Room The plan would place politics at the bedside of the ill. It would open the gates for a multitude of proposals endangering basic American freedoms all along the line. HEALTH INSURANCE IS HERE TO STAY! There is no argument about the basic principles of health insurance. Almost half of the American people, on their own initiative, already have protected themselves against the financial shock of unexpected illness and accidents, through the hundreds of Voluntary Health Insurance plans available. THE ONLY QUESTION IS: How Will You Have Your Health Insurance? On a Voluntary basis—with sound medical direction? Or on a Compulsory basis—with politicians at the controls? ... Q. What is “Compulsory Health Insurance”? A. It is a multi-billion dollar program proposed by the Federal Security Administrator. In place of existing Voluntary Health Insurance plans, it would levy a new, compulsory payroll tax to support a medical system featuring Government regulation of both patients and doctors. Q. Who is for Compulsory Health Insurance? A. The Federal Security Agency The American Association of Social Workers The National Farmers Union The American Veterans Committee

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Americans for Democratic Action All who seriously believe in a Socialistic State Every left-wing organization in America Two specially organized propaganda groups—the “Committee for the Nation’s Health” and the “Physicians Forum”—whose prime concern is campaigning for Compulsory Health Insurance. Some AFL and CIO Leaders, but Labor is divided on this issue. Most rank-and-file union men and women are violently opposed to more payroll deductions, and less take-home pay. The Communist Party Some well-intentioned, but misinformed, people who have been led, by the proponents’ misuse of facts, to believe that Government control will solve all of our health problems. . . Is It Socialization? Q. Why is Compulsory Health Insurance called “socialized medicine”? A. Because the Government proposes to: Collect the tax Control the money Determine the services Set the rates Maintain the records Control not only the medical profession, but hospitals—both public and private—dentistry, nursing and allied professions. Direct both the citizen’s and the doctor’s participation in the program—through administrative lines from the Government in Washington—down through State agencies and Local committees. You May Be Next! Q. Would socialized medicine lead to socialization of other phases of American life? A. Lenin thought so. According to Lawrence Sullivan in his hook “The Case Against Socialized Medicine”, the founder of international revolutionary Communism once proclaimed socialized medicine “the keystone of the arch of the Socialist State”. Today, much of the world has launched out on that road. If the medical profession should be socialized because people need doctors, why not the milk industry? Certainly, more people need milk every day than need doctors. On the same erroneous premise, why not the corner grocery? Adequate diet is the very basis of good health!

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Why not nationalize lawyers, miners, businessmen, farmers? Germany did, Russia did. England is in the process. Q. What can Americans learn from this? A. That the greatest error in all history would be for America to start borrowing the unsuccessful systems of foreign countries which today are still functioning largely because the American system is strong enough to support them! Q. Where did Compulsory Health Insurance start? A. In Germany in 1883 under the “Iron Chancellor”, Bismarck, whose main idea was to gain political control of the workers. That Nation’s philosophy of Government control led ultimately to the complete degeneration of German medicine, and finally to the rubble heaps of a bombed-out totalitarianism. England started out in 1911 with a limited system of Compulsory Health Insurance. England today has fully socialized medicine under a Socialist Government which gradually is whittling away the traditional rights and freedoms of Englishmen. Government-controlled medicine is a common characteristic of Nations which sacrifice freedom to authority—whether Fascist, Nazi, Communist or Socialist. By any name—it is a danger signal for all Americans! ... This issue of Voluntary versus Compulsory Health Insurance involves more than doctors, patients and medicine. It represents the basic struggle— between those who would preserve fundamental American freedoms and those who would take them away. HELP STRIKE A BLOW FOR AMERICAN FREEDOM! Tell Your Congressman How You Stand Source: American Medical Association, “The Voluntary Way is the American Way,” submitted for the record in US Congress, Senate, Committee on Labor and Public Welfare, National Health Program, 1949: Hearing before the Subcommittee on Health Legislation on S. 1106, S. 1456, S. 1581 and S. 1679, pp. 811–819.

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DOCUMENT 13

Homosexuals in Government, 1950 his is a section of a speech given by Cliff Clevenger (R-OH). Filled with the contempt with which almost all heterosexuals of the era viewed gay men and women, it demonstrates the commonly held misconception that homosexuals, even if not Communists, constituted a special security risk, as well as the disdain which red scare anticommunists felt toward liberals.

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ON THE FLOOR OF THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES: Mr. Clevenger We have heard a great deal in recent weeks concerning the security risks within the Department of State and I would like to say that while I am not familiar with the charges being bandied about I think the basic issue has been somewhat obscured in the unfortunate partisanship that has developed in this inquiry that is of prime importance to every American, Republican or Democrat. The sob sisters and thumb-sucking liberals are crying for proof of disloyalty in the form of overt acts, on any security risks who are being removed from the Government rolls, but shed no tears for the lives lost as a result of the activities of the Hisses, Coplons, and the Wadleighs, all of whom would or did pass the loyalty standards with flying colors. I wish the American people would keep in mind the fact that a security risk does not have to be a member of the Communist Party or even of a Communist-front organization. It is not only conceivable but highly probable that many security risks are loyal Americans; however, there is something in their background that represents a potential possibility that they might succumb to conflicting emotions to the detriment of the national security. Perhaps they have relatives behind the iron curtain and thus would be subject to pressure. Perhaps they are addicted to an overindulgence in alcohol or maybe they are just plain garrulous. The most flagrant example is the homosexual who is subject to the most effective blackmail. It is an established fact that Russia makes a practice of keeping a list of sex perverts in enemy countries and the core of Hitler’s espionage was based on the intimidation of these unfortunate people.

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Despite this fact however, the Under Secretary of State recently testified that 91 sex perverts had been located and fired from the Department of State. For this the Department must be commended. But have they gone far enough? Newspaper accounts quote Senate testimony indicating there are 400 more in the State Department and 4,000 in Government. Where are they? Who hired them? Do we have a cell of these perverts hiding around Government? Why are they not ferreted out and dismissed? Does the Department of State have access to information in the files of the Washington Police Department? Are we to assume that the State Department has a monopoly on this problem? What are the other Departments of Government doing about this? For years we had a public prejudice against mentioning in public such loathsome diseases as gonorrhea and cancer. In effecting cures for these maladies the medical people recognized the first step was in public education. These matters were brought before the public and frankly discussed and it was not until then that progress was really made. It is time to bring this homosexual problem into the open and recognize the problem for what it is. The Commerce Department hearings are somewhat enlightening in regard to the entire security problem and I would suggest that interested Members read them in detail beginning on page 2260. Here we find that the Commerce Department has not located any homosexuals in their organization. Are we to believe that in the face of the testimony of the District of Columbia police that 75 percent of the 4,000 perverts in the District of Columbia are employed by the Government, that the Department of Commerce has none? What is wrong with this loyalty program that does not uncover these matters, and when it does, adopts an attitude of looking for proof of disloyalty in the form of overt acts rather than elements of security risk? Is it not possible for the Government to refuse employment on the grounds of lack of qualifications where risk is apparent? This is not necessarily an indictment or conviction; it is merely the exercise of caution for the common welfare. Source: Congressional Record, volume 96, part 4, 81st Congress 2nd Session, March 29–April 24, 1950, pp. 4527–4528.

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Commager, Henry Steele. “Who Is Loyal to America?” Harper’s Magazine, Vol. 195, No. 4168 (Sept., 1947), 193–199. Commager, Henry Steele. Freedom Loyalty Dissent. New York: Oxford University Press, 1954. The Commission of Inquiry, The Interchurch World Movement Report on the Steel Strike of 1919. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Howe, 1920. Davenport, Charles B. Heredity in Relation to Eugenics. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1911. Davies Jr., John Paton. China Hand: An Autobiography. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012. Davis, Morris. “Community Attitudes toward Fluoridation,” The Public Opinion Quarterly, Vol. 23, No. 4 (Winter, 1959–1960), 474–482. Dies, Martin. Martin Dies’ Story. New York: Bookmailer, 1963. Dilling, Elizabeth. The Red Network: A “Who’s Who” and Handbook of Radicalism for Patriots (Chicago: Elizabeth Dilling, 1934). https://archive.org/details/rednetwork whoswh00dillrich. Dmytryk, Edward. Odd Man Out: A Memoir of the Hollywood Ten. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1996. Faulk, John Henry. Fear on Trial. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1964. Fenzi, Jewell. “Interview of Caroline S. Service,” Foreign Affairs Oral History Collection, Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training, Arlington, VA. www.adst.org., January 10, 1987, 24. Filene, Peter G., ed. American Views of Soviet Russia, 1917–1965. Homewood, IL: The Dorsey Press, 1968. Goldman, Emma. My Disillusionment in Russia. New York: Doubleday, Page and Company, 1923. Grant, Madison. The Passing of the Great Race or The Racial Basis of European History. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1936. Gravel, Mike. “Geneva Conference: Indo China,” in The Pentagon Papers: The Defense Department History of United States Decision-Making on Vietnam. Boston: Beacon Press, 1971, 1: 573. Hall, Chadwick. “America’s Conservative Revolution,” Antioch Review, Summer, 1955, 207. Hanson, Ole. Americanism versus Bolshevism. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1920. Hart, Randle J. “The Greatest Subversive Plot in History? The American Radical Right and Anti-UNESCO Campaigning,” Sociology, Vol. 48, No. 3 (2014), 554–572. Herberg, Will. “Government by Rabble-Rousing,” New Leader, January 18, 1954, 13–16. Hook, Sidney. “Should Communists Be Permitted to Teach?” New York Times Magazine, February 27, 1949, 7. Hoover, J. Edgar. Masters of Deceit: The Story of Communism in America and How to Fight It. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1958.

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FILMOGRAPHY A King in New York. Dir. Charles Chaplin. 1957. Film. Chaplin. Dir. Richard Attenborough. 1992. Film. Citizen Cohn. Dir. Frank Pierson 1992. TV Movie. Cradle Will Rock. Dir. Tim Robbins. 1999. Film. Dash and Lilly. Dir. Kathy Bated. 1999. TV Movie. Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. Dir. Stanley Kubrick. 1964. Film. Fear on Trial. Dir. Lamont Johnson. 1975. TV Movie. Fellow Traveller. Dir. Grant Thoburn. 2003. Short Film. Good Night, and Good Luck. Dir. George Clooney. 2005. Film. Guilty by Suspicion. Dir. Irwin Winkler. 1991. Film. Hollywood on Trial. Dir. David Helpern, Jr. 1976. Documentary. Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Dir. Don Siegel. 1956. Film. I Was a Communist for the FBI. Dir. Gordon Douglas. 1951. Film. J. Edgar. Dir. Clint Eastwood. 2011. Film. Legacy of the Hollywood Blacklist. Dir. Judy Chaikin. 1987. Documentary. Murrow. Dir. Jack Gold. 1986. TV Movie. One of the Hollywood Ten. Dir. Karl Francis. 2000. Film. On the Waterfront. Dir. Elia Kazan. 1954. Film. Point of Order! Dir. Emile de Antonio. 1964. Documentary.

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Salt of the Earth. Dir. Herbert J. Biberman. 1954. Film. Storm Center. Dir. Daniel Taradash. 1956. Film. Tail Gunner Joe. Dir. Jud Taylor. 1977. TV Movie. The Atomic Café. Dir. Kevin Rafferty, Jayne Loader, and Pierce Rafferty. 1982. Documentary. The Crucible. Dir. Nicholas Hytner. 1996. Film. The Front. Dir. Martin Ritt. 1976. Film. The Hollywood Ten. Dir. John Berry. 1950. Documentary. The Majestic. Dir. Frank Darabont. 2001. Film. The Manchurian Candidate. Dir. John Frankenheimer. 1962. Film. The Manchurian Candidate. Dir. Jonathan Demme. 2004. Film. Trumbo. Dir. Peter Askin. 2007. Film. Trumbo. Dir. Jay Roach. 2015. Film. Winchell. Dir. Paul Mazursky. 1998. TV Movie.

WEBSITES The American Presidency Project. www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=15142. Foreign Affairs Oral History Collection, Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training, Arlington, VA. www.adst.org. Goldstein, Robert Justin. “Prelude to McCarthyism: The Making of a Blacklist,” Prologue Magazine, Vol. 38, No. 3 (Fall, 2006). www.archives.gov/publications/ prologue/2006/fall/agloso.html. Haynes, John Earl. “American Communism and Anticommunism: A Historian’s Bibliography and Guide to the Literature.” www.johnearlhaynes.org/page 94.html. Murrow, Edward R. “A Report on Senator Joseph R. McCarthy,” See It Now (CBS-TV, March 9, 1954), transcribed July 20, 2006 by G. Handman from DVD, The McCarthy Years (Edward R. Murrow Collection). www.lib.berkeley.edu/ MRC/murrowmccarthy.html. Roosevelt, Franklin D. “Campaign Address on Progressive Government at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco, California,” September 23, 1932. Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project. www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=88391. Roosevelt, Franklin D. “Acceptance Speech for the Renomination for the Presidency, Philadelphia, Pa.,” June 27, 1936. Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project. www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ ws/?pid=15314. Roosevelt, Franklin D. “Address at Marietta, Ohio,” July 8, 1938. Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project. www.presidency. ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=15672. State Department Employee Loyalty Investigation. “Hearings before a Subcommittee of the Committee on Foreign Relations, United States Senate, Eighty-first Congress, second session pursuant to S. Res. 231, a Resolution to Investigate

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whether there are Employees in the State Department Disloyal to the United States.” March 8, 9, 13, 14, 20, 21, 27, 28, April 5, 6, 20, 25, 27, 28, May 1, 2, 3, 4, 26, 31, June 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 12, 21, 23, 26, 28, 1950. https://archive.org/ stream/statedepartmente195001unit/statedepartmente195001unit_djvu.txt Tydings Committee Hearings on McCarthy’s charges. Truman, Harry S. “Special Message to the Congress Recommending a Comprehensive Health Program,” November 19, 1945. Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project. www.presidency. ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=12288. Truman, Harry S. “Statement by the President on the Point Four Program,” April 18, 1951. Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project. www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=14065. United States Senate. Executive Sessions of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the Committee on Government Operations (McCarthy Hearings 1953–54). www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/common/generic/McCarthy_ Transcripts.htm. United States Senate Subcommittee on Internal Security. Institute of Pacific Relations. “Hearings before the Subcommittee to Investigate the Administration of the Internal Security Act and Other Internal Security Laws of the Committee on the Judiciary, United States Senate, Eighty-second Congress, first[-second] session.” https://archive.org/stream/instituteofpacif09unit/instituteofpacif09unit_ djvu.txt SISS hearings with Lattimore testimony.

Index

Acheson, Dean 129; on aid to Nationalist Chinese 136, 137, attacked by McCarthy 217, 284; and Lattimore 160, 168, 207 Allen, Frederick Lewis 47, 55, 64 Allen, Raymond B. 200 Amerasia 117, 151, 153, 154, 158 American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) 57, 95, 96, 145 American Federation of Labor (AFL) 25; goals of 34; and Seattle strike 44–5, 50, 51, and strikes of 1919 52; suspicious of New Deal 91–2, 98, 100, 138, 192, 212, 222, 276; versus CIO 89 American Historical Association (AHA) 197 American Legion: in anti-communist network 138; attacks progressive education 196–7; Centralia Lynching 38–9, 56; and GI Bill 116–17, 122; history of 57, 100; and Mosinee “takeover” 2; pressures legislatures 199, 201, 213; Truman speech to 258–60, 264 American Liberty League 5, 83 American Medical Association (AMA) 208, 209, 210, 211, 212, 213, 214, 215, 229n49, 274, 277 American Plan 65 Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) 133, 157, 193, 209, 212, 276

Anarchism 15, 24, 30 Anderson, Jack 158 Arbenz, Jacobo 234 Army-McCarthy Hearings 176–7 Attorney General’s List (Attorney General’s List of Subversive Organizations) 113, 114, 157, 289 AWARE, Inc. 179 Barton, Bruce 66 Bator, Francis M. 240 Bentley, Elizabeth T. 127, 128, 131, 161 Berger, Victor 36, 58 Big Red Scare 38, 42, 44, 61, 62, 63, 72, 100, 199 Bilbo, Sen. Theodore G. 221 Bolsheviks 39, 40, 41, 42, 46, 47, 50, 51, 53, 55, 60, 61, 67n4 Boston Police Strike of 1919 52 Browder, Earl 94, 100, 101, 102, 109, 162 Brown v. Board of Education 225, 226 Budenz, Louis F. 156, 160, 161, 166 Bureau of Investigation (see also FBI) 45, 50, 51, 55, 59 Canwell Committee 99 Carnegie, Andrew 22, 23, 26, 27, 129 Carr, Robert K. 120 Catholic Church 138

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INDEX

Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) 112, 156, 157, 173, 174, 232, 233, 234, 239 Centralia lynching 38, 56 Chambers, Whittaker 126, 128, 129, 161 Chiang Kai-shek (Jiang Jieshi) 2; and China Hands 158, 166, 168; and China Lobby 137, 152; and the “loss” of China 135–6; and Marshall Mission 154 Chicago Tribune 18, 77, 133, 138, 206 China Hands (see also John Paton Davies, John Stewart Service, John Carter Vincent) 157, 166 China Lobby 137, 156 China White Paper 137 Churchill, Winston 109, 110, 111, 152 Citizens’ Councils 226 Clark, Tom C. 113, 114, 116, 133, 156 Cohn, Roy M.: and Army—McCarthy Hearings 176; hired by McCarthy 157; and Schine in Europe 263–4; and State Dep’t libraries 171–3 Comintern (Third International) 42, 51, 84, 85, 92, 97, 101, 103n25 Communist (defined) 20 Communist Control Act of 1954 6, 7, 98, 142 Communist control laws 99 Communist Party of the USA (CPUSA) 1, 9, 21; and American public 41; and the Depression 71, 78, 84; during WWII 101, 103n36, 111, 118; founding of 51, 53, 62, 70; and Hollywood 121–5; infiltrated by FBI 142, 143, 145, 149, 150, 155, 160, 163, 165, 166, 179, 199, 200, 201, 202, 213, 220; JE Hoover on dangers of 251–3, 261, 262, 267, 276, 278; and left liberals 85; loss of members 100; membership 93; relationship to USSR, also CIO 94–6; and Scottsboro case 224; and Soviet espionage 129–30; and Smith Act 128; suppression of 98; and Wallace campaign 132, 141

Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) 16, 88; origins of 89; early successes 90–1; denounced by Frey 92; Communist role in 94, 95, 98, 100, 101; and Nixon attack on Voorhis 106–7, 119; and Taft-Hartley Act 120, 192, 212; and Operation Dixie 222–3, 276 Conservative (defined) 20 Consumerism 183, 203–8 Consumers’ National Federation 206, 207, 208 Consumers’ Research 203, 204 Consumers’ Union 205, 208 Coudert, Frederic R. 97 Cvetic, Matthew 161 Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) 61, 195, 197, 199, 200, 201 Davies, John Paton 121, 136, 153, 158, 166, 237 Debs, Eugene Victor 36, 57, 58 Democratic Party 8, 28, 75, 83, 102, 112, 117, 132, 145, 155, 169, 209, 223, 241 Dewey, John 194, 195, 197, 204 Dewey, Thomas E. 122, 132, 133 Dickstein, Rep. Samuel 87 Diem, Ngo Dinh 237, 238, 239 Dies, Martin 87, 88, 92, 94, 95, 96, 97, 120, 121, 207 Dilling, Elizabeth 91, 195, 196, 197, 199, 201 disenfranchisement 31–3 Dulles, Allen 174, 234 Dulles, John Dulles 194, 233, 234, 238 Dulles, John Foster 175 Eastland, Sen. James O. 225 Ebey, George 202 education 194–203 passim Eisenhower, Dwight David 13; 1952 support from McCarthy 169–70; challenged by McCarthy 173, 174; on GOP right-wing 178, 187, 190; ideological place in the GOP 81, 110, 151, 166; and overthrow of Arbenz

INDEX

234; and overthrow of Mossadegh 232–233; on religion 193, 194, 220; turns on McCarthy 175; and Vietnam 235–6, 237, 238, 239, 240, 264 Executive Order 9835 113 Fair Deal 5, 6, 133, 220 Fair Employment Practices Committee (FEPC) 117, 134, 221 Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 76 Faulk, John Henry 179 Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) 45; and the American Legion 57, 93; and Amerasia 153; and the anticommunist network 138; and CPUSA propaganda 130, 131, 132; doubts Budenz 160; and Elizabeth Bentley 127; helps HUAC 121, 122, 123; helps McCarthy 156–7, 158; and Hollywood 125; and John Henry Faulk 179; infiltrates CPUSA 142, 151; institutes COINTELPRO 180, 203, 211, 217, 220, 225, 251, 258, 286, 291, 295, 296, 297, 298; and Lattimore 167; and McCarran 168, 176, 177; and professional witnesses 161, 166; and the public 124; role under FDR 100–1, 113; and Truman loyalty program 114–15; 116, 120; and Venona 128, 129; Fellow Traveler (defined) 21 Fifield, Rev. James W. 189 Fifth Amendment communist (defined) 21 Flanders, Sen. Ralph 175 fluoridation 11, 186 Fontaine, André 4, 16 Foster, William Z. 53 Frey, John P. 92, 93, 94, 95 Fuchs, Klaus 2, 132, 137, 163 Gabrielson, Guy G. 219 Gallup Poll 93, 100, 142, 177, 187, 211 Garner, John Nance 87 Geneva Accords 236, 239 Goldman, Emma 40, 58 Gouzenko, Igor 128, 131

Graham, Rev. Billy 190, 191, 192, 193, 227 Grant, Madison 49 Great Society 240, 241 Guatemala 234–5 guilt by association 95, 115, 136, 259 Guomindang (Kuomintang or Chinese Nationalists) 136, 137, 158 Hanson, Ole 44, 45, 46 Haymarket bombing 16, 18, 19, 30, 72 Hearst, William Randolph 77, 117, 156, 196, 206, 207, 295, 297 Hiss, Alger, 11, 126; accused by Chambers 129, 132; and rightwing suspicions 137, 150, 151; and McCarthy 154–5, 158, 163 Hitler, Adolph 49, 96, 100, 200, 218, 278 Hitler-Stalin Pact 96, 98, 100, 109, 200 Ho Chi Minh 235, 236, 237, 239, 241 Hoey, Rep. Clyde 219 Hollywood 101, 121; HUAC investigation 124–6, 180; and Humphrey Bogart 256–8 Hollywood Ten 125, 126, 256 Hook, Sidney 200, 201 Hoover, Herbert 73, 79 Hoover, John Edgar: abandons McCarthy 176, 177, 178, 179, 180; and African-Americans 225; and Big Red Scare 52, 54, 58, 62, 93, 100; as head of General Intelligence Division 51; helps HUAC 121, 129, 130, 142; helps McCarthy 156, 157; helps McCarran 168; 172; and homosexuals 217, 220; and Lattimore 167; and Martin Dies, Jr. 120; speech before HUAC 251–3, 257 House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC): and anticommunist network 138, 151, 156, 165, 173; functions 120; and Hollywood 125–6, 128, 130; and

303

304

INDEX

Humphrey Bogart 256; and J. Edgar Hoover 121, 122, 123, 124; and little HUACs 199, 207, 223, 225; and NAACP 226, 251; and Red Monday 178, 180; role in red scare 21, 46, 61, 88, 98, 109; Humphrey, Sen. Hubert H. 6, 7, 132, 133; and Communist Control Act 141–5; and McCarran Act 164 Hunter, John Patrick 183, 184 Hurley, Patrick S. 151, 153, 154 Hutchins, Robert M. 202 Industrial Workers of the World (Wobblies) 16, 31, 33, 36, 38, 47, 56 Institute of Pacific Relations (see also Owen Lattimore) 158, 166, 167, 283, 300 Internal Security Act of 1950 (McCarran Act) 6, 7, 16n9, 141, 143, 164, 165, 253 Iran 110, 232, 233, 234, 235 Jenner, Sen. William E. 162, 179 Johnson, Lyndon Baines 215, 231, 240, 241 Kempton, Murray 145 Kennan, George 110 Kohlberg, Alfred (see also China Lobby) 137, 156, 158 Korean War 3, 5, 151, 160, 274 Ku Klux Klan 65, 223, 226, 272 La Follette Committee 87, 88, 91, 95 La Follette, Jr., Sen. Robert M. 64, 88, 89, 91, 147 Lattimore, Owen 158, 159, 160, 161, 166, 167 Lavender Scare 215–20 League of Women Shoppers (LWS) 203, 205, 206, 207, 208 Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich 39, 40, 41, 47, 51, 52, 67n4, 149, 190, 213, 214, 246, 261, 276 Lewis, John L. 89, 92, 100

Liberal (defined) 20 Little HUACs 61, 97, 99, 199, 225 Little Red Scare 88, 100 Louis F. Post 58, 62 loyalty oaths 98, 99, 174, 202 Luce, Henry R. 137, 190, 238 Lusk Committee 46, 48, 50, 55, 61 The Man Nobody Knows 66 Mao Tse-tung (Mao Zedong) 135, 136, 166, 241 Marshall Mission 154 Marshall Plan 112, 128 Marshall, George C. 112, 136, 146, 154, 168, 169, 170 Marxism (defined) 20 Matthews, John B. 156, 160, 173, 207 Matusow, Harvey 161, 166 Maverick, Rep. Maury 88, 249, 251 McCarran, Sen. Patrick (Pat) A. 75; described 144–5, 163–8 passim; and Internal Security Act 143; and Lattimore 166–7, 253 McCarthy, Sen. Joseph R. 2, 3, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 19, 108, 123, 126, 127, 142, 145, 146, 147; Army-McCarthy hearings 173–8, 183, 184, 187, 193, 202; attacks Marshall 168–9, 170, 171; and homophobia 215 216, 217, 219, 231, 237, 238, 240, 251; interrogates Gen. Zwicker 264–6; text of Wheeling speech 261–2; Tydings hearings 155–62, 163, 166; Wheeling speech 148–51, 152, 153 McCarthyism: effect on college students 3–4; explained by historians 7–14, 15, 60, 108, 114, 155, 162, 183, 202, 215, 231, 272 McCormack-Dickstein Committee 87 McCormick, Colonel Robert R. 19, 77, 206 McNamara, Robert S. 237 Meiklejohn, Alexander 200, 201 Minor, Anne Rogers 195, 196, 198 Minute Women of the USA 138, 197, 201, 202 Mission to Moscow 101

INDEX

Mosinee, WN 1, 2, 3, 11 Mossadegh, Dr. Mohammad 232, 233, 234 Mundt, Sen. Karl E. 163, 164, 176, 201, 253 Mundt-Nixon Bill 163, 253–5 Murphy, Frank 70, 72, 87, 90, 96 Murrow, Edward R. 175, 176 Myers, Sen. Henry L. 59, 60, 61, 243 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) 206, 224, 225, 226 National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) 5, 188, 190 National Council for American Education 197, 201 national health insurance 208–15 National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) 76, 90 National Labor Relations Act of 1935 (NLRA or Wagner Act) 76, 82, 86, 90, 91, 92, 119, 222 National Labor Relations Board (NRLB) 82, 86, 89, 205 nativism 22, 48, 49 New Deal: and ADA 133, 134; Conservative arguments against 5–6; conservatives label as communist 118, 119, 132; McCarran opposes 144, 147, 169; Nixon associates communism with 106, 108, 109; religion and 187–9, 193, 202, 206, 209, 220, 221, 222, 231, 241, 249, 256; rollback as conservative goal 14, 70–104 passim, 105 New York Times 3, 4, 15, 18, 29, 45, 46, 51, 55, 94, 200, 256, 264 Niebuhr, Reinhold 12, 13, 133, 193 Nixon, Richard M.: and Hiss case 129, 138, 156; and homophobia 218, 234, 241, 253; moves against McCarthy 175; and Mundt-Nixon bill 163–4; and Voorhis 105–8 Operation Dixie 222, 223 Overman Committee 45, 46, 47, 61

Pacific Affairs 158, 166 Palmer, A. Mitchell 47, 50, 52, 55, 58, 62 Paris Commune 29 Parlor Pink (defined) 20 Passing of the Great Race 49, 281 Peale, Norman Vincent 190, 192, 193, 296 Peress, Irving 173, 174 Peurifoy, John (see also Lavender Scare) 215 Philbrick, Herbert Arthur 161 Pink (defined) 20 Popular Front 5, 85, 96, 133, 199, 200, 207, 211, 223 professional witnesses 161 Progressive Education 195, 197 Progressive Party 112, 132, 208, 211 Race 220–227 Rankin, Rep. John E. 221, 225 Rapp-Coudert Committee 97, 104n42 Red (defined) 20 Red Network 91, 199, 207 Religion 187–194 Republican Party 81 Robin Hood 186 Roosevelt, Eleanor 133, 157, 207, 212 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano (FDR) 5, 8; accused of being a communist 77; approach to Stalin 109; on causes of communism 60, 72; death of 108; empowers FBI 100; and FEPC 221, 227; and GI Bill 116, 117, 122, 126, 131; and health care 209; and Hiss 154–5; and New Deal 73–6; Norman Thomas on 83–4, 85, 86; and NIRA 90, 93; and religion 187–9, 193; and sit-down strikes 87; and Soviet Union 101, 102, 103; Syracuse Address 246–8; views on government 78–80; and Yalta 151–3 Roosevelt, Theodore 33, 81 Roosevelt, Jr. Theodore 56, 57, 59 Rosenberg, Julius and Ethel 11, 132, 163

305

306

INDEX

Rovere, Richard 172 Rugg, Harold O. 195, 196, 197 Salk (polio) vaccine 186 Schine, G. David 171, 172, 173, 176, 177, 263, 264 Schlesinger, Benjamin 42 Schlesinger, Jr., Arthur M. 85, 133, 145, 216 Schrecker, Ellen 97, 138, 202 Scottsboro Boys 224, 292 Seattle general strike 44, 45, 46, 47, 54 Senate Internal Security Subcommittee (SISS or McCarran Committee) 138, 165, 166, 167, 168, 178, 225, 226 Service, Caroline S. 151 Service, John Stewart 136, 150, 153, 157–8, 166, 237 Sevareid, Eric 219–20 sit-down strikes 86, 87, 90, 94, 96 Sloan, Alfred P. 86 Smith Act 97, 129, 178 Smith, Sen. Margaret Chase 162 Socialist (defined) 20 Song of Russia 101, 121 Stalin, Josef 2; and atom bomb 131; and Berlin Blockade 128, 129; dominance in Soviet Union 84, 85; pact with Hitler 96, 100, 101; and postwar order 109–10, 111, 113, 121; at Yalta 152, 155, 159, 162, 190, 200, 261 Steel Strike of 1919 43, 53 Stevens, Robert T. 176 Stevenson, Adlai 122, 123, 129, 145, 157, 169, 170, 175, 220 Stevenson, Archibald E. 46, 48, 50 Stevenson, Suzanne Silvercruys (see also Minute Women of the USA) 198 Stilwell, Gen. Joseph W. 135, 136 Sumner, William Graham 6, 16, 25, 26 Supreme Court of the United States 36, 86, 122, 126, 165, 178–9 syndicalism 24 Taft, Sen. Robert A. 81, 118, 155, 169, 171, 185, 210

Taft, William Howard 50 Taft-Hartley Act (Labor Management Relations Act of 1947) 16, 119, 120, 133, 223 Tenney Committee (California Senate Fact-finding Subcommittee on UnAmerican Activities) 99 Thomas, Norman 83, 187, 200, 269 Trotsky, Leon 40, 41, 52 Truman Doctrine 16, 111, 113 Truman, Harry S. 5, 6, 16, 110; attacked by McCarthy 169; and China 136–7; criticizes Eisenhower 170; deplores McCarthyism 184, 191, 208; and Hoover 156–7; and loyalty program 113–16, 131, 132; and Marshall Mission, 155; and Point 4; proposes Fair Deal 133–4; proposes national health insurance 209–10, 211, 215, 221, 227, 232; speech to American Legion 258–60, 274; and Truman Doctrine 111–12; vetoes McCarran bill 165, 168 Tydings, Sen. Millard 155, 158, 161, 162, 163, 216, 219 UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) 186 United Auto Workers’ Union (UAW) 86, 90, 94, 249 United Fruit 234 US Chamber of Commerce 117, 165, 188, 190, 191, 209, 213 US State Department 2, 50, 110, 136, 137, 142; Cohn and Schine investigate 171–3, 175, 215; homosexuals in 217–19, 237, 262, 279; McCarthy attacks 146–50, 151, 153, 154, 155, 157, 158, 159, 161, 163, 166, 167 Utley, Freda 156, 157, 158 Vandenberg, Arthur 16, 112 Vietnam 178, 231, 235–41 passim Vietnam Lobby (Friends of Vietnam) 238

INDEX

Vincent, John Carter 136, 158, 166, 167, 237 Voorhis, Rep. Jerry 97, 105, 106, 107, 108 Wagner, Sen. Robert F. 75, 209 Wallace, Henry 5, 9, 106; campaign for president 132–3, 158, 185, 211, 221 Warren, Gov. Earl 212 Welch, Joseph Nye 176, 177 Wherry, Sen. Kenneth 13, 215, 219 White, Ada 186 Whitaker and Baxter 212, 213, 214, 215, 274 White, Harry Dexter 123, 128, 129, 132 Wilson, Woodrow 35, 41, 43, 45, 58, 208, 247

world communism 3, 11; dangers of 253–5, 268; McCarthy and 148; United Nations and 186, 194; in US foreign policy 234–8; World War I 24, 30, 35, 39, 42, 51, 63, 72, 100 World War II 5, 88, 95, 100, 108, 111, 121, 134, 135, 146, 151, 174, 191, 193, 199, 216, 231, 235 Yalta Agreement 109, 129, 137, 151, 152, 153, 155 Youth for Christ 191 Zoll, Allen 197, 201, 202 Zwicker, Gen. Ralph W. 174, 175, 176, 264

307