[Marxism] RE: Nation on McCarthyism

["Charlie Parks" <jcparks5550@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Rick Kelly wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I followed the link you posted on marxmail.org regarding the Nation's
> review of books on McCarthyism. The page, however, is only available to
> subscribers. Do you think you could post the entire text on marxmail, or
> alternatively email it to me?
>
> Regards,
>
> Rick Kelly

Sorry about that--here's the full text.--CP

Patriot Acts

by MIKE MARQUSEE

Washington Gone Crazy: Senator Pat McCarran and the Great American Communist
Hunt
by Michael J. Ybarra

Reds: McCarthyism in Twentieth Century America
by Ted Morgan

Treasonable Doubt: The Harry Dexter White Spy Case
by R. Bruce Craig

Alger Hiss's Looking Glass Wars: The Covert Life of a Soviet Spy
by G. Edward White

Deadly Farce: Harvey Matusow and the Informer System in the McCarthy Era
by Robert M. Lichtman and Ronald D. Cohen

[from the December 13, 2004 issue]

In September 1950, four months into the Korean War, Congress passed the
draconian Internal Security Act (ISA), known as the McCarran Act, after its
sponsor, the Nevada Democratic Senator Pat McCarran, a son of immigrants who
hated immigrants. The act required all members of the Communist Party and
all Communist "front" organizations to register with the government,
deprived "subversives" of their right to passports and to government
employment and subjected aliens deemed "subversive" to exclusion or
deportation. Most notoriously, it granted the President emergency powers to
intern "potential subversives" in concentration camps.

This "preventive detention" provision, which remained on the statute books
for twenty years, had not featured in McCarran's original bill. Its authors
were, in fact, McCarran's liberal opponents--including Hubert Humphrey--who
had hoped to sabotage the bill by offering an alternative that was even
tougher on Communism. Alas, the alternative ended up as an addition. After
Truman vetoed the bill, Humphrey found himself arguing in the Senate in
support of the veto on the grounds that the bill was wrong to guarantee the
right of habeas corpus to the "despicable traitors" who would be interned in
the camps.

The ISA was perhaps the worst legislative excrescence of McCarthyism, though
Senator Joe McCarthy had nothing to do with it. The wave of domestic
repression of the late 1940s and early '50s that bears his name--also
referred to as the Red Scare, the blacklist, the witch hunt, the cold war
purge--was, of course, the work of an array of social forces, not a single
individual. Nonetheless, if it is to be called after an individual,
McCarran's claim is stronger than McCarthy's.

Pat McCarran was one of the great monsters of American public life. Though
he started out as a Western populist and was elected to the Senate on FDR's
coattails in 1932, he broke with the New Deal and became one of Roosevelt's
chief Congressional tormentors. He hated Jews as well as Communists, and
later described the new UN headquarters in New York as "a vantage ground for
the infiltration of the United States." Thanks to the seniority system, and
what Michael Ybarra describes as his "uncommon parliamentary skill, great
tenacity and utter ruthlessness," McCarran acquired vast power in Washington
and "ran a virtual government in opposition, even while his own party
controlled the White House and both wings of the capital." He bullied the
departments of Justice and State, created the racist and restrictive
McCarran-Walter immigration act, and as chair of the Senate Internal
Security Subcommittee (SISS) presided as the nation's grand inquisitor,
hounding unions, intellectuals and federal employees, provoking fear,
firings, deportations and suicides. He was despotic, vindictive, corrupt and
mendacious--and fully merits the thorough treatment he receives in Ybarra's
book, where he is used as a linchpin for a synoptic account of "the great
American Communist hunt."

The canvas Ybarra paints in Washington Gone Crazy has both the scale and
detail demanded by the subject, but he works too hard at making his tome
readable. The racy journalese descends into cliché and the novelistic
touches undermine the narrative's credibility. ("The switchboard at the
Daily Worker lit up like a Christmas tree," "the sight of the flag never
failed to move him," "Pat McCarran picked up the phone. Jim Farley was on
the other end.")

However, as a work of scholarship it is far superior to Ted Morgan's
cartoonlike account, which makes only three fleeting references to McCarran.
Throughout, Reds is shaped by a bizarrely arbitrary selection of sources and
by astounding jumps from the anecdotal to the epochal.

For an ostensibly liberal critique of McCarthyism, Morgan's book is
curiously indulgent toward some of its most noxious avatars. Martin Dies,
first chairman of the House Un-American Activities Committee, is described
as a "simplistic but dogged ideologue" who "turned out to be surprisingly
effective in uncovering the concealed activities of the party" and "created
an instant awareness that the danger of communist subversion was real" in
1938, when he investigated the CIO. As Morgan's own account makes clear,
Dies was a shameless white supremacist who used his committee to harass
low-ranking federal government functionaries, provide a platform for
semifascist cranks and mount sweeping attacks on the labor movement and the
New Deal.

Although Morgan condemns McCarthy's scattershot accusations, he often
replicates his method, repeatedly eliding the categories of Communist Party
member and Soviet agent, casually sweeping individuals into the suspect
camp. He is harsh on "the posturing cardboard heroes who took the
Fifth...cowards afraid of admitting their allegiance," while those who
"named names...were doing their duty as citizens under oath." His is an
eerie form of liberalism, one that glibly endorses state inquisitions into
the political opinions and personal associations of individuals.

In his verdict that McCarthyism was an "exaggerated reaction to a real
threat," Morgan shares common ground with Ybarra, who argues that "the
Communist party presented a unique challenge to American liberty....
Anti-Communism, then, was both a rational and necessary response.
Anti-Communism run amok was something altogether different." But where does
"anti-Communism" end and "anti-Communism run amok" begin? Who draws the
boundaries of "American liberty"? How was the Communist Party "unique" in
its challenge to this system? Surely J. Edgar Hoover's reign at the FBI
mounted a more sustained and substantial challenge to human rights in the
United States than anything the American Communist Party was responsible
for. And the Constitution, which is held up as a repository of "American
liberty," is also the document that handed disproportionate and
unaccountable power to the likes of McCarran, who sat in the Senate for
twenty-two years without ever winning more than 36,000 votes in an election.

Like others, Ybarra and Morgan treat the Venona transcripts published in the
1990s--decryptions of secret communications between Soviet officials and
their agents in the United States--as a watershed, belated and conclusive
proof that Communists were engaged in an illicit and treasonous conspiracy.
Venona is also held to confirm the guilt of Alger Hiss and Harry Dexter
White, two eminent New Deal liberals accused of spying for the Soviet Union.
As Treasonable Doubt, R. Bruce Craig's careful study of the White case,
makes clear, the initial attack on the two men was very much an attempt to
roll back the "American internationalism" that had gained influence in
government during the Roosevelt years. At the Treasury Department, White
played a key role in the establishment of the IMF and World Bank, while Hiss
at State was closely involved in the launch of the UN--institutions reviled
by the American right of the era as alien encroachments on US sovereignty.
Neither Hiss nor White was, remotely, a Marxist revolutionary; both were
liberal elitists and believers in active US participation in multilateral
institutions. Though sympathetic to the USSR, they were even more committed
to a peaceful postwar order built on US-USSR cooperation--a commitment that
may have led them to pass on confidential information to Soviet agents.

The Hiss and White cases were infamous mood-setters, used to bolster the
claim that liberals had presided over "twenty years of treason." As Craig's
book makes clear, the central charge against White--that he subverted US
government policy in the interests of the Soviets--is contradicted by his
record in office. As for Hiss, not even the harshest interpretation of the
Venona evidence justifies the elaborate edifice that G. Edward White
constructs in Alger Hiss's Looking Glass Wars: a double life postulated in
great detail and an inner life analyzed as if the subject were on the
dissection table. Speculation here turns casually into assertion and
assertion into psychobabble.

In contrast, Robert Lichtman and Ronald Cohen have produced in Deadly Farce
a judicious and nonjudgmental account of one of the now-forgotten
celebrities of the era, ex-Communist Harvey Matusow, who achieved notoriety
first as a star witness for the government against his former comrades, and
then for spectacularly recanting his testimony. Matusow was one of at least
eighty-three ex-Communists on the Justice Department payroll in the early
1950s. As Lichtman and Cohen note, "The sheer volume of employee loyalty
cases, deportation proceedings, Smith Act prosecutions, SACB [Subversive
Activities Control Board] proceedings, and Congressional and state
investigative committee hearings created a large market for informers." In
the end, this troupe of professional witnesses perjured themselves
frequently and flagrantly, and--unlike Hiss, White and others named as
spies--did so with impunity. Matusow was a valuable asset to his employers,
naming 216 people as party members. He solemnly told McCarran's credulous
SISS that the Communist Party planned to infiltrate the Boy Scouts. He was
paid by the New York school system to identify Communist teachers. He
advised industrialists and columnists and enjoyed the limelight.

It was a period when informers were not only financially rewarded but held
up as moral exemplars, and the young Matusow found the lure irresistible.
But what he did next was rare. As a result of what seems to have been a
genuine fit of conscience, he announced that he had made it all up. The
Justice Department then brought a perjury charge against him--not for his
original testimony but for his recantation, specifically his claim that
prosecutor Roy Cohn had induced him to lie in the Smith Act trials. He was
convicted and served three and a half years in prison. Matusow is sometimes
mocked as an attention-seeker, but in Lichtman and Cohen's account he
emerges as a complex figure, elusive and more symptomatic of the
pressure-cooker times than the Washington high-fliers.

Any history of the Red Scare must also include some account of its putative
adversary, the Communist Party USA. The party was habitually authoritarian
in its internal regime and sectarian in its relations with others. Its
strategic lurches--subordinated to Stalin's realpolitik--were crude and
frequently opportunistic. It attracted its share of abusive or inadequate
personalities. But that is not the whole story. The party was first and
foremost a political entity whose existence was tied up with the
fluctuations of a wider social movement. Neither Ybarra nor Morgan has any
feel for the left as a shifting milieu, for grassroots activism or for the
labor movement. They see only hardened party hacks (knaves) or gullible
fellow-travelers (fools). Neither makes use of the extensive literature on
American Communism produced over the past twenty-five years. Their narrative
is not merely incomplete; it's lopsided and misleading. It cannot come to
grips with the real social impact of the witch hunt or its lasting legacy.

There is a huge leap between taking a cold-eyed or even hostile view of the
Communist Party and embracing "anti-Communism" as an unremitting ideology.
But with few exceptions, that was the leap American liberals made in the
late 1940s and early '50s. And that is a leap that Ybarra and Morgan hold up
for us to admire today. But they can do so only by ignoring a good deal of
intervening history. Marxists are rightly urged to face up to their history
of appalling errors, but liberals must do the same. As an ideology
anti-Communism has as much blood on its hands as any. The Vietnam War stands
as a grisly monument to cold war liberalism, to which a string of other
crimes could be added: mass murder of leftists in Indonesia, death squads
across Latin America, support for the likes of Mobutu in Africa and the Shah
in Iran.

Ybarra and Morgan both exalt Truman as a foe of intolerance, a bulwark
against the right. But as Ybarra recounts McCarran's repeated victories over
the White House, it becomes clear that the liberals' blunder in introducing
the concentration camp clause was not unique. Their strategy of pre-empting
the right wing by beating them to the anti-Communist punch proved as great a
failure as the CPUSA's protestations that Communism was merely
"twentieth-century Americanism."

In 1947 Truman publicly intervened on behalf of the right wing in the civil
war in Greece (and helped establish a military dictatorship there). This
critical escalation of the cold war witnessed the forging of the postwar
bipartisan foreign policy consensus--a consensus that was not merely
anti-Soviet but pro-military intervention wherever US interests were seen to
be under threat. That same year Truman issued Executive Order 9835, under
which more than 2 million federal employees were made subject to loyalty
checks. His Justice Department compiled official lists of subversive
organizations and "fronts" and prosecuted Communist leaders under the Smith
Act. These leaders were jailed in the end not for espionage but for a
thought crime: They were proven guilty of formally adhering to Marx and
Lenin, who did indeed preach the overthrow of the bourgeois state. All this
before the rise of Joe McCarthy--indeed, before the "loss" of China, the
Soviet blockade of Berlin or the Communist coup in Czechoslovakia.

By colluding in the transformation of "socialism" into a dirty word, the
liberals set a trap for themselves--and helped create the political culture
in which "liberal" itself became a dirty word. They handed the right a
devastatingly flexible ideological trump card: "Americanism," a means to
delegitimize radical, nonconformist and especially avowedly internationalist
ideas.

The "excesses" of McCarthyism were eventually curbed, but its assumptions
remained in place. By world standards, the cold war purge was nonlethal
(compare Indonesia or Chile). Nonetheless, the damage was profound, and much
of it has still not been undone. Ultimately, McCarthyism wasn't about spies
or celebrities or even grand inquisitors. It was about factories and
offices, schools, local libraries. PTAs. Radio stations. Comic books. TV
series. Advertisements.

In the labor movement the purge led to mass expulsions, splits, internecine
battles and a historic depoliticization from which US unions never fully
recovered. State and local governments subjected 80 percent of the country's
1 million public school teachers to some form of loyalty screening.
Nationalist paranoia and superpower prerogatives merged, with long-term
consequences for US political culture. McCarthyism's defining legacy was not
its procedural abuses (grotesque though these were) but the foreclosure of
radical options in general. Any politics that did not genuflect before the
idol of American exceptionalism was demonized. The divergence of the US
polity from its European counterparts was deepened and the center of gravity
pushed to the right. That's why the label "McCarthyism" is worse than a
casual misnomer. It's a misrepresentation and an evasion.

Ybarra and Morgan largely ignore the intertwined economic and international
dimensions of the witch hunt. It was as much the revenge of big business on
organized labor as it was of the right wing on the New Deal, and it unfolded
against the background of anticolonial struggles in Indochina, Indonesia,
the Philippines and West Africa, in many of which US corporate interests had
a major stake. The cold war purge and the consensus it bred led to the
establishment and acceptance of huge peacetime military expenditures. It
also insured that there was barely a whisper of domestic dissent when the
United States helped overthrow the non-Communist, nationalist regimes of
Mossadegh in Iran in 1953 and Arbenz in Guatemala in 1954, and when it
invaded Lebanon in 1958.

While Ybarra and Morgan are keenly aware that the "protection of American
liberty" has served as a pretext for fierce attacks on freedom in America,
they are much less alert to its role as a pretext for the mass destruction
of liberty and life overseas. Long before the rise of the neocons, cold war
liberalism had brought the United States into disrepute across several
continents.

The Red Scare consolidated American popular support for what was, in
reality, a burgeoning empire, though then as now it refused to call itself
that. In the "war on terror," as in the Red Scare, an international
conspiracy whose agents are said to be in our midst has been posited as the
national nemesis. Once again America is depicted as under siege from both
without and within. This time around, the public has proved more resistant
and dissent more resilient. Nonetheless, like their cold war forebears,
liberal opponents of the "excesses" of the war on terror often accept the
bulk of its premises--not least America's assumed right to invade and occupy
foreign lands.

For Ybarra and Morgan, 1954 marks the end of the era of darkness. McCarran
died and McCarthy was censured by his Senate colleagues. That year,
independent journalist I.F. Stone (referred to by Morgan, preposterously, as
"the pro-Soviet Washington correspondent") warned that it would take more
than the fall of one extremist to put an end to the witch hunt: "It is
sometimes hard to draw a line of principles between McCarthy and his
critics. If there is indeed a monstrous and diabolic conspiracy against
world peace and stability, then isn't McCarthy right?... How talk of fair
procedure with a protean and Satanic enemy?... McCarthy is personally
discomfited but McCarthyism is still on the march...to acquiesce in the
delusions which create a panic is no way to stem it."



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