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

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 The Battle of Fort Sumter

A Global Context The First Shots of the American
Robert D. Bush Civil War
Wesley Moody
The Fort Pillow Massacre
North, South, and the Status of The WPA
African Americans in the Civil Creating Jobs and Hope in the Great
War Era Depression
Bruce Tap Sandra Opdycke
From Selma to Montgomery The California Gold Rush

The Long March to Freedom The Stampede that Changed the
Barbara Combs World
Mark Eifler
The Homestead Strike
Labor, Violence, and American Bleeding Kansas
Industry Slavery, Sectionalism, and Civil War
Paul E. Kahan on the Missouri-Kansas Border
Michael E. Woods
The Flu Epidemic of 1918
America’s Experience in the Global The Marshall Plan
Health Crisis A New Deal for Europe
Sandra Opdycke Michael Holm
The Emergence of Rock and The Espionage and Sedition

Roll Acts
Music and the Rise of American World War I and the Image of Civil
Youth Culture Liberties
Mitchell K. Hall Mitchell C. Newton-Matza
Transforming Civil War Prisons McCarthyism

Lincoln, Lieber, and the Politics of The Realities, Delusions and Politics
Captivity Behind the 1950s Red Scare
Paul J. Springer and Glenn Robins Jonathan Michaels
McCarthyism
The Realities, Delusions and Politics
Behind the 1950s Red Scare
Jonathan Michaels
First published 2017
by Routledge
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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 viii

List of Figures ix
Acknowledgments x
Introduction 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 243
Bibliography 280
Index 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 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. 127
5.1 Nevada Senator. Washington, DC, April 24. An informal
picture of Senator Pat McCarran, Democrat of Nevada.
Division, LC-USZ62-117816. 143
5.2 Roy M. Cohn, head-and-shoulders portrait, facing right.
Division, LC-DIG-hec-26549. 171
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 Com-
munist 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
2 INTRODUCTION
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 3
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”
4 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 self-
appointed ‘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 5
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
6 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 7
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
8 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 mid-
1950s. 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 9
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
10 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 11
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 anti-
communist 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,
12 INTRODUCTION
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 13
God has not been preparing the English-speaking and Teutonic

peoples for a thousand years for nothing but vain and idle self-
contemplation 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 soon-
to-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 reconsid-
eration. 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.
14 INTRODUCTION
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 Amer-
icans, 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 com-
munism, 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 15
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 extra-
legal 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 anti-
communism 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
16 INTRODUCTION
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 American Legion Magazine, June, 1950, 32.
2 New York Times, May 11, 1951, 1, 28, 29.
3 New York Times, May 11, 1951, 1, 28, 29.
4 André Fontaine, “Fear on the Campus,” Redbook Magazine, April, 1954, 34–38.
5 Fontaine, “Fear on the Campus,” 34.
6 Chadwick Hall, “America’s Conservative Revolution,” Antioch Review, Summer,
1955, 207.
7 William Graham Sumner, The Forgotten Man and Other Essays, ed. Albert Galloway
Keller (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1918), 470.
8 Sumner, The Forgotten Man and Other Essays, 470.
INTRODUCTION 17
9 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.
10 See Chapter 5 for a discussion of this act.
11 Quoted in Robert Griffith, The Politics of Fear: Joseph R. McCarthy and the Senate
(Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987), 121.
12 Griffith, Politics of Fear, 151.
13 Will Herberg, “Government by Rabble-Rousing,” New Leader, January 18, 1954,
13–16.
14 Marya Mannes, “Did or Did Not . . . ,” The Reporter, June 8, 1954, 40–41.
15 Daniel Bell, ed., The Radical Right (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1963).
16 Nelson Polsby, “Towards an Explanation of McCarthyism,” Political Studies, 8
(1960), 250–271).
17 Earl Latham, The Communist Controversy in Washington: From the New Deal to
McCarthy (New York: Atheneum, 1969), 394.
18 Latham, The Communist Controversy in Washington, 398.
21 Michael Paul Rogin, The Intellectuals and McCarthy: The Radical Specter (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 1967).
22 Rogin, The Intellectuals and McCarthy, 10.
25 Richard M. Fried, Nightmare in Red: The McCarthy Era in Perspective (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1990), 224.
26 Reinhold Niebuhr, The Irony of American History (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press); Reprint edition (May 1, 2008), 67.
27 Niebuhr, The Irony of American History, 70.
28 Niebuhr, The Irony of American History, 71.
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 circumfer-
ence.”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 demon-
strators 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 19
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—
20 THE ORIGINS OF RED SCARE ANTI-COMMUNISM
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 non-
Communists 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.
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
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 mid-
1800s 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
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 easily-
replaced 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 low-
paying, 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 eight-
hour 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 importa-
tion of foreign workers coming from countries so abjectly impoverished
that they were willing to work for very low pay in the United States.
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. Native-
born 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
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 country-
men 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
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 race-
conscious 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.
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
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 long-
standing 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 Franco-
Prussian 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
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 depic-
tions 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 “synon-
ymous 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 Penn-
sylvania”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 bargain-
ing. 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.
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 any-
one 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.
Turn of the century businessmen were under pressure from move-

ments 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 under-
lying 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
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-to-
do 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.
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
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 relation-
ship 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 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 pro-
fessional 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 pro-
German 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
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 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.
2 New York Times, May 6, 1886, 1.
3 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.
4 David Caute, The Fellow-Travellers: Intellectual Friends of Communism (New Haven,
CT: Yale University Press, 1988), 5.
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.
6 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.
7 William Graham Sumner, “The Challenge of Facts” in The Challenge of Facts and
Other Essays (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1914), 23.
8 Sumner, “The Challenge of Facts,” 25.
9 Allan Nevins, John D. Rockefeller (New York: Scribner, 1959), 622.
10 Quoted in M. J. Heale, American Anti-Communism: Combating the Enemy Within,
1830–1970 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 29.
11 Heale, American Anti-Communism, 41.
12 Quoted in Labor Divided, 21.
13 Samuel Bernstein, “The Impact of the Paris Commune in the United States,” The
Massachusetts Review, Vol. 12, No. 3 (Summer, 1971), 436.
14 Bernstein, “The Impact of the Paris Commune in the United States,” 437.
17 Elias Tobenkin, “Anarchists and Immigrants in America,” The World Today, May,
1908, 484.
18 Quoted in Gerald Friedman, State-Making and Labor Movements. France and United
States, 1876–1914 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998), 187.
19 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.
20 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.
21 John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860–1925 (New
Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1988), 211.
22 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.
23 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.
CHAPTER 2
The Big Red Scare
I 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:
“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 39
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,
40 THE BIG RED SCARE
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:
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 represen-
tatives. 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
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.
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 indus-
tries 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
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
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
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
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 assump-

tion 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, anti-

cigarette 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
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
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 selec-
tion 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 some-
thing 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
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 upper-
class 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-
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, African-
American 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
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:
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
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
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
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
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 anti-
radical 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
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
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, revolution-

ary 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
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 anti-
communism 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.
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 cun-
ning 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 anti-
communists; 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
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—
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
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
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 under-
ground 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 institu-
tion of what has become known as “welfare capitalism.” There was a
cultural trend to see and portray business and businessmen as the benign
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
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 Jerrold Owen, “Centralia: The Inevitable Clash Between Americanism and Anti-
Americanism,” in The American Legion Weekly, Vol. 1, No. 24 (December 12, 1919), 9.
2 Rosa Luxemburg, The Russian Revolution (New York: Workers Age Publishers,
1940), 69.
3 Emma Goldman, My Disillusionment in Russia (New York: Doubleday, Page and
Company, 1923), 33.
4 The Socialist Revolutionaries had actually won a plurality in elections that had left
Lenin’s Bolsheviks with a mere 25 percent of the vote.
5 Leon Trotsky, Terrorism and Communism: A Reply to Karl Kautsky (Verso Books:
Brooklyn, 2007), 51–52.
6 Trotsky, Terrorism and Communism, 54.
7 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.
8 “President Schlesinger’s Visit to Russia,” Justice, October 20, 1920, 1.
9 George Henry Soule, Prosperity Decade: From War to Depression, 1917–1929 (New
York: Rinehart, 1947), 74.
10 Soule, Prosperity Decade, 210.
11 Committee on Recent Economic Changes of the President’s Conference on
Unemployment, Recent Economic Changes in the United States (New York: McGraw-
Hill Book Company, 1929), 480.
12 Regin Schmidt, Red Scare (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2004), 131.
13 Ole Hanson, Americanism versus Bolshevism (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Page &
Company, 1920), 39.
14 New York Times, February 9, 1919, 3.
15 Kristofer Allerfeldt, Beyond the Huddled Masses: American Immigration and The Treaty
of Versailles (New York : Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 118.
16 Schmidt, Red Scare, 132.
17 Todd J. Pfannestiel, Rethinking the Red Scare: The Lusk Committee and New York’s
Crusade Against Radicalism, 1919–1923 (New York: Routledge, 2003), 13.
18 New York Times, October 26, 1919, 5.
19 Chicago Daily Tribune, May 1, 1919, 1.
20 Paul Avrich, Sacco and Vanzetti: The Anarchist Background (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
21 David A. Shannon, The Socialist Party of America: A History (New York: Macmillan,
1955), 122–123.
22 Frederick Lewis Allen, Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the Nineteen-Twenties

(New York: Harper & Brothers, 1931), 76.
23 Kevin Murphy, Uphill All the Way: The Fortunes of Progressivism, 1919–1929, Ph.D.
diss., Columbia, 2013.
24 Albert de Silver, “The Lusk-Stevenson Report: A State Document,” The Nation,
Vol. 113, No. 2923 (July 13, 1921), 38.
25 De Silver, “Lusk-Stevenson Report,” 38.
26 De Silver, “Lusk-Stevenson Report,” 39.
27 Charles B. Davenport, Heredity in Relation to Eugenics (New York : Henry Holt and
Company, 1911), 219.
28 Madison Grant, The Passing of the Great Race or the Racial Basis of European History
(New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1936), 50–51.
29 The Nation, Vol. 113, No. 2923, 32.
30 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.
31 Regin Schmidt, Red Scare: FBI and the Origins of Anticommunism in the United States,
1919-1943 (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2004), 152.
32 New York Times, July 28, 1919, 1.
33 Wall Street Journal, September 12, 1919, 1.
34 David A. Shannon, Between the Wars: America, 1919–1941 (New York: Houghton
Mifflin, 1965), 27.
35 Shannon, Between the Wars, 24.
36 The Commission of Inquiry, The Interchurch World Movement Report on the Steel Strike
of 1919 (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Howe, 1920), 43.
37 The Commission of Inquiry, The Interchurch World Movement Report on the Steel Strike
of 1919, 248.
38 Allen, Only Yesterday, 75.
40 The American Legion Weekly, December 7, 9.
41 Washington Post, May 7, 1919, 1.
42 See Alec Campbell, “The Sociopolitical Origins of the American Legion,” Theory
and Society, Vol. 39 (2010), 1. doi:10.1007/s11186-009-9097-1
43 William Pencak, For God and Country: The American Legion, 1919–1941 (Boston:
Northeastern University Press, 1989), 155–156.
44 David Caute, The Great Fear: The Anti-Communist Purge under Truman and Eisenhower
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1978), 350.
45 Athan G. Theoharis, “The FBI and the American Legion Contact Program,
1940–1966,” Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 100, No. 2 (Summer, 1985), 271–286.
46 Shannon, Between the Wars, 28.
47 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.
48 Louis Freeland Post, The Deportations Delirium of Nineteen-Twenty (Chicago: C.H.
Kerr & Co., 1920), 92.
49 Louis Waldman, Albany: The Crisis in Government (New York : Boni & Liveright,
Inc., 1920), 4.
50 Henry L. Myers in Peter G. Filene, ed., American Views of Soviet Russia, 1917–1965
(Homewood, IL : The Dorsey Press, 1968), 42.
51 Filene, American Views of Soviet Russia, 40.
54 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.
55 Allen, Only Yesterday, 88
57 Lucy S. Dawidowicz, On Equal Terms: Jews in America, 1881–1981 (New York:
Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1982), 88–89.
59 Soule, Prosperity Decade, 200–201.
60 Soule, Prosperity Decade, 200–201.
61 Edward Earle Purinton, “Big Ideas for Big Business: Try Them Out for Yourself!,”
Independent, April 16, 1921, 395–396.
62 Bruce Barton, The Man Nobody Knows: A Discovery of the Real Jesus (Indianapolis,
IND: Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1925), 6.
CHAPTER 3
The New Deal
I n March 1932, the United States was in the depths of its deepest, long-
est 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.
THE NEW DEAL 71
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:

72 THE NEW DEAL
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 native-
born Americans, there was nothing obvious to set them apart from their
neighbors, not their appearance, not their speech.
THE NEW DEAL 73
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.
74 THE NEW DEAL
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 govern-
ment 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.
THE NEW DEAL 75
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 African-
Americans 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
76 THE NEW DEAL
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
THE NEW DEAL 77
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 “dom-
inated 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
78 THE NEW DEAL
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 govern-
ment 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 demo-
cratically 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
THE NEW DEAL 79
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 opera-
tion 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 cor-
porations was based on the fact that corporations were government-
created 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 self-
interested 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, govern-
ment 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.
80 THE NEW DEAL
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
THE NEW DEAL 81
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:
82 THE NEW DEAL
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 redistri-
bution 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 trans-
continental 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.
THE NEW DEAL 83
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 govern-
ment. 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 conserva-
tives, 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
84 THE NEW DEAL
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, com-
munism: 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 social-
ists were dubbed “social fascists” and were to be considered the main
THE NEW DEAL 85
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 anti-
New 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
86 THE NEW DEAL
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
THE NEW DEAL 87
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 Repre-
sentatives 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
88 THE NEW DEAL
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 Represen-
tative 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 con-
servatives 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 parlia-
mentary 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 anti-
communist 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
THE NEW DEAL 89
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.
90 THE NEW DEAL
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
THE NEW DEAL 91
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
92 THE NEW DEAL
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 un-
questionably 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
THE NEW DEAL 93
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.
94 THE NEW DEAL
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
THE NEW DEAL 95
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 sus-
picious 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 African-
Americans; 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
96 THE NEW DEAL
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
THE NEW DEAL 97
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,
98 THE NEW DEAL
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 accompany-
ing 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
THE NEW DEAL 99
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 Commis-
sion—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. 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.”
2. 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).
3. 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 con-
sistently 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.
100 THE NEW DEAL
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 condem-
ned “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.
THE NEW DEAL 101
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
102 THE NEW DEAL
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 “Brother Dave Moore and the Ford Hunger March,” Political Affairs, March 7,
2007. www.politicalaffairs.net/brother-dave-moore-and-the-ford-hunger-march.
2 Beth Tompkins Bates, The Making of Black Detroit in the Age of Henry Ford (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012), 161.
3 Detroit Times, March 8, 1932, 1.
4 “Brother Dave Moore and the Ford Hunger March.”
5 Quoted in Alex Baskin, “The Ford Hunger March – 1932,” Labor History, Vol.
13, No. 3 (1972), 338.
6 Detroit Free Press, March 9, 1932, 6.
7 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.
8 New York Times, July 24, 1935, 6.
9 Chicago Daily Tribune, August 7, 1934, 1.
10 The Gettysburg Times, May 14, 1935, 5.
11 New York Times, September 22, 1936, 11.
12 George Wolfskill and John A. Hudson, All but the People: Franklin D. Roosevelt and
His Critics, 1933–39 (London: The Macmillan Company, 1969), 187.
13 Economist Rexford Tugwell, though by no means a Communist, was one of the
more radical members of the Roosevelt administration.
14 Ben Procter, William Randolph Hearst: The Later Years, 1911–1951, (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2007), 207–208.
15 Wolfskill and Hudson, All but the People, 193.
16 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.
17 Roosevelt, “Address at the Democratic State Convention, Syracuse, N.Y.”
18 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.
THE NEW DEAL 103
19 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.
20 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.
21 Roosevelt, “Address at the Democratic State Convention, Syracuse, N.Y.”
22 Frederick Rudolph “The American Liberty League, 1934–1940,” The American
Historical Review, Vol. 56, No. 1 (Oct., 1950), 19.
23 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.
24 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.
25 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).
26 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.
27 David Farber, Sloan Rules: Alfred P. Sloan and the Triumph of General Motors (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2002), 196–197.
28 Kim Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands: The Businessmen’s Crusade against the New Deal
(New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2010), 89.
29 Walter Goodman, The Committee: The Extraordinary Career of the House Committee
on Un-American Activities (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1968), 14.
30 Goodman, The Committee, 21.
33 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.
34 Frank Newport and Joseph Carroll, “Reflections on Presidential Job Approval and
Re-election Odds,” June 10, 2003. www.gallup.com/poll/8608/reflections-
presidential-job-approval-reelection-odds.aspx.
35 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.
36 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:
104 THE NEW DEAL
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).
37 Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward, Poor People’s Movements: Why They
Succeed, How They Fail (New York: Vantage Books, 1979), 68.
38 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.
39 Fraser Ottanelli, The Communist Party of the United States: From the Depression to
World War II (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1991), 198.
40 New York Times, June 3, 1941.
41 Ellen W. Schrecker, No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1986), 76.
42 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.”
43 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.
44 M J. Heale, McCarthy’s Americans: Red Scare Politics in State and Nation, 1935–1965
(Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1998), 26.
45 The Milwaukee Journal, November 21, 1940, 1.
46 M.J. Heale, American Anti-Communism: Combating the Enemy Within, 1830–1970
(Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 127.
47 Los Angeles Times, December 6, 1939, 6.
48 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 five-
term 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
106 THE RED SCARE BEGINS
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 tide-
lands 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 anti-
Communist 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
THE RED SCARE BEGINS 107
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 Communist-
dominated 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
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 post-
Second 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 con-
siderable 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
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 participa-
tion 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
word when he said that he would support “free and unfettered elections
as soon as possible” in Poland, especially given that the alternative, as his-
torian 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. Mean-
while, 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 show-
downs.” 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, “long-
term, 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.
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 com-
mitments 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
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
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 conser-
vatives 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
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
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 mis-
understood 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
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
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 anti-
lynching 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
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 Republican-
ism.”24 The man known as “Mr. Republican,” Robert Taft (who, as his-
torian 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.
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 “ill-
conceived 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 management-
labor 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
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”
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 misrepresen-
tation 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 anti-
Communists 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
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
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 com-
munism. 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,
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
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
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 ex-
Communist, came to President Roosevelt’s internal security adviser, Adolf
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 anti-
fascist organization. In 1938 she met an important Soviet intelligence agent,
Jacob Golos, who became her lover. Bentley started providing Golos with
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,
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 Commu-
nist 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,
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
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
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,
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
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.
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 Tse-
tung) 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
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 adminis-
tration 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 partici-
pation 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
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
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 Paul Bullock, “‘Radicals and Rabbits’: Richard Nixon’s 1946 Campaign against
Jerry Voorhis,” Southern California Quarterly, Vol. 55, No. 3 (Fall, 1973), 350.
2 Bullock, “‘Radicals and Rabbits,” 351.
3 Quoted in Bullock, “Radicals and Rabbits,” 320.

4 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.
5 Bullock, “Radicals and Rabbits,” 324.
6 Irwin Gellman, The Contender, Richard Nixon: The Congress Years, 1946–1952 (New
York: The Free Press, 1999), 331.
7 Roger Morris, Richard Milhous Nixon: The Rise of an American Politician (New York:
Holt, 1990), 340–341.
8 Bullock, “Radicals and Rabbits,” 342.
9 Stephen E. Ambrose, Nixon: The Education of a Politician, 1913–1962 (New York:
Simon & Schuster, 1988), 140.
10 Stewart Alsop, Nixon & Rockefeller: A Double Portrait (New York: Doubleday, 1960),
188.
11 Tom Wicker, One of Us: Richard Nixon and the American Dream (New York: Random
House, 1991), p. 45.
12 Ambrose, Nixon, 142.
13 David M. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War,
1929–95 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), xxxiv.
14 Robert H. Ferrell, Harry S. Truman: A Life (Columbia: University of Missouri Press,
1994), 301.
15 David Caute, The Great Fear: The Anti-Communist Purge under Truman and Eisenhower
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1978), 284.
16 The Connecticut Daily Campus, December 10, 1951, 6.
17 Ted Morgan, Reds: McCarthyism in Twentieth-Century America (New York: Random
House, 2003), 304.
18 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.
19 December 1988 Report of Congressional Subcommittee on Education and Health
of the Joint Economic Committee.
20 Subcommittee on Education and Health of the Joint Economic Committee, A Cost-
Benefit Analysis of Government Investment in Post-Secondary Education under the World
War II GI Bill, December 14, 1988.
21 M.J. Heale, American Anticommunism: Combating the Enemy Within, 1830–1970
22 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.
23 Stephen M. Feldman, Free Expression and Democracy in America: A History (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2008), 433.
24 David A. Horowitz, Beyond Left and Right: Insurgency and the Establishment (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 1997), 218.
25 Alonzo Hamby, Liberalism and Its Challengers: FDR to Reagan (New York: Oxford
26 Curt Gentry, J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets (New York: W.W. Norton,
1991), 242.
27 Robert K. Carr, The House Committee on Un-American Activities, 1945–1950 (Ithaca,

NY: Cornell University Press, 1952).
28 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.
29 Lewis Hartshorn, Alger Hiss, Whittaker Chambers and the Case that Ignited McCarthyism
(Jefferson, NC: McFarland Books, 2013), 10.
30 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.
31 Ronald Kessler, The Bureau: The Secret History of the FBI (New York: St. Martin’s
Press, 2002), 103.
32 Kessler, The Bureau, 103.
33 Albert Fried, McCarthyism: The Great American Red Scare: A Documentary History
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 6.
34 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.
35 Hoover, HUAC Testimony, 44.
36 The Times Recorder from Zanesville, Ohio, February 19, 1951, 4; Lebanon Daily
News from Lebanon, Pennsylvania, February 15, 1951, 8.
37 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.
38 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.
39 Katherine A.S. Sibley, Red Spies in America: Stolen Secrets and the Dawn of the Cold
War (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004), 75.
40 Thomas W. Devine, Henry Wallace’s 1948 Presidential Campaign and the Future of
Postwar Liberalism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013.)
41 John C. Culver and John Hyde, American Dreamer: The Life and Times of Henry A.
Wallace (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2002), 466.
42 Christopher Pierson and Francis G. Castles, eds., The Welfare State Reader
(Cambridge: Polity, 2006), 202.
43 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.
44 Merle Miller, Plain Speaking: An Oral Biography of Harry S. Truman (New York:
Berkley Publishing Corp., 1974), 289.
45 Lloyd E. Eastman, “Who Lost China? Chiang Kai-shek Testifies,” The China
Quarterly, No. 88 (Dec., 1981), 658.
46 Quoted in Robert D. Dean, Imperial Brotherhood: Gender and the Making of Cold
War Foreign Policy (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2003), 73.
47 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
O 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:
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
142 THE RED SCARE AT FULL TIDE
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.
THE RED SCARE AT FULL TIDE 143
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 concen-
tration 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
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 sub-
committee 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:
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
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 self-
proclaimed 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-
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.
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
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 educa-
tion 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
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
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 anti-
communism. It is understandable that many Americans—especially Polish-
Americans 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
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
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
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 com-
promise 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
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.
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 right-
wing 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
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 Ambassador-
at-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
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 Kai-
shek’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 anti-
Communists 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
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]
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 ex-
Communist 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
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
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.
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
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
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
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 admin-
istration, 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
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 informa-
tion 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
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
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
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 Commu-
nist 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
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
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 nineteenth-
century 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
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
who had refused to take a loyalty oath and, on loyalty forms, had written
“federal constitutional privilege” in response to questions about member-
ship 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
against the agency. More than that, Dulles launched a Hoover-style black-
bag 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 anti-
McCarthy 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
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.
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
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
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
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 John B. Gilmour, Strategic Disagreement: Stalemate in American Politics (Pittsburgh,
PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995), 111.
2 Cong. Record, 83 Cong., 2 Sess., 14210, 14215 (Aug. 12, 1954)
3 Anthony Summers, Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover (New
York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1993), 224.
4 Michael J. Ybarra, Washington Gone Crazy: Senator Pat McCarran and the Great
American Communist Hunt (Hanover, NH: Steerforth, 2004), 537.
5 Ybarra, Washington Gone Crazy, 265.
6 Las Vegas Sun, August 25, 2012, 1.
7 Mary S. McAuliffe, “Liberals and the Communist Control Act of 1954,” The Journal
of American History, Vol. 63, No. 2 (Sept., 1976), 360.
8 Murray Kempton, New York Post, August 24, 1954, 34.
9 Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., New York Post, August 24, 1954, 33.
10 William W. Keller, The Liberals and J. Edgar Hoover: Rise and Fall of a Domestic
Intelligence State (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), 66.
11 McAuliffe, “Liberals and the Communist Control Act of 1954,” 351–367.
12 David M. Oshinsky, A Conspiracy So Immense: The World of Joe McCarthy

(New York: Free Press, 1983), 32.
13 Oshinsky, A Conspiracy So Immense, 32–33.
14 Wisconsin State Journal, July 31, 1946, 4.
15 Thomas C. Reeves, The Life and Times of Joe McCarthy: A Biography (New York:
Stein and Day, 1982), 201.
16 Reeves, The Life and Times of Joe McCarthy, 202.
17 V. I. Lenin, Speeches at the Eighth Party Congress (Rockville, MD: Wildside Press,
2008), 15.
18 Oshinsky, A Conspiracy So Immense, 109.
19 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.
20 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.
21 Ed Cray, General of the Army: George C. Marshall, Soldier and Statesman (New York:
W.W. Norton, 1990), 555.
22 Ross Y. Koen, The China Lobby in American Politics (New York: Macmillan, 1960),
63.
23 S.M. Plokhy, Yalta: The Price of Peace (New York: Viking Press, 2010).
28 Tim Weiner, Enemies: A History of the FBI (New York: Random House, 2012), 151.
29 Weiner, Enemies, 160.
30 Michael J. Ybarra, Washington Gone Crazy, 392.
31 Weiner, Enemies, 160.
32 Curt Gentry, J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets (New York: WW Norton,
1991), 378–379.
33 Robert P. Newman, Owen Lattimore and the “Loss” of China (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1992), 215.
34 Newman, Owen Lattimore, 215.
35 Newman, Owen Lattimore, 124–125.
37 Thomas C. Reeves, The Life and Times of Joe McCarthy: A Biography (New York:
Stein & Day, 1982), 268.
40 James Cross Giblin, The Rise and Fall of Senator Joe McCarthy (Boston: Clarion Books,
2009), 104.
41 Nelson Lichtenstein, Walter Reuther: The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit (Champaign:
University of Illinois Press, 1997), 378.
42 Time, May 31, 1948, Vol. 51, No. 22, 17.

46 Frank Wilkerson, ‘The Era of Libertarian Repression,” Akron Law Review, Vol 7,
No. 2, Winter 1974, 280–309, 289–290.
47 Owen Lattimore, Studies in Frontier History: Collected Papers, 1928–1958 (London:
Oxford University Press, 1962) 18.
48 Victor Navasky, Naming Names (New York: Viking Press, 1980), 13.
49 Harvey Matusow, False Witness (New York: Cameron & Kahn, 1955), 103.
50 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.
52 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.
53 McCarthy, Major Speeches and Debates, 305.
54 Chicago Daily Tribune, September 15, 1951, 15.
55 Harvey Klehr, John Earl Haynes and Fridrikh Igorevich Firsov, The Secret World of
American Communism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), 16–17.
56 See Stephen E. Ambrose, Eisenhower: Soldier and President (New York: Simon &
Schuster, 1991), 282–284.
57 Merle Miller, Plain Speaking: An Oral Biography of Harry S. Truman (New York:
G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1972), 130.
58 Edwin R. Bayley, Joe McCarthy and the Press (Madison: University of Wisconsin
Press, 1981), 104.
59 Bayley, Joe McCarthy and the Press, 104.
60 Richard H. Rovere, Senator Joe McCarthy (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1959),
199–205.
61 J.B. Matthews, “Reds and Our Churches,” The American Mercury, July 1953, 3–14.
62 New York Times, April 4, 2005, pg. B4.
63 Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA (New York: Doubleday, 2007),
121–122.
64 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.
65 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.
66 William E. Jenner, Congressional Digest, May 1958, Vol. 37 Iss. 5, 142.
67 “Blacklisted Entertainer John Henry Faulk Recalls McCarthyism,” Bryant Gumbel,
correspondent, NBC Today Show. NBCUniversal Media. July 11, 1983. NBC Learn.
Web. February 3, 2015.
68 Bridgeport Post, July 6, 1957, 16.
69 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.
70 The Connecticut Campus, January 9, 1956, 2.
CHAPTER 6
Culture Wars
T 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.
184 CULTURE WARS
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 con-
gratulate 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:
CULTURE WARS 185
“He was always talking about world peace.” – Housewife,

Oregon.
“I suspect it from his conversation and manner. He was well-
educated 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
186 CULTURE WARS
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, believ-
ing 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 Commun-
ists, 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.”
CULTURE WARS 187
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 mean-
ing 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,
188 CULTURE WARS
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 anti-

New 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
CULTURE WARS 189
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
190 CULTURE WARS
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
CULTURE WARS 191
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
192 CULTURE WARS
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 rapproche-
ment 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
CULTURE WARS 193
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
194 CULTURE WARS
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
CULTURE WARS 195
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
196 CULTURE WARS
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 well-
written 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.
CULTURE WARS 197
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 histor-
ian 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 adminis-
trators 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.”)
198 CULTURE WARS
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
CULTURE WARS 199
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
200 CULTURE WARS
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
CULTURE WARS 201
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 muzzl-
ing 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
202 CULTURE WARS
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
CULTURE WARS 203
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 self-
appointed 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 con-
sumerism. 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
204 CULTURE WARS
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.
CULTURE WARS 205
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 socially-
accepted 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
206 CULTURE WARS
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 Communist-
affiliated 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
CULTURE WARS 207
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 allega-
tions 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
208 CULTURE WARS
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 well-
organized 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
CULTURE WARS 209
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
210 CULTURE WARS
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 all-
important 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
CULTURE WARS 211
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 INDEPEN-
DENCE.”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
212 CULTURE WARS
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
CULTURE WARS 213
out was that “The Voluntary Way Is the American Way;” the physician-
controlled 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 Cross-
Blue 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
214 CULTURE WARS
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.
CULTURE WARS 215
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 “perver-
sion,” 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.
216 CULTURE WARS
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 well-
known 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 them-
selves 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
CULTURE WARS 217
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, undemon-
strative) 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.”
218 CULTURE WARS
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.
CULTURE WARS 219
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 Gov-
ernment” were “perhaps as dangerous as the actual Communists.”64 Wherry
put out rumors that the Soviet Government had a list of American homo-
sexuals 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 investiga-
tion” 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 homo-
sexuals 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
220 CULTURE WARS
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 “hand-
outs” 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
CULTURE WARS 221
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 African-
American 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
222 CULTURE WARS
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 long-
held 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 Birmingham-
based 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
CULTURE WARS 223
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 Communist-
led 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
224 CULTURE WARS
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
CULTURE WARS 225
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 African-
Americans, 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
226 CULTURE WARS
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 middle-
and 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-
CULTURE WARS 227
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 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
2 Harry Truman, “Address in Detroit at the Celebration of the City’s 250th
Anniversary,” July 28, 1951.
3 Stouffer, Communism, Conformity, and Civil Liberties, 176–178.
4 US Congress, Senate, Committee on the Judiciary: Hearings before the
Subcommittee on H.R. 5852, An Act to Protect the United States against Un-
American and Subversive Activities, 80th Cong., 2nd sess. (Washington, DC: U.S.
GPO, 1948), 286.
5 Control of Subversive Activities, Hearings Before the Committee on the Judiciary,
United States Senate (Washington: U.S. GPO, 1948), 268.
6 Control of Subversive Activities, 268.
7 Cavalier Daily, April 19, 1951, 2.
8 Morris Davis, “Community Attitudes toward Fluoridation,” The Public Opinion
Quarterly, Vol. 23, No. 4 (Winter, 1959–1960), 474–482.
9 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.
10 Indianapolis Times, November 12, 1953, 1.
11 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.
12 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.
13 Kevin Kruse, One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America
(New York: Basic Books, 2015), 6.
14 Kruse, One Nation Under God, 79.
19 Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, MA:
Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1967), 20.
20 Learned, Billy Graham, 62.
21 Learned, Billy Graham, 137.
228 CULTURE WARS
22 Jay Douglas Learned, Billy Graham, 90.

23 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.
24 Herzog, The Spiritual-Industrial Complex, 174.
25 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.
26 Herbert M. Kliebard, The Struggle for the American Curriculum, 1893–1958 (New
York: Routledge, 2005), 24.
27 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.
28 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.
29 O.K. Armstrong, “Treason in the Textbooks,” American Legion Magazine, Vol. 29,
No. 3 (September, 1940), 8.
30 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.
31 Andrew Hartman, Education and the Cold War: The Battle for the American School
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 115.
32 Erickson, “We Want No Teachers,” 497.
33 Henry Steele Commager, “Who Is Loyal to America?” Harper’s Magazine, Vol.
195, No. 4168 (Sept., 1947), 195.
34 M.J. Heale, American Anti-Communism: Combating the Enemy Within, 1830–1970
35 Minor, “DAR Address,” 270.
36 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.
37 Raymond B. Allen, “Communists Should Not Teach in American Colleges,”
Educational Forum, Vol. 13, No. 4 (May, 1949), 433–440.
38 Sidney Hook, “Should Communists Be Permitted to Teach?” New York Times
Magazine, February 27, 1949, 7.
39 Alexander Meiklejohn, “Should Communists Be Permitted to Teach?” Or
“Professors on Probation,” New York Times Magazine, March 27, 1949, 10.
40 Ellen Schrecker, “Academic Freedom and the Cold War,” The Antioch Review,
1 July 1980, Vol.38(3), 16.
41 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.
42 Glickman, “The Strike in the Temple of Consumption,” 104.
45 Lawrence B. Glickman, Buying Power: A History of Consumer Activism in America
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 212.
CULTURE WARS 229
46 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.
47 James A. Morone, Theodor J. Litman and Leonard S. Robins, Health Politics and
Policy (Albany, NY: Delmar Publishers, 1991), 105.
48 Richard Harris, A Sacred Trust (London: Pelican Books, 1969), 8.
49 Monte M. Poen, Harry S. Truman Versus the Medical Lobby: The Genesis of Medicare
(Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1979), 85.
50 Poen, Harry S. Truman Versus the Medical Lobby, 105.
51 David F. Drake, Reforming the Health Care Market: An Interpretive Economic History
(Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1994), 200.
52 Clark Porteous, “Doctors Asked to Fight Socialized Medicine,” Journal of the
Tennessee State Medical Association, Vol. XLII, No. 1 (January, 1949), 1.
53 Porteous, “Doctors Asked to Fight Socialized Medicine,” 4.
54 Porteous, “Doctors Asked to Fight Socialized Medicine,” 123.
55 David Blumenthal and James A. Morone, The Heart of Power: Health and Politics in
the Oval Office (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 92.
56 Blumenthal and Morone, The Heart of Power, 93.
57 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.
58 James Giblin, The Rise and Fall of Senator Joe McCarthy, 104.
59 K. A. Cuordileone, Manhood and American Political Culture in the Cold War (New
York: Routledge, 2004), 28.
60 Cuordileone, Manhood and American Political Culture, 46.
61 Naoko Shibusawa, “The Lavender Scare and Empire: Rethinking Cold War
Antigay Politics,” Diplomatic History, Vol. 36, No. 4 (Sept., 2012), 751.
62 Shibusawa, “The Lavender Scare and Empire,” 73.
63 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.
64 Baxter, “‘Homo-Hunting’ in the Early Cold War,” 125.
65 Baxter, “‘Homo-Hunting’ in the Early Cold War,” 125.
66 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.
67 Gregory S. Taylor, The History of the North Carolina Communist Party (Columbia:
University of South Carolina Press, 2009), 205
68 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.
69 Dewey W. Grantham, The South in Modern America: A Region at Odds (Fayetteville:
University of Arkansas Press, 2001), 196.
70 Jeff Woods, Black Struggle, Red Scare: Segregation and Anti-Communism in the South,
1948–1968 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University, 2004), 35.
230 CULTURE WARS
71 Woods, Black Struggle, Red Scare, 33.

72 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.
73 Woods, Black Struggle, Red Scare, 28.
74 168 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.
75 Thomas R. Waring, “Councils Spark New Life into Republic’s Principles,” The
Citizens’ Council, December 1955, 2.
76 “Theophilus Eugene Connor,” Dictionary of American Biography (Supplement 9:
1971–1975) (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1994).
Epilogue: Consequences
T 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
232 EPILOGUE: CONSEQUENCES
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 233
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 Western-
style liberal democracy was a major development in the 1960’s and 70’s
that contributed to the Islamic revolution.”2
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
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
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 Eisen-
hower 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 deci-
sive 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
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 policy-
makers 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
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 independently-
minded 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
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
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
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.
NOTES
1 Christopher de Bellaigue, Patriot of Persia, Muhammad Mossadegh and a Tragic Anglo-
American Coup (New York: Harper, 2012), xviii.
2 Quoted in Stephen Kinzer, “Revisiting Cold War Coups and Finding Them
Costly,” New York Times, November 30, 2003.
3 Quoted in Kinzer, “Revisiting Cold War Coups.”
4 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.
5 Zelizer, When Liberals Were Hawks, 12.
6 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.
7 See I.V. Gaiduk, The Soviet Union and the Vietnam War (Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1996),
passim.
8 Edward Cuddy, “Vietnam: Mr. Johnson’s War. Or Mr. Eisenhower’s?” The Review
of Politics, Vol. 65, No. 4 (Autumn, 2003), 359.
9 Robert McNamara, In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam (New York:
Random House, 1995), 32–33.
10 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.
11 Jacobs, America’s Miracle Man, 74.
16 A. J. Langguth, Our Vietnam: The War 1954–1975 (New York: Simon & Schuster,
2000), 208.
17 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
T 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.
244 DOCUMENTS
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. Self-
preservation 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
DOCUMENTS 245
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
246 DOCUMENTS
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
T 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
DOCUMENTS 247
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 self-
constituted 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
248 DOCUMENTS
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.
DOCUMENTS 249
DOCUMENT 3
A Texas Congressman Speaks

on the Sit Down Strikes and
Organized Labor
M 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.
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.
250 DOCUMENTS
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.
DOCUMENTS 251
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)
I 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.
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
252 DOCUMENTS
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 well-
meaning 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.
DOCUMENTS 253
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 then-

H Representative 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.
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.
254 DOCUMENTS
(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, con-
spiratorial 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
DOCUMENTS 255
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.
256 DOCUMENTS
DOCUMENT 6
“I’m No Communist”
by Humphrey Bogart
ovie star Humphrey Bogart was a member of the Committee for the First
M 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.
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 Un-
American 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.
DOCUMENTS 257
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 Un-
American 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
258 DOCUMENTS
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 liberal-
minded 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
T 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.
DOCUMENTS 259
[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 accusa-
tion 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
260 DOCUMENTS
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.
DOCUMENTS 261
DOCUMENT 8
Speech of Joseph McCarthy,

Wheeling, West Virginia,
February 9, 1950
T 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
262 DOCUMENTS
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.
DOCUMENTS 263
DOCUMENT 9
Roy Cohn’s Descent on the

Libraries of Europe
areer Diplomat Hans N. Tuch describes his memories of encountering Roy

C 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 commo-
tion 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
264 DOCUMENTS
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
T 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.
DOCUMENTS 265
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 honor-
able 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.)
266 DOCUMENTS
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.
DOCUMENTS 267
DOCUMENT 11
Students and Professors on

Communist Teachers in the
Classroom
tudent newspapers often featured informal “man-in-the-street” polls; this is

S 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.
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.
268 DOCUMENTS
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
DOCUMENTS 269
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.
270 DOCUMENTS
* * *
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
DOCUMENTS 271
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
272 DOCUMENTS
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.
DOCUMENTS 273
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?
274 DOCUMENTS
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
T 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.
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.
DOCUMENTS 275
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
276 DOCUMENTS
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!
DOCUMENTS 277
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.
278 DOCUMENTS
DOCUMENT 13
Homosexuals in Government,
1950
his is a section of a speech given by Cliff Clevenger (R-OH). Filled with

T 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.
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.
DOCUMENTS 279
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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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.
BIBLIOGRAPHY 299
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.
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300 BIBLIOGRAPHY
whether there are Employees in the State Department Disloyal to the United
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djvu.txt SISS hearings with Lattimore testimony.
Index
Acheson, Dean 129; on aid to Anarchism 15, 24, 30

Nationalist Chinese 136, 137, Anderson, Jack 158
attacked by McCarthy 217, 284; and Arbenz, Jacobo 234
Lattimore 160, 168, 207 Army-McCarthy Hearings 176–7
Allen, Frederick Lewis 47, 55, 64 Attorney General’s List (Attorney
Allen, Raymond B. 200 General’s List of Subversive
Amerasia 117, 151, 153, 154, 158 Organizations) 113, 114, 157,
American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) 289
57, 95, 96, 145 AWARE, Inc. 179
American Federation of Labor (AFL)
25; goals of 34; and Seattle strike Barton, Bruce 66
44–5, 50, 51, and strikes of 1919 Bator, Francis M. 240
52; suspicious of New Deal 91–2, Bentley, Elizabeth T. 127, 128, 131,
98, 100, 138, 192, 212, 222, 276; 161
versus CIO 89 Berger, Victor 36, 58
American Historical Association (AHA) Big Red Scare 38, 42, 44, 61, 62, 63,
197 72, 100, 199
American Legion: in anti-communist Bilbo, Sen. Theodore G. 221
network 138; attacks progressive Bolsheviks 39, 40, 41, 42, 46, 47, 50,
education 196–7; Centralia Lynching 51, 53, 55, 60, 61, 67n4
38–9, 56; and GI Bill 116–17, 122; Boston Police Strike of 1919 52
history of 57, 100; and Mosinee Browder, Earl 94, 100, 101, 102, 109,
“takeover” 2; pressures legislatures 162
199, 201, 213; Truman speech to Brown v. Board of Education 225, 226
258–60, 264 Budenz, Louis F. 156, 160, 161, 166
American Liberty League 5, 83 Bureau of Investigation (see also FBI)
American Medical Association (AMA) 45, 50, 51, 55, 59
208, 209, 210, 211, 212, 213, 214,
215, 229n49, 274, 277 Canwell Committee 99
American Plan 65 Carnegie, Andrew 22, 23, 26, 27, 129
Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) Carr, Robert K. 120
133, 157, 193, 209, 212, 276 Catholic Church 138
302 INDEX
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) 112, Congress of Industrial Organizations

156, 157, 173, 174, 232, 233, 234, (CIO) 16, 88; origins of 89; early
239 successes 90–1; denounced by Frey
Centralia lynching 38, 56 92; Communist role in 94, 95, 98,
Chambers, Whittaker 126, 128, 129, 100, 101; and Nixon attack on
161 Voorhis 106–7, 119; and Taft-Hartley
Chiang Kai-shek (Jiang Jieshi) 2; and Act 120, 192, 212; and Operation
China Hands 158, 166, 168; and Dixie 222–3, 276
China Lobby 137, 152; and the Conservative (defined) 20
“loss” of China 135–6; and Marshall Consumerism 183, 203–8
Mission 154 Consumers’ National Federation 206,
Chicago Tribune 18, 77, 133, 138, 206 207, 208
China Hands (see also John Paton Davies, Consumers’ Research 203, 204
John Stewart Service, John Carter Consumers’ Union 205, 208
Vincent) 157, 166 Coudert, Frederic R. 97
China Lobby 137, 156 Cvetic, Matthew 161
China White Paper 137
Churchill, Winston 109, 110, 111, 152 Daughters of the American Revolution
Citizens’ Councils 226 (DAR) 61, 195, 197, 199, 200, 201
Clark, Tom C. 113, 114, 116, 133, 156 Davies, John Paton 121, 136, 153, 158,
Cohn, Roy M.: and Army—McCarthy 166, 237
Hearings 176; hired by McCarthy Debs, Eugene Victor 36, 57, 58
157; and Schine in Europe 263–4; Democratic Party 8, 28, 75, 83, 102,
and State Dep’t libraries 171–3 112, 117, 132, 145, 155, 169, 209,
Comintern (Third International) 42, 51, 223, 241
84, 85, 92, 97, 101, 103n25 Dewey, John 194, 195, 197, 204
Communist (defined) 20 Dewey, Thomas E. 122, 132, 133
Communist Control Act of 1954 6, 7, Dickstein, Rep. Samuel 87
98, 142 Diem, Ngo Dinh 237, 238, 239
Communist control laws 99 Dies, Martin 87, 88, 92, 94, 95, 96, 97,
Communist Party of the USA (CPUSA) 120, 121, 207
1, 9, 21; and American public 41; Dilling, Elizabeth 91, 195, 196, 197,
and the Depression 71, 78, 84; during 199, 201
WWII 101, 103n36, 111, 118; disenfranchisement 31–3
founding of 51, 53, 62, 70; and Dulles, Allen 174, 234
Hollywood 121–5; infiltrated by FBI Dulles, John Dulles 194, 233, 234, 238
142, 143, 145, 149, 150, 155, 160, Dulles, John Foster 175
163, 165, 166, 179, 199, 200, 201,
202, 213, 220; JE Hoover on dangers Eastland, Sen. James O. 225
of 251–3, 261, 262, 267, 276, 278; Ebey, George 202
and left liberals 85; loss of members education 194–203 passim
100; membership 93; relationship to Eisenhower, Dwight David 13; 1952
USSR, also CIO 94–6; and support from McCarthy 169–70;
Scottsboro case 224; and Soviet challenged by McCarthy 173, 174;
espionage 129–30; and Smith Act on GOP right-wing 178, 187, 190;
128; suppression of 98; and Wallace ideological place in the GOP 81, 110,
campaign 132, 141 151, 166; and overthrow of Arbenz
INDEX 303
234; and overthrow of Mossadegh Graham, Rev. Billy 190, 191, 192, 193,
232–233; on religion 193, 194, 220; 227
turns on McCarthy 175; and Vietnam Grant, Madison 49
235–6, 237, 238, 239, 240, 264 Great Society 240, 241
Executive Order 9835 113 Guatemala 234–5
guilt by association 95, 115, 136, 259
Fair Deal 5, 6, 133, 220 Guomindang (Kuomintang or Chinese
Fair Employment Practices Committee Nationalists) 136, 137, 158
(FEPC) 117, 134, 221
Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 76 Hanson, Ole 44, 45, 46
Faulk, John Henry 179 Haymarket bombing 16, 18, 19, 30,
Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) 45; 72
and the American Legion 57, 93; and Hearst, William Randolph 77, 117, 156,
Amerasia 153; and the anticommunist 196, 206, 207, 295, 297
network 138; and CPUSA Hiss, Alger, 11, 126; accused by
propaganda 130, 131, 132; doubts Chambers 129, 132; and rightwing
Budenz 160; and Elizabeth Bentley suspicions 137, 150, 151; and
127; helps HUAC 121, 122, 123; McCarthy 154–5, 158, 163
helps McCarthy 156–7, 158; and Hitler, Adolph 49, 96, 100, 200, 218,
Hollywood 125; and John Henry 278
Faulk 179; infiltrates CPUSA 142, Hitler-Stalin Pact 96, 98, 100, 109,
151; institutes COINTELPRO 180, 200
203, 211, 217, 220, 225, 251, 258, Ho Chi Minh 235, 236, 237, 239, 241
286, 291, 295, 296, 297, 298; and Hoey, Rep. Clyde 219
Lattimore 167; and McCarran 168, Hollywood 101, 121; HUAC
176, 177; and professional witnesses investigation 124–6, 180; and
161, 166; and the public 124; role Humphrey Bogart 256–8
under FDR 100–1, 113; and Truman Hollywood Ten 125, 126, 256
loyalty program 114–15; 116, 120; Hook, Sidney 200, 201
and Venona 128, 129; Hoover, Herbert 73, 79
Fellow Traveler (defined) 21 Hoover, John Edgar: abandons
Fifield, Rev. James W. 189 McCarthy 176, 177, 178, 179, 180;
Fifth Amendment communist (defined) and African-Americans 225; and Big
21 Red Scare 52, 54, 58, 62, 93, 100;
Flanders, Sen. Ralph 175 as head of General Intelligence
fluoridation 11, 186 Division 51; helps HUAC 121, 129,
Fontaine, André 4, 16 130, 142; helps McCarthy 156, 157;
Foster, William Z. 53 helps McCarran 168; 172; and
Frey, John P. 92, 93, 94, 95 homosexuals 217, 220; and
Fuchs, Klaus 2, 132, 137, 163 Lattimore 167; and Martin Dies, Jr.
120; speech before HUAC 251–3,
Gabrielson, Guy G. 219 257
Gallup Poll 93, 100, 142, 177, 187, 211 House Committee on Un-American
Garner, John Nance 87 Activities (HUAC): and anti-
Geneva Accords 236, 239 communist network 138, 151, 156,
Goldman, Emma 40, 58 165, 173; functions 120; and
Gouzenko, Igor 128, 131 Hollywood 125–6, 128, 130; and
304 INDEX
Humphrey Bogart 256; and J. Edgar Liberal (defined) 20

Hoover 121, 122, 123, 124; and little Little HUACs 61, 97, 99, 199, 225
HUACs 199, 207, 223, 225; and Little Red Scare 88, 100
NAACP 226, 251; and Red Monday Louis F. Post 58, 62
178, 180; role in red scare 21, 46, 61, loyalty oaths 98, 99, 174, 202
88, 98, 109; Luce, Henry R. 137, 190, 238
Humphrey, Sen. Hubert H. 6, 7, 132, Lusk Committee 46, 48, 50, 55, 61
133; and Communist Control Act
141–5; and McCarran Act 164 The Man Nobody Knows 66
Hunter, John Patrick 183, 184 Mao Tse-tung (Mao Zedong) 135, 136,
Hurley, Patrick S. 151, 153, 154 166, 241
Hutchins, Robert M. 202 Marshall Mission 154
Marshall Plan 112, 128
Industrial Workers of the World Marshall, George C. 112, 136, 146, 154,
(Wobblies) 16, 31, 33, 36, 38, 47, 168, 169, 170
56 Marxism (defined) 20
Institute of Pacific Relations (see also Matthews, John B. 156, 160, 173, 207
Owen Lattimore) 158, 166, 167, 283, Matusow, Harvey 161, 166
300 Maverick, Rep. Maury 88, 249, 251
Internal Security Act of 1950 (McCarran McCarran, Sen. Patrick (Pat) A. 75;
Act) 6, 7, 16n9, 141, 143, 164, 165, described 144–5, 163–8 passim; and
253 Internal Security Act 143; and
Iran 110, 232, 233, 234, 235 Lattimore 166–7, 253
McCarthy, Sen. Joseph R. 2, 3, 6, 7, 8,
Jenner, Sen. William E. 162, 179 9, 10, 11, 19, 108, 123, 126, 127,
Johnson, Lyndon Baines 215, 231, 240, 142, 145, 146, 147; Army-McCarthy
241 hearings 173–8, 183, 184, 187, 193,
202; attacks Marshall 168–9, 170,
Kempton, Murray 145 171; and homophobia 215 216, 217,
Kennan, George 110 219, 231, 237, 238, 240, 251;
Kohlberg, Alfred (see also China Lobby) interrogates Gen. Zwicker 264–6;
137, 156, 158 text of Wheeling speech 261–2;
Korean War 3, 5, 151, 160, 274 Tydings hearings 155–62, 163, 166;
Ku Klux Klan 65, 223, 226, 272 Wheeling speech 148–51, 152, 153
McCarthyism: effect on college students
La Follette Committee 87, 88, 91, 95 3–4; explained by historians 7–14, 15,
La Follette, Jr., Sen. Robert M. 64, 88, 60, 108, 114, 155, 162, 183, 202,
89, 91, 147 215, 231, 272
Lattimore, Owen 158, 159, 160, 161, McCormack-Dickstein Committee 87
166, 167 McCormick, Colonel Robert R. 19,
Lavender Scare 215–20 77, 206
League of Women Shoppers (LWS) 203, McNamara, Robert S. 237
205, 206, 207, 208 Meiklejohn, Alexander 200, 201
Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich 39, 40, 41, 47, Minor, Anne Rogers 195, 196, 198
51, 52, 67n4, 149, 190, 213, 214, Minute Women of the USA 138, 197,
246, 261, 276 201, 202
Lewis, John L. 89, 92, 100 Mission to Moscow 101
INDEX 305
Mosinee, WN 1, 2, 3, 11 Pacific Affairs 158, 166

Mossadegh, Dr. Mohammad 232, 233, Palmer, A. Mitchell 47, 50, 52, 55, 58,
234 62
Mundt, Sen. Karl E. 163, 164, 176, 201, Paris Commune 29
253 Parlor Pink (defined) 20
Mundt-Nixon Bill 163, 253–5 Passing of the Great Race 49, 281
Murphy, Frank 70, 72, 87, 90, 96 Peale, Norman Vincent 190, 192, 193,
Murrow, Edward R. 175, 176 296
Myers, Sen. Henry L. 59, 60, 61, 243 Peress, Irving 173, 174
Peurifoy, John (see also Lavender Scare)
National Association for the 215
Advancement of Colored People Philbrick, Herbert Arthur 161
(NAACP) 206, 224, 225, 226 Pink (defined) 20
National Association of Manufacturers Popular Front 5, 85, 96, 133, 199, 200,
(NAM) 5, 188, 190 207, 211, 223
National Council for American professional witnesses 161
Education 197, 201 Progressive Education 195, 197
national health insurance 208–15 Progressive Party 112, 132, 208, 211
National Industrial Recovery Act
(NIRA) 76, 90 Race 220–227
National Labor Relations Act of 1935 Rankin, Rep. John E. 221, 225
(NLRA or Wagner Act) 76, 82, 86, Rapp-Coudert Committee 97, 104n42
90, 91, 92, 119, 222 Red (defined) 20
National Labor Relations Board (NRLB) Red Network 91, 199, 207
82, 86, 89, 205 Religion 187–194
nativism 22, 48, 49 Republican Party 81
New Deal: and ADA 133, 134; Robin Hood 186
Conservative arguments against 5–6; Roosevelt, Eleanor 133, 157, 207, 212
conservatives label as communist 118, Roosevelt, Franklin Delano (FDR) 5, 8;
119, 132; McCarran opposes 144, accused of being a communist 77;
147, 169; Nixon associates approach to Stalin 109; on causes of
communism with 106, 108, 109; communism 60, 72; death of 108;
religion and 187–9, 193, 202, 206, empowers FBI 100; and FEPC 221,
209, 220, 221, 222, 231, 241, 249, 227; and GI Bill 116, 117, 122, 126,
256; rollback as conservative goal 14, 131; and health care 209; and Hiss
70–104 passim, 105 154–5; and New Deal 73–6;
New York Times 3, 4, 15, 18, 29, 45, 46, Norman Thomas on 83–4, 85, 86;
51, 55, 94, 200, 256, 264 and NIRA 90, 93; and religion
Niebuhr, Reinhold 12, 13, 133, 193 187–9, 193; and sit-down strikes 87;
Nixon, Richard M.: and Hiss case 129, and Soviet Union 101, 102, 103;
138, 156; and homophobia 218, 234, Syracuse Address 246–8; views on
241, 253; moves against McCarthy government 78–80; and Yalta
175; and Mundt-Nixon bill 163–4; 151–3
and Voorhis 105–8 Roosevelt, Theodore 33, 81
Roosevelt, Jr. Theodore 56, 57, 59
Operation Dixie 222, 223 Rosenberg, Julius and Ethel 11, 132,
Overman Committee 45, 46, 47, 61 163
306 INDEX
Rovere, Richard 172 Taft, William Howard 50

Rugg, Harold O. 195, 196, 197 Taft-Hartley Act (Labor Management
Relations Act of 1947) 16, 119, 120,
Salk (polio) vaccine 186 133, 223
Schine, G. David 171, 172, 173, 176, Tenney Committee (California Senate
177, 263, 264 Fact-finding Subcommittee on Un-
Schlesinger, Benjamin 42 American Activities) 99
Schlesinger, Jr., Arthur M. 85, 133, 145, Thomas, Norman 83, 187, 200, 269
216 Trotsky, Leon 40, 41, 52
Schrecker, Ellen 97, 138, 202 Truman Doctrine 16, 111, 113
Scottsboro Boys 224, 292 Truman, Harry S. 5, 6, 16, 110; attacked
Seattle general strike 44, 45, 46, 47, 54 by McCarthy 169; and China 136–7;
Senate Internal Security Subcommittee criticizes Eisenhower 170; deplores
(SISS or McCarran Committee) 138, McCarthyism 184, 191, 208; and
165, 166, 167, 168, 178, 225, 226 Hoover 156–7; and loyalty program
Service, Caroline S. 151 113–16, 131, 132; and Marshall
Service, John Stewart 136, 150, 153, Mission, 155; and Point 4; proposes
157–8, 166, 237 Fair Deal 133–4; proposes national
Sevareid, Eric 219–20 health insurance 209–10, 211, 215,
sit-down strikes 86, 87, 90, 94, 96 221, 227, 232; speech to American
Sloan, Alfred P. 86 Legion 258–60, 274; and Truman
Smith Act 97, 129, 178 Doctrine 111–12; vetoes McCarran
Smith, Sen. Margaret Chase 162 bill 165, 168
Socialist (defined) 20 Tydings, Sen. Millard 155, 158, 161,
Song of Russia 101, 121 162, 163, 216, 219
Stalin, Josef 2; and atom bomb 131;
and Berlin Blockade 128, 129; UNESCO (United Nations Educational,
dominance in Soviet Union 84, 85; Scientific and Cultural Organization)
pact with Hitler 96, 100, 101; and 186
postwar order 109–10, 111, 113, 121; United Auto Workers’ Union (UAW)
at Yalta 152, 155, 159, 162, 190, 86, 90, 94, 249
200, 261 United Fruit 234
Steel Strike of 1919 43, 53 US Chamber of Commerce 117, 165,
Stevens, Robert T. 176 188, 190, 191, 209, 213
Stevenson, Adlai 122, 123, 129, 145, US State Department 2, 50, 110, 136,
157, 169, 170, 175, 220 137, 142; Cohn and Schine
Stevenson, Archibald E. 46, 48, 50 investigate 171–3, 175, 215;
Stevenson, Suzanne Silvercruys (see also homosexuals in 217–19, 237, 262,
Minute Women of the USA) 198 279; McCarthy attacks 146–50, 151,
Stilwell, Gen. Joseph W. 135, 136 153, 154, 155, 157, 158, 159, 161,
Sumner, William Graham 6, 16, 25, 26 163, 166, 167
Supreme Court of the United States 36, Utley, Freda 156, 157, 158
86, 122, 126, 165, 178–9
syndicalism 24 Vandenberg, Arthur 16, 112
Vietnam 178, 231, 235–41 passim
Taft, Sen. Robert A. 81, 118, 155, 169, Vietnam Lobby (Friends of Vietnam)
171, 185, 210 238
INDEX 307
Vincent, John Carter 136, 158, 166, 167, world communism 3, 11; dangers of
237 253–5, 268; McCarthy and 148;
Voorhis, Rep. Jerry 97, 105, 106, 107, United Nations and 186, 194; in US
108 foreign policy 234–8;
World War I 24, 30, 35, 39, 42, 51, 63,
Wagner, Sen. Robert F. 75, 209 72, 100
Wallace, Henry 5, 9, 106; campaign for World War II 5, 88, 95, 100, 108, 111,
president 132–3, 158, 185, 211, 221 121, 134, 135, 146, 151, 174, 191,
Warren, Gov. Earl 212 193, 199, 216, 231, 235
Welch, Joseph Nye 176, 177
Wherry, Sen. Kenneth 13, 215, 219 Yalta Agreement 109, 129, 137, 151,
White, Ada 186 152, 153, 155
Whitaker and Baxter 212, 213, 214, 215, Youth for Christ 191
274
White, Harry Dexter 123, 128, 129, 132 Zoll, Allen 197, 201, 202
Wilson, Woodrow 35, 41, 43, 45, 58, Zwicker, Gen. Ralph W. 174, 175, 176,
208, 247 264

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

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

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McCarthyism

In this succinct text, Jonathan Michaels examines the rise of anti-communist

Jonathan Michaels received his Ph.D. in history from the University of

The Louisiana Purchase The Battle of Fort Sumter

From Selma to Montgomery The California Gold Rush

The Emergence of Rock and The Espionage and Sedition

Transforming Civil War Prisons McCarthyism

ISBN: 978-0-415-84102-3 (hbk)

Typeset in Bembo and Helvetica Neue

Visit the series page: http://routledgetextbooks.com/textbooks/_author/criticalmoments/

Series Introduction viii

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

Welcome to the Routledge Critical Moments in American History series. The

4.1 Senator Joseph McCarthy standing at microphone with

I t was unusually chilly—snow was still on the street—that first morning

about some investigating committee or other “getting you” if you said or

THE DEBATE ON THE RED SCARE

Sumner continued, summing up the view of the modern conservative

in its cause, and moderately aided by those politicians who—fearful that

relentless, interminable breaking down of the witness; the

—all these seemed dreadfully reminiscent of Nazi and Soviet patterns of

position in American society was undergoing change, whether for better

McCarthyism in this view of the party movements of almost a

itself to quiet and nonsensational solutions before the late forties

The ﬁnal and most devastating attack on the sociological explanations of

By the 1960s, most interpreters of McCarthyism had come to

God has not been preparing the English-speaking and Teutonic

So it was with anti-communism in all its varieties, including, but not

of being, if not an actual Communist, then a tool, witting or unwitting,

The Origins of Red Scare

I t was 10:30 pm in the city of Chicago on May 4, 1886, in Haymarket

three surviving men, declaring, “The deed to sentencing the Haymarket

AMERICAN CAPITAL, AMERICAN LABOR:

A Glossary of The Red Scare

Fifth Amendment Communist: A person who, because they invoked their

the fellow-traveller’s [sic] commitment takes a different form from that of a

a group that included anarchists, Socialists, syndicalists and Communists—

BIG BUSINESSES IN SEARCH OF CHEAP LABOR

BELIEFS, AMERICAN AND “UN”

day, Social Darwinism, an attempt to extend the biological insights of

So, to Sumner, Carnegie and other Social Darwinists, the capitalist

COMBINATIONS: CORPORATIONS AND UNIONS

after which he had to pick up again at 3 pm, continuing until 7 am the

In this favored land of law and liberty, workers have no need of

government, declaring Paris to be an independent commune. Two events

that there was a chance to grasp the luxuries of wealth, or to

This same period—the late 1800s—was one of intense strike activity in

THE RED HAND OF ANARCHISM

Turn of the century businessmen were under pressure from move-

THE DISENFRANCHISEMENT OF WORKING-CLASS

Along with voting discrimination against the poor went an increasing

THE POLITICAL TEMPER OF THE AMERICAN

THE FIRST WORLD WAR AND THE

organizations or who espoused the ideas associated with such organizations,

6 Robert Asher and Charles Stephenson, “American Capitalism, Labor Organization,

The Big Red Scare

I n Centralia, Washington on Armistice Day, 1919, parading American