McCarthyism: The Realities, Delusions and Politics Behind the 1950s Red Scare

by Jonathan Michaels

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. 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.

318 pages, Kindle Edition

Published April 21, 2017

Reviews

[Stefania Dzhanamova · Rating 5 out of 5]

Link to my YouTube History Channel: https://youtu.be/D6_7kwHfIXw (THE 1950s RED SCARE: Joe McCarthy, Roy Cohn & McCarthyism)

Although there had been a post-WWI Red Scare and a New-Deal Red Scare, three main developments distinguished the post-Second-World-War Red Scare from them: 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; the Soviet recruitment and use of American spies to get access to American military secrets, especially the knowledge of atomic weaponry, and the national response to the rapid expansion of communism all over the globe. In addition, the military-industrial complex was reluctant to lose the money and the power that came with it, which it had gained during WWII. During the war, the USA had become a warfare state in order to defeat Nazi Germany and make Europe "safe for democracy." It succeeded; to the military-industrial complex's disappointment even the war to start wars all over again ended. Now America was about to make an about face and demobilize — unacceptable. The only way to keep the war machine working at full pace was to find a new enemy. Nothing could have been easier! I mean, it was obvious: there, an ocean apart, lay a gigantic country headed by an agressive dictator and governed by an ideology fervently opposed to capitalism. World Communism again loomed menacingly on the U.S horizon like a sinister apparition, or did it?
In the 50s, Americans were high on success and economic prosperity. They had survived the Great Depression, battled Hitler, and bombed Imperial Japan into surrender. Unlike Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, they were tired of going abroad in search of monsters to destroy. They wanted to enjoy the skyrocketting standard of life, buy cars, and raise big, happy families. Special efforts had to be made to convince them danger was still hovering over their heads. Yet, the dollars flowing into the defense and armament budgets were a powerful stimulus for the miltary-industrial complex. And they had the best weapon — propaganda. The CIA, this ever vigilant guardian against communist influence, summoned its army of writers and journalists — all enticed with the promise of fame or threatened with career ruin — and the American Goebbels-es threw themselves into the task of brainwashing and frightening the American people. With the national defense mobilized to the utmost, the USA did not have to fear much from the outside. To instill true terror into the minds of Americans, the media aimed to impress on them that the enemy had infiltrated governmental agencies, that it was "among us."
No need to say that the FBI and the CIA are masters of their craft and that the propaganda campaign proved to be more than effective, sowing panic in the hearts of Americans. Ironically, though, it was so well-conducted that its creators got taken in by their own propaganda. The artifically created Red Scare became real, seeping into all levels of the U.S Government. This is the only way to explain how the phenomenon McCarthyism happened.
Early in the 1950s (a.k.a in the whirl of the growing Red Scare), Joseph R. McCarthy, an obscure Republican senator from Wisconsin, was suddenly propelled to the forefront of American news by his declaration of an all-out attack on Communist spies in the government. McCarthy took up the cause of anti-Communism with a fiery speech to a women’s Republican club in Wheeling, West Virginia, on February 9, 1950, in which he charged that the State Department was infested with Communists; he even claimed to have their names. But one (in)significant detail has to be mentioned: he never provided those names. At those tumulous times of terror, however, this was not important. Joe McCarthy successfully fed the fear already deeply engraved in the mind of the average newspaper-reading American. His reckless charges created a media sensation — or should I say the media seized the opportunity to make a sensation out of his claims? I think each one of us should decide for himself/herself.
What matters is that everything went downhill from there. Joe McCarthy had come a long way from the Wisonsin dairy farm where he had grown up. His search for Communists was not an investigation — it was a witch hunt reminiscent of the Salem witch trials. Even the military-industrial complex came to regret the fact they had let this monster loose. No one — from the loftiest general or cabinet member to the lowliest government clerk — was immune from McCarthy's suspicious gaze. His most favorite target, as I already mentioned, was the U.S State Department, which according to him was teeming with communists. He attacked it mercilessly, dragging its employees before his Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. There, instead of providing actual evidence (which simply did not exist) he bullied and browbit them into confessing their (unexistent) Communist sympathies. Truman privately denounced McCarthy as “just a ballyhoo artist who has to cover up his shortcomings with wild charges,” but the raging senator was not so easily dismissed. He was a monster of the Republican Party's own creation and enjoyed the backing of the unscupulous Nixon, who in turn was backed by the CIA, and other Republicans, all eager to hurt Democrats in the 1950 Congressional elections by convincing America they were “soft on Communism.” LBJ said McCarthy was “the sorriest senator” in Washington. “But he’s riding high now, he’s got people scared to death. . . .” Well, that was the goal, after all: scare Americans to death so that they would support the continuing armament, enlarge the defense budget, and enrich the military-industrial giants.
As Ike Eisenhower took over the White House in 1953, it was uncertain whether the most dynamic force in Washington would be the widely popular new President or the senator from Wisconsin. Eisenhower confided that he reviled McCarthy nearly as much as Hitler — but he kept pulling back from confronting him. McCarthy, for his part, quickly made clear that he considered the new Republican administration fair game. Nobody in the capital was safe. The senator would boldly target the three institutions at the very center of Washington's global power: the State Department, the CIA, and the Army. The last would be his undoing.
The State Department became the target of no less than ten separate, on-going congressional investigations by McCarthy, who saw it as a hotbed of Communists, pinkos, and other soft types. His relentless probes daunted even the solemn, formidable Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, who was widely known for his policy of brinksmanship and hatred towards communism. In spite of all his efforts and rage, Joe found no evidence of Communist sympathies against any State Department officials. This, of course, did not prevent his witch hunt from ruining reputations, careers, and lives by bluntly and irrationally accusing many of those employees of Communist affiliations. On top of that, the unstoppable senator soon found a new target — homosexuals.
Here the ridiculousness of the whole phenomenon reaches its climax. The thing is that McCarthy could not run his high carnival alone. He had a right hand — Roy Cohn, a vicious and unprincipled mob-connected attorney. While he himself was a closeted gay man, Cohn threw himself into exposing and accusing all homosexuals who had the misfortune to work in the State Department and other governmental agencies. Homosexual was turned into a synonym for Communist. Although at first this sounds absurd, there is a lot of logic behind this horrendous connection. It's the easiest to make people fear something they know little about, and most Americans knew next to nothing about queer people, whom they shunned like the plague because at the time homosexuals were considered to be on the same level as pedophiles and rapists (mutual consent apparently did not matter.)
To top the climax, Cohn installed his 26-year-old playmate, a rich son of a hotel tycoon with no particular credentials named David Schine, on the staff of the witch trials. "Essentially," observed one Cold-War historian, "Schine was Cohn's dumb blonde." Thus, the Subcommittee turned into a playground for two gay men who took obvious pleasure in humiliating homosexual witnesses appearing before Joe McCarthy, demanding to know the locations of their illicit trysts and the names of their sexual partners. Some investigation, eh?
Ironically, it is exactly because of David Schine that McCarthy's well-constructed control over Washington came crashing down. Schine joined the armed forces, and they decided to send him to a remote base overseas. Naturally, his boyfriend, Cohn, went ballistic at the news. Out of vengence, he and McCarthy, who had long ago set his sights on the Army, outrageously accused George Marshall, the former secretary of state and war hero, of making “common cause with Stalin.” The military-industrial complex was furious. No one touched their precious Army. McCarthy's fate was sealed.
The Army opened an investigation into David Schine. After Schine had been drafted into the Army, Roy 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 Joe had a very serious drinking problem — “a quart or more a day” — and he desperately needed Cohn to do much of the committee work.
In addition to the embarrassing Army investigation, McCarthy was facing a very serious problem behind the scenes: Director J. Edgar Hoover, disturbed by the senator's increasing recklessness, had cut him off from FBI files. 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. The puppet masters had decided to get rid of him, so in an unprecedented political drama, they even televised his proceedings — a sight that proved to be unpleasant for the 80 million viewers, who got to witness the senators bullying behavior and dishonest tactics.
As a political force, Joe McCarthy was spent. Nobody wields power alone; a person is only as socially and politically strong as his/her 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. Since he had brought unfavorable publicity to himself and had attacked the precious U.S Army, he could not be tolerated. The age of McCarthy came to its unglorious end. During the four years of his reign of terror, he had not uncovered a single Communist spy in the government. However, his smear campaign tarnished and ruined lives and reputations. During the Red Scare, thousands of left-wing Americans were “blacklisted” from employment because of past political associations, real or rumored. Fears of Soviet spies in the United States working with American sympathizers led Congress to pass the McCarran Internal Security Act over President Truman’s veto, making it unlawful “to combine, conspire, or agree with any other person to perform any act which would substantially contribute to . . . the establishment of a totalitarian dictatorship.” Communist organizations had to register with the Attorney General. Would-be immigrants who had belonged to totalitarian parties in their home countries were barred from admission to the United States. And during any future national emergencies, American Communists were to be herded into concentration camps. The McCarran Internal Security Act, Truman said in his veto message, would “put the government into the business of thought control.” The artifically ignited Red Scare had achieved its goals: it had kept the military-industrial complex rich and powerful and it had curbed the civil liberties of the American people.

[Landis Duffett · Rating 5 out of 5]

Successful demagogues aren't always charismatic and eloquent. Shortcomings in persona can be compensated for by that unique skill which the classical rhetoricians called 'kairos', the ability to seize an opening in time and exploit some exigency. The exigency a demagogue exploits must give the appearance of a problem that can be solved while in fact being insoluble and interminable. Enter the good old American witch-hunt, in which the demagogue undertakes to expose to the light of day every practitioner of 'x' (the historically determined object of our fear or even mass hysteria), leaving no stone unturned.

But even so, even though one can compensate for lack of personal magnetism, still not everyone can be a demagogue. Exploiting an exigent fear for one's own self-aggrandizement, quite counterintuitively, requires the capacity for radical self-abasement. The old self must die and a new self be reborn that subordinates itself--sacrifices itself even--to the great historical mission to which it now devotes itself. From that point on, only the new self speaks. The authentic self recedes to an imperceptible blip. Even mundane pronouncements--"My mother raised chickens on a farm in Wisconsin."--must be bathed in rhetorical gravitas.

Before he gave his '205 Communists in the State Department' speech at the Lincoln Day Women's Republican meeting in Wheeling, West Virginia in February of 1950, Joseph McCarthy was a mostly bumbling and harmless freshman senator who seemed destined to a single term in office. Within just two years, he used the fear of Communism to launch himself to the stardom and recognition that otherwise would have eluded him. Did he know that it wasn't really "him" who was the object of so many people's awe? We can't ever know for sure, but given human nature and given that it poses no contradiction with the quality of self-abasement described above, it seems safe to say that another skill required by the successful demagogue is to believe, wrongly, that somehow their rise is the result of that very self which always existed but which, in fact, has now disappeared, i.e., that their fame is the cake which they now also get to eat.

In _McCarthyism: The Realities, Delusions and Politics Behind the 1950s Red Scare_, Jonathan Michaels barely mentions McCarthy's name until at least halfway through the book. Michaels, we might say, is a historian who appreciates the pre-existing rhetorical field which any demagogue is only briefly passing through. Michaels doesn't offer a thorough biography of McCarthy. If anything, it becomes clear how little of a role McCarthy the man played in McCarthyism. McCarthyism, rather, is presented as a conglomeration of events, mostly rhetorical events--hearings, interrogations, speeches, television appearances, headlines--that registered as recognizable events only because of the long historical background against which they were read. Michaels provides a remarkable survey of that history that strikes a balance between succinctness and fullness.

As Michaels points out in the discussion of his methodology, the study of McCarthyism, like all areas of historical research, has gone through 'schools' or changes in methodological emphasis over the decades. In the 1950s, the approach was primarily sociological, an attempt to place the Second Red Scare in relation to the race and class conflicts arising form social mobility in a postwar society beginning to experience stability and economic prosperity. Then, in the 1960s, McCarthyism was seen as essentially a political rather than a sociological phenomenon. The fear of Communism was exploited by both Republicans and Democrats but worked to the overall political advantage of the Right. In this view, the Red Scare was a vehicle whose goal was to dismantle the New Deal and erase it from the American political landscape. Studies in recent decades have subordinated both sociological and political approaches to McCarthyism to the debate over motives, with 'traditionalists' arguing that McCarthyism arose out of a genuine fear of Communism and a legitimate attempt to eradicate the threat it posed and the 'revisionists' seeing McCarthyism as nothing more than cynical fear-mongering for purposes of political gain.

Michaels himself takes an approach that mixes both a political and sociological approach that mostly leaves aside--quite refreshingly--questions about ultimate motivation. Such an approach seems almost inevitable for a historian who analyzes the Red Scare of the 1950s within the longue duree of American fear of immigrants, antagonism towards labor unions, and paranoiac hysteria about Communism. Michaels sees here a single tradition at work in American history--grounded philosophically in the ideology and discourse of 'self-reliance' and 'property as liberty' and fueled by the indignant economic entitlement of big business owners--and in a narrative of truly epic historical sweep, starting in the early 19th century and extending past the 1950s Red Scare, he traces this discourse through its twists and turns and its changing targets, most of all making clear the effects of this discourse on the lives of human beings. In this approach, it becomes almost redundant to wring hands over the question of motivation in the Red Scare. Red scares--like all exercises in demagoguery--are not structures created ex nihilo. Rather, they are dramas. Some of the actors willingly jump into their roles, some of the roles are crafted and adapted (but never invented), and some of the actors are cast in the drama quite against their will. But the stage was constructed before any of the actors walked across it. The only actor in the drama whose role is created anew each time and for whom the possibilities are radically open is the audience.