Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974 (26 page)

Whether the American Communist party was as alien an organization as Howe and others maintained still divides historians. Some point out accurately that the party, after reaching a peak in membership in 1945, declined in the late 1940s. Although influential among certain unions until 1949, it was hardly a potent force in American politics, and its leaders did not receive a great deal of aid from Moscow. Many American Communists in union locals, moreover, were honest, effective, and popular with the rank-and-file. Still, Howe and others were on target in lamenting the lockstep consistency with which leading party officials—as opposed to many lesser party members—followed the Moscow line on all major questions, including the coup in Czechoslovakia and the Berlin Airlift.
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Some of the leaders had indeed surrendered their intellectual independence—and their patriotism—to the Kremlin. And Howe was surely correct in bewailing the baneful effect of such a rigid and uncompromising party on the chances for revival of an independent Left in the United States.

Another issue dividing historians concerns the degree to which the "public at large" promoted a Red Scare. Should one emphasize the role of elites—partisan Republicans, interest group leaders, anti-Communist liberals—or see the elites as mainly reflecting the "voice of the people"? There is no sure answer to this question, in part because polls of public opinion on the subject offer conflicting evidence. Analysts who focus on elites, however, probably have the better case, for the majority of Americans in the late 1940s and early 1950s only slowly grew worried about subversion. As William Levitt remarked of his suburbanites, people were too busy getting ahead to fret a great deal about Communists, let alone to lead crusades against Reds. A survey at a height of the Red Scare in 1954 found that only 3 percent of Americans had ever known a Communist; only 10 percent said they had known people they even suspected of being a Communist. The same survey concluded, "The internal communist threat, perhaps like the threat of crime, is not directly felt as personal. It is something one reads about and talks about and even sometimes gets angry about. But a picture of the average American as a person with the jitters, trembling lest he find a Red under the bed, is clearly nonsense."
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Still, anti-Communism cut fairly deeply in some ways. As early as 1946 polls showed that 67 percent of Americans opposed letting Communists hold government jobs. A poll in 1947 revealed that 61 percent of respondents favored outlawing the Communist party.
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Political leaders and anti-Communist pressure groups had helped to rouse such popular feelings; they did not spring up on their own. But there was a good deal of evidence to suggest that ardently patriotic and anti-Communist emotions were not hard to whip up once Cold War fears mounted. When the Truman administration sent the so-called Freedom Train around the country in 1947–48, it was greeted by enthusiastic crowds, brass bands, and patriotic speeches. An estimated 4 million people turned out to look at the train's exhibits, which included the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Truman Doctrine.
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It is especially clear that most American people continued to care little for civil liberties in the immediate postwar years. Americans in the 1940s and early 1950s may not have worried deeply that there were a lot of Communists hiding under the bed, but they were often ready to believe that party members and sympathizers were dangerous to the Republic. Acting on such beliefs, liberal organizations moved summarily to purge Communists in these years. By 1949 labor unions, the NAACP, the Urban League, and the Congress of Racial Equality had largely succeeded in doing so, and in 1950 the NAACP decided to expel Communist-dominated chapters.
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Civil liberties also came under siege in the world of education. Those who knew much about the history of education in the United States were not surprised by this development, for taxpayers long had demanded that schools and colleges promote national values. Patriotism, as taught in the schools by the salute to the flag and the Pledge of Allegiance, was highlighted in classrooms celebrating the American way. In 1940 twenty-one states required loyalty oaths of teachers. There was therefore little reason to suppose that school boards, principals, or college administrators would behave much differently from other American officials caught up in the Red Scare.

What began happening in the late 1940s was nonetheless unsettling to beleaguered civil libertarians in the academic world. In 1948 the University of Washington fired three teachers—two of them with tenure—when they refused to answer questions by state legislators about whether they belonged to the Communist party. The teachers never found another academic job. Later in the same year the American Federation of Teachers, a leading union, voted against allowing Communists to teach, and the Board of Regents of the University of California system required its faculty to take a non-Communist oath. Faculty members who refused to sign got caught up in a long and internecine controversy. A total of thirty-one, including some with tenure, were ultimately fired.
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Although legislators and other outsiders led these anti-Communist crusades, they found prominent educators ready to go along with much of their agenda. Charles Seymour, president of Yale, announced, "There will be no witch hunt at Yale, because there will be no witches. We do not intend to hire Communists." Presidents Conant of Harvard and Eisenhower of Columbia headed a blue-ribbon panel which concluded in 1949 that Communists were "unfit" to teach. The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) opposed loyalty oaths and the firing of teachers for taking the Fifth Amendment, but it granted the right of university administrators to expect its professors to answer questions about their politics. Moving with excruciating slowness, the AAUP did not censure universities that violated civil liberties until 1956.
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All who took stern positions essentially endorsed the view that Communists, as minions of Moscow, had surrendered their independence of thought. Sidney Hook, a well-known philosopher, defended the autonomy of educational institutions, but he said that university administrators could and should police their campuses against such influences. Hook reiterated that Communists were not free to think for themselves: there was a party line "for every area of thought from art to zoology."
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The Socialist leader Norman Thomas, a veteran of bitter fights with Communists over the years, agreed: "The right of the Communist to teach should be denied because he has given away his freedom in the quest for truth. . . . He who today persists in Communist allegiance is either too foolish or too disloyal to democratic ideals to be allowed to teach in our schools."
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It is an exaggeration to conclude that the Red Scare terrorized American academe in general.
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Most universities—and many individual faculty members—defended academic freedoms.
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Still, the Red Scare in education was a demoralizing episode, especially at the not-so-ivory towers of universities where academic freedom had been supposed to be safe. Schools and colleges feared to keep on their faculties anyone who had refused to deny that he or she was a Communist. When confronted with such issues, a number of administrators and non-Communist faculty members were quick to assume that all Communists were the same, without asking if Communist teachers made any effort to indoctrinate students and without distinguishing between those faculty who were good scholars and teachers and those who were not. Teachers grew cautious, and some suffered greatly.
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Though estimates vary, it is thought that 600 or so public school teachers and professors in these years lost their jobs because they were smeared by accusations that they were Communists or Communist sympathizers. Blacklists often ensured that they would not be hired elsewhere.
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M
UCH OF THE IMPETUS
for McCarthyism in the early 1950s developed between 1947 and 1949 and arose from the activities of government. Some of these activities, such as the efforts of the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC), came from right-wing zealots and political opportunists in Congress.
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Others came from the Justice Department (including the FBI) of the Truman administration. Well before McCarthy took his place on the national stage, ever more energetic governmental scene-setters had rung up the curtain on a Red Scare drama that appeared to play popularly at the polls.
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By all odds the most durable villain of the drama was Hoover, who had begun his hunt for subversives when Woodrow Wilson's Red-hunting Attorney General, A. Mitchell Palmer, placed him in charge of the Justice Department's newly created General Intelligence Division in 1919. Hoover was then 24.
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He moved quickly to set up special files on virtually all radicals known to the country and did the legwork that much facilitated the Red Scare of 1919. By 1924 he was head of the FBI, a post he retained for forty-eight years until his death in office in 1972. Hoover was vain, surrounded by sycophants, obsessed with order and routine. People who met him in his later days at the FBI were led through his many "trophy rooms" to his office, which glowed with a purplish insectrepelling light that Hoover, a hypochondriac, had installed to "electrocute" bad germs.
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Hoover sat regally behind a desk on a six-inch-high dais and looked down on his visitors. Throughout his career he employed very few blacks or other minorities. Those who did get hired spent much of their time driving his limousine, handing him towels, or swatting flies.

Hoover worked harder at rooting out subversion than at any other activity. In doing so he used a vast and intricate network of informers, some of them undercover agents, others—like Cardinal Spellman—well-known public figures anxious to cooperate in the anti-Communist crusade. In return he gave them information about subversives in their midst. No rumor, it seemed, was too trivial for Hoover to follow up, especially if it involved sexual activities. Much of the information—fact, hearsay, trivia—went into his secret files.

These many flaws were well known to critics in the Truman years. Bernard De Voto lashed out in 1949 against Hoover's use of "gossip, rumor, slander, backbiting, malice and drunken invention, which, when it makes the headlines, shatters the reputations of innocent and harmless people. . . . We are shocked. We are scared. Sometimes we are sickened. We know that the thing stinks to heaven, that it is an avalanching danger to our society."
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Truman complained privately, "We want no Gestapo or Secret Police. FBI is tending in that direction. They are dabbling in sex life scandals and plain blackmail. . . .
This must stop."
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But Truman made no effort to fire him. He refrained from criticizing Hoover openly, even when he realized that the director was feeding information about alleged subversives to enemies of his administration. Truman even depended on the FBI to check the loyalty of federal employees and to help prosecute Communist leaders.
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When Truman left office at the peak of the Red Scare, Hoover and the FBI were stronger than they had been in 1945.

The reasons for Hoover's success were not hard to discover. One was his carefully cultivated reputation as a crime-fighter. Another was his apparently large pile of dirt about people high in public places. Hoover was also a consummate bureaucrat. More than most high officials in the 1920s and 1930s, he had then mastered the art of public relations. When FBI agents killed John Dillinger, "Public Enemy Number One," Hoover took personal credit. Equally important, Hoover was hardly a rogue elephant. He ordinarily made sure that authority for aggressive activities such as bugging and wiretapping came from above. Again and again he got such assurances from Presidents and Attorneys General who recognized that Hoover commanded information they needed—or thought they needed—to have.

A co-villain in the Red Scare drama was HUAC, which had attracted some of the most reactionary and bigoted men in public life.
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A senior Democrat, John Rankin of Mississippi, was an especially rabid antiSemite and racist. Denouncing civil rights activity in 1950, Rankin exclaimed, "This is a part of the communistic program, laid down by Stalin approximately thirty years ago. Remember communism is Yiddish. I understand that every member of the Politburo around Stalin is either Yiddish or married to one, and that includes Stalin himself."
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Another HUAC power, Republican J. Parnell Thomas of New Jersey, was later convicted of illegally padding his payroll. A third member thereafter was Nixon, who did more than anyone else after 1946 to make HUAC an aggressive agent of anti-Communism. His persistent labors gave him a national reputation.