The government-industry-press campaign against the Red Menace continued throughout the 1920s. Socialists elected to the New York state legislature and to the US Congress were denied their seats. Legislative committees conducted witch-hunting investigations. Radicals and union organizers were harassed and arrested by state and local authorities. Immigrant leftists were summarily deported. These developments earned little criticism and much praise from the business-owned news media.
In marked contrast to the flood of horror stories about the Soviet Union was the treatment accorded fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. In the 1920s, major publications like the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Fortune, Saturday Evening Post, Chicago Tribune, and Christian Science Monitor hailed Mussolini as Italy’s savior, the man who had suddenly brought his nation from poverty and unrest to harmonious prosperity, rescuing his people from the perils of anarchy and radicalism.10 Likewise the stories that greeted Hitler’s ascension to power in 1933 were strikingly different from the shrill press treatment of Lenin and the Bolsheviks. With a few notable exceptions like the Baltimore Sun and the Boston Globe, American newspapers and radio news reports were optimistic about Hitler. In an editorial entitled “The Tamed Hitler,” the New York Times (January 30, 1933) told its readers to expect a “transformation” in Hitler as he begins “softening down or abandoning” “the more violent parts of his alleged program.”
There swiftly arose the give-Adolph-a-chance press claque. The Houston Post pleaded, “Let Hitler try his hand.” CBS national radio interviewed the Times Berlin bureau chief, Frederick Birchall, who said the Nazis were not intending “any slaughter of their enemies or racial oppression in any vital degree.” While the Soviets were being portrayed as ever on the edge of launching aggressive attacks against any and all, Birchall reassured listeners that the Nazis had no desire to go to war and Hitler could not be called a dictator. With that keen eye for the irrelevant that is the hallmark of American journalism, he observed that Hitler was a vegetarian and a nonsmoker, attributes that were supposedly indicative of a benign nature. And he noted that Hitler had taken upon himself “the hardest job that ever a man could undertake.” The Los Angeles Times (April 4, 1933) also looked at the brighter side of things, seeing Hitler as a stern opponent of communism. And even though violent attacks had begun against the Jews, Nazi anti-Semitism was “understood to have been mainly rhetorical.”11
While denouncing the Soviet Union as a menace to civilization, the US press manifested an open admiration for fascism in Italy and a hopeful tolerance of Nazism in Germany. Unlike the Soviets, Mussolini and Hitler were attacking not the capitalist system but its enemies. Both of them murdered leftists, imprisoned dissenters, and abolished all democratic political organizations, including opposition political parties and newspapers. They also destroyed labor unions, cut wages, reduced upper-bracket income taxes, practically abolished inheritance taxes for the wealthy, subsidized big business enterprises, and privatized large portions of the public sector, thereby winning the approval of industrialists and press moguls in the United States and elsewhere. Some US business leaders like Henry Ford accepted honorary decorations from Mussolini and Hitler, while others longed to emulate their rule. Former president of the National Association of Manufacturers, H. W. Prentiss, announced, “American business might be forced to turn to some form of disguised Fascistic dictatorship.”12
After Hitler built up Germany’s war machine, occupied the Rhineland, annexed Austria, and grabbed Czechoslovakia, the US press belatedly began treating him as a threat to peace and freedom. Yet even as late as 1939, Time magazine could claim that Hitler’s regime “was no ordinary dictatorship, but rather one of great energy and magnificent planning.”13
The Red Peril continued to be conjured up by the media whenever labor militancy gathered momentum. In 1934, a strike of maritime workers down the entire West Coast, coupled with a general strike in San Francisco, caused newspapers, radio commentators, and clergy to join together in whipping up anticommunist hysteria against the strikers. A front-page story in the San Francisco Chronicle, headlined “RED ARMY MARCHING ON CITY,” announced that a “Communist army” was approaching the Northern California border with plans to destroy rail and road facilities and take San Francisco.14
Organized labor won some important victories during the struggles of the 1930s. American corporations spent substantial sums for spies, gun thugs, goons, and propaganda to prevent unionization and to spread anti-Red calumny among the rank and file. Despite such efforts, the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) grew from less than a million to nearly four million by 1938. Massive strikes, sit-ins, and agitations swept across the country in the period between 1935 and 1941. The eight-hour day, fought for since 1866, was at last won by millions of workers. The wage gains achieved during these struggles increased the national purchasing power of wage earners in the United States by an estimated $5 billion each year.15
Despite its victories—or because of them—the CIO was attacked as an agent of the “communist conspiracy.” The anti-labor, anti-Red ferocity emanating from the business leadership and the business-owned press was so persistent as to move Senator La Follette’s committee to declare in 1939 that business saw “Communism behind every move designed to improve the lot of labor.” The employer “cloaks his hostility to labor” under “the pretext that he is defending himself and the country against Communism.”16
Communists did play a crucial role in organizing the CIO. But they were targeted by the press and business not because they threatened to take over the nation but because their organizing efforts were helping to cut into the profits of the industrialists. The communists would be the first victims of union purges, but equally troublesome to the bosses were the noncommunist employees who were organizing and redirecting billions of dollars of would-be profits into the workers’ pay envelopes.17 It would not be until the postwar Truman and Eisenhower administrations, the “McCarthy era,” that the ruling elites and the press would be able to generate enough anticommunist phobia to hunt out the leftists and weaken the labor unions.
THE COLD WAR
Anticommunist propaganda was muffled during World War II as the United States found itself allied with the Soviet Union against Nazi aggression. But with the war’s end in 1945, the longstanding antilabor, anticommunist, and anti-Soviet attitudes of government, business, and media once more came to the fore with dire warnings about Soviet plans for “world domination” and the internal threat of “communist spies and saboteurs.” In 1947 President Harry Truman declared in his “Truman Doctrine” that the United States was locked in a mortal contest defending world freedom from “Soviet expansionism” and that huge amounts of American money and arms would be used to fortify pro-US regimes in Greece, Turkey, and elsewhere. The inseparable advances of the dollar and the flag were hailed in publications like Business Week with captions that read, “New Democracy, New Business, U.S. Drive to Stop Communism Abroad Means Heavy Outlays for Bases, Relief and Reconstruction. But in Return American Business is Bound to Get New Markets Abroad.” And the financial editor of the New York World-Telegram wrote, “All of this is a much safer and profitable state of affairs for investors. It is good news of a fundamental character.”18
A few newspapers expressed concern about Truman’s bellicose challenge to the Soviets. The Chicago Daily News said the United States was “asking for a war with Russia.” But the great majority of the press hailed Truman’s cold war declarations with an avalanche of articles and stories about the “international communist menace.”19
As the press continued to propagate the cold war, downplaying Soviet overtures for negotiation, public opinion responded in kind. In 1945, 32 percent of the public thought the US would be involved in a new world war within two decades or so; by March of 1948, 73 percent, according to a Gallup poll.20
In 1950, U.S. News & World Report offered this revealing observation:
Government planners figure they have found the magic
formula for almost endless [economic] good times... . Cold War is the catalyst. Cold War is an automatic pump-primer. Turn the spigot and the public clamors for more arms spending. Turn another, the clamor ceases... . Cold War demands, if fully exploited, are almost limitless.21
The real formula for “good times,” U.S. News was saying to its corporate readers, was big defense spending: It brought huge contracts, guaranteed markets, and the highest profits available. And how do you get the public to go along with the huge deficits and high taxes that big defense budgets bring? Turn on the cold war spigot. Create a state of alarm about the “Soviet threat.”
The anticommunist witch-hunt continued against labor. Faced with high profits, high prices, and frozen wage levels, organized labor—grown to some 34 percent of the work force by the end of World War II— embarked on a series of strikes. In 1947 Congress passed the Taft-Hartley Act (written word for word by representatives of the National Association of Manufacturers, according to Congressman Donald O’Toole of New York). The new law repealed many of the hard-won gains of the prolabor legislation of the previous decade. It reinstituted injunctions to break strikes and the court’s power to impose heavy fines. It outlawed mass picketing, secondary boycotts, and the closed shop. It authorized employer interference in workers’ attempts at unionizing and “right-to-work” anti-union laws at the state level. It prohibited unions from ejecting company spies as long as they paid their dues. Owners now could refuse to bargain collectively, even by shutting down their plants, and could destroy union treasuries with expensive court suits.
Taft-Hartley also required union officials to sign noncommunist oaths. Those who refused were ejected from their positions. Communists who might sign risked perjuring themselves and going to jail. Thus many unionists were deprived of one of their most precious liberties, the right to work.22
With the exception of a few liberal publications, the news media applauded the new law for its anticommunist features and because it supposedly redressed the power balance between management and labor. Succumbing to pressure from business, government, and the press, the CIO expelled many of the more militant and pace-setting unions from its organization, then launched membership raids against them. As a result, CIO membership declined by one-fourth. Burdened by the strictures of the Taft-Hartley Act, a much weakened, divided, and red-baited union movement never regained the momentum and effectiveness of previous years.23
The anticommunist witch-hunt reached into other areas of life. Government employees and private citizens had their careers ruined and their personal lives and opinions scrutinized by legislative committees, the FBI, local police—and the press. Millions were required to sign loyalty oaths. Prosecutions of US Communist Party members under the Smith Act, state sedition trials, and contempt proceedings gave the United States a growing number of political prisoners. (By 1952, 110 persons had been indicted or imprisoned under the Smith Act, about half of them trade unionists.) A Democratic-controlled Congress overwhelmingly passed the McCarran Internal Security Act of 1950; it called for the registration of “communist-front” and “communist-action” groups, and authorized the construction of concentration camps for purposes of interning without trial or hearing all suspected “subversives,” should either the president or Congress declare a “national emergency.” Of the six camps built in 1952, several were maintained on a standby basis through the 1950s and into the 1960s. The attorney general and congressional and state legislative committees periodically published lists of “communist front” organizations. Generally, these groups supported such causes as world disarmament, peace, organized labor, and greater racial and economic equality.
Despite these repressive measures, Republicans in Congress and the Republican-dominated press repeatedly charged that the Truman administration was “soft on communism.” Truman reacted to these pressures by taking an increasingly bellicose line toward the Soviets abroad and setting up “loyalty boards” to screen the political views of federal employees at home.24 Such measures did not stop the conservative-dominated press from continuing to fault the Democrats. If anything, Truman’s policies only further fed the anticommunist hype.
THE CREATION OF JOE McCARTHY
One of the more notorious figures to emerge during the anticommunist mania of the 1950s was Senator Joseph McCarthy (R.-Wisc.). Using innuendo, nonexistent “documents,” and outright fabrication, McCarthy rose in 1950 from an obscure senator to national prominence with a series of alarming charges about “communist subversives” who supposedly had infiltrated the State Department, other branches of government, the universities, the clergy, and the press itself. McCarthy’s accusations have been described as “sensational,” but they would have been nothing more than ludicrous had not the press given them such sensational play.
Although many reporters came to hate McCarthy as a cynical liar and power manipulator, they treated his fabrications as straight news. Under the rule of “objectivity” the press reported the senator’s charges about treasonous Reds in front-page stories with banner headlines, while the refutations from his victims were buried on inside pages or lost under the next wave of charges. As Aronson acidly notes:
The portrait of the press of the United States as an objective entity is a myth. There is nothing in the Canons of Journalism that compelled reporters to accept and editors to publish information allegedly contained in uninspected documents waved at them by a Senator. Such reports, if their content proved to be false, might have been excused once or twice on the grounds of deadline or overzealous reporting. But when this happened day in, day out for four years, when every reputable Washington correspondent knew that the disseminator of this information was a proved liar, there was no shred of an excuse. Objectivity was mocked when almost every story was weighted in favor of McCarthy’s fraud.-
More than cowardice and uncritical sensationalism lay behind the press’s role in the making of McCarthyism. Active complicity and sympathy for his goals played a major part, if not among most of the working press, certainly among many media owners and editors. Some publishers entered directly into the red-baiting game, sending reporters out to conduct their own investigations to “expose” communists or excommunists and stigmatize progressive persons, organizations, and ideas. Not only did they do the senator’s work by publishing his attacks but they sometimes copied his methods, purging individuals from their own staffs who had been affiliated with groups of leftist persuasion—as did the New York Times, CBS, and numerous radio stations.26 Some media luminaries cooperated directly with the senator. Thus the professedly anti-McCarthy New York Post editor James Wechsler, when called before McCarthy’s committee in 1953, handed over the names of sixty persons he knew to be communists during his days as a leader of the Young Communist League at Columbia College in the 1930s.
Liberal editors and news commentators who opposed McCarthy were always careful to do it on cold-war anticommunist grounds, contending that he was “playing right into the hands of the communists” because he was disrupting our institutions and “demoralizing loyal Americans.” This was “not the best way to fight communism.” The unchallenged assumption was that communists were our treacherous, mortal enemies and should be hounded, hunted out, and even jailed for their political affiliations and beliefs—as many had been before McCarthy. Ben Hibbs, editor of the Saturday Evening Post, when commenting on McCarthy’s crusade, offered a view shared by most centrist and liberal editors and politicians:
My own guess is that there are some pinks in the State Department and in other government departments and agencies, and of course they should be found and ousted; but it seems to me that this can be done without besmirching innocent people and without making such broadside charges that people will lose faith in all government.27
Hibbs’s observation is revealing. McCarthy’s critics defended the rights of noncommunists only. The liberal’s complaint about McCarthy was that he was attacking liberals, “besmirching innocent people,” in Hibbs’s words, “i
nnocent” meaning anticommunist like themselves. Anyone who harbored political beliefs to the left of liberalism (“pinks”), who preferred socialism and rejected capitalism, who thought communists should be allowed their political freedom not so they can be better exposed and defeated but because it was their right as Americans and human beings and because they had good things to say—such a person was implicitly judged guilty, a worthy target of purge and attack. The liberal complaint against McCarthy was that he was attacking the wrong people. Also his wild attacks against government, as Hibbs notes, might make people “lose faith in all government”—something the established powers did not relish. Indeed, this danger proved to be McCarthy’s undoing.
McCarthy made his big mistake in 1954 when he undertook an investigation of the Army loyalty-security program. The probe was a veiled assault on the Eisenhower administration and was McCarthy’s bid for leadership of the Republican Party and dominance over national politics. This time the senator went too far. The very newspapers that had supported him when he was accusing communists, liberals, and Democrats of treason now turned against him when he brought similar charges against the Republican administration of President Eisenhower. Conservative publishers “simply decided that McCarthy was harming rather than helping the Republican party and that it was time to get rid of him.”28
In short time the same forces that had helped propel McCarthy to the fore in 1950 now united to undo him. The White Elouse denounced the hearings. The Senate ordered an investigation of his actions and voted to censure him. The press ignored or downplayed his charges. The same reporters who once gave copious coverage to his every utterance now failed to show up for his press conferences. The personal instrument of McCarthyism, the senator himself, was consigned to oblivion, but not before McCarthyism had accomplished much of its task, having stigmatized as “traitors” thousands of persons and hundreds of organizations that had fought for peace and social justice.
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