McCarthyism, the "Ism" that Isn't
One of the favorite words for Democrats, communists, former communists, and leftists in general to throw around is the term “McCarthyism.” One of a number of “isms” coined by leftist journalists and academics since the 1930s, the term is most often (mis)applied to the black-listing of members of the entertainment industry with ties to the Communist Party, USA.[1] It’s most often used by leftists, particularly “red diaper babies,” academics and writers in particular, whose parents were accused of CPUSA membership in the 1940s and 50s, some of whom were blacklisted due to their alignment with the Soviet Union. In reality, the late Senator Joseph McCarthy for whom the term is named, wasn’t involved with the black-listing and his name is erroneously applied to government actions dating back to the 1930s when it became apparent that the Soviet Union was using Hollywood and broadcast media as a vehicle to promote the USSR and communist beliefs. Investigations resumed after World War II as the Soviets became more aggressive and continued into the 1960s. Perhaps there should be a term to describe that time, but even though Senator Joseph McCarthy conducted investigations in his capacity as head of senate committees, “McCarthyism” is not it. Neither is “red scare,” another communist-invented term, because it wasn’t a “scare,” it was fact.
Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy rose to prominence immediately before the United States became embroiled in a new war on the Korean Peninsula and shortly after the revelation that members of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal had spied for the Soviet Union during and after World War II. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were being prosecuted for transmitting atomic and other military secrets to the Soviet Union and Alger Hiss was on trial for perjury for denying he was a communist after information came out that he was. The United States was becoming embroiled in a “Cold War”, which really wasn’t cold, with the USSR and it’s soviet allies.[2] McCarthy began speaking out against communism in the United States government and former New Dealers became upset. McCarthy’s outspokenness led to him being blamed for Congressional actions in which he played no part. He is blamed, by leftists such as historian Ellen Schrecker, for an “attack on the Constitution far more dangerous than anything communists ever did.” Never mind that McCarthy never attacked free speech; he attacked the infiltration of the Federal government by communists, many of them members and former members of the Communist Party, USA, and their fellow travelers.
Communism, a political philosophy advocated by German revolutionaries Karl Marx and Fredrick Engles, was introduced to the United States in 1847 when a League of Communists made up mostly of recent German immigrants was formed in New York and Philadelphia. Communism was a topic of wide discussion in Europe, particularly Germany, and immigrants brought the idea with them. Joseph Wedemeyer, a Marx disciple, immigrated to the United States in 1851 with instructions to promote communism. Marx and Engles had charged him to make their Communist Manifesto available to Americans. The following year he and four others formed the Proletarian League, which became the American Workers League, a communist organization aimed at Northern factory workers. Wedemeyer and other communists and socialists became heavily involved in the newly formed Republican Party and played a major role in its development and success by encouraging German immigrants to support the new party.[3] A number of communists, including Wedemeyer, and socialists held positions in Lincoln’s administration and as officers in the Union army.[4] Marx saw the United States and Russia as ripe for revolution, and he saw the black slaves in the South joining with workers in the industrial North as a source of manpower to develop a communist movement once they were freed. With that goal in mind, Marx pressured Lincoln to make his war against the seceded states about freeing slaves rather than reunification. He wrote letters to Lincoln and his articles appeared in Horace Greely’s New York Tribune until the paper changed its editorial policy and began advocating for an end to the costly war leaving slavery in place. Although the slaves were freed, Marx’s goals were thwarted when the Reconstruction policies of Radical Republicans failed and Northern workers turned toward the Democratic Party as Republicans became more oriented toward big business, particularly the railroads. Marx died, but his ideas flourished in Russia where the Tsar was overthrown and the Soviet Union was established after Leninist Bolsheviks s took over the revolution. The Bolshevik Revolution was harsh and bloody. Bolsheviks executed their White Russian opponents (White Russians also executed Bolsheviks but weren’t as blood-thirsty.) After they rose to power, the Soviets continued executing their opponents. It got even worse after Lenin died and Stalin took over. Soviets stated that their goal was to eliminate the bourgeoisie, the middle class. Their intent was to establish an international proletarian revolution with the intent of promoting world-wide communism.
The Communist Party, USA was a Soviet Union surrogate. It was established in 1919 in response to Vladimir Lenin’s founding of Communism International, or Comintern, an organization devoted to establishing communism world-wide, and was under its direction.[5] It’s stated goal was to “conquer and destroy” the United States government and establish a communist dictatorship as had been established in Russia. The Party was sold as a vehicle for American workers, i.e. union members, to establish a workers’ paradise in the United States. The new party, which operated legally at first, was made up largely of immigrants, particularly Russians. Many were Jews. From its inception, the party was heavily involved in the labor movement and the CPUSA followed suit. Some unions fell under Communist control. Students, especially those in Ivy League schools, were attracted to communism’s (false) promise of “equality.” Communists sought to eliminate the aristocracy (landlords) and bourgeois (capitalists) and establish governments ruled by workers, an idea that appealed to idealistic students. Comintern established Young Communist Leagues in many countries in 1920, including the United States, as incubators for party members. YCL chapters were established near college campuses to attract students with socialist views. The goal of the YCL was to produce communists and recruit members for the national parties, including the Communist Party, USA. New York City, with its population of immigrants and first and second generation Americans, was the center of the Communist movement. The CPUSA headquarters was there, and New York City College was a source of recruits as was Columbia. Large numbers of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe had settled in New York; consequently, many Communists were Jews. Communism enjoyed support among American intellectuals, many of whom were socialists; some became Communists while others never officially joined the Party but were sympathetic to its goals.[6] Communists called them “fellow travelers.” They weren’t carried on Party rolls but supported its policies and goals.
Moscow instructed the Party to recruit American blacks and it formed the American Negro Labor Congress in response. The Communist Party defended the Scottsboro Boys, a group of young blacks who were accused of raping two white women on a train running between Chattanooga and Memphis, Tennessee. The tracks ran through Scottsboro, Alabama and that’s where the rapes were reported. The Communist Party evidently paid for one of the young women to travel to New York where she was influenced by leftist preacher Harry Emerson Fosdick to change her story.[7] She testified on the stand that the Communist Party bought the clothes she was wearing. (The other woman refused to change her story and the young blacks were convicted.) After the trial, she frequently appeared at Communist rallies and events. The AMLC didn’t last long, Discord rose among the leadership and the Communist Party dissolved it and formed a new organization called The League of Struggle for Negro Rights. It, too, fell apart so the Party tried a new tact and organized a “Popular Front” organization called the National Negro Congress. The NNC merged with other leftist organizations to form the Civil Rights Congress. The CRC was labeled as a Communist Front organization and disbanded. In the 1930s the Communist Party advocated the formation of an all-black nation in the so-called “Black Belt” in the Deep South, a region stretching from Virginia to Louisiana heavily by descendants of slaves.
Initially, most American Communists were immigrants from populated Russia and states in its circle of influence but by the 1930s more and more Americans had joined the party. The head of the American party was Earl Browder, a Kansan, who became a Socialist at the age of sixteen when he joined the Socialist Party. He was opposed to American involvement in World War I and was convicted under the Espionage Act and spent two years in prison. He returned to prison for two years on a conspiracy charge six months after his release. While he was in prison, the left wing of the Socialist Party formed the Communist Party of America and the Communist Labor Party of America. The two parties merged and became the United Communist Party which later became the Communist Party, USA. Browder joined as soon as he was released from prison in 1921. In 1930 Browder became political secretary of the party, effectively the Communist Party, USA’s head. He remained head of the party for the next fourteen years. In 1944 he was removed from his position and expelled from the Party because he had changed the name of the Party to the Communist Political Association and was advocating that Communists support Democrats. [8] Browder had come to believe the Communist Party was no longer necessary because Roosevelt’s New Deal was accomplishing most of its goals.[9] Moscow, however, had decided that the relationship between the USSR and the United States would be hostile after the war and had Browder removed. He was replaced by Francis X. Waldron, who had fled the US to the Soviet Union to avoid prosecution, then returned as Eugene Dennis. The Comintern also changed the name back to Communist Party, USA. Although Browder denied having spied, decoded Soviet intercepts showed that he had. Members of his family, including his sister and niece, spied for the Soviets.
The CPUSA supported the Republicans, who weren’t republicans, they were communists and socialists and part of the Comintern Popular Front, in the Spanish Civil War. The Republicans sole supporters were Mexico and the USSR. The United States remained neutral, to the indignation of the CPUSA who began recruiting young Communists to go to Spain to fight with the International Brigade, an organization formed by Comintern. Because the US was neutral in the conflict, it wasn’t issuing visas for Americans to visit Spain so they had to go by a roundabout way through France. American and Canadian Communists fought mostly with the Lincoln Battalion. Just over 3,000 Americans, many of them first or second generation citizens, went to Spain. Some 80% were Communists; those who weren’t party members were Soviet supporters. Veterans claimed they went because they hated “fascism,” a nebulous term generally used by communists to denote anyone who was not supporting the world-wide communist revolution. Stalin started using it to apply to socialists who didn’t support communism. It came to be applied to the Axis nations of Germany, Italy and Japan. Germany and Italy were socialist but they were not communist. Communists also applied it to the Chinese Nationalists. Then Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov and German Foreign Minister Ribbentrop signed a non-aggression agreement, making the two countries allies. All of a sudden, in the minds of communists fascists were okay.
Soviet Premier Stalin and German Chancellor Adolph Hitler jointly attacked Poland in 1939. The USSR annexed much of Eastern Poland and turned the lands over to the new Soviet states of Lithuania, Belorussia and Ukraine, where they would remain after the war.[10] It would come out later that the Soviets massacred more than 20,000 Polish officers, government officials and educated professionals in the Katyn Forest. In 1940 President Franklin Roosevelt announced a military draft as part of his efforts to build up the US military. Many of those drafted had leftist sympathies and leaned toward socialism and communism. Some were Communists, even registered members. Some had gone to Spain to fight for the Comintern’s International Brigade. Some, such as folk singer Woody Guthrie who went into the Merchant Marine, were outspoken in their leftist beliefs. Guthrie claimed he became a Party member in 1936. Robert Oppenheimer, a physicist and the head of the highly classified Manhattan Project, had a long association with Communists on the West Coast and both his wife and mistress as well as his brother and a number of his students and associates were Party members. Whether Oppenheimer was a Party member is open to conjecture, but there is evidence that he was but kept it hidden.[11] Manhattan Project scientists fed information on the highly-classified project to the Soviet Union. General Leslie Groves, the actual head of the project, said he recruited Oppenheimer in spite of misgivings about his political leanings because he felt he would be effective as the civilian head of the development project. Many of Oppenheimer’s recruits were Communists or fellow travelers and at least three turned out to be spying for the USSR.[12] Oppenheimer would later be stripped of his security clearances due to his opposition to the development of a hydrogen bomb and because he had lied about contacts with a Soviet agent. The CPUSA was initially opposed to US involvement in the war in Europe. American Communists and leftists were supportive of the Soviet Union and Germany until Hitler attacked the newly widened Soviet states and drove into Russia. Communists and leftists changed their tune and started advocating US intervention in the European War.
Just when the USSR began recruiting spies in the United States is unclear, but by the 1930s numerous Americans, some Party members and some supportive of its goals, began gathering information and passing it on to Moscow. Whitaker Chambers, who defected in 1938, became a Communist in 1925 after reading a book by Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin. Chambers had studied at Columbia, but left the university due to controversy over a play he wrote for the campus literary magazine. A writer, he wrote for and edited Communist newspapers. One of his short stories was adapted as a play by leftist playwright Hallie Flanagan, who became part of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. He was recruited as a spy for the Soviet GRU, the Soviet Army’s intelligence organization, and became part of the Ware Group, an organization of spies initially headed by New Deal agricultural organizer Harold Ware. Ware went to Russia in 1922 to establish a collective farm. He returned to the United States in 1929 with $25,000 in US currency and began efforts at organizing farmers. He went to work for the Federal government in the Agricultural Adjustment Agency and began organizing a network of spies in the DC area. His network included a dozen New Deal officials, two of whom were the Hiss brothers. After Ware died of injuries sustained in an automobile accident in 1935, Chambers was put in charge of the group. Chambers became fearful after word of Stalin’s purges reached the United States and decided to defect. He initially didn’t intend to contact the US government but changed his mind after Stalin formed an alliance with Hitler. He went to Assistant Secretary of State Adolf Berle, who took his information to FDR. Roosevelt ignored it.[13] Berle took the information Chambers had given him to the FBI in March 1940. Chambers went to work for TIME magazine. He would later testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee.
The House Un-American Activities Committee was established as a Congressional investigative committee in 1938 while Joe McCarthy was an obscure Wisconsin lawyer and a Democrat. Chaired by Texas Congressman Martin Dies and originally called the Dies Committee, it was actually a reorganization of the Fish Committee, which had been established eight years earlier by New York Congressman and former soldier Hamilton Fish to investigate communist activities in the United States after word reached the United States of Stalinist excesses in the Soviet Union.[14][15] Dies was joined by New York Congressman Samuel Dickstein, a Russian-born Jew who, ironically, turned out to be a Soviet spy! One of the first subjects was Hallie Flanagan, a playwright who had been hired by Franklin Roosevelt advisor Harry Hopkins, who was suspected of spying for the Soviet Union, to head up the Federal Theater Project as part of Hopkins’ Works Progress Administration.[16] Hopkins knew Flanagan from Grinnell College, a leftist school founded by abolitionist Congregationalists (it was the center of the “social gospel”) in Grinnell, Iowa where they were fellow students. Flanagan was suspected of using the project to promote socialism and undermine American values. The project was shut down. The committee became a standing committee in 1945. Its purpose was the investigation of suspected threats of subversion or propaganda attacking the form of government established by the Constitution.
In 1938 Chairmen Dies released a report in which he revealed that Soviet Communism had a huge influence in Hollywood. In 1940 former Communist John L. Leech provided Dies with a list of 42 movie industry professionals who were Communists. Leech later provided the names to a Los Angeles grand jury. Although the names were supposed to be kept secret, they were leaked to the press. Among the names were some of Hollywood’s leading stars – Humphrey Bogart, James Cagney, Kathrine Hepburn, among others. Dies announced that he would clear those who were willing to meet with him in an executive session. Except for actress Jean Muir, they all met with him. Dies cleared them all except actor Lionel Stander, a well-known Communist. Stander was black-listed by Hollywood but continued to appear in theater and on TV. In 1947 the HUAC began an investigation into activities by members of the motion picture industry, including actors, directors, screen writers and producers. Radio commentators were also subjects of the investigations. The testimony is famous for “the Hollywood Ten,” ten writers and directors with Communist ties who refused to testify and were cited for contempt of Congress and served prison terms. They were black-listed by the Hollywood establishment. One of the ten, Canadian-American director Edward Dmytryk, later appeared before the Committee after he changed his mind due to the revelation that government official Alger Hiss was a Soviet spy and of other Soviet spies in the US and Canada. (Former Communist Party member and confessed spy Whitaker Chambers outed Hiss and his brother.) He was also disturbed by the North Korean invasion of its southern neighbor. Dmytryk named 23 party members and testified that Hollywood Communists had pressured him to include communist propaganda in his films.
That same year the Truman Administration established the Loyalty Review Program, a program to investigate government employees to determine possible affiliation with subversive organizations to protect classified information. Attorney General Francis Biddle had compiled a list of subversive organizations in 1943 known as the Biddle List. Nearly every organization on the list was a Communist front. His successor, Texas lawyer Tom C. Clark, who would later be appointed to the Supreme Court and was the father of far left Attorney General Ramsey Clark, expanded the list to include right-wing conservative organizations, including the Ku Klux Klan. Truman’s program was replaced by the Eisenhower Administration with a new program which transferred investigative responsibility to the Civil Service Administration and the heads of various Federal agencies. The new program expanded responsibilities to include potential security risk for other reasons as well as affiliation with political organizations deemed subversive. This added homosexuality as a cause for refusal of employment in some agencies due to the potential for blackmail. The program was abolished by President Bill Clinton.
Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy, whose name is misapplied to the events of the 1940s-50s, was not involved with the investigation of the entertainment industry nor was he involved with the HUAC. His interest was Communists in government, starting with the State Department. McCarthy was a farm boy from near Appleton who raised chickens and sold eggs to make money to go to college. After dropping out of school after elementary school to work on the farm, he went back to school at age 21 and completed the entire high school curriculum in nine months! He then entered Marquette, a Jesuit school, to study engineering but switched to law because of the math. Admitted to the Wisconsin Bar in 1935, McCarthy became a circuit judge four years later.
Even though his position as a judge exempted him from military service when war broke out, McCarthy applied for a commission in the Marine Corps in 1942 and was commissioned as an intelligence officer. As such, he was part of Naval Intelligence and would have attended intelligence training, training which would have included interrogation techniques, techniques designed to throw the subject off balance. He would later claim he enlisted as a buck private and since his enlistment date is June 4, 1942, and his date of commission is almost two months later on July 29, 1942, this is probably true since most, if not all, officers were initially enlisted before commissioning. The future senator completed Marine officers training at Quantico, Virginia.[17] After officers training, he was further trained as an air combat intelligence officer in preparation for assignment to a Marine aviation unit. An article by Wisconsin historian Thomas C. Reeves about McCarthy’s military service is partially objective but there are holes in it due to Reeves’ own lack of military service and resulting unfamiliarity with how the military works. After intelligence training, McCarthy was assigned to a Marine Aviation dive-bomber squadron, VMSB-235. The squadron was commissioned on 1 January 1943 at Marine Corps Airfield El Toro, California. McCarthy joined the squadron as its intelligence officer two months later in March, some eight months after his commissioning. After training in Hawaii, the squadron deployed to Espiritu Santo in the New Hebrides, an island chain in the Southwest Pacific. He was injured during the traditional Equator crossing ceremony when he fell backwards down a ladder. A corpsman mistakenly used acid to soften a plaster of Paris cast to remove it and caused a burn on McCarthy’s leg. He is alleged to have later implied it was an injury sustained in an aircraft accident.
As an intelligence officer, McCarthy was not required to fly missions. His job was to provide intelligence to the squadron and debrief flight crews after missions to determine the effectiveness of air strikes. However, he volunteered to fly as a rear seat gunner and photographer in order to participate in airstrikes and thus gain intelligence firsthand, and after instruction from the squadron chief gunner, flew at least eleven combat missions and possibly as many as 32. The 32 number became controversial when McCarthy submitted records to the Marine Corps to apply for a Distinguished Flying Cross after the war.[18] Although sometimes awarded for specific acts, the military commonly awarded them to aircrew members for flying a specific number of missions or accruing a specified number of combat flying hours. Reeves acknowledged that squadron personnel took their flying record with them when they left the squadron as they were considered personal property and there was no way to determine just how many missions McCarthy flew without seeing the record. Reeves interviewed some of McCarthy’s former squadron mates including his squadron commander, Major Glenn Todd, and concluded that McCarthy had inflated his combat record although Todd told him that McCarthy was just as brave as any man in the squadron and contributed as much or more to the war effort. Reeves acknowledges that McCarthy started calling himself Tail Gunner Joe when he decided to run for the US Senate in 1944 while still in the Southwest Pacific. McCarthy critics imply that it was a name of derision hung on him after he achieved notoriety in his efforts to root out Communists in government. As a matter of fact, McCarthy used the term during his campaign for the Senate, stating “Wisconsin needs a tail gunner in the Senate.” McCarthy really did fly combat missions as a rear gunner on his squadron’s SBD Dauntless dive-bombers. The SBD’s 2-man crew included a gunner in the rear cockpit who operated twin 30-caliber machineguns. McCarthy flew a number of missions, some more dangerous than others, and strafed targets on the ground after the pilot passed over them. Criticism of McCarthy’s war record was initiated by Robert Fleming, a journalist with the anti-McCarthy Milwaukee Journal who started covering McCarthy in 1946 when he began campaigning for the US Senate. Fleming hated McCarthy and once told him he “was out to get him.” Much of the claim that McCarthy inflated his war record can be attributed to Fleming, who was heavily involved in Democratic Party politics and later was part of the Johnson Administration. Flemings’ hatred for McCarthy may have been due to his having left the Democratic Party to become a Republican.
McCarthy left active duty in April 1945 to return to the bench in preparation for a campaign for the Senate the following year. He remained in the Marine Corps Reserve and was promoted to major. He is reported to have sometimes appeared in court in uniform. Although he had been a Democrat and voted for Franklin Roosevelt four times, he decided to switch parties and defeated long-time Senator Robert La Follett in the Republican primary then went on to win the 1946 election and took office the following year. The 1946 election was a banner event for recently discharged veterans as a number, including John F. Kennedy as well as McCarthy, were elected to Congress. The new Congressmen are referred to as “the class of ’46.” Although Republicans had control of the Senate, McCarthy was a junior senator and there wasn’t much he could do. The Democrats regained Senate control two years later in the 1948 election when Harry Truman was elected to a new term – Truman had not been elected president before, he had assumed the presidency on the death of Franklin Roosevelt in early 1945.
In early 1949 Senator McCarthy got involved in the investigation of the trial of former German troops for the massacre of captured Americans at Malmedy in December 1944 during the Battle of the Bulge. The Army conducted trials of the accused men, who had been members of a Waffen-SS regiment, and found them all guilty and sentenced most of them to death. There was criticism of the trials, which some claimed were “mock,” and there were accusations of torture of the prisoners to get them to confess. Another issue that came to light was that many of the legal personnel involved in the trials were Jews, and were thus suspected of partiality. The leading interrogator was a European-born Jew who had been heavily involved in the Zionist movement (and would return to it after the war.) The two leading American veterans’ organizations were divided, with the American Legion wanting the maximum punishment and the VFW advocating leniency for men they saw as soldiers acting on the orders of their superiors. Just why McCarthy decided to get involved is uncertain. His critics believe he did it as a means of attracting attention. Others believe his actions were political since Wisconsin is heavily German and he had German ancestry himself. However, there are indications he simply didn’t trust the Army, with whom he would go head-to-head a few years later. More than 12 million young American men served in uniform during the war and many of them went home with a keen distrust of the military establishment. Although he was not part of the investigating committee, McCarthy got permission to take part and accompanied them to Germany then was heavily involved in the hearings, from which he eventually walked out.
Joe McCarthy’s name came before the American public after he made a speech to a group of Republican women on February 9, 1950, Lincoln’s birthday, in Wheeling, West Virginia. During the speech, he is alleged to have claimed he had the names of 205 State Department officials who were known Communists. The speech was not recorded and his exact words are unknown but he evidently claimed he had a list of known Communists in the State Department, but the number is in dispute. In a telegram to Truman and in the entry into the Congressional Record he used the number 57, which is true[19]. The number 205 came from a letter former Secretary of State James Byrnes sent to Chicago Congressman Adolph Sabath in which he stated that internal investigations had revealed 289 people who were security risks and 79 had been removed, leaving 205. Since that time, the number had been reduced to some 65 who were still with the State Department. The State Department, which was heavily Ivy League, had been plagued with accusations of Communists and fellow travelers all through World War II and several had admitted to Communist ties with some admitting to having spied for the Soviet Union while others denied Communist affiliation. Alger Hiss had been convicted of convicted of perjury for lying about having been a spy and sentenced to jail. Whitaker Chambers, who outed Hiss, had admitted to having spied, as had other State Department employees.[20]
After the Wheeling speech and subsequent media reports, McCarthy was in demand for appearances at conservative events. New Deal liberals were aghast; his revelations revealed how they had been in bed with Communists and the Soviet Union during the war and still had ties to Communism. The New Deal itself followed the Marxist line of government control of nearly everything, from banking to farm production. Conservatives began claiming it was a Communist plot and that Franklin Roosevelt, who had managed to get elected to the presidency an unprecedented four times, was closely aligned with the Soviet Union, which in many respects was true. The Roosevelt Administration was riddled with Communists, some in high positions in government, and some had spied for the Soviets. Signal Intelligence intercepts of Soviet cables would reveal that Harry Dexter White, one of Roosevelt’s closest advisors, while not known to be a Party member, had been spying for the Soviet Union. Laughlin Currie, another Roosevelt intimate, was revealed to have been a Soviet spy.[21] Other New Deal officials and advisors were known fellow travelers. Embarrassed New Dealers fought back.
After Senator McCarthy made a long speech in the Senate in which he revealed the presence of Communists and fellow travelers in the State Department, the Senate was forced to hold hearings to investigate the matter. Responsibility was given to the Foreign Relations Committee, headed by Maryland Senator Millard Tydings. McCarthy had revealed that there were 57 known Communists and fellow travelers working for or with the State Department. McCarthy – and others – blamed the State Department for the loss of China to Mao’s Communists. The committee was hardly impartial. Democrats immediately took the position that McCarthy’s charges were false and took steps to prevent an actual investigation. Republicans, on the other hand, felt the charges were warranted and wanted a thorough investigation. Democrats made the mistake of making the hearings public, which meant that McCarthy’s claims would become public knowledge. McCarthy named a number of State Department officials and advisors as having Communist affiliations. True to form – Communists were instructed to deny Party membership – they denied it but they had been revealed publicly as suspected Communists.[22] As it turned out, the hearings sounded a death knell to Tyding’s long political career. He was defeated in the upcoming election.
New Deal supporters in the media, particularly columnist and broadcast journalist Drew Pearson, attacked McCarthy, claiming he was making untrue claims. Pearson was pro-Soviet and had pressured the US to mount a second front to help out the Soviets. He was pro-Stalin. Franklin Roosevelt called him “a chronic liar.” Ironically, Pearson publicized the existence of a Soviet spy ring in Canada in 1946 and hinted that they might have spies in the United States as well. Yet he was staunchly opposed to Congressional investigations of Communist activities and when McCarthy started making noises about Communists in the New Deal, Pearson went ballistic. Pearson had actually been using McCarthy as a source through Jack Anderson, one of his investigators. He was happy to use McCarthy’s information about other politicians, but didn’t want to hear ANYTHING about Communists in government. McCarthy attacked Pearson’s aide, David Karr, as being a Communist agent. He claimed that Karr was “Pearson’s KGB controller.” Karr, who had participated in Communist activities in his youth, worked for the Office of War Information until 1943 when he was called to appear before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Karr claimed he wasn’t a Communist and he was exonerated, although the Civil Service Commission thought otherwise. Actually, he was a Communist and had spied for the USSR, as was revealed by NSA intercepts. Karr resigned his government job and went to work for Pearson. Karr wangled his way into business and became CEO of a company that owned Colt Firearms. He was heavily involved in business dealings in the Soviet Union as well as politics. In 1992 after the collapse of the USSR, a Russian journalist reported that a KGB file revealed that Karr was a valuable spy for the Soviet Union. Another of Pearson’s staff was identified as a Communist, along with his wife. The hostility between Pearson and McCarthy was so bad that the senator slugged the mouthpiece. Pearson claimed he kicked him in the groin.
Just when the term “McCarthyism” originated and by whom is unclear. Some attribute it to its use in the anti-McCarthy Christian Science Monitor, possibly in reference to his accusations. Political cartoonist Herb Block started using it shortly afterwards. The term may have actually originated in The Daily Worker, a communist/socialist newspaper affiliated with the Communist Party USA. It became a household word thanks to Owen Lattimore, a journalist and “Orientalist” who McCarthy publicly accused of supporting the USSR in the Tydings hearings. Although Lattimore may not have known it, he had been identified to the FBI as a spy in 1948 by Soviet defector Alexander Gregory Barmine, a former Red Army general and Soviet GRU (Soviet Army intelligence) officer who became a diplomat. He defected during Stalin’s purge of KGB and GRU officers in 1937. After joining the US Army as a private, Barmine joined the newly created Office of Strategic Services. Barmin revealed that GRU director Yan Karlovich Berzin, who was shot during the Purge, told him that Lattimore was a Soviet agent. The FBI had conclude that Lattimore was “part and parcel a Communist.” Lattimore denounced McCarthy with alligator tears – he would be outed two years later as a fellow traveler, if not an outright Communist, when he was arrested and charged with perjury.[23] Lattimore had been pushing the Soviet Union’s interest in Asia; he had advocated that the United States should abandon South Korea to Communism. Lattimore was also identified as working for the Soviet Union by Louis Budenz, a former CPUSA member, ACLU official and editor of the Daily Worker. Budenz testified that he had been told by CPUSA officials in 1944 that Lattimore was doing secret and important work for the Communist Party and the Daily Worker should help conceal his identity. The Democrats countered Budenz’ testimony by bringing up that he had fathered children by three different women. Budenz had since returned to Catholicism.
Since then, the term has been applied and misapplied by journalists and academics, usually directing it toward the attitudes of conservative Republicans. It has been expanded beyond McCarthy’s actual actions to include everything from the House Un-American Activities Committee to basically anything of which the Left disapproves. Like racism and antisemitism, it has become a catch-all phrase. It is also used in conjunction with the term second red scare, a term used by Communists to describe the investigations of their activities. It’s called the second red scare in reference to the original red scare which took place immediately after the Russian Revolution and the establishment of the USSR. In reality, both periods of investigation were justified because the new USSR had instituted a campaign to literally take over the world in 1919 with the establishment of Communism International and Stalin reinvigorated the plan after the Soviet victory in Europe in World War II.[24] (Yes, I know. The victory was by the Allies, which included the USSR, but the Soviets had taken control of ALL of Eastern Europe as well as eastern Germany and had no intention of allowing democratic government in any of the territory Soviet troops had captured.) The USSR had successfully expanded Communism into Asia, including China, Korea, which had been divided into two countries, and Indochina where an expatriate Vietnamese Leninist who used numerous aliases including Ho Chi Minh was mounting a war against the French colonial government. Stalin declared war on Japan in the final days of the war in order to occupy Manchuria and the Sakhalin Islands and was in the process of occupying all of Korea when Japan surrendered. The country was divided with a promise of free elections but Stalin immediately began turning the northern half of the country into a soviet state. Americans had every right to fear communism. There were at least 70,000 card-carrying members of CPUSA by 1950, a number FBI Director Herbert Hoover pointed out was more communists than there had been in Russia when the Bolsheviks launched their revolution. There were untold numbers of communist sympathizers – fellow travelers – in the US as well, many in academia and the media, not to mention the labor movement which was heavily infested. Certain left wing academics have advanced the theory that communists/socialists were poised to launch a revolution in the United States after World War II with white workers and blacks to throw over corporate interests and establish a workers paradise based on the Soviet model.[25] So-called McCarthyism defeated their plans.[26]
Asia, specifically China, was where leftists in the State Department deliberately effected the Communists’ plans by denouncing Nationalist Generalissimo Chaing ki Chek and pushing the Communists of Mao Zedong. Owen Lattimore, as well as other intellectuals with experience in China, believed the United States should be supporting Mao, who they claimed was an agrarian reformer, not a communist. Actually, Mao had spent time in Moscow and was closely aligned with and supported by Stalin. Some of the “China Hands,” as they called themselves, one of whom was TIME reporter Teddy White, planted stories about how Mao’s Communists were fighting the Japanese when they were actually laying low in northern China waiting for the war to end so they could resume hostilities against the Nationalists and establish their own communist dictatorship. After the war, former General George C. Marshall went to China, allegedly to attempt to negotiate a truce between Chaing and Mao. He returned to the United States and cut off all supplies to the Nationalists, to the disgust of men like Claire Chennault and General Patrick Hurley with experience in China who knew Mao’s communists for what they were. Marshall claimed US aid would be more beneficial in Korea, Japan and Europe.
McCarthy would later denounce Marshall, a New Dealer, as a communist tool in a speech in Congress, an allegation that may have had some factual basis. When Colonel Merian Cooper, the Hollywood director who produced the epic King Kong, returned to the US after serving as chief of staff to Brigadier General Clarie Chennault, he met with Marshall. During the meeting, Cooper, who had been a World War I bomber pilot then had fought against the Bolsheviks in Poland and was imprisoned in Moscow, told Marshall that Lt. General Joseph Stillwell, the senior US officer in the China-Burma-India area of operations, was a communist. Stillwell had shown favoritism to Mao Zedong, the Communist leader, and outright hatred for Nationalist commander General Chaing ki Shek. Marshall became incensed and told Cooper he would never receive another promotion or decoration as long as he was head of the Army. True to his word, Marshall kept Cooper off the promotion list and refused his recommendations for decorations. [27] Cooper would be promoted to brigadier general along with Charles Lindbergh, who had been blacklisted by the Roosevelt White House, after Dwight Eisenhower became president. Stillwell, who died in 1946, may not have been a Party member but he definitely had communist leanings. That Stillwell was influenced by communists was probably due to Comintern efforts to infiltrate the US military as early as the 1920s when Comintern notified the CPUSA to recruit military personnel. Retired Marine Corps General Smedley Butler became a spokesman for an antiwar organization founded by the CPUSA. If he wasn’t a Communist, he definitely had Marxist leanings and was a fellow traveler. Many military personnel were Communists or were fellow travelers.
In 1952 the Republican Party regained control of the Senate. McCarthy won his campaign for reelection and was appointed chairman of the Senate Committee on Government Operations and the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations which gave him the right to initiate hearings.[28] In his new role, Senator McCarthy conducted a number of investigations, including an investigation of Communist influence in the US Army, starting with civilian employees in the Signal Corps then into other aspects of the Army. McCarthy’s aim was not to root out Communists in government as is so often stated, but rather to prove that the security/loyalty program investigators were not doing their jobs and were allowing Communists and fellow travelers to work for the Federal government in sensitive positions where they had access to classified information. The Truman Administration had established a security/loyalty program in the spring of 1947 to root out possible security risks. By this time, the United States and the Soviet Union had become professed enemies and the USSR was considered likely to have spies in the government.[29] McCarthy and others feared that the loyalty committees were not doing their jobs, and were allowing people to occupy sensitive positions even though they had Communist affiliation. McCarthy’s position on various committees gave him the authority to conduct investigations. McCarthy’s initial campaign was against the US State Department but he later expanded it to the Army, which may at least partially explain why he became involved in the investigation of the Malmedy Massacre trials. In his capacity in charge of investigations, McCarthy learned of a number of Communists and people with Communist affiliations in government jobs, including as Army civilian employees. One woman, Dorothy Walters Powell, who worked for the Army in a depot in New York, was found to have associated with Communists during her employment with The Peoples Voice, a newspaper started by black New York Congressman Adam Clayton Powell Jr. before he was elected to Congress. The paper was headed for a time by Doxey A. Wilkerson, a black educator who joined the Communist Party in 1943 and used the paper to advance communist principles. Mrs. Powell lost her job due to her connections, even though she denied being a Communist Party member herself. Francisco Palmiero, another Army employee, had two trunks with Communist Party literature he claimed belonged to “an old man in the hospital” he was just keeping. Palmiero was also suspended.
After investigating Communist Party affiliations among Army civilian employees at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey, the McCarthy committee investigated Communists in the Army Signal Corps. That there were Soviet spies employed by the US Army is indisputable. Army employee Julius Rosenberg, a New York Jew, had worked at the Army’s Signal Corps Engineering Laboratories at Fort Monmouth, NJ from 1940 until 1945 when his Party membership was revealed. Rosenberg and his wife Ethel, also a Jew, had been Party members since they joined the Young Communist League in the mid-1930s. Julius was recruited as a Soviet spy on Labor Day, 1942. Although the Rosenberg’s sons, supported by numerous others, claimed their parents were unjustly convicted, Soviet documents and NSA intercepts made public in the 1990s revealed that they were spies and had fed thousands of classified documents to their handlers. Not only did they provide documents related to the atomic bombs, they provided other materials including the design for the Army’s planned P-80 jet fighter which would later fight against Soviet fighters in Korea. Ethel’s brother, David Greenglass, was also a Communist as was his wife Ruth. Greenglass had a background in engineering and was assigned as an Army machinist. After working for a time at the Army’s new nuclear facility at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, he was transferred to Albuquerque, New Mexico to work in the Manhattan Project. Julius suggested his sister-in-law’s New York apartment as a safe house. After she was recruited, her handler realized her husband was involved in the Manhattan Project and Ruth recruited him. The Rosenbergs were caught when German scientist Klaus Fuchs, who worked on the Manhattan Project for the British, was outed as a Soviet spy and implicated Greenglass. Greenglass implicated his brother-in-law and sister and testified against them. The Rosenbergs were tried and convicted then executed as spies.
Julius Rosenberg was suspected of setting up a spy ring at the Army Signal Corps Engineering Laboratory where he worked as an engineer and project manager and there was reason to believe it had remained in force. Julius Rosenberg was a graduate of New York City College where there had been considerable Communist activity. One of his fellow classmates, Morton Sobell, worked for General Electric in Schenectady and had been recruited by the Soviets as a spy. McCarthy’s committee conducted an investigation to determine the extent of Communist infiltration of the Signal Corps Laboratory. Senator McCarthy had just got married and was on his honeymoon when the committee began secret hearings in New York. McCarthy left Roy Cohn, an experienced investigative attorney who had been involved in the Rosenberg investigation, to conduct the hearings in his absence. Robert F. Kennedy (yes, THAT Robert F. Kennedy) was a part of his staff. Cohn brought on G. David Schine, a wealthy Harvard graduate and dedicated anticommunist, as an unpaid consultant. Cohn began calling in Signal Corps laboratory employees who were known or suspected to have Communist ties. Several employees had been suspended or let go before the hearings when they were found to have Communist ties. The hearings were not public and the media was not aware of them. The media’s information came from statements made by Senator McCarthy.
McCarthy returned from his honeymoon and took charge of the investigation. He made public pronouncements of the findings of Communists and people with Communist ties in the Army. Needless to say, Army officials were upset. In November, David Schine, who had served as a civilian purser in the Army Transport Command after World War II, was drafted. (The Korean War had ended the previous July when the UN and North Korea agreed to an armistice.) Schine was 26 years old and a college graduate, and was thus not the typical 1950s draftee, who were in their early twenties. It was obvious that someone, probably in the Army, engineered his drafting. Cohn took steps to make Schine’s military life easier and tried to have him commissioned. The Army said no, claiming he “wasn’t qualified” in spite of his Harvard degree. Cohn managed to have him assigned to Fort Monmouth so he could continue to work for McCarthy. The Army complained to Congress about Cohn’s actions and tried to implicate McCarthy. In reality, political interference on the part of draftees was common. The Army hired Joseph Welch, a leftist Boston lawyer and sometime actor, to represent it’s interest in the resulting Army-McCarthy hearings, which were televised to a national audience. McCarthy was not in charge of the hearings; he was the subject. At one point, Welch challenged McCarthy to present his list of 130 names to Attorney General Herbert Brownell “before sundown.” McCarthy responded that if he was so concerned about persons aiding the Communist Party, he should check on one of the lawyers on his staff, Fred Fisher, who was a member of The National Lawyers Guild, which Brownell had labeled as a Communist front organization. He called it “the legal mouthpiece of the Communist Party.” Welch was aware of Fisher’s Communist connections. He had initially brought him to Washington on his staff because he was a veteran – of the Signal Corps – but decided to replace him when he learned of his affiliations. Welch and Cohn had previously agreed that if Cohn and McCarthy didn’t bring up Fisher, Welch wouldn’t bring up Cohn’s own draft referment.[30] Welch was going after Cohn when McCarthy asked to interrupt and mentioned Fisher. The lawyer, who was also an actor and knew how to play to an audience, in this case national TV, responded to McCarthy by claiming he had no shame for revealing the young man’s politics before a national audience and broke out in tears then rushed out of the room. However, the tears were contrived. As soon as he was out of sight of the media, he remarked to his companion, “how did it look?” Leftists who watched the hearings were incensed and mounted a campaign against McCarthy. They screamed that McCarthy was violating those called before his committee’s freedom of speech, a tactic Communists and their supporters had been using since 1920. Never mind that it wasn’t McCarthy’s committee, he was the subject. The result of the hearings was that McCarthy was not found to have exercised political influence on the part of Schine, who he really didn’t like. Roy Cohn was the one who used his influence in an attempt to make the young soldier’s life easier.
McCarthy critics and anti-McCarthy historians leave out that EVERYONE of those who appeared before his committees was or had been a government employee or advisor, some with high clearances. They all had legal representation available. Furthermore, the FBI had evidence of their complicity. The Smith Act of 1940 made membership in any organization advocating the overthrow of the Federal government by violence prosecutable. Comintern had advocated just that. The act also prohibited employment by the Federal government of anyone convicted of holding such views for a period of five years. The Soviet Union was engaged in an all-out campaign to gain information in an effort to undermine the United States and they were using CPUSA members as spies. The FBI stumbled on a leftist newspaper, Amerasia, with nearly 2,000 classified documents, some highly classified, in its possession after a State Department official who had served in China saw a classified article in the paper that he had written. The documents had been stolen by government officials and military personnel for the paper. Elizabeth Bentley, a Vasser graduate who worked for the government and held Party membership decided to leave the Party and went to the FBI. Bentley said she had been radicalized by Communists at Vasser. Bentley had been a handler for spies in the government and in the Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of the CIA. She revealed that there were twenty Party members in her network and knew of another twenty elsewhere. The FBI referred to the network as the Silvermaster Group, after Nathan Gregory Silvermaster, who headed it. Bentley was the conduit to the Soviets. Documents were given to her and she passed them on. Some of those she named were high-placed Democrats in the Roosevelt and Truman Administrations including Treasury Department official Harry Dexter White, who passed the plates for US currency used by occupation forces to the Soviets.
Leftist journalist Edward R. Murrow, who detested the senator, featured him on a TV show in which he used 10-second sound bites to show McCarthy contradicting himself. The program was designed to show McCarthy in a bad light through selective editing of film clips of McCarthy’s speeches, a common media tactic. The editing was so obvious that even some anti-McCarthy people criticized the tactic. Murrow’s leftist leanings went back to the 1930s when he was president of The National Student Federation of America, the forerunner of the Communist Students for a Democratic Society that appeared on college campuses in the 1960s. Murrow made a name for himself by broadcasting from Europe at the beginning of World War II then went into television. He was active in Democratic Party politics and would serve in the Kennedy Administration. Murrow persuaded McCarthy to appear on his television show. McCarthy called Murrow a Communist sympathizer and one of “the jackal pack which is always found at the throat of anyone who dares to expose individual Communists and traitors.”
Perhaps the most glaring example used by Murrow was Annie Lee Moss, a black Army Signal Corps employee who had somehow managed to move from cafeteria worker to communications clerk in the Signal Corps coding office at the Pentagon, a job that required a security clearance. Now, Annie Lee Moss WAS a Communist! The FBI knew it and McCarthy knew it, but the American public didn’t. She had been outed by an FBI informant, a high-placed Communist Party member named Mary Stalcup Markward. Mrs. Markward operated a beauty shop in Washington, DC where a number of women believed to be Communists had their hair done. Perhaps because of an article she had written about her pride as an American that was published in a local Virginia paper, the FBI recruited her as an informer and had her join the party. She was a Party member for seven years during which she was ostracized by those who knew her as a result. She held positions in the party that gave her access to the names of party members, including Annie Lee Moss. She was expelled from the party in 1951 after she appeared before the House Un-American Activities Committee.
When Moss appeared before the committee, she pulled a shuck and jive. At one point she asked, “Who’s Karl Marx?” She had been investigated by the FBI and a Loyalty Review Board found her to have been a Party member. She was suspended but had been reinstated. Anti-McCarthy historians claimed her job as a communications clerk didn’t allow her access to codes, which is doubtful since the role of clerks is typing up and filing documents. McCarthy left the room during Moss’s interrogation before his committee. After he left, some committee members aided Moss in her denials by claiming she might have been misidentified by Mrs. Markham, who didn’t know her personally but had seen her name and address in party records. She was the right one, it was her address. Although modern historians downplay Moss’s Party membership and claim she didn’t have access to classified documents, which may or may not be true, they do acknowledge that she was, in fact, a Communist in spite of her denials. Another was Owen Lattimore, who anti-McCarthyists insist was innocent but who was actually revealed as having spied by a Chinese spy in his memoirs and in declassified files.
Senator McCarthy did not endure himself to politicians, including President Dwight Eisenhower, who had campaigned with the senator in the 1952 election. Eisenhower was infuriated because of McCarthy’s investigation of the Army, of which Ike had been a member for most of his adult life. Although a popular president, Eisenhower was a disappointment to many Republicans because nothing really changed, the Eisenhower Administration was basically a continuation of the Truman Administration. Ike was no conservative, and really wasn’t even a Republican – the Democrats tried to get him to run for the presidency as a Democrat in 1948. Truman even offered to run as Eisenhower’s VP if Douglas MacArthur was the Republican nominee. He only ran as a Republican in 1952 to keep Senator Robert Taft of Ohio, a staunch conservative who believed America’s place was at home and was opposed to the formation of NATO of which Ike was Supreme Commander, from getting the nomination. Unlike Taft, Ike was an internationalist as was Marshall. McCarthy was disappointed in Eisenhower and stated that, like Marshall, he was a Communist tool.
Although they were professional Army officers and rose to the highest rank, neither Eisenhower nor Marshall ever commanded troops in combat. Both were military politicians who spent most of their career as staff officers before their promotions to general rank. McArthur once said of Eisenhower, “he was the best clerk I ever had.” They were both internationalists, having dealt with senior officers and statesmen from the Allied nations during World War II and they were both involved in the creation of the United Nations. The term “United Nations” was used to describe the nations allied against the Axis during World War II although the organization wasn’t officially chartered until after the war. The “Big Four” allied nations were the US, the UK, the USSR and China, which meant the Nationalist government of Chaing ki Shek. Of course, the USSR supported Mao and the US, in particular, threw Chaing to the wolves after the war. Eisenhower and Marshall had both vouched for Phillip Jessup, a highly placed government official and diplomat, who McCarthy identified as sympathetic to communism and the USSR. Jessup would later be denied an appointment as the US representative to the UN.[31] Although the denial was blamed on McCarthy, Jessup had been revealed as advocating for recognition of Mao’s China and for allowing China to occupy Formosa, where Chaing’s Nationalists had established a government in exile, and Hong Kong, which belong to the UK. McCarthy had reason to refer to Marshall and Ike as Communist stooges. Needless to say, Ike was incensed and began putting pressure on Republicans to withdraw support of McCarthy. Eisenhower held a White House meeting to decide what to do about the senator. He classified the meeting and refused to make the discussion public, claiming “executive privilege.” He had negative information about McCarthy planted with Drew Pearson, who hated the senator.
Marshall and Eisenhower as well as others were deceived by Stalin. They seemed to have forgotten that although Stalin was an ally during the war, he had been allied with Hitler until the Nazis attacked Soviet troops in eastern Poland and advanced into Ukraine. They seemed to have blinders on in regard to Stalin’s purges, They didn’t remember, or were not aware, that Stalin’s stated goal was to establish communism worldwide, including in the United States. Stalin’s predecessor, Lenin, had instructed American Communists that their role was to overthrow and destroy the United States government and establish a Soviet workers paradise in America as well as throughout Europe, including the British Isles. That goal had not changed under Stalin. It wasn’t until North Korean troops crossed the 38th Parallel in June 1950, with Stalin’s blessing and assistance, to invade South Korea that they realized the USSR was an enemy. They should have known. Stalin had provided military assistance to Mao’s forces in their victorious campaign to defeat Chaing’s Nationalists while the United States, at Marshall’s insistence, had withheld aid to Nationalist China. While Stalin was building up the North Korean military, Truman was only maintaining a garrison force under General Douglas MacArthur in nearby Japan. The Soviets had blockaded Berlin two years before to cut the city off from supply of crucial fuel and food. The city was only supplied because the Soviets weren’t willing to shoot down US Air Force, British and French transports flying into the city with needed commodities such as flour and fuel.
Leftist historians claim that Welch’s response to McCarthy in the Army-McCarthy Hearings and Murrow’s program are responsible for McCarthy’s “downfall.” In reality, McCarthy lost his power when the Senate and the House changed hands again in the 1954 elections and he lost his chairmanships and thus his power to conduct investigations and hold hearings. After the election, when it had become apparent that McCarthy would no longer have the power he had held for two years, the Senate voted to “condemn” him, basically for insulting some of his fellow members of the Senate by calling them communist tools (which some of them were.) The effort to censure him (it was never called a censure but a condemnation) was engineered by Texas Senator Lyndon B. Johnson, who would be disgraced himself a decade and a half later. Johnson, who was heavily invested in the New Deal and would initiate his own Great Society to continue it after he became president in 1963, saw an opportunity to neutralize McCarthy influence. Johnson convinced Southern Democrats, whose views were more in line with McCarthy’s, to vote for condemnation. In the end, all the Democrats in the Senate voted for condemnation, all but one. Senator John F. Kennedy, whose father supported McCarthy and whose brother, Robert, had been one of McCarthy’s attorneys, had himself scheduled for back surgery and was not there for the vote.
McCarthy’s influence was gone, but as much because the Democrats now had control of the Senate as due to the vote to condemn him. He no longer had a seat on a committee and had lost the power to call for hearings, public or secret. He remained in the Senate but since the Republican Party was out of power, so was he. In fact, Republicans would not regain the Senate for over a quarter century and would not regain control of Congress for forty years. He continued to speak out against Communism for the rest of his short life, although his audience had declined due to the efforts of his haters. Senator Joseph McCarthy died in May 1957 of hepatitis. The anti-McCarthy media would insinuate, without evidence, that he died of alcoholism. Although he had been diagnosed with cirrhosis of the liver, he had also been diagnosed with hepatitis.
Was there such a thing as “McCarthyism”? Not by definition. An “ism” is a philosophy or set of beliefs, usually religious but can also be political, but there was no set of beliefs involved with the actions of the period other than an awareness of Communist infiltration of government as well as the media and academia. The term was coined by leftists who were fearful that they would be exposed. It is widely used by academics such as history professor Ellen Wolf Schrecker, who has made “McCarthyism” practically her career. Schrecker, who was a young teenager during the McCarthy years, deliberately downplays the influence of communism and the CPUSA, claiming that McCarthyism was/is the real threat to the Constitution. I’m not sure if she is a red diaper baby, but her views are far, far to the left. She claims that if it hadn’t been for the suppression of communism during the McCarthy era, the world would be much better off. An ACLU member, her focus is on freedom of speech even though no one was prosecuted or blacklisted for speech, but rather were removed from sensitive government jobs for affiliation with a political organization whose goal was to overthrow the US government and destroy American society in order to establish a soviet government.
While Schrecker may not be a red diaper baby, other academic/historians are. One is Eric Foner, who has made his name writing about the nineteenth century, particularly Reconstruction, which he calls an unfinished Revolution. (The actual revolt, if there was one, was the secession of the Southern States, Reconstruction was an effort to establish the Republican Party in the South and guarantee it’s power indefinitely by preventing former Confederates from voting and holding office.) Forner’s father was what he calls “Old Left,” meaning he was a Communist. Jack Foner was fired from his position at New York’s City College in 1941 after an investigation by the New York state legislature that found he was a Communist. Foner refused to confirm or deny his communist beliefs, a common communist tactic. He became a lecturer on civil rights and later taught black history. His son would follow his lead. The Foner family was heavily involved in leftist activities. Eric Foner’s uncles were a Marxist historian and labor organizers. The Foners were later allowed to resume teaching; their firing was alleged to have been a violation of “academic freedom,” a principle advocated by academics, but which is not established by law or any governing body. Professor Foner, along with other socialist historians, attempts to justify the Communist spying as being based on ideology without recognizing that the spies were betraying their country.
McCarthyism has become a propaganda tool, along with antisemitism and racism, terms invented as weapons to use by groups against their perceived enemies. A more proper term for the attitudes of the period would be anticommunismism for that was what it was, a period when the US government took an aggressive approach to rooting out Communists and Communist influence in government, academia and the entertainment/media industry. It could also be called antiliberalism since McCarthy and other conservatives were accusing liberals of aiding and abetting the Soviet Union, which was true although some liberals had seen the light and become anticommunist as had some former Communists. One of the most famous criticisms of McCarthy is that he stated that the 1930s, under FDR, began twenty years of treason. Actually, his comment was true as testimony by former Communists like Whitaker Chambers and Elizabeth Bentley revealed.
The media, in particular, is famous for the misuse of terms then making them part of language with meanings other than their actual meaning. One in particular that bugs me is the use of the word Tarmac for an aircraft parking ramp. Tarmac is actually a brand name for a method of paving roads using a mixture of tar and macadam, a term for packed gravel. Tarmac was replaced by asphalt and was probably never used in airfield construction, but the word evidently became common in England and was used by British authors writing about World War II, but not by American authors. I spent some forty years in civilian and military aviation and not once did I ever hear anyone refer to the aircraft parking ramp as the Tarmac. Yet the term has become common in the US for airline terminal parking ramps – which are made of concrete and asphalt, not Tarmac. Another example is the current use of “enslaved people” to refer to slaves in the American South. By definition, to enslave is to make someone a slave, a common practice in Africa. The natives captured by other Africans and sold into slavery were enslaved, but their descendants, who were born into slavery were not and to refer to them as enslaved is a misuse of the word, yet it is in common use today, apparently as a propaganda tool to imply that the slaves who labored on Southern plantations (they leave out slavery in the North before it was abolished) had once been free. Similarly, Communists and leftists (fellow travelers) coined the term McCarthyism as a general term for what they deemed as “anticommunist hysteria.” Never mind that Americans had good reason to be concerned about communism in the United States. Their sons were fighting communism in Korea.
The Wikipedia article on Senator McCarthy claims the hearings didn’t expose a single Communist spy but this is untrue. Actually, a number of Communists and Army employees with Communist ties were outed and approximately 40 lost their jobs because they couldn’t be cleared to handle classified information. Unknown to the American public, during the Truman Administration the military and government instituted background investigations conducted by the FBI prior to issuing security clearances. Having a close relative with membership in an organization deemed subversive – including the Ku Klux Klan – was grounds for denial of a clearance.
The irony is that when the Soviet Union collapsed and the former USSR records were partially opened, McCarthy’s claims of Communist influence and Soviet spies in the US government were vindicated. The classified US Army Signal Corp/National Security Agency Project Venona files revealed that numerous State Department and other government employees who had denied Party membership – or took the Fifth rather than answering the question “are you a Communist” – were not only Party members, they had been spying for the Soviet Union. Project Venona, the forerunner of the highly classified National Security Agency, was a highly classified project involving the decoding of Soviet messages sent from Communist Party headquarters in New York. Venona codebreakers managed to break the Soviet code and identify spies.
Incidentally, most Americans, including members of the media, are not fully aware of what the National Security Agency actually does. There’s a lot of hype about how the NSA “spies on Americans.” That’s part of their job. The NSA was set up immediately after World War II to prevent the revelation of classified information by government officials by monitoring telephone lines and other government communications systems, which has since been expanded to include the Internet as well as cellular lines. They also monitor communications of foreign governments, including military transmissions. Their emphasis during the not-so-Cold War was on communications with and by the Soviet Union and its satellites, including Communist China, North Vietnam and North Korea. NSA personnel, many of whom are military, intercept communications sent by foreign governments but also by US government personnel and record them for later translation and decoding. Government personnel were well aware that government telephones and other means of communication were monitored. Placards were placed on the wall by government telephones on Okinawa reminding users their conversations were being monitored. The government spooks were looking for possible dissemination of classified information to unauthorized personnel. Project Venona began in 1943 and continued to 1980. It consisted of decoding of Soviet messages, only a fraction of which were successfully decoded primarily because of a lapse on the part of Soviet coders which allowed US Army personnel to temporarily break the codes. The decoded messages were declassified in 1995 at the insistence of Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York.
Decoded Venona messages corroborated information revealed by Communist defectors like Whitaker Chambers and Elizabeth Bently and they also revealed that high-placed members of the Roosevelt Administration, including Alger Hiss, Harry Dexter White and Laughlin Currie, were spying for the USSR. As a result of the revelation that government officials were spying, the FBI began taking a closer look at Federal employees. Contrary to popular belief, McCarthy did not just call people to testify before his committees on a whim. He had investigators, including Robert F. Kennedy and Roy Cohn, to do the leg work. He was fed information by the FBI, and possibly by the NSA. He knew who to call because they were suspected of having Communist ties that precluded them from having access to classified information. Many of those called took the Fifth Amendment when asked if they were or had been members of the Communist Party.
McCarthy critics were Communists, who resented his exposure of their infiltration of government, their fellow travelers and Roosevelt New Dealers and supporters. They used television by putting forth “moments” such as actor/lawyer Joseph Welch’s grandstanding about how McCarthy had no shame for exposing his associate’s Communist connections on national television. (It wasn’t McCarthy’s idea to televise the hearings, which were being held to investigate HIM.) Leftist muckraker Drew Pearson and his associates made insinuations of him being a closet homosexual (he wasn’t.) Homosexuals in sensitive government positions were forbidden because they could be easily blackmailed. He was criticized for “antisemitism” since so many of those called before his committees were Jews, which isn’t surprising since Jews made up a large percentage of CPUSA members and some were spies. Leftists linked him to the HUAC and the blacklisting of Hollywood writers and directors in which he played no part.
Leftists, particularly “red diaper babies” whose parents had been affected by the investigations, continued to berate “McCarthyism” long after the senator was dead. Many red diaper babies obtained degrees in academic pursuits, particularly history and sociology, in which they could perpetuate their distortions of the period and the downplaying of CPUSA’s role in Stalinist spying and influence young minds toward adoption of Marxist beliefs. It is no accident that the original proponents of Critical Race Theory were/are Marxists. The civil rights movement was heavily influenced by Marxism, with members such as Rosa Parks, a black activist whose activities date back to the early 1940s when she and her husband attended CPUSA meetings in Alabama, who was schooled at the far left Highlander School in Monteagle, Tennessee. Members of the staff were CPUSA members and one of the founders was the Party secretary in North Carolina, even though he denied Party membership. The school is still in existence in another location with the stated goal of establishing a new social order. Antifa stands for anti-fascist, and traces its roots to communist activities in Germany. Red diaper baby Eric Foner has focused on the Reconstruction Era to advance his leftist theories. Foner was the first to advocate that the Fourteenth Amendment applies to the events of January 6, 2021, and Donald Trump’s eligibility to be president. (It doesn’t, the amendment was written specifically to keep former Confederates out of government.) Washington Post journalist Carl Bernstein, who reported on Watergate, is a red diaper baby, as is anti-Vietnam singer/activist Country Joe McDonald, who was named after Joseph Stalin by his Communist parents. He and his band got their name from Mao’s description of communists as fish moving through the countryside. Judy Clark, a leader of the all-women’s May 19th movement, M19, was the daughter of high-level CPUSA functionaries. Although her parents became disillusioned and left the party, she remained and was active in the Communist Weather Underground in the 60s and early 70s. She went from the Weathermen to May 19th. She was convicted for her role in the robbery of a Brinks armored car and the murder of one of the drivers and served part of three 25 to life sentences before she was paroled in 2020. Current Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg is a red diaper baby whose father was a Maltese Marxist who immigrated to the United States and taught at New Mexico State then moved to Notre Dame. One red diaper baby who turned his back on the politics of his parents and on leftism is David Horowitz, who became disillusioned after the murder of white Black Panther bookkeeper Betty Van Patter, who was believed to have been killed by Panther leaders. Huey Newton admitted he had ordered her killed. Horowitz became further disillusioned when he saw what the Communist victors were doing in Vietnam and Cambodia. He voted for Reagan in 1984 and has since devoted his life to exposing communism.
The term “McCarthyism” has become a household word, in Europe as well as the United States, thanks to the efforts of leftist historians and the media. Yet the word is a misnomer because the senator only played a part, albeit not a small one, in the exposure of Communist infiltration of the US government, including in the State Department, Department of the Treasury, the military and the United Nations. The Soviets were forced to turn away from using idealistic CPUSA members as spies and turned instead to greedy Americans who were willing to betray their country for lucre and Soviet KGB and EGR members who infiltrated the United States. I personally knew Air Force OSI agent J. Woods, an associate of my wife, who was apprehended in the process of handing over classified documents to a Soviet diplomat in 1973. Woody was paid $950 for the information.
Only one Soviet agent was caught, William August Fisher, who grew up in England as a child of Russian immigrants. He went back to Russia and became an officer in the Soviet army then of the KGB. In 1948 Fisher entered the United States where he became part of a New York City-based spy ring. His mission was to reactivate the volunteer network that had been providing atomic secrets to the Soviet Union from Los Alamos. The Rosenbergs did not reveal his identity when they were arrested and Fisher remained in the United States until 1957 when his assistant, KGB Lieutenant Colonel Reino Hayhanen, defected and revealed information that led to the revelation of Fisher’s identity.[32] Fisher used the alias Rudolph Abel when he was arrested. Fisher is not known to have recruited any CPUSA members as spies, at least in part because the Party had gone in decline due to the anticommunist efforts of the 1940-60s along with disenchantment with the USSR after Stalin’s death. It’s not a stretch to claim that the anticommunist efforts led to the downfall of the Soviet Union, although at least part of the reason was economic, the Soviets became involved in a costly war in Afghanistan. The Soviet Union collapsed in the early 1990s and the former soviet republics became mostly independent nations. The CPUSA changed its affiliation from support of the USSR to supporting the Democratic Party.
Yet even though the CPUSA declined, sympathy for Marxist communism actually increased in the 1960s as young Americans were recruited into the “New Left,” a communist organization that identified more with communists Cuban Fidel Castro, his Argentinian associate Che Guevera, Chinese Communist Mao Zedong and Vietnamese Ho Chi Minh. Many members of the civil rights movement identified as communists, as did feminists. Germaine Greer, the author of the book The Feminine Mystique, was an avowed Marxist. Unfortunately, although the Communist Party went into decline, it’s influence remains and in many respects is growing although communist now are more likely to identify as Democrats. Naturally, leftists refer to any anticommunism ideology as “McCarthyism.”
Marx & Lenin Praise Lincoln (traditioninaction.org)
McCarthyism: Interpretations since Hofstadter on JSTOR
Tail Gunner Joe: Joseph R. McCarthy and the Marine Corps on JSTOR
The Search for Joe McCarthy on JSTOR
U.S. Senate: McCarthy and Army-McCarthy Hearings – These are documents released by the US Senate in 2003. Comments by Carl Levin, a leftist from Michigan, and Susan Collins of Maine (who was a toddler in 1953), are clearly anti-McCarthy as are comments by the Senate historian, Donald Ritchie, who edited documents.
Sergeant at McGuire Admits Espionage - The New York Times (nytimes.com)
Air Sergeant Held On Spying Charges In Aid to Russians - The New York Times (nytimes.com)
[1] By definition, the suffix “ism” is applied to a word to indicate a system of beliefs, usually religious or political. It can also be a practice, such as baptism. So-called “McCarthyism” was not a belief system nor a practice, it was an investigation of how invested an actual hostile belief system, communism, was in the United States government and influential mediums.
[2] The period from 1945 to 1990 was rife with conflict, some such as the wars in Korea, Indochina and, later, Vietnam were well-known but there were others far from the public eye. Some involved US military personnel in open conflict with communist forces while others were clandestine, often under the auspices of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Special Activities Division. Even the Yom Kipper War in Israel was a conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union although the actual combatants were Israelis and their neighbors Egypt and Syria. All told, there were some 70 wars fought during that period, usually with the US supporting one side and the USSR and/or Communist China the other.
[3] Horace Greely, the New York newspaper publisher who was one of the Republican Party founders, was a socialist. His paper employed Marx as a columnist/journalist.
[4] Wedemeyer survived the war but died soon afterwards.
[5] Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin abolished Comintern in 1943 to show good will to his WW II allies, but all he really did was change the name to the International Department of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
[6] Socialism in America goes back to the nineteenth century and had become widespread among American intellectuals by the Twentieth Century. Popular writers such as Upton Sinclair and Jack London were socialists who pressed for the teaching of socialism in colleges and universities. An organization they helped found is the forerunner of the Communist Students for a Democratic Society of the 1960s. One of the founders had financed radical abolitionist John Brown.
[7] Harry Emerson Fosdick was a nominally Baptist minister in New York who had become pastor of Presbyterian churches in New York City, then became pastor of the ecumenical Riverside Church. Fosdick was a product of Union Theological Seminary, a left-wing school that spawned a number of leftist movements.
[8] Browder’s ideas were not new. In 1935 he led the CPUSA to support FDR’s New Deal, although Communists turned against Roosevelt four years later when he ran for a third term and attempted to derail his campaign.
[9] Roosevelt’s “New Deal” was a program of government involvement in much of American life, starting with banking and continuing into farm programs and government programs to provide employment for men who had lost their jobs due to the financial collapse of 1929. Roosevelt, who was a political progressive, a euphemism for leftist, sought to establish progressivism as the basis for the Federal government.
[10] Poland, Lithuania, Austria and Russia had been battling over the region for centuries. Ukraine did not exist at the time, but was divided between the four countries as “the border regions.”
[11] A former Soviet intelligence agent who was granted access to former Soviet intelligence files after the collapse of the Soviet Union says he was.
[12] The identity of one of the Manhattan Project spies was either never determined or has yet to be revealed.
[13] Roosevelt said he didn’t give a fuck.
[14] Communists and their supporters in the Roosevelt Administration launched a campaign to discredit Fish by claiming he was a tool of the Nazis.
[15] If I capitalize the word communism, I am referring to the Communist Party, USA. Non-caps refers to communism in general.
[16] Information revealed in former Soviet records revealed that Hopkins had, indeed, passed US nuclear secrets to Moscow. Hopkins had been accused by American businessman and former Army Air Forces officer George Racey Jordan, who had monitored Lend-Lease supplies going to the Soviet Union, of sending uranium and other materials used in the production of atomic weapons. Jordan was denounced by liberal mouthpieces, primarily because he was associated with Senator McCarthy, but his testimony was later proven accurate. General Leslie Groves confirmed that the US sent nuclear materials to the Soviet Union, which was an ally at the time.
[17] Some claim he got a direct commission and went through training as an officer. However, direct commissions were usually given to men who had some kind of skill the military needed. McCarthy was a lawyer and could have been commissioned as a legal officer or staff judge advocate, but he was commissioned as an intelligence officer.
[18] Although it is commonly believed that military personnel were put in for combat decorations by someone else, this is not always true. For example, the prestigious Bronze Star was established primarily as a decoration to award ground personnel who resented the Air Medals and Distinguished Flying Crosses airmen were receiving. After the award was authorized, any soldier who had qualified for the Combat Infantryman’s Badge could automatically be awarded the Bronze Star upon application.
[19] There were probably a lot more. Elizabeth Bentley had defected from the Communists in 1945 and had given the FBI a list of spies who had worked with her, including some in the State Department and the Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of the CIA. US Army Signal Intelligence intercepts had revealed a number of Communist spies, but the information from the highly classified unit was kept from the public and could not be used in court.
[20] Alger Hiss denied to his dying day that he had spied, but Soviet records and NSA decoding of Soviet communications showed he had.
[21] White died of a heart attack shortly after being interrogated and Currie left the US and eventually settled in Colombia.
[22] I read Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book many years ago. One of the foremost principles was that a Communist should lie to advance party goals. Cuban dictator Fidel Castro denied that he was a communist until after his rebels had overthrown the Batista government and he was firmly entrenched in power.
[23] The perjury charges against Lattimore were later dismissed on technical grounds. As a result of the charges, Lattimore was removed from his role as a State Department consultant. He was not identified in the Venona intercepts but only a fraction of the intercepts were successfully decoded and a number of people identified as Soviet agents in the intercepts were never identified.
[24] Stalin disbanded Comintern in 1943 to avoid antagonizing the United States and Great Britian, but did not change its goals.
[25] A revolution of white industrial workers and freed black slaves in the South was exactly what Karl Marx advocated.
[26] They blame Truman for launching the Cold War and thus putting Americans on their toes.
[27] Chennault and his supporters believed Cooper was withdrawn from China due to politics. Marshall thought he had him out of the war but General George Kenney got wind that Cooper was in the US and pressured Marshall to let him have him for his Fifth Air Force in the Southwest Pacific where Cooper was made chief of V Bomber Command and served with distinction.
[28] The role of Congress is to implement legislation, and Congressional hearings are supposed to be to determine the need for legislation.
[29] Stalin made a speech in February 1946 in which he stated that the USSR and capitalist states were enemies and implied it was his intent to overthrow them. In response to the speech, diplomate George Kennan, who was part of the US mission in Moscow, sent what is called The Long Telegram outlining his suggestion of a policy of containment of communism.
[30] The military draft was highly political. Local political bosses influenced draft boards to draft or not draft sons of men they either favored or disfavored.
[31] Even though the Senate denied his appointment, Truman sent him to the UN anyway as his “unofficial representative.”
[32] Hayhanen died mysteriously in an accident on the Pennsylvania Turnpike in 1961.