In the spring of 1953, the McCarthy subcommittee was looking into books carried by U.S. information centers overseas and found a substantial number of works by Langston Hughes—about 200 altogether, including 16 separate titles, on offer in 51 different venues. Though “Goodbye Christ” apparently wasn’t in these collections (no exact breakdown was given), the hearings indicated that various works provided were from this phase of his career and reflected the same outlook. The McCarthy panel was of the view that tax-supported information centers overseas, allegedly promoting the cause of the United States in its war of words with Moscow, shouldn’t be featuring material of such nature.
In pursuit of this notion, McCarthy called an expert witness who knew a lot about the works of Langston Hughes and concurred strongly in the negative verdict. One of the exchanges went as follows:
QUESTION: Now let us take those [Hughes books] that you think followed the Communist line. Do you feel that those books should be on our shelves throughout the world, with the apparent stamp of approval of the U.S. government?
ANSWER: I was certainly amazed to hear that they were. I was surprised; and I would certainly say “no.”
Committee counsel Cohn would further inquire if these works “should be included in a program to fight communism today?” To which the witness answered, “I would [think] not.” Quizzed as to whether such books were something “you would want included in our information program,” the witness responded, “I would not.” Such materials, he said, ought not be on the shelves of tax-supported U.S. libraries overseas.1
This threefold assertion that the early works of Hughes shouldn’t be in our official information centers came from the world’s foremost expert on the writings of Langston Hughes, as the witness being questioned was Langston Hughes himself. He had broken with Communism, he said, and written other things of more patriotic nature. As he put it, “I have more recent books that I would much prefer, if any books of mine are kept on the shelves…They contradict the philosophy [of the early works] and they certainly express my pro-democratic beliefs and my faith in democracy.”2
This vignette is offered to give some perspective on the “book-burning” episode in the saga of Joe McCarthy featured in most histories of the era. According to these treatments, McCarthy, Cohn, et al. were setting out to ban or destroy books with which they disagreed, thus stifling freedom of thought and diversity of opinion. The most notorious chapter of the story was an April tour of U.S. reading centers and related posts in Europe by Cohn and committee staffer David Schine. For conducting this survey and asking a lot of nosy questions, the two were derided as intolerant clowns who terrorized innocent State Department employees, outraged Europeans, and richly earned the sobriquet “junketeering gumshoes,” bestowed by one irate U.S. official.
As with the companion inquest into the doings of VOA, the voluminous record of the McCarthy panel on U.S. information libraries provides a sharply different reading. The testimony of Langston Hughes was but one example of the extent and nature of the problem with these reading centers and the merits of McCarthy’s corrective efforts. As the hearings would suggest, there was a great deal of other material in the centers like the early work of Hughes, but comparatively little, so far as anyone could tell, of a vigorous anti-Communist nature to oppose it.
Had the facilities in question been private, or even public, general-interest libraries, neither McCarthy nor other members of his panel would have been pursuing such an inquest. However, the purpose of the reading centers, per the State Department, was “to utilize…books and related materials to advance the idea of America in the struggle against Communism.” This was done under Public Law 402, cosponsored by Karl Mundt, which set up the reading centers and other aspects of the information program to promote American interests in the Cold War. As cosponsor of the law, Mundt was presumably knowledgeable of its purpose. He also happened to be an active member of the McCarthy panel delving into the curious way the project had developed.
Given the stated object of the program, it struck McCarthy, Mundt, and others as odd that Communist and pro-Communist writings should be profusely featured in the reading centers. And, based on data from the State Department, the surveys of Cohn and Schine, and other analyses of the setup, profuse would seem to be an apt description. By the committee’s best estimates, there were on the shelves approximately 30,000 books by Red and pro-Red writers. Included in this number were veteran Communist bosses and sometime authors Earl Browder and William Z. Foster, who of course made no secret of their Red opinions. Others represented weren’t so famous but were well known to students of Communist propaganda and disinformation. As the committee report expressed it:
A breakdown of some of these authors shows that at least 12 have been in the past either identified under oath as having been involved or implicated in Soviet espionage or had acted in some important or confidential capacity in behalf of Soviet Russia: Cedric Belfrage, Haakon Chevalier, Lauchlin Currie, Israel Epstein, Philip Jaffe, Owen Lattimore, Kate Mitchell, Harriet Lucy Moore, Andrew Roth, Agnes Smedley, Guenther Stein, [and] Victor Yakhontoff. The adverse information on the above individuals was not classified or secret but was available to anyone who could read the public press. Most of them had been the subject of extensive reports published by the Senate Internal Security subcommittee or the House Committee on Un-American Activities.3
The report provided still other lists of authors featured in the centers who were known members of the Communist Party or party-liners. These included James S. Allen, Herbert Aptheker, Howard Fast, Doxey Wilkerson, and more of like persuasion. Several authors were called before the panel, quizzed about the volumes in the reading centers, and declined to say if they were members of the Communist Party when they wrote the books in question. The committee also provided information on the books themselves, including numerous quotes in lavish praise of Moscow. Following are some examples:
“The Soviet Union plays the role of clearing the path, of facilitating world progress, of proving by its own example the superiority of the socialist system” (James S. Allen). “Russia’s strength, to put it in a nutshell, lies in her moral and scientific achievements. Russia has introduced moral principle and scientific method into the heart of productive life. That is the prime cause of her matchless strength” (Hewlett Johnson). “The one hopeful light on the horizon [was] the exciting and encouraging conditions in Soviet Russia, where for the first time in history our race problem has been squarely faced and solved” (Eslanda Robeson).4
Especially choice were comments on the good life and noble purposes of the USSR by Scott Nearing, a well-known pro-Communist writer, in one of the books in the USIS collection: “The Soviet Union was therefore the symbol of the popular triumph over privilege. Privilege, the world over, recognized the situation and did its best to destroy the Soviets. The overthrow of the Soviet Union would have meant a decisive and overwhelming victory for privilege. While the Union endured, however, it was the logical homeland of the people’s struggle.”
These effusive tributes to the Kremlin, to repeat, were taken from books in official U.S. reading rooms, allegedly meant to advance American interests in the Cold War. Still other quotations in this vein, from an author whose books were widely offered in the program, included: “The merit of the new [Soviet] constitution and the national policy it institutionalized is seen by the fact that in the midst of a war for survival, the powers of the constitutive republics are not abridged but extended. The war has strengthened this far-sighted policy of the Soviet people.” And: “[In the USSR] society undertakes to protect its members from undue hazards of life, requiring work as a means of life, but supplying in return assurance from accident, chance and misfortune.”5
The author of these pro-Soviet statements, Columbia professor Bernhard Stern, swore he wasn’t a Communist at the time of his committee appearance, but took the Fifth when asked if he had been a Party member when he penned his encomia to the Moscow system. Still other such items
would be developed by the committee, including the fact that USIS reading centers carried the works of the Rev. Hewlett Johnson (above quoted), known as the “Red Dean” of Canterbury, and the prominent Russian author Ilya Ehrenburg. How books by these two foreign apologists for Moscow would enlighten readers as to the aims of America in the Cold War was hard to fathom. It certainly raised questions in the mind of the skeptical Joe McCarthy.
The standard explanation for having radical books on official shelves was that they showed the diversity of our culture, where even Communists and pro-Communists were allowed their say, and that we had no fear of revealing this to other countries. That subtle message, however, may not have gotten across to patrons of the centers. As McCarthy and others on the panel opined, a more likely inference would have been that, if such books were bought and paid for by American taxpayers and placed in U.S. reading centers, they had a stamp of approval from U.S. officials. Or, if not outright approval, at least represented something our government, or some of its agents, thought people should be reading (which, as suggested by other data, was probably the case).
Considering the Cold War purpose of these centers, the diversity-openness thesis would have been a tenuous rationale for having Communist and pro-Soviet books on offer. But even if that premise were accepted, it still didn’t explain the condition of the reading rooms. To raise the obvious point, if “diversity” were the object of the program, then presumably anti-Communist books would, at a minimum, have equal billing with Communist and pro-Red volumes. But, so far as anybody could tell, this was not the case.
A prime example, brought out by subcommittee witness Freda Utley, was the selection of USIS books on China and the Far East, the area of her specialization. Having analyzed the catalogues of books available in USIS reading centers in Germany, Miss Utley found the vast preponderance of these works were by such as Owen Lattimore, Guenther Stein, Lawrence Rosinger, and others whose views about these matters have been noted. “I counted some two dozen books,” she testified, “which belonged to the Lattimore school on China, and in the China section…which I naturally studied in particular as my own subject, I could find practically nothing, almost nothing, that was not favorable to the Chinese Communists.”6
In the case of Professor Lattimore, the committee found some 161 copies of his books available in 60 USIS reading centers, including not only his several volumes on Far East affairs but also his plangent memoir, Ordeal by Slander, dealing with his appearance before the Tydings panel and including a vigorous blast against McCarthy.
It was of course conceivable that, in so vast a system of books and periodicals, some vigorously anti-Communist works existed somewhere to counterbalance the pro-Red material that was cited. Utley and researcher Karl Baarslag would testify that such books did exist in the collections, but that these were few and far between, hard to find, and outnumbered by works of leftward or radical persuasion. Likewise, defenses of the system were more usually geared to arguing that it was okay to carry radical or pro-Communist materials as examples of diversity, free thought, and good old-fashioned plucky dissent in America’s great tradition.7
From these and other indicators, it was reasonably obvious the reading centers funded by the U.S. government to combat Communism weren’t doing this very well, if at all, and were more often nearly doing the reverse. And as the hearings on VOA suggested, the reasons for this weren’t too esoteric. In numerous instances the book collections, and the people who chose them, were holdovers from the days of OWI, among the most heavily penetrated and leftward-tilting federal agencies ever. The contents of the reading centers were pretty much what one might expect given knowledge of that record.
As the McCarthy inquest revealed, old-line personnel who came aboard with OWI during the war had stuck around under the State Department and U.S. occupation forces. Under the Acheson State Department and High Commissioner for Occupied Germany (HICOG) John McCloy, a number of these holdovers had advanced to top positions. Now, however, the rules had changed and the pro-Soviet outlook of the early 1940s and postwar era had been replaced by the harsh new realities of the Cold War. Making things more awkward still, the Truman-Acheson regime was now supplanted by Eisenhower-Dulles. Worst of all, meddlesome committees of Congress, headed by the likes of Joe McCarthy, were taking an interest in the programs and the officials who ran them.
In these conditions, the holdovers did what they could to adjust to the new setup, presenting themselves as “Cold War liberals” battling against the schemes of Moscow, which perhaps in certain cases they were. As with Reed Harris, however, their own previous records and the embedded programs they were running made it hard to sell this. The McCarthy hearings consisted, in considerable measure, of a long string of contradictions and anomalies inherent in an allegedly anti-Soviet program being run by people of completely different background.
Among the clearest examples of such problems was one Theodore Kaghan, in 1953 the acting deputy director of public affairs for HICOG. Kaghan was another alumnus of OWI, and had the kind of résumé one might suspect based on the history of that unit. In 1939, he had signed a nominating petition for a Communist political hopeful, Israel Amter, saying, “I intend to support at the ensuing election” the Communist candidate for office. Kaghan in the 1930s had also been the roommate and coworker of an identified Communist, worked with a Communist-dominated outfit called the New Theater Project, written a play staged by this group, and attended various Communist meetings.8
It was further testified, in the Voice of America sessions, that Kaghan had flunked a loyalty-security check when it was proposed that he move from HICOG to VOA (an episode hashed over in the Reed Harris hearings). All in all, not a vita on first appraisal well suited to conducting a “psychological warfare” campaign against Moscow, which Kaghan said he was in charge of doing. As with Reed Harris, much of the wrangling between McCarthy/Cohn and Kaghan concerned the question of whether, and to what degree, he had shed the opinions and affiliations of the 1930s and early ’40s, and what proof there was that he had done so.
Other highlights (or lowlights) of the Kaghan affair included testimony that pro-Communist manifestations in American information programs weren’t limited to USIS reading centers. Kaghan’s office had distributed, for instance, at a cost of $50,000, over a thousand copies of an alleged sociological/ historical tract that said of Stalin, “As the accepted leader of world communism he gave the teachings of Marx, Engels and Lenin their present valid form.” It further developed that the occupation government had subsidized with U.S. tax dollars a printing plant being used, inter alia, for printing Red materials. In yet another instance, a lecturer sponsored by HICOG was traveling about in Germany voicing praises of Soviet leader Georgi Malenkov.9
In cases of this type, the holdover mind-set was apparent, as policies in the early postwar era had viewed the Reds in Germany as allegedly “democratic” elements to be encouraged, subsidized, and otherwise supported. According to records from the postwar occupation archives, one of the Americans involved in supplying aid to the Communist Party under this policy had been none other than Theodore Kaghan.10 The subsidies and other involvements with the Communists, like the condition of the reading centers, suggested the earlier mind-set and embedded features of the program continued in the 1950s.
Confronted by all this information from the McCarthy probe, the Dulles State Department issued an order that books by Communist authors be removed from the reading centers. The full extent to which this was done isn’t clear, but a number of such books were indeed removed and in some manner disposed of. This gave rise to the plaint that the books were being “burned,” ultimate responsibility for which was placed on McCarthy. In fact, if any books were burned or otherwise destroyed (and apparently some were), McCarthy didn’t do it. He frequently stated that people should be able to obtain and read such books if they so desired. His point was simply that pro-Red materials shouldn’t be supplied by American taxpayers as part of an alleged Communi
st-fighting program overseas.
On this, ironically, McCarthy was backed not only by Langston Hughes and the Dulles State Department but also by the new and impeccably liberal HICOG commissioner, James B. Conant, a successor in that post to John McCloy. Under intense questioning on the subject, Conant agreed that tax dollars shouldn’t be used to finance Communist or pro-Communist books in U.S. reading rooms. This testimony was particularly telling as it occurred in a direct confrontation with McCarthy—another encounter where we see the caveman face-to-face with an urbane Ivy League opponent. In this exchange, McCarthy by no means came off second best, as he questioned Conant closely about the reading centers. In this colloquy, the former Harvard president at last affirmed that, “I would not be in favor of having books by Communist authors on the shelves. If they are already there, I would be in favor of taking them off.”11
The same thought was expressed by President Eisenhower, discussing the subject before the press. On this occasion, Ike said that if USIS libraries overseas carried books that advocated Communism, such books should be gotten rid of, “because he saw no reason for the Federal government to be supporting something that advocated its own destruction. That seemed to him the acme of silliness.”12 Again, this was identical to McCarthy’s position on the issue. However, Eisenhower’s views on the matter, and McCarthy’s role in it, were subject to a good deal of backstage influence, which would be used to get him to issue a famous statement of very different implication.
Oddly enough, before all this occurred, there had been a mass destruction of books and other printed materials in Germany dictated by the Allied occupation forces of the postwar era. Such publications were destroyed wholesale in 1946, under orders to dispose of Nazi, pro-Nazi, or “militaristic” literature of all types “from the stocks of all publishing concerns, libraries, and public repositories.”13 At that time, and through the intervening years, nobody had protested that, in obeisance to diversity of thought and old-fashioned notions of dissent, pro-Nazi literature should be available in any form whatever, much less presented to the reading public of Europe in libraries run by the U.S. government.
Blacklisted By History Page 59
