Age of Mccarthyism America Began

Age of McCarthyism

America began World War II on the side of the Soviet Union, yet after the war's closure the U.S. became the U.S.S.R.'s intractable enemy. The Cold War was fought, not simply on the frontlines of Europe, but also on the American home front. How anticommunism moved "to the ideological center of American politics" and how America lost its own central convictions of the importance of freedom, democracy, and civil liberties is the subject of Ellen Schrecker's the Age of McCarthyism (Boston: St. Martin's Press, 1994). According to Schrecker, the Cold War irrevocably transformed the American internal debate over the ethics and efficacy of domestic liberal reforms. Leftist ideology was no longer a matter of personal political conviction. Instead, even domestic political ideas that seemed potentially socialistic became issues of national security. Members of the Communist party were viewed as potential enemy agents of a hostile state, lurking at every corner of American life. Anti-communism was no longer simply being anti-Stalin, no longer confined to issues pertaining America's foreign policy agenda. Instead, all good Americans were suddenly promoted to the status of foot soldiers in a war against enemy spies who looked the same as ordinary Americans, but were secretly plotting to overthrow the government from within.

Fears of communist incursions had been hard-wired into the American psyche since the turn-of the century labor movement was tarred and feathered in the press as communistic. Businesses claimed that support for unions had been stimulated by outside foreign agitators, as opposed to true-blue American workers. But although there may have indeed been some communist or leftist sympathizers left within American institutions and government, the result of the distrust of the capitalist system that had flourished during the Great Depression, Schrecker says that ideology rather than reality defined the McCarthy era. The conception of who and what communists were as a kind of Red Menace, silent, subtle, and permeating America from within was a myth with "just enough plausibility to be convincing -- especially to the vast majority of Americans who had no direct contact with the party or its members. Above all, it legitimated the McCarthy era repression by dehumanizing American Communists and transforming them into ideological outlaws who deserved whatever they got" (Chapter 3, pp.16-20).

In fact, even card-carrying communists were hardly a political monolith, as many quit the party in protest of some of the American Communist Party's stances. Contrary to the image presented by McCarthy, the anti-Communist movement, such as it existed, was largely a loosely-organized coalition that "gradually attracted groups and individuals. Each element in the network appealed to a different constituency and used its own tactics," but this diffuse "mixture of offensives became far more potent than any single campaign would have been" in generating support for the anti-communist movement (Chapter 3, pp.16-20). The fact that some communist sympathizers had ties to labor organizations, or others had ties to the entertainment industry fueled the sense of the invisible Red Menace that was present in every sphere of American life.

The truth was always less important than the facts -- emotion rather than reason fueled McCarthyism. Communists were seen as the 'other' in the American midst: "Historians have noted the roots of American anticommunism in what they refer to as the nation's counter-subversive tradition: the irrational notion that outsiders (who could be political dissidents, foreigners, or members of racial and religious minorities) threatened the nation from within. Projecting their own fears and insecurities onto a demonized 'Other,' many Americans have found convenient scapegoats among the powerless minorities within their midst. Native Americans, blacks, Catholics, immigrants -- all, at one time or another, embodied the threat of internal subversion" (Chapter 2, pp.9-16). Communists, unlike many of these 'other' groups, however, could not be identified by their appearance, culture, or accent, even though they were seen as foreign. "By the twentieth century, the American 'Other' had become politicized and increasingly identified with communism, the party's Moscow connections tapping in conveniently with the traditional fear of foreigners" (Chapter 2, pp.9-16).

In short, the aftermath of Yalta alone cannot explain the vociferousness with which many Americans expressed their anticommunist views or adopted the anticommunist cause. McCarthy's anti-civil libertarian stance masquerading as American patriotism sadly did have very deep roots in American history and the American psyche.

The fact that a few American communists were apologists for Stalin during the 1940s, even after Yalta, did not help. Although Schrecker largely condemns red-baiters like J. Edgar Hoover, the young Richard Nixon, as well as McCarthy himself, she does not portray the communist movement in a blindly sympathetic light. She attempts to take a balanced, historical view and place both the hysteria and the views of the movement in an appropriate historical context.

Then, no one knew that the Soviet Union would eventually be defeated, as we do today -- but nor did leftists realize the full extent of Stalin's purges, and what would transpire after the Yalta Conference of 1945 in Eastern Europe. There was some vague plausibility to the idea of communists as spies intent upon creating a new form of government in the United States, just as there was the possibility in the mind of some leftists that the American media, after praising Russia when the U.S.S.R.'s help was necessary to defeat Hitler, was exaggerating the evils of Stalin in the eyes of many communists. Schrecker attempts to put the reader into the mindset of both communists and anti-communists of the period.

Anti-communism was not simply a product of mass, cultural hysteria. It also provided a practical foundation for many politicians' emerging careers. For example, as early as the smaller 'Red Scare' of 1919-20, J. Edgar Hoover made his name and solidified his institutional base within the Department of Justice by rounding up suspected foreign communists. Later, these ideologues and Hoover loyalists within the F.B.I would allow Hoover to conduct illegal wiretaps, and commit other civil liberties violations, with the power of the F.B.I. Richard Nixon first came to national prominence during the Alger Hiss trials. And McCarthy himself was a relatively obscure senator, until he began to wave his famous lists in the air. President Truman, despite the fact he held the highest office in the land, may have oversold the communist threat, to gain the necessary funds from the Republican-dominated congress for his postwar agenda and to prove himself worthy of the legacy of F.D.R.

The fear of seeming to ignore the communist threat created a kind of conspiracy of silence amongst civil libertarians, such as they existed, in American government. "An important element of the power of the modern state is its ability to set the political agenda and to define the crucial issues of the moment, through its actions as well as its words. During the early years of the cold war, the actions of the federal government helped to forge and legitimize the anti-Communist consensus that enabled most Americans to condone or participate in the serious violations of civil liberties that characterized the McCarthy era" (Chapter 4, p.20). Being a communist was never a crime in America, but the implicit charge of espionage was in the atmosphere, every time communism was mentioned.