William A. Andersen                                                                                                    

History 574 précis

Feb. 3, 2006

 

Haynes, John E.  Red Scare or Red Menace?  American Communism and Anticommunism in the Cold

            War Era.  Chicago:  Ivan R. Dee, Inc., 1996.

 

Whitfield, Stephen J.  The Culture of the Cold War, 2d ed.  Baltimore and London:  The Johns Hopkins
            University Press, 1996.

 

 

            Haynes and Whitfield write about an era in which Americans felt threatened.  The infectious taint of fear created a drive toward security at any price.  Communists were viewed as radical ideologues harboring a dream of a terrestrial paradise so enticing they would commit any crime to achieve it.  Policy advisors debated the notion of preemptive war, or “aggression for peace,” while lawmakers endeavored to strike a delicate balance between national security and civil liberties.  The prevailing view among conservatives was expressed by political philosopher Eric Voegelin in 1952:  “If liberalism is understood as the immanent salvation of man and society, communism certainly is its most radical expression.”[1]

           

I

 

John Haynes rejects the notion that liberals formed a monolithic bloc sympathetic to, or tending towards, communism.  He writes that there were anticommunist liberals.  He also asserts that anticommunism during the first Red Scare (1919-21) “flowed from a variety of motives” (3).  Early anticommunism was a reaction to the American Communist Party, whose stated goal was to organize a proletariat state “for the coercion and suppression of the bourgeoisie” (7).  The Party, in short, wanted to overthrow the existing capitalist system (7).  Linked to this was a suspicion of immigrants from Eastern Europe (although Haynes is ambiguous about cause and effect:  was anti-immigration a result of communist fears or vice-versa?).  The Catholic Church considered communist ideology its mortal enemy.  (“The Communist vision is the vision of Man without God,” proclaims Whittaker Chambers.)[2]  Evangelical Christians were suspicious of communist atheism but it was not until the Cold War that Evangelicals widely preached anticommunism from their pulpits (90).  Anticommunists on the left included moderate liberals, Socialists (opposed to the imposition of a Communist party dictatorship), and Trotskyists (radical intellectuals opposed to Stalin).  After World War II, organized labor joined the ranks of anticommunists thus greatly diminishing the influence of the Communist Party U.S.A. (CPUSA).

            The first Red Scare ended in 1921 due to diminished fears of world revolution.  With the 1930s came the Red Decade.  American society “proved to be a promising environment for the Communist Party U.S.A.” thanks to the disaster of the Great Depression and the rise of fascism in Europe (11).  American Communists abandoned their revolutionary rhetoric, aligned themselves with New Deal reforms, and in 1935 formed the Popular Front to oppose fascism.  (Such a coalition, however, did not preclude the organization of a Communist underground, funded and directed by Moscow for the purpose of espionage.)  CPUSA membership grew to between 65,000 and 70,000 members by 1939, Communists joined the CIO and the American Labor Party, and liberal publications such as the New Republic and The Nation adopted a Popular Front position.  The CPUSA was nearly mainstream, but kept a low public profile nevertheless.

            In the 1930s regnant anti-fascism generated legislation and tactics that would later be used against Communists in the post-war era.  Isolationist movements such as the America First Committee and the German-American Bund were tarred with the Nazi brush.  Attempts to control domestic subversion became manifest in legislation such as the Hatch Act (1939), the Smith Act (1940), and the Voorhis Act (1940).  All were precursors to the Internal Securities (McCarran) Act inspired by the Red Scare in 1950.  Haynes observes that isolationists and right-wing Republicans who were “unfairly tainted were greatly angered by the excesses of the campaign against them,” and, after the war, extracted revenge through enforcing the very legislation that had used against them and others suspected of fascist sympathies (29).

            The 1939 Nazi-Soviet pact aligned American Communists with pro-fascist isolationists, proving the adage that politics makes strange bedfellows.  The CPUSA (directed by Moscow) demanded U.S. neutrality, declaring that “the conflict between Nazi Germany and the Western Allies was an imperialist war” (31).  Many liberals dropped out of the Popular Front.  Of course, once Germany attacked the Soviet Union, the CPUSA reversed its position, but the damage to the Popular Front was irreparable:  “New Deal liberals attuned to the Popular Front atmosphere of the 1930s had received a rude demonstration that no Communist principle was as important as loyalty to the Soviet Union” (35).  At the beginning of the Cold War, the Popular Front was shattered for good with the defeat of Henry Wallace and his Progressive Party in 1948.

            Haynes claims that post-war American anticommunism was fueled by Stalin’s “imposing subservient tyrannies” upon Eastern Europe and the apparent failure of purported American war aims embodied in the Atlantic Charter (1941) and FDR’s idealistic Four Freedoms:  freedom of speech worldwide, freedom of religion, freedom from want, and freedom for fear (39).  Roosevelt critics denounced the abandonment of Poland to the Soviet jackboot and for the Yalta “sellout” giving Stalin free reign in Eastern Europe (a fait accompli for Stalin since his troops already occupied most of the area in question).  Sensational espionage cases and the Soviet atom bomb further galvanized anticommunism in the U.S.  “Most Americans,” writes Haynes, “thought the new Communist fifth column should be treated in the same fashion as the Nazi/fascist fifth-column threat of the late 1930s and early 1940s” (63).  The Alger Hiss-Whittaker Chambers melodrama (and the ensuing Hiss perjury trial) exacerbated fears of treason within the government.  Haynes points out that extant Hiss supporters offer varying theories in his defense but the evidence indicates Whittaker Chambers was telling the truth (88).

            It was in such a sociopolitical atmosphere that the House of Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) became active in ferreting out subversives and other threats to national security.  During the second Red Scare, anticommunism became politicized and a means to discredit FDR and his disciples.  Thus in the post-war era, liberalism was being redefined and one form of anticommunism assumed the shape of anti-New Dealism.  For one of the fundamental tenets of postwar conservatism was the notion of the philosophical continuity of the left (66).

            It was this perceived “philosophical continuity” that the Democrats (and the left) tried to dispel.  The Popular Front became the Progressive Party which advocated an accommodation with Stalin.  The Union for Democratic Action (later Americans for Democratic Action) – socialist in principle, internationalist, and anticommunist – eventually won the “liberal civil war” and constituted what became the left-wing of the Democratic Party (116).  Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr and historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. were the movement’s most articulate spokesmen.  As Popular Front Progressives and anticommunist liberals contested for power, Republicans gained control of Congress and the White House by 1952.  Haynes declares that “American communism’s decisive defeat occurred in 1948-1950 when the Progressive Party campaign failed” (191).  He adds, “the ejection of Communists from the CIO and the victory of anti-Communist liberalism over Popular Front liberalism were important, even decisive, events of the anti-Communist era” (135).

            With Democrats and New Dealers on the defensive, they applied the secrecy associated with communism as a defense.  Haynes writes that the “conspiratorial portrait of communism allowed anti-Communist liberals to deny any ideological or political link between communism and the New Deal and to explain away exposures of Communist participation in liberalism”(139).  The challenge for the left was to separate liberals and the New Deal from the Communists.  Ironically, they found an ally in Senator Joe McCarthy, for according to Haynes, the negative consequences of his excesses “became so well established that those seeking the historical rehabilitation of American Communists and Popular Front liberalism have depicted all varieties of opposition to communism as forms of McCarthyism” (162). 

            “By the 1960 presidential campaign,” Haynes notes, “domestic communism was not an issue in dispute between the two parties” (191).  A new Democratic coalition borne of the battle between Popular Front Progressives and anticommunist liberals assumed power in 1960.  A New Left radicalism emerged shortly thereafter, but the movement was “disorganized, anarchistic, and without the CPUSA’s covert ties to a foreign power.”  Nevertheless, the New Left had more influence on public policy in the 1960s and 1970s than did the CPUSA, which had dwindled to fewer than 5,000 members (194-96).  (Nevertheless, historian John Lukacs remarks, “There will always be Communists – in Manhattan.”)[3]

            Haynes concludes that Cold War mobilization in the U.S. required an anticommunist consensus, what he calls a “negative ideological mobilization” (199).  Therefore, reduced influence and marginalization of the CPUSA were prerequisites for Soviet containment, the overarching strategy of the Cold War.

 

II

 

            Stephen Whitfield uses the terms Stalinism and Communism interchangeably, thus rejecting the notion that they are separate and distinct.  He asserts that American Communists were “enemies of civil liberties, which they disdained as ‘bourgeois’ but which they invoked in their own behalf when opportune” (3).  On the other hand, Whitfield calls the American Red Scare reprehensible.  Unlike our European (and by inference more “enlightened”) allies who tried to maintain the spirit of Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms, Whitfield holds that American repression of civil liberties in the Cold War was a disgrace.  To illustrate the hysteria in the U.S., Whitfield recounts calls for a preemptive nuclear first strike and attendant “aggression for peace” (6).  Heated rhetoric notwithstanding, Whitfield acknowledges that U.S. military action during the Cold War was measured.  Indeed, he argues that restricted range of action in the nuclear age may have caused frustration, resulting in redoubled anticommunist energies against “enemies” at home.

            The Cold War generated a politicization of culture that was manifested in art, entertainment, and literature, but did not inhibit fertility of expression.  “The culture of the 1950s,” writes Whitfield, “was therefore not monochromatic . . .”, yet a certain narrowing occurred when “super-patriots . . . adopted the methods of their Communist enemies, and because the axis of partisan politics shifted so dramatically to the right” (14).  Whitfield cautions that anticommunist zeal made the U.S. like its enemy, and that demonization of the “other” was a prerequisite for battling subversives.

            Whitfield stops short of moral equivalency when comparing the fate of Stalin’s political opposition with American citizens oppressed by the Red Scare, yet he claims the latter were victims in kind if not in degree.  Caught in the fallout, left-wing ideology lost currency with American labor and the general public.  Whitfield decries the siege mentality and “the shrunken distance between the two political parties” with regard to labor, civil rights, and foreign policy.  Americans circled the wagons and moved to the right.

            With the Alger Hiss case, the New Deal and “the thrust of social reform became discredited” (28).  The Rosenbergs made liberal impulses suspect.  “As sensitivities to constitutional safeguards were coarsened,” writes Whitfield, “the axis of American politics spun toward the primitive, the intolerant, the paranoid” (33).

            So did popular fiction.  Mickey Spillane’s bestselling novels in the 1950s emphasized anticommunism and often centered on rejection of liberalism.  Whitfield observes that the exploits of Spillane’s character Mike Hammer paralleled those of Sen. Joe McCarthy:  a vigilante ruthlessness, loosed from the fetters of legal guarantees in the pursuit of justice.  Many conservative anticommunists distanced themselves from McCarthy and his minions as he “altered the nature of the anti-Communist crusade” (38).  McCarthy, according to Whitfield, promoted the notion that anticommunism was incompatible with liberalism.  Neither could sexual perversion be separated from subversion.  McCarthyism was the wellspring for the ultra-right wing John Birch Society, thus proving the maxim that the last men of any school or revolution are generally the worst.

            Whitfield argues that the height of the Red Scare occurred after the CPSUA was no longer a threat.  He argues that HUAC adopted the methods of its enemy.  Yet witnesses called to testify before HUAC became known as “Fifth Amendment Communists,” invoking their right to immunity from self-incrimination usually to avoid an inadvertent perjury charge.  (There is no record of a Bolshevik Fifth Amendment.)  Witnesses generally took one of three courses:  (a) to invoke immunity when talking about others but not of oneself, (b) not to invoke immunity at all and name names, or (c) not to invoke immunity but refuse to talk about others (104).  Whitfield describes the high-profile cases of playwright Lillian Hellman, director Elia Kazan, and playwright Arthur Miller, each of whom adopted one of the three tactics respectively.

            In summation, Whitfield maintains that the effects of the Cold War were mixed.  In reaction to McCarthyism, President Eisenhower gradually curtailed state excesses and adventures at home and abroad.  The Warren Court invalidated local statutes curtailing civil liberties.  A paradoxical effect of the Cold War was to further the cause of black equality in order to curtail CPUSA recruitment.  Conversely, white supremacists used the Communist card to smear the equal rights movement.  Both Democratic and Republican administrations receive high marks from Whitfield for avoiding a general war, yet with the Cold War isolation was discredited (241).  America would never again embrace the isolationism advocated by the America First Committee before Pearl Harbor.

                       

Conclusion

           

            There are thoughtless assertions in Whitfield’s work.  First, he writes of Stalinism:  “Founded upon subjugation and terror, the Soviet system was devoted to the violation of the humanitarian ideals of the Enlightenment” (italics added) (2).  On the contrary, Marxism and Stalinism are of the Enlightenment by twenty tests.  Secularism, relativism, scientism, State interventionism, social engineering, futurism, Rousseau’s General Will (under which citizens consider themselves only in their relationship to the “Body of the State”), the abolition of private property, and most importantly the notion of the Perfectibility of Man – all such ideas are transmitted from the philosophes to Marx in theory, and to Stalin in action.  In a second (albeit minor) flaw, Whitfield writes that actor John Garfield’s heart attack was directly caused by pressures from HUAC.  This is speculation to say the least (110).

            Cheers to Whitfield for calling communism Stalinism.  (Marxists today gladly dump the burden of Stalin, claiming he was not a true Marxist.)  Whitfield and Haynes however ignore the macro picture, described by Professor Philip Bobbitt of the University of Texas:  that the Cold War was the last phase of an epochal conflict that began in 1914.  This Long War, according to Bobbitt, was fought to determine which of three new constitutional forms – parliamentary democracy, communism, or fascism – would replace the old imperial states.  War is never pretty and its ugliness is compounded in an open society.  All wars involve collateral damage and misadventure.  But the stakes in the Cold War were very high indeed.  If ideas can have ruinous consequences, then ideology can be a destructive foe.  “From the saintly and single-minded idealist to the fanatic,” writes F.A. Hayek, “is often but a step.”[4]  Accepting the ground that America was in a real war – a war for survival – places Cold War exigencies in perspective.  Neither Haynes nor Whitfield appear to accept this ground – indeed, their position is ambiguous.  (Whitfield declares a pox on both houses.)  Haynes and Whitfield may be neutral in Bobbitt’s epochal conflict; they may not believe (as did one of the principal participants) in the extent and “depth of [communism’s] penetration or the fierce vindictiveness of its revolutionary temper, which is a reflex of its struggle to keep and advance its political power.”[5]  Rather, their equivocal message is that “history is rarely a Manichean struggle between pure good and uncut evil, but more often a drama played by actors with noble ideals, perhaps, but blind to their flaws.”[6]


                [1] Eric Voegelin, The New Science of Politics:  An Introduction (Chicago:  The University of Chicago Press, 1952), 175.

 

                [2] Whittaker Chambers, Witness (New York:  Random House, 1952), 9.

[3] John Lukacs, quoted in Russell Kirk, Prospects for Conservatives, “Part I:  Prospects Abroad,” 14 June 1990, <http://adasboro.tripod.com/abroad.htm> (3 February 2006).

                [4] Friedrich A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (Chicago:  The University of Chicago Press, 1944; reprint, 1994), 62 (page citations are to the reprint edition). 

 

                [5] Chambers, 742.

 

                [6] Paul Gottfried, review of Gods and Generals, National Review, 10 March 2003, <http://www.ronmaxwell.com/ggreviews.html> (29 January 2006).