Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974 (27 page)

In 1947 HUAC concentrated on probing into left-wing activity in Hollywood. Announcement of the committee's intention inspired protests among American entertainment figures. "Before every free conscience in America is subpoenaed," Judy Garland cried, "please speak up! Say your piece. Write your Congressman a letter! Airmail special." Frank Sinatra asked, "Once they get the movies throttled, how long will it be before we're told what we can say and cannot say into a radio microphone? If you make a pitch on a nationwide radio network for a square deal for the underdog, will they call you a Commie? . . . Are they going to scare us into silence?" Fredric March demanded, "Who's next? Is it your minister who will be told what he can say in his pulpit? Is it your children's school teacher who will be told what he can say in his classroom? . . . Who are they after? They're after more than Hollywood. This reaches into every American city and town."
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The hearings that opened in October began relatively quietly with the testimony of "friendly witnesses" who cooperated with the committee. The actor Gary Cooper, terse as ever, said that he opposed Communism "because it isn't on the level." Walt Disney contended that the Screen Cartoonists Guild was Communist-dominated and had earlier tried to take over his studio and make Mickey Mouse toe the party line. Ronald Reagan, head of the Screen Actors Guild, tried to straddle the fence. He criticized the deviousness of Communists but added that he hoped never to see Americans "by either fear or resentment . . . compromise with any of our democratic principles."
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In the next few years Reagan turned more decisively to the right, enthusiastically enforcing a blacklist on actors accused of being Communists and identifying to the FBI actors and actresses who "follow the communist party line."
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His cooperation with HUAC and Hoover was a milestone on his road from New Deal liberalism to the Republican Right.

Donnybrooks broke out when unfriendly witnesses confronted HUAC. Some cited the Fifth Amendment, which protected them against possible self-incrimination. Ten others took the much riskier path of claiming the right of freedom of speech under the First Amendment. They refused to give straight answers to a range of committee questions about whether they were Communists. The "Hollywood Ten," as they became known, included talents such as the screenwriters Alvah Bessie, Dalton Trumbo, and Ring Lardner, Jr. Some of them rudely insulted HUAC members. The screenwriter Albert Maltz likened Rankin and Thomas to Goebbels and Hitler.
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The stand of the Ten evoked admiration among left-liberal colleagues in the entertainment industry, including such stars as Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Katharine Hepburn, and Danny Kaye, who formed the Committee for the First Amendment. But public opinion seemed hostile, and the studio heads, who feared for the image of the industry, closed ranks against them. The Ten, along with 240 or so others, were blacklisted by the industry, many of them for years. HUAC cited the Ten for contempt. When they lost their appeals in 1950, they went to prison for terms ranging between six months and a year.

If Hoover and HUAC were the villains of the anti-Communist drama, Truman and his advisers clumsily—and sometimes recklessly—acted as spear-carriers. Even as the Red-hunters looked for subversives in 1947 the administration was scouting out the "loyalty" of federal employees. Their efforts rested on Executive Order No. 9835 issued on March 22, 1947, nine days after announcement of the Truman Doctrine. The order set up "loyalty boards" in government agencies that employed some 2.5 million people. It seemed reasonable on the surface. Employees (and potential new hires) who were called before the boards had the right to a hearing and to counsel. They were to be informed of the specific charges against them and had the right to appeal to a Loyalty Review Board under the auspices of the Civil Service Commission. They could be fired if the boards found "reasonable grounds . . . for belief that the person involved is disloyal to the Government of the United States." This involved such activities as sabotage, espionage, treason, advocacy of violent revolution, performance of duties "so as to serve the interests of another government," and affiliation with any group "designated by the Attorney General as totalitarian, fascistic, communistic, or subversive."
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In practice Truman's loyalty program was careless of civil liberties. The very word "loyalty" was problematic, encouraging zealots to bring charges on vague and imprecise grounds. While employees had the right to hear of charges against them, accusers could withhold anything they designated as secret. Government workers did not have the right to know the identity of their accusers—often agents of the FBI—or to confront them in the hearings. "Evidence" used against them often amounted to no more than a dossier available only to members of the loyalty boards.
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Many governmental employees investigated by the loyalty boards were guilty of nothing more than having belonged to liberal organizations on an AG list that grew rapidly after 1947.

Critics of Truman have argued that his loyalty program was intended as a tough domestic counterpart to the Truman Doctrine. This was not the case. The order had been considered for some time and stemmed from recommendations of a Temporary Commission on Employee Loyalty that Truman had established in November 1946. Moreover, the program was hardly new; for the most part it broadened and codified orders that Roosevelt had issued during the war. The AG's list dated to 1942. In tightening these wartime procedures the President hoped to fend off right-wingers who said that he was "soft" on Communism and to keep management of the program out of the hands of the FBI. That is why the Civil Service Commission, not Hoover, controlled the program. Hoover felt slighted and angry about the order.

Still, the President and his aides should have taken greater care to protect people. Truman knew that government employees deserved fair procedures and asserted that his loyalty program would provide them. But he nonetheless expanded an already flawed set of procedures and did nothing to stop other agencies of government from establishing even more arbitrary loyalty programs: the armed services were allowed to investigate civilian employees of defense contractors and to order firings without giving any account of the charges against the suspects.
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By mid-1952 Truman administration loyalty boards had investigated many thousands of employees, of whom around 1,200 were dismissed and another 6,000 resigned rather than undergo the indignities and potential publicity of the whole process. None of them was proved to be a spy or a saboteur.
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The program reflected badly on the administration's awareness of civil liberties and encouraged subsequent apocalyptic thinking about subservion. It was ironic indeed that Truman's partisan opponents scored political points by charging him with being "soft" on Communism.

A year later, during the 1948 campaign, the Truman administration went still further to demonstrate its Americanism, by prosecuting top leaders of the American Communist party. This effort led to drawn-out litigation that culminated in review by the Supreme Court in June 1951. At every level of the court system the eleven defendants lost their case. In New York the judge ruled that the leaders had violated the Smith Act by urging overthrow of the government "as speedily as circumstances permit" and therefore represented a "clear and present danger" to American society. Judge Learned Hand of the appeals court agreed and cited events of the Cold War as evidence of the Communist threat. When the Supreme Court upheld the convictions in the case of
Dennis
v.
U.S
., the leaders were fined $10,000 each and sentenced to prison terms of five years.
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Almost no one in those troubled times was eager to stand up and defend these leaders of the American Communist party. That was understandable, not only because of Cold War tensions but also because the party itself had never cared for civil liberties. Americans thought the Communists had it coming. But the prosecutions were disturbing to advocates of free speech, for they depended on the ill-constructed Smith Act, which took aim at organizations deemed to be engaged in the teaching or advocacy of violent revolutionary activity. The government, unable to show that the defendants had committed any overt acts of violence or crime, fell back on the argument that belonging to the Communist party made them part of a conspiracy to commit such acts in the future. In so doing the government was stifling speech, and Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black said so in a dissent that he registered with William Douglas. He hoped that "in calmer times, when present pressures, passions, and fears subside, this or some later court will restore the First Amendment liberties to the high preferred place where they belong in a free society."
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Having put the top leadership in jail, the Truman administration then went after other well-known Communists. By the end of 1952 it had secured thirty-three more convictions. Ultimately 126 were indicted and ninety-three convicted before Cold War fears abated and a more liberal Supreme Court discouraged such litigation in the mid- and late 1950s.
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In this sense the prosecutions were successful; they not only sentenced Communists to prison but forced the party to throw vast amounts of its time and money toward their defense. Meanwhile the party committed suicide by supporting Soviet foreign policies, including the crushing of the Hungarian revolution in 1956. Thereafter it was estimated that party membership plummeted to 5,000, of whom so many were FBI agents that Hoover considered taking over the party by massing his men at its next convention.
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But the prosecutions were otherwise unfortunate, for two reasons. First, they engaged the government in further attacks on civil liberties. Second, they drove the remaining leaders underground, where it proved harder to keep track of their activities. Indeed, the prosecutions represented a remarkable overreaction. They revealed, as did the broader McCarthyism that complemented them after 1950, the growing force of the Red Scare in America, a force that owed some of its strength to activities of the administration of Harry S. Truman.

All these actors in the drama against subversion—Hoover and the FBI, HUAC, administration loyalty boards and prosecutors—gained the attention of an increasingly alarmed American audience between 1947 and early 1950. The most compelling actors, however, were the protagonists in a prolonged and bitter legal fight that episodically grabbed center stage between the summer of 1948 and January 1950: the tribulations of Alger Hiss. Many decades later this fight stands out as among the most dramatic in the history of the Red Scare.

HUAC opened the action in August 1948 when it brought a number of confessed ex-Communists before it to testify. One of these was Whittaker Chambers, who said he had spied for the Soviets in the 1930s. Rejecting the party in 1938, Chambers embraced Christianity and emerged as a knight-errant against atheistic, brutal Communism. A facile writer, he worked for nine years at
Time
magazine before resigning as a senior editor in 1948. Chambers was pudgy, rumpled, disheveled, sad-faced, and emotionally unstable to the point of frequently considering suicide. In sensational testimony he identified for HUAC a number of people as fellow Communists in the 1930s.
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One of those named was Alger Hiss, then the much-respected head of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Hiss was the antithesis of Chambers. He had been educated at Johns Hopkins University and the Harvard Law School. A protégé of Harvard professor Felix Frankfurter, he became a clerk for Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. During the 1930s he worked in a number of New Deal departments, including State after 1936. Although not quite a top-ranking official, he attended a number of international conferences, including Yalta, and was a promising member of the State Department when he left to direct the Carnegie Endowment in 1947.

Hiss was an Establishmentarian. Among his friends were Acheson and others in the elite of foreign policy-makers in the Roosevelt-Truman years. Associates marveled especially at his poise. He had handsome, well-defined features and the facility in speech of a well-trained attorney. Murray Kempton, a respected liberal columnist, said that Hiss "gave you a sense of absolute command and absolute grace." Alistair Cooke, a friendly journalist, observed that Hiss "had one of those bodies that without being at all imposing or foppish seem to illustrate the finesse of the human mechanism."
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Much of the drama that followed Chambers's testimony stemmed from the apparently impeccable credentials of Alger Hiss. If such a man had been a Communist, then nothing the government did was safe.
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When Hiss heard of Chambers's accusations, he insisted on responding. Under oath he denied all before HUAC, whose members he openly disdained, and challenged Chambers to repeat his charges without benefit of congressional immunity. When Chambers did so, Hiss sued him for libel. Hiss's many friends were outraged at Chambers's accusations; Truman himself denounced HUAC's fishing as a "red herring." But Nixon was suspicious of Hiss, regarding him as the epitome of the liberal eastern Establishment, and he pressed the case against him. The FBI worked closely with Nixon, apparently feeding him sensitive material—and denying it to Hiss—whenever it was needed.