The most serious cases of Soviet espionage had occurred when the two world powers were not at odds. Nonetheless, spying that had taken place earlier but was uncovered only during the Cold War served to justify U.S. foreign policy and explain its failings, providing an outlet for frustrations over the enormous gap between official rhetoric and the practical limit of American power. Short of all-out war, the Truman administration could not have forced the Soviet Union out of Eastern Europe or prevented the Communist victory in China. Yet communist advances, rather than sparking a rethinking of American policy, led to a search for traitors who “gave away” Eastern Europe and China. For years, congressional conservatives and executive branch security officers launched one loyalty investigation after another of the wartime State Department officials who had correctly predicted the collapse of the Chinese Nationalist regime and advocated trying to reach an accommodation with the Chinese communists to further the fight against the Japanese. Disloyalty also provided a convenient explanation for America’s loss of its nuclear monopoly, inevitable given the sophistication of Soviet science and engineering (though information gotten through spying did speed up the effort).
McCarthyism
The career of Senator Joseph McCarthy reflected the close link between the Red Scare at home and events abroad. A Republican senator from Wisconsin, little known outside his home state, McCarthy captured national attention in February 1950 when he claimed to have a list of State Department employees with communist affiliations against whom the secretary of state had failed to act. Though in this instance and others to come, McCarthy largely recycled old charges with little concern about their veracity, his flamboyant manner and ever-shifting, dramatic accusations, replete with specific numbers and details (often later proved wrong), led to extensive press coverage, bitter partisan controversy, and congressional investigations. The term “McCarthyism,” coined in a Washington Post political cartoon, became widely used to describe the anticommunist drive, particularly its most lurid and sleazy forms.
The political climate ushered in by the Korean War eliminated any chance that concern about the dangers of domestic communism would begin to die down. Though by 1950 the American Communist Party was in steep decline, congressional conservatives, led by Pat McCarran, an anti–New Deal Democratic senator from Nevada, congressional liberals, and the Truman administration all put forth proposals to legally restrict communist activity and bolster national security laws. Elements of the various plans were combined into an omnibus Internal Security Act that Congress passed by huge margins. Truman, who had sought a more modest measure, vetoed the bill, saying that it would “greatly weaken our liberties,” but Congress easily overrode him. The new law required communist organizations and their members to register with the federal government; excluded foreigners who ever had been affiliated with groups advocating totalitarianism from visiting or emigrating to the United States; and authorized the detention without trial of suspected subversives in the event of a national emergency. By 1954, the FBI had over twenty-six thousand people on a list of those to be arrested.
Liberal Democrats had fallen over themselves to prove they were as staunchly anticommunist as conservatives. Nevertheless, in the 1950 election, Republicans, with McCarthy in the lead, charged the Democrats with being soft on communism. The tactic already was well worn. But with U.S. troops fighting in Korea, red-baiting—on the part of both parties—became more common and cruder. In a bitter Senate primary fight in Florida, Democratic congressman George Smathers called his opponent, the liberal incumbent Claude Pepper, “an apologist for Stalin” and claimed that “Red Pepper” was an “associate of fellow travelers.” In a California Senate primary, a Democratic opponent labeled liberal congresswoman Helen Gahagan Douglas, a former Hollywood actress married to a movie star, part of a “subversive clique,” asserting, in a not uncommon linking of political and sexual transgression, that she was “neither truly representative of her sex nor of her party.” After Douglas won the nomination, her Republican opponent, Richard Nixon (seeking to move from the House to the Senate), kept her on the defensive by repeatedly pointing out that her voting record on national security issues heavily overlapped that of New York’s radical congressman Vito Marcantonio.
Anticommunist politicians received backing from party leaders and economic interests who sought to use them to advance partisan and policy agendas that often had little to do with national security. Mainstream Republican leaders like Taft and Eisenhower either tacitly supported McCarthy or refrained from publicly criticizing him, seeing him as an electoral asset for their party. Anticommunism provided a way to attack the New Deal, the Fair Deal, and liberalism by implying that they were on a continuum with communism, pink if not red, softer versions of the ultimate evil. Conservative newspapers, elements of the Catholic Church, business groups such as the Chamber of Commerce, and conservative civic organizations like the American Legion and the Daughters of the American Revolution clamored about the dangers of communism as part of a broader effort to roll back the New Deal, or at least stop its expansion.
Business found anticommunism a useful weapon against labor, charging that unions, rather than simply trying to help their members, were advancing an anti-American conspiracy. Within the labor movement, longtime anticommunists found their position bolstered by unfolding events. After a group of unions with ties to the Communist Party dissented from the CIO’s backing of Truman and the Marshall Plan, CIO leaders expelled them. The federal government, through congressional investigations, deportations, prosecutions, and an ever-growing web of anticommunist laws and regulations, isolated left-wing unionists and forced many out of the labor movement. The combination of internal battling, government action, and employer attacks left unions weakened and all but ended the historic ties between organized labor and political radicalism.
Real estate interests used anticommunism to try to stop the development of public housing. In 1947, as vice chairman of a joint congressional committee studying housing issues, Joe McCarthy, who raised money not only from businesses in his own state but also from the oil and real estate industries nationally, blamed government housing for broken homes and juvenile delinquency and for serving as “a breeding ground for communists.” In Los Angeles, a coalition of business groups, real estate agents, home builders, and the Los Angeles Times attacked an ambitious plan to build ten thousand units of public housing as “creeping socialism,” leading to a 1952 referendum vote that killed off much of the program. (The city then helped entice the Brooklyn Dodgers to move west by selling them a parcel of land in Chavez Ravine, originally taken for public housing, on which to build a stadium.)
In the South, anticommunism developed largely as a way to block the civil rights movement. The Red Scare started late in the region, which, with a one-party system and a high degree of ideological consensus among its ruling powers, had less occasion than elsewhere for anticommunism to be mobilized for partisan purposes. A 1954 poll found the South to be the only region of the country where more people opposed McCarthy than supported him. But as the movement for racial equality grew, particularly after the 1954 Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, southern defenders of segregation increasingly made use of anticommunism, portraying the push for civil rights as a conspiracy orchestrated by communists from outside the region. Most southern states passed laws and set up police agencies or legislative committees aimed at repressing civil rights efforts in the name of anticommunism, often with considerable success.
Sometimes it was unclear how much the Communist Party itself was actually a concern to anticommunists, who deemed disloyal a broad range of social, political, and religious views. McCarthyism was a quest for a conservative ideological and cultural consensus that went far beyond the issue of communism. Many anticommunists worried at least as much about atheists, intellectuals, integrationists, trade unionists, left-liberals, and homosexuals as they did about communists.
; HUAC’s sustained investigation of the entertainment industries reflected this desire to control mass culture and popular values. In repeated probes searching for communist infiltration, committee members concerned themselves with the content of cultural products. They did not worry about open communist appeals; as actor Adolphe Menjou, a devoted anticommunist, said in HUAC testimony, “I have seen no such thing as Communist propaganda, such as waving the hammer and sickle in motion pictures.” Rather the issue was what Menjou called “things that I thought were against what I considered good Americanism.”
A large number of leftists worked at one time or another in the culture industries, including several hundred Communist Party members in Hollywood alone. Much of their work differed little from that of their more conservative colleagues, but when they had a chance, left-wing writers and directors tried to project their social values into films, be it prewar gangster movies that portrayed crime as an outgrowth of poverty, wartime antifascist movies, or postwar “message movies,” like Gentleman’s Agreement and The Big Clock, that attacked racism and anti-Semitism and were critical of big business. Since communists, former communists, and communist sympathizers were particularly active in pursuing such liberal themes, their expulsion from the industry provided a way to reorient mass culture. The movie studios and, to an even greater extent, the emerging television industry soon began shying away from controversial subjects and avoiding the kind of social-problem themes that had been commonly addressed in the mid-1940s. In commercial culture, as in political debate, the range of discourse narrowed.
A few Hollywood figures who refused to answer questions before HUAC went to jail for contempt of Congress, but in the movie industry, and more generally, the sanctions against those linked in one way or another to the Communist Party came largely from civil society. Congressional committees and other government agencies identified current and former leftists, but their punishment came from being fired by private employers and being put on blacklists of unhirables maintained by trade associations and professional red-hunting agencies. By the early 1950s, anyone who refused to sign a form declaring that they were not a communist or refused to testify before a congressional committee could not work in the movie, radio, or television industries, at least under his or her own name.
By one estimate, over thirteen million Americans, about a fifth of the workforce, came within the scope of government and private loyalty programs. Most simply had to fill out a questionnaire or take a loyalty oath. Even that could have a chilling effect. For tens of thousands, the consequences were direr. Nearly three thousand longshoremen and seamen lost their jobs under a federally established port security program, ostensibly aimed at preventing sabotage but in practice more concerned with ridding the maritime industry of left-wing unionists. On college campuses, some one hundred faculty members lost their jobs, mostly for refusing to cooperate with anticommunist investigations or name leftists they knew. Hundreds of state and municipal workers across the country—social workers, teachers, transit workers, and the like—lost their jobs, too, because of their political affiliations or refusal to testify about them.
The job-based loyalty system could exact a high personal cost. Thomas J. Coleman, an African American employee of the Detroit Garbage Department, was the first worker investigated by the loyalty commission city voters authorized in 1949. A high-ranking Mason with a son serving in Korea, and a civil rights and union activist, Coleman denied ever being a communist. Nonetheless, he was fired after a quarter century on the job. Veteran actor Philip Loeb, a star of the long-running television series The Goldbergs and a supporter of various left-wing causes, lost his job after the sponsor of the show, General Foods, refused to keep it going as long as he was employed. Four years later, blacklisted from most other work, running out of money, and no longer able to keep his mentally ill son in a private institution, Loeb committed suicide. Vera Shlakman, a pioneering economic historian, fared better. After being fired by Queens College in 1952 for refusing to tell a Senate committee if she had ever been a communist, she eventually built a second career teaching social work. But she never regained a position in economics.
The many purposes anticommunism served helped sustain it even as the domestic Communist Party all but disappeared. But anticommunism also had a noninstrumental side, an expressive side—often irrational, fantastic, carnivalesque—such as McCarthy’s attacks on Dean Acheson and George Marshall for being leaders of a pro-Soviet conspiracy or Indiana senator William Jenner’s claim that “this country today is in the hands of a secret inner coterie which is directed by agents of the Soviet Union.” Charges that defied common sense often had an emotional and partisan logic. Many were expressions of frustration over the lack of sustained peace after World War II, or reflections of populist antielitism, as in the case of charges against Acheson, whose immaculate tailoring and aristocratic pretensions won him wide dislike. McCarthy’s draw lay in part in the antiestablishment image he cultivated, as a drinker, racetrack regular, and harasser of the high and mighty. Hearings and trials served as a kind of theater, sometimes of statecraft, sometimes of cruelty, and sometimes of the absurd.
A semisubmerged current of antimodernism fed anticommunism, a discomfort many Americans felt with the changes wrought by the triumph of urban industrialism over rural life, of individualism and the market over communal ties, of abstract bureaucratic institutions over organic relations, of democracy over hierarchy. (However, plenty of modernist urban liberals embraced anticommunism too.) Antistatism often wore anticommunist clothes, as conservatives saw the growth of the national government (and taxes to sustain it) as a threat to republican values and individual freedom, a way station on the road to full-blown tyranny. Communists provided a symbolic target and anticommunism an organizing framework for a range of resentments and dislikes that in many cases had nothing to do with communism itself.
Cold War Religion
Religion complemented anticommunism and patriotism in bolstering support for Cold War foreign policy and the militarization of American society. In the decades after World War II, the United States experienced an increase in churchgoing and public religiosity. On the eve of World War II, half of all Americans belonged to a church or synagogue; by 1960, that had risen to nearly two-thirds, a remarkable change from a hundred years earlier, when only a fifth of the population had a formal religious affiliation. In its increasing religiousness, the United States differed from other industrialized nations, which generally experienced a decline in churchgoing and a general secularization after World War II.
From the earliest days of English colonization, many white Protestant Americans believed that God had given them a mission to create a model society, a living embodiment of the ideal godly community, which would inspire others to live like them. During the Cold War, some policymakers formulated U.S. foreign policy in this light, believing that in opposing communism and promoting its own values the country was engaged in divine work. Three Cold War secretaries of state had grown up in deeply Protestant environments as sons of ministers: Dean Acheson, whose father rose to be an Episcopalian bishop; John Foster Dulles, the son of a Presbyterian minister, who himself considered becoming a minister; and Dean Rusk, who served under Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. Each, to at least some extent, imbued U.S. policy with a sense of Christian mission.
In Cold War rhetoric, Americans often described their enemy as “godless communism.” Many Protestant anticommunist activists—like Billy Graham, who emerged in the early 1950s as the country’s best-known evangelist—were as distressed by the atheism of communism as by its collectivism. In 1952, Democratic presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson described the international battle the United States was engaged in as against “the anti-Christ.” His opponent, Dwight Eisenhower, described the contest with the Soviets as “a war of light against darkness, freedom against slavery, Godliness against atheism.”
Catholics, too, embrac
ed anticommunism as a religious cause. New York’s Francis Cardinal Spellman and Los Angeles’s Archbishop James Francis McIntyre emerged as among the most militant and tenacious anticommunists in the country. Among the Catholic laity, a wave of Marian piety developed during the Cold War that had an explicitly anticommunist dimension. Millions devoted themselves to Our Lady of Fatima, who in 1917 had appeared to three Portuguese children, saying that newly communist Russia could be converted to Christianity and world peace guaranteed if her followers undertook a particular set of prayers and religious acts. In 1950, a homegrown apparition occurred when the Virgin Mary appeared before Mary Ann Van Hoof, a Wisconsin housewife living a few miles from the hometown of Joe McCarthy, then in the process of becoming one of the country’s most prominent Catholic politicians. At the height of the fervor about Mary’s appearance and her warnings to Van Hoof about communism and Satan, some 100,000 pilgrims gathered on the Van Hoof farm hoping to witness a miracle. Church officials condemned the cult that grew up around Van Hoof but encouraged hundreds of thousands of Catholic adults and schoolchildren to regularly participate in prayers and rallies for Catholic prelates imprisoned in Eastern Europe.
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