Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974 (25 page)

This was a breathtaking and revolutionary document, full of emotional language contrasting the "slave society" of Communists to the blessings of the "Free World." The USSR, "unlike previous aspirants to hegemony, is animated by a new fanatic faith, antithetical to our own, and seeks to impose its absolute authority over the rest of the world." Soviet fanaticism necessitated globalistic responses: "The assault on free institutions is world-wide now, and in the context of the present polarization of power a defeat of free institutions anywhere is a defeat everywhere."

The conclusions of NSC-68 rested on one key assumption, which reflected the grand expectations that pervaded America in the postwar era: economic growth in the United States made such a huge expansion of defense spending easy to manage, and without major sacrifices at home. One of Lovett's memos strongly made this case:
"There was practically nothing the country could not do if it wanted to do it."
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While drafting the document, Nitze communicated regularly with Leon Keyserling, chairman of Truman's Council of Economic Advisers. Keyserling had great faith in the ability of government spending to stimulate the economy. Then, as throughout in the postwar era, grand expectations about American economic and industrial growth promoted globalistic foreign and military policies.

NSC-68 was seriously flawed in many respects. As Kennan complained at the time, it assumed the worst of Soviet foreign policy, which for the most part remained cautious, concentrating on tightening control of eastern Europe and other sensitive regions close to Soviet boundaries. NSC-68 also defined United States defense policies in terms of hypothetical Soviet moves rather than in terms of carefully defined American interests. This approach required the United States to be prepared to put out fires all over the globe.
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The report's assumptions about the relative power of Soviet and American forces were especially questionable. In 1949 the American GNP was roughly four times as great as that of the Soviet Union, which remained an inefficient and relatively unproductive society. Although the Soviets were devoting perhaps twice as much of their GNP to military spending, this was being done at terrific costs at home and could not make them serious economic rivals of the United States in the foreseeable future. The Soviets maintained a much bigger army, but they had used it to stamp out dissent in their spheres of interest, not to invade new territories. There was no clear indication in 1950 that this largely defensive posture would change. America had much the greater arsenal of nuclear weapons, by far the superior navy, much stronger allies, and incomparably greater economic health. As it turned out, moreover, the Soviets did not make a big effort to improve their long-range bombing forces until the mid-1950s; NSC's worries about nuclear attack as early as 1954 were way off the mark.
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When Truman received the report in early April, he neither endorsed nor rejected it. Instead, he passed it along for economic analysis. If the Korean War had not broken out two months later, it might not have been acted on; Truman still hoped to curb defense spending. Still, NSC-68 commanded the support of virtually all high-ranking American officials (Defense Secretary Johnson excepted) at the time it was delivered. It was music to the ears of the armed services. The Korean War then cinched the case for defense spending along the lines urged by the report. By fiscal 1952 the United States was paying $44 billion for national defense; by 1953, $50.4 billion, roughly the amount privately anticipated by advocates of NSC-68. Spending declined a little when the Korean War ended but still ranged between $40 and $53.5 billion every year between 1954 and 1964. Along with the decision for the Super, the logic of NSC-68 reflected the rapid militarization in American foreign policies following the Soviet atomic explosion and the "fall" of China.

T
HE TOUGHENING
of American attitudes toward the Soviets in early 1950 did not exist in a cultural or political vacuum. On the contrary, events heated up already flammable anti-Communist emotions and ignited a Red Scare of considerable fire and fury. On January 21, ten days before Truman decided for the Super, a federal jury brought thirteen months of hotly contested litigation to a close by finding Alger Hiss, accused of having been a spy for the Soviets in the 1930s, guilty of perjury. Hiss, a middle-rank Establishment figure in foreign policy councils during the mid-1940s, was sentenced to five years in prison. On January 27 Klaus Fuchs, a German-born English atomic scientist who had worked on the A-bomb, was arrested for turning over secrets to the Soviets during and after the war. He was later tried in England, convicted, and imprisoned. On February 9 Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin alleged that Communists infested the American State Department. His accusations, offered to the Ohio County Women's Republican Club of Wheeling, West Virginia, increased pressure on the Truman administration to get tough with the Soviets. The Red Scare of "McCarthyism" helped to besmirch American politics and culture for much of the next five years.

These dramatic events, while of great significance in fanning the flames of anti-Communism in the United States, have to be seen in a longer historical context. McCarthy was in fact a Joe-Come-Lately to the Red Scare, whose roots require a quasi-archaeological probe into the American past. Americans have periodically lashed out at radicals, alleged subversives, aliens, immigrants, blacks, Catholics, Jews, and other vulnerable groups who could be blamed for complex problems. The Red Scare in America following the Bolshevik Revolution was only the most flagrant of many outbursts, driven both by the government and by popular vigilantism, against left-wing activists. These outbursts revealed the volatility of popular opinion, the growing capacity of the State to repress dissent, and the frailty of civil libertarian thought and action in the United States.

The turbulent years of the 1930s and especially of World War II did much to lay the foundation for the Red Scare of the 1940s and 1950s. From the mid-1930s on, right-wing politicians and intellectuals readily associated the New Deal with socialism and Communism. The House Committee on Un-American Activities investigated left-wingers following its establishment in 1938.
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In 1940 Congress approved the Smith Act, which made it a criminal offense for anyone to "teach, advocate, or encourage the overthrow or destruction of . . . government by force or violence." People accused under the law did not have to be shown to have
acted
in any way, only to have
advocated
action. The Smith Act was used by the Roosevelt administration against alleged Nazis as well as against American Trotskyists—prosecutions that Communists applauded.

At the same time, Roosevelt unleashed FBI director J. Edgar Hoover to check into potentially subversive people and groups. In 1941 Congress authorized the army and navy summarily to dismiss any federal employee considered to be acting contrary to the national interest. This was the start of governmental "security risk" programs, which cost 359 employees their jobs in 1942. The Justice Department began developing in 1942 the "Attorney General's list" of groups considered disloyal. By the middle of the year the FBI had helped the AG to name 47 such groups.
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Even the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which had been formed following World War I to protect dissenters, joined in the patriotic efforts of the war years. As early as 1941 it had excluded Communists from membership. From 1942 on Morris Ernst, its head, corresponded with Hoover on a "Dear Edgar" basis, in which he passed on information about alleged Communists in the ACLU.

Wartime patriotism spurred other, much more flagrant violations of civil liberties, notably the incarceration of Japanese-Americans in "relocation" camps during most of the war. Less obvious but of long-run significance was the hyper-patriotism that developed among many American people. For some this patriotism arose during military service. For others it followed years of work in defense plants. Either way, large numbers of people, including many European-Americans, came to feel a larger sense of belonging to the United States. The patriotic wartime injunction "Be American" competed with earlier ethnic or class identifications.

When the Cold War arose after 1945, Americans were often quick to join the "get-tough" chorus. The atheistic dogmas of orthodox Marxism repelled Catholics and other religious believers. The subjection of the "old countries" offended many others. More generally, Americans who were trying to get ahead—going to college, raising families, moving to suburbia, acquiring consumer goods—were all the more ready to believe fervently that the United States was a free and mobile society and that Communism, which took away private property, was not only totalitarian but also a threat to their social and economic futures. In this way the hopes for social mobility that pervaded the postwar years stimulated both grand expectations and nervous feelings about Reds. The quests for personal security and domestic security became inextricably interrelated.
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World War II had lasting effects in one other, less definable way: like most armed conflicts it toughened popular feelings. The fighting, people concluded, had been necessary. Sacrifice was noble. "Appeasers" were "soft." Long after the war many Americans tended to glorify the "manly" virtues of toughness. Those who were "soft" ran the risk of being defined as deviant. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr's. widely admired liberal manifesto
The Vital Center
(1949) made this clear. Liberals, he said, showed "virility," leftists and rightists "political sterility." Communism was "something secret, sweaty, and furtive like nothing so much, in the phrase of one wise observer of modern Russia, as homosexuals in a boys' school."
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The homophobia that pervaded American culture had many sources, but some of it rested on the view that homosexuals were not only perverted but also subject to blackmail. In the early 1950s they were specifically included among the categories of people who could be fired from sensitive positions as "security risks."
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Many postwar forces abetted these wartime developments. One was disturbing evidence of Communist espionage. In June 1945 the FBI arrested several employees of
Amerasia
, a left-wing magazine close to the American Communist party, as well as John Stewart Service, a China expert in the State Department. The magazine's offices contained 600 secret and top-secret documents, some of which contained information concerning American plans for bombing in Japan. When it became known that federal agents had illegally entered the magazine's offices, the case against the editors fell apart. Evidence concerning Service was too skimpy, and he was released. The result was small fines for three
Amerasia
staff members for illegal possession of government documents.
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In part because the Justice Department was embarrassed about its own illegal activities in the case, the
Amerasia
matter did not get widespread publicity at the time. But it was a worrisome affair for government officials. When Igor Gouzenko, a file clerk in the Soviet Embassy in Toronto, defected in early 1946, their worries intensified. Gouzenko produced evidence that the Soviets had spied on atomic energy research in Canada and elsewhere during the war. Neither the
Amerasia
nor the Gouzenko affair proved that any Americans—let alone government officials—were guilty of espionage. Indeed, no American public officials were convicted of spying at any time during the postwar Red Scare. But Gouzenko's revelations did show that the Soviets had spied on America during and after World War II. Evidence such as this later played into the hands of Red Scare activists.
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The heat of partisan politics further intensified the postwar Red Scare. Running for the presidency in 1944, Dewey had linked Communism, FDR, and the New Deal. The Democrats had fired back by associating the GOP with fascism and "fifth column" activities. Red-baiting in the 1946 campaign smeared many candidates, including Congressman Jerry Voorhis, Richard Nixon's opponent in southern California. Voorhis denied Nixon's unfounded accusations, but to no avail. His defeat, like that of others attacked by anti-Communists in 1946, provided an obvious object lesson: Red-baiting could pay off at the polls.
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Ardent foes of Communism often enjoyed substantial support from conservative interest groups, many of which worked closely with Hoover. The American Legion was one, the United States Chamber of Commerce another. Right-wing publishers such as Colonel Robert McCormick of the
Chicago Tribune
and aging, melancholic William Randolph Hearst, who ran a nationwide chain of papers, regularly (and sometimes hysterically) raised the alarm against subversives at home and Communists abroad. Patriotic organizations such as the Daughters of the American Revolution chimed in. Leading prelates of the Catholic Church as well as the Knights of Columbus were especially outraged by the atheism of Communism. Francis Cardinal Spellman of New York was a sort of chaplain of the Cold War and actively assisted the FBI to root out Reds from American institutions.
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By mid-1946 a number of anti-communist liberals and leftists joined in this chorus against Communism at home and abroad. They included union leaders, intellectuals, and others who joined the ADA and who worried about Communist influence in the labor movement and other high places.
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These liberals opposed the extreme and sometimes irrational fulminations about Communism that emanated from the Far Right. They detested Red-baiters like Nixon. Unlike many conservatives, they did not worry much that Communism threatened private property in the United States. But, having tried to work with Communists in progressive causes, they were certain that American Communists got their marching orders from Moscow.
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Irving Howe, a democratic socialist, explained, "Those who supported Stalinism and its pitiful enterprises either here or abroad, helped befoul the cultural atmosphere, helped bring totalitarian methods into trade unions, helped perpetrate one of the great lies of the twentieth century, helped destroy whatever possibilities there might have been for a resurgence of a serious radicalism in America."
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