Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History

by David Aaronovitch

  MR. STARNES: You are quoting from this Marlowe. Is he a Communist?

  MRS. FLANAGAN: I am very sorry. I was quoting from Christopher Marlowe.

  MR. STARNES: Tell us who Marlowe is, so we can get the proper reference, because that is all that we want to do.

  MRS.FLANAGAN:Put in the record that he was the greatest dramatist in the period immediately preceding Shakespeare.

  MR. STARNES: Put that in the record because the charge has been made that this article of yours is entirely Communistic, and we want to help you.

  MRS. FLANAGAN: Thank you. That statement will go in the record.

  MR.STARNES : Of course, we had what some people call “Communists” back in the days of the Greek theater.

  MRS. FLANAGAN: Quite true.

  MR. STARNES: And I believe Mr. Euripides was guilty of teaching class consciousness also, wasn’t he?

  MRS. FLANAGAN: I believe that was alleged against all of the Greek dramatists.

  MR. STARNES: So we cannot say when it began.37

  With such heroic wielders of the broad brush as Starnes, a former schoolteacher, it is hardly any wonder that, in short order, the HUAC had listed some 640 organizations, 438 newspapers, and 280 unions and labor groups as possible Communist fronts, including the American Civil Liberties Union and the Boy Scouts.38 The anti-Communist impulse waned during the war as the United States allied itself with Soviet Russia, which it supplied with arms and which bore the brunt of the fighting and dying, but as the war ended, that alliance was fracturing. Even before V-E Day, it was clear from intelligence intercepts that the Russians were attempting to run a serious espionage network in the United States. Toward the end of 1945, the director of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover, was once again describing Communists as “panderers of diabolic distrust.” As the Iron Curtain, so famously named by Winston Churchill, descended, the balance of political argument tilted back from the liberals, the internationalists, and the pro- New Dealers, toward populism and the right. In 1946, the Republicans won substantial victories in Congress, with a disproportionate number of Democratic casualties occurring among the liberals in the north and west of the country. President Truman trimmed to the new wind by launching his own program to combat internal Communist subversion through administering loyalty tests to public servants.

  The following year, 1947, saw the resuscitation of HUAC and the famous procession of movie directors, producers, and actors being questioned on whether they or their friends were or had ever been members of the Communist Party. The proposition was familiar to those who had watched the abortive hearings about alleged Hollywood propagandizing before the war: Communists or fellow travelers had consciously used their power over the industry to influence the (sometimes obscure) political messages contained in their movies. And indeed we now know, not least from the autobiography of screenwriter Walter Bernstein, that there was some limited truth in the notion that left-wing writers and directors would sometimes attempt to smuggle ideologically compatible material into their work. However, the institution of an effective blacklist in the entertainment industry was a reaction out of all proportion to the actual threat. And so, what Flynn had attempted unsuccessfully to do in 1941, was now accomplished with exemplary ruthlessness just six years later.

  Though Truman narrowly won the presidential election of 1948, that was just about the only break that the center and center-left of American politics was going to get. In the summer of 1949, the Russians tested their own atomic bomb; in September, the nationalist Chinese government of Chiang Kai-shek was finally defeated by the Chinese Communists and fled to the island of Formosa; and in June 1950, the North Koreans moved south of their disputed border, and Americans found themselves once more involved in a foreign war. Who, the Republicans asked, was responsible for this series of disasters?

  The notion that much of this was due to some kind of inside job stemmed, as we have seen, from the belief that the Roosevelt administration had contained many crypto-Bolsheviks, one of whose objectives had been to make the world safe for communism. The case that seemed to prove this imputation involved a man named Alger Hiss, who as a young lawyer had worked with John Flynn on the Nye Munitions Investigating Committee in the mid- 1930s. From there Hiss had gone to the State Department, serving as special assistant to the director of the Office of Far Eastern Affairs, then as special assistant to the director of the Office of Special Political Affairs. At the end of the war, Hiss was intimately involved in the American effort to set up the United Nations. He was smooth, articulate, Ivy League, and an avid New Dealer, with powerful friends at the very top of the administration. He was everything, in short, that Flynn, American populists, Southern Democrats, and Republicans loathed. He had also, it turned out, been a Communist in the 1930s, and had handed American secrets over to the Russians via a clandestine agent named Whittaker Chambers.f Hiss’s arraignment before the HUAC took place in a firestorm of publicity, but, as with Oscar Wilde, it was his attempt to clear his name through a libel action that led to Hiss’s eventual conviction and imprisonment for perjury.

  Then, in the summer of 1950, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, both American Communists, were arrested and charged with passing atomic secrets to the Russians. To many Americans, the wilder allegations of the anti-Communists now seemed to have substance. From California to the New York Island, the cry went up, Nous sommes trahis!

  In this atmosphere, increasingly little distinction was made between espionage and subversion on the one hand, and legitimate political activity and agitation on the other. Historian of the McCarthy phenomenon David M. Oshinsky relates how “Indiana forced professional wrestlers to sign a loyalty oath. Ohio declared Communists ineligible for unemployment benefits. Pennsylvania barred them from all state programs with one exception: blind Communists would be cared for . . . Tennessee ordered the death penalty for those seeking to overthrow the State government.” The government of the State of Tennessee, that is.39 Another illustration of the folk appeal of this new Red Scareg was an incident in the small town of Mosinee, Wisconsin, where in 1950 veterans from the American Legion disguised as Russian soldiers took over the town, arrested the mayor, imprisoned the clergy, nationalized businesses, and allowed only potato soup to be served in the cafés, before allowing everyone to be liberated from communism at dusk .40

  One of those elected in the 1946 midterm congressional elections was the young Californian Republican Richard Nixon. It was Nixon who, as a member of the HUAC, had first pursued the Chambers-Hiss case and Nixon for whom the outcome of the Hiss perjury trial was a personal triumph. The Soviets, argued Nixon, might be the ultimate enemy, but Soviet success was a homegrown disaster. It had happened “because President Truman treated Communist infiltration like any ordinary political scandal. He is responsible for this failure to act against the Communist conspiracy, and has rendered the greatest possible disservice to the people of this nation.”41 The enemy without was not nearly as potent, he was implying, as the enemy within.

  Enter McCarthy

  In 1950, Senator Joe McCarthy of Wisconsin was no more or less anti-Communist than most of his fellow Republicans. He had a streak of that midwestern populism, but there was nothing to suggest that he was a monocausal crusader. A speech made by McCarthy in 1949 was, by the standard of the time, quotidian. “One of the major aims of the Communist Party,” McCarthy told his audience, “is to locate members in important positions in newspapers—especially in college towns, so that young people will be getting daily doses of the Communist party-line propaganda under the mistaken impression that they are absorbing ‘liberal’ and ‘progressive’ ideas.”42 And, of course, subtracting the suggested underhandedness of this desire to spread the word, this was substantially true and mostly obvious. It’s what all party activists do.

  But in January 1950, McCarthy (according to most accounts) enjoyed a lunch with two friendly academics and a lawyer, and told them he was looking for an issue around which to base his campaign for reelection. One mentioned comm
unism in government, to which McCarthy is said to have replied, “The government is full of Communists. The thing to do is to hammer them.”43 A few weeks later, McCarthy addressed a meeting of the Republican Women’s Club at the McClure Hotel in Wheeling and was reported as telling his audience, “While I cannot take the time to name all the men in the State Department who have been named as members of a spy ring, I have here in my hand a list of 205 . . . that were known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping the policy of the State Department.”44

  This was a sensational charge, its impact due to its specificity and the fact that it was being leveled by a senator. The list itself was never published, but David Oshinsky has calculated that the figure was reached by taking the number of those employees whose loyalty screening back in 1946 had thrown up some damaging information, and then subtracting the number (seventy-nine) who had subsequently been discharged. McCarthy, comments Oshinsky, couldn’t have known “whether those individuals were Communist, fascists, alcoholics, sex deviants or common liars. As a gambling man he was simply raising on a poor hand, searching for an ace or two before his bluff was called.”45

  On February 20, McCarthy took his charges to the floor of the Senate. In eight hours of innuendo, semi-connected suggestions, exaggerations, guilt by association, implied accusations, and invective, McCarthy elaborated on his essential charge that the American government and the administration of President Truman were riddled with Communists and Communist sympathizers conspiring against American interests. So wild were McCarthy’s claims that the Democrats decided to undermine the man from Wisconsin by establishing an investigation to look at his accusations. Properly and publicly tested, they believed, these assertions would be revealed as false, thus casting doubt on other such allegations.

  The Republicans agreed that such a body should be established, and McCarthy set up an investigation team with the objective of finding absolutely anything that would give substance to his contentions. Onside were a couple of ex-Communists, a handful of muckraking journalists such as Westbrook Pegler, and a number of right-wing ideologues. The HUAC helped out with access to their files, and the FBI may well also have given assistance. The posse was given the job of hunting down any signs that government employees had sympathies with the Reds, connections with the Reds, or relationships with anyone who did. It didn’t matter how tenuous such links might be.

  One of the earliest of McCarthy’s targets was an academic and sinologist, Owen Lattimore, director of the School of International Relations at Johns Hopkins University. Lattimore had never actually been an employee of the government but had acted as an adviser, and in that capacity had long argued against U.S. support for the nationalist Chinese. During the war, he had insisted, correctly, that the Communists were more effective in the battle against the Japanese. But in the atmosphere of 1950 and the argument over who had “lost” China, Lattimore’s past toleration of Mao looked like a fondness for communism. It didn’t help that in 1938 Lattimore had been one of the credulous Westerners duped by the Moscow trials.

  There were some problems for McCarthy, however. The most obvious was that Lattimore had himself been attacked in the Communist Party newspaper, the Daily Worker. Ah well, said McCarthy’s team, wasn’t it obvious that some party members and sympathizers would be protected from exposure by being criticized by party publications, or by being given special dispensation to deviate from the party line? “A new technique had been unveiled,” comments David Oshinsky, “guilt by disassociation.”h “Owen Lattimore had not been proved a Communist,” Time commented on the case, “but he had not proved that he was not one.” And how could he? Any more than he could prove that the Daily Worker wasn’t criticizing him as part of a secret Communist strategy?

  The comment illustrates how the ground had shifted. At the outset of the Red Scare, Communists might have been people with whom one absolutely disagreed but whose actions were broadly legal and acceptable. Then Communists per se came to be seen as disloyal and their activities semicriminal. Then people who might have been Communists were added to that category, or people whose arguments were sometimes the same as the Communists. Assumption was piled on assumption, until you could have someone as nonrevolutionary as Lattimore, whose calvary could be justified because “he had not proved he was not” a Communist. One feature of widely believed conspiracy theories may be that even those who do not accept them often cease to examine them properly; something that would otherwise be quickly seen as absurd is instead treated as if it were one genuine possibility among several.

  John T. Flynn, now almost at the end of his ideological journey, was one of Joe McCarthy’s most enthusiastic supporters. For him, the enemy was that group of fellow-traveling social democrats who had sold the New Deal, procured war, and were now revealed as having been in cahoots with the Reds. Owen Lattimore provided Flynn with a satisfying villain. In 1953, Flynn even wrote a book, The Lattimore Story, to expose “a conspiracy involving over four dozen writers, journalists, educators and high-ranking government officials—almost all Americans—to force the American State Department to betray China and Korea into the hands of the Communists.” Lattimore himself was never successfully prosecuted, but departed America to teach at Leeds University in a United Kingdom that seemed unworried by Flynn’s and McCarthy’s accusations.

  Before Lattimore left, McCarthy delivered an address to the Senate that stands as the perfect encapsulation of the Red Scare proposition and its psychology:

  How can we account for our present situation unless we believe that men high in this government are concerting to deliver us to disaster? This must be the product of a great conspiracy, a conspiracy on a scale so immense as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man. A conspiracy of infamy so black that, when it is finally exposed, its principals shall be forever deserving of the maledictions of all honest men.46

  McCarthy’s rhetorical question could have been answered by an analysis of twentieth-century history and any number of plausible hypotheses. But rather than attempt such a discussion, McCarthy begins his answer, “This must be . . .” The situation couldn’t be the culmination of the effects of huge political, economic, and other forces, of mistakes and accidents; it “must be” the result of a deliberate and infernal calculation on the part of people whose avowed position—that they were trying to achieve the opposite result—was all a blindsiding lie.

  The occasional Alger Hiss would not suffice. In his speech, McCarthy insinuated the involvement in the conspiracy of men like the secretary of defense, author of the Marshall Plan and wartime chief of staff General George C. Marshall, who had made a “baffling pattern of decisions” that always ended up serving the “world policy of the Kremlin.” The aim of the conspirators, said the senator, was to make certain that America would “finally fall victim to Soviet intrigue from within and Russian military might from without.”

  This formulation recommended itself to Flynn, who was to endorse McCarthy’s opposition “to admitting Americans who are enemies of our American system of government—Communists or Socialists—into the government of the United States.” Unfortunately for Flynn, the Red Scare burned itself out over the next few years, with McCarthy himself being largely marginalized by the end of 1954. By then the Republicans were in the White House and less likely to give tacit support to McCarthy’s rampage through American institutions. Flynn himself moved on to other targets. In a 1955 publication, Flynn took on the youthful United Nations, which in his view had nothing to do with preserving world peace. In a voice unmellowed by age, he thundered, “We must rid this nation of the United Nations, which provides the Communist conspiracy with a headquarters here on our own shores, and which actually makes it impossible for the United States to form its own decisions about its conduct and policies in Europe and Asia.”47 In his assault on the United Nations, Flynn anticipated the main thrust of American right-wing conspiracy thinking for the nex
t forty years, certainly up to Oklahoma City and Timothy McVeigh. “They”—the forces of world domination and government—were seeking to hobble the independent United States and force it into submission, either to the advantage of communism or for the benefit of Zionism.

  Why Flynnism?

  The appeal of McCarthy, according to David Oshinsky, was that he provided “a simple explanation for America’s ‘decline’ in the world. He spoke of a massive internal conspiracy directed by Communists and abetted by government officials who came to include the Republican President of the United States. He provided names, documents and statistics—in short the appearance of diligent research.”48 But there is a puzzle here, the existence of which is highlighted by Oshinsky’s use of quotes around “decline.” By any objective standard, America had risen, not declined. America was richer, victorious in war, and—in contrast to the pulverized continents of Europe and Asia—undamaged. The specter of communism might be repulsive, but it was a long way away and less obviously threatening than Nazi Germany and the Axis powers had been at their height. Yet for several years in postwar America, conspiracism was almost a majority pastime. And the targets of suspicion were far more exalted than the usual minorities or secret organizations of past demonologies. As the historian Richard Hofstadter put it: