The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972

by William Manchester

  The form would conclude with a formal notice of dismissal: “The foregoing information indicates that you have been and are a member, close affiliate, or sympathetic associate of the Communist Party.” The luckless ex-employee had been cashiered by a court which “could proceed on mere rumor”—Webster’s definition of a star chamber. The mere opening of the full field investigation was often enough to humiliate a man and shame his family. Guilty in the eyes of many until innocence had been proven, he became suspect the day his loyalty check began. Neighbors questioned by security officers cut him on the street, ignored invitations from his wife, and forbade their children to play with his. His sons might be barred from the Cub Scouts. He couldn’t even call upon civil service friends without putting them, too, in the shadow of the ax. In the end he had to fall back upon his savings, if any, and his family.

  In June of 1949 former Attorney General Clark, now a member of the Supreme Court, remarked that “never before” had the morale of federal officials been so high, “thanks to the Loyalty Order.” It is hard to imagine what had made him think so. Nearly every other lawyer in the country knew that the program had made a sham of due process. Tom Paine’s proud boast that the New World had become “the asylum for the persecuted lovers of civil and religious liberty from every part of Europe” mocked his memory. The most popular book in Washington was Bert Andrews’s Washington Witch Hunt, a recital, by the respected chief of the Herald Tribune’s Washington Bureau, of the loyalty program’s more flagrant injustices. John Lord O’Brian, writing in the Harvard Law Review of April 1948, had pointed out that the effect of an assertion of guilt by association was “analogous to that of a criminal conviction—loss of occupation, lasting disgrace, and a continued impairment of… ability to earn a livelihood.” Already the program had cost twelve million dollars, and among the more diverting cases awaiting appeal was that of a man who had been dismissed for deserting the Army during World War I, when he was nine years old.

  Those who trusted the National Loyalty Review Board to set things straight were grasping at a frail reed. In President Truman’s memoirs he identifies Seth Richardson, the board’s chairman, as “a prominent conservative Republican” who “worked in close contact with the Department of Justice.” Doubtless the Richardson appointment was good politics—he had been a protégé of Harding and Coolidge—but it led to wretched equity. In his late sixties, the appeals chairman was best known in the capital as counsel for the American Medical Association and the Pullman Corporation. He was an American Legionnaire, an Elk, and a member of the Metropolitan, Burning Tree, and Chevy Chase clubs—exactly the sort of establishmentarian who defined loyalty negatively, as something which was not un-American, and who confused patriotism with orthodoxy.

  Sometimes a single incident may illumine an entire era. The appeal of Dorothy Bailey sheds considerable light on this one. A graduate of Bryn Mawr and the University of Minnesota, Miss Bailey was forty-one in the spring of 1948. She had worked at the United States Employment Service for fourteen years and was regarded as an exemplary employee; her only public activity was in the United Public Workers of America, an organization not cited by the attorney general. Miss Bailey was president of her UPWA local, which may have inspired jealous gossip, though she had no known enemies. On the strength of unsupported charges that she was, or had been, a Communist and had “associated with known Communist Party members,” she had been haled before the District of Columbia’s regional loyalty board. The prosecution presented no evidence. No witnesses testified against her. She categorically denied the reports, presented several character witnesses—and was sacked anyway.

  During Miss Bailey’s appearance before Seth Richardson’s review board, Paul Porter, her attorney, suggested that she may have been prey for hidden spite. The chairman answered that “five or six of the reports came from informants certified to us by the Federal Bureau of Investigation as experienced and entirely reliable.” Pressed by Porter, Richardson refused to identify the sources. He then added that he couldn’t if he wished to, because “I haven’t the slightest knowledge as to who they are or how active they have been in anything.” One of Richardson’s fellow board members noted a damning phrase in the dossier, and this exchange followed:

  BOARD MEMBER: Then another one says it first came to the informant’s attention about 1936, at which time [you were] a known member of the so-called “closed group” of the Communist Party operating in the District of Columbia.

  MISS BAILEY: First of all, I didn’t know, or don’t know, that there is a “closed group.” The terminology is unfamiliar to me. I can say under oath and with the strongest conviction that I was not then and have never been a member of the Communist Party.

  BOARD MEMBER: Here is another that says you were a member of the Communist Party, and he bases his statement on his knowledge of your association with known Communists for the past seven or eight years. That is part of the evidence that was submitted to us.

  MR. PORTER: It is part of the allegations. I don’t think that can be considered evidence.

  CHAIRMAN RICHARDSON: It is evidence.

  MR. PORTER: We renew our request, although we recognize the futility of it, that some identification of this malicious gossip be given this respondent or her counsel.

  CHAIRMAN RICHARDSON: Of course, that doesn’t help us a bit. If this testimony is true, it is neither gossip or [sic] malicious. We are under the difficulty of not being able to disclose this.

  MR. PORTER: Is it under oath?

  CHAIRMAN RICHARDSON: I don’t think so.

  BOARD MEMBER: It is a person of known responsibility who had proffered information concerning Communist activity in the District of Columbia.

  MISS BAILEY: You see, that point in it worries me, because if I am convicted here that will make this person who has made these charges considered a reliable witness; and they are not, because the charges are not true, and whatever is said here should not add to their reliability.

  Her appeal was denied. Reminded that the board’s procedures were in flagrant contempt of constitutional guarantees, Richardson took refuge in the meaningless cliché that government service is “a privilege, not a right.” He then glanced at his agenda, pored over the next batch of unsigned accusations, and began conferring with his colleagues. That was justice under the vigilantes.

  Seldom in the long history of bureaucracy has there been such a waste of time and paper. Even in Richardson’s kangaroo court, with every conceivable card stacked against the pleader, such a conviction as Miss Bailey’s was rare. During the loyalty program’s five years the FBI screened over 3,000,000 Americans and conducted 10,000 full field investigations. Preliminary indictments were filed against 9,077, of whom 2,961 were arraigned before regional boards and 378 were given notice. Asked to sum up his findings for a congressional committee, Richardson said: “Not one single case or evidence directing toward a case of espionage has been disclosed in the record. Not one single syllable of evidence has been found by the FBI indicating that a particular case involves a question of espionage.”

  ***

  “A specter is haunting Europe,” Marx and Engels had written in 1848—“the specter of Communism.” Now in the centennial of their Communist Manifesto the shadow of the same apparition had fallen across the United States. It seldom made sense. Richardson, for example, had been boasting to the congressmen: no spies had been found; therefore the searchers must have driven them out. This inverted logic was not confined to federal employees. Irene Curie, arriving in New York for a scientific meeting, was interned overnight on Ellis Island; anonymous telephone calls had warned that she might be an enemy agent. After the publication in Liberty magazine of “Reds in Our Atomic Bomb Plants,” an article by J. Parnell Thomas insinuating that all scientists were security risks, the government for a time found it almost impossible to recruit young nuclear physicists.5 Physicians subscribing to the American Review of Soviet Medicine, a professional journal issued by the American-Soviet Medica
l Society, asked that issues be mailed to them in plain paper wrappers.

  Firms active in defense work were jittery—one spent $3,000,000 on new safes and strongboxes for classified documents entrusted to it—and colleges and universities were torn by a double allegiance, to the flag and to academic freedom. Legislature after legislature was requiring loyalty oaths from teachers, 11,000 of them at the University of California alone; UCLA fired 157 professors who balked. On the local level teacher oaths were administered by school board chairmen, PTA presidents, and police chiefs. In many communities Legion or VFW officers also studied classroom texts for subversive material.

  If any occupation had to endure more than the teaching profession, it was show business. In New York three aggressive ex-FBI agents, egged on by vigilantes in the American Federation of Radio Artists, published Counter-Attack, a pamphlet listing 151 actors, directors, and writers whose names had appeared in the files of various congressional committees. Counter-Attack was circulated among communications executives, who were urged to fire anyone in it and to check it before hiring new people. Next the three issued Red Channels, a thicker directory of entertainers and announcers whose friends or “affiliations” were dubious. The industry trembled—Counter-Attack had described CBS as “the most satisfying network for the Communists”—and vice presidents kept copies of Red Channels in their bottom desk drawers. On Madison Avenue and throughout Hollywood it was rechristened “the blacklist.”

  Blacklisting was to be a feature of the entertainment industry for over a decade. It was a blunt instrument of blackmail, used to cow administrators whose livelihood depended upon public opinion. Time has blurred many sharp contours of the Age of Suspicion, but no brief can be held for those company heads who permitted themselves to be intimidated. Often they knew that a star had been blacklisted by a jealous competitor, and at the other end of the wage scale they summarily dismissed stagehands and deodorant demonstrators on preposterous charges that they were “disloyal” or “security risks.” If one executive had stiffened his backbone the counter-attackers’ house of cards might have collapsed. None did.

  The experience of Jean Muir was typical. One day she was the leading actress in The Aldrich Family, NBC’s most popular radio serial. The next day her name was added to Red Channels. By afternoon the network had torn up her contract and put her on the street. NBC’s explanation to the press set a new low in what had already become a low era, and established a precedent its competitors soon followed. Of course Miss Muir wasn’t a Communist, the network spokesman said blandly. She was loyal to her country and always had been. Unfortunately, she had become controversial. Controversy alarmed sponsors, stirred up the public, and hurt the product. In short, she had been fired because someone had lied about her. From then on, “controversial” was almost a synonym for “disloyal”—and just as likely to ruin a career. Eventually most people stopped trying to justify the blacklist. If questions were raised about its iniquities, there always seemed to be someone around who would shake his head and say maddeningly, “Where there’s smoke, there’s fire.”

  ***

  The worst of it was that he was right, there was a flame beneath all that smog. Not that Dorothy Bailey and Jean Muir had anything to do with it. They were martyrs, sacrificed to ignorance and fear as surely as any Salem “witch” in 1692. But it was a chilling fact that real agents had made off with real secrets. Once Stalin had the Bomb, few gave peace more than an even chance—Lloyd’s of London didn’t—and the swiftness with which Russian scientists built their first nuclear weapon owed almost everything to the ingenious espionage web Soviet Vice Consul Anatoli A. Yakovlev had spun between New York and Los Alamos during the war.

  Yakovlev’s apparatus would never have been discovered without the defection of Gouzenko in Ottawa. Even so, it took four years and the combined efforts of the Canadian Mounties, Scotland Yard, and the FBI to unravel the snarl. Fuchs was the key to it. His confession to a Yard inspector in Harwell and London led to Harry Gold in New York. Gold broke down when FBI agents found a New Mexico map in his apartment showing the routes he followed in his rendezvous with Fuchs and Greenglass. When Julius Rosenberg read of Gold’s arrest in the New York Herald Tribune he took the paper to Ruth Greenglass. She and David would have to leave the country, he said; David could implicate all of them, including Ethel Rosenberg, his own sister. Ruth said, “We can’t go anywhere. We have a ten-day-old infant.” Rosenberg said, “Your baby won’t die. Babies are born on the ocean and in trains every day. My doctor says that if you take enough canned milk and boil the water the baby will be all right.”

  Julius gave the Greenglasses a thousand dollars and mapped out a complex journey from Mexico City to Sweden to Czechoslovakia to Moscow. Local Communists would meet them and guide them on each leg of the trip, he said. They had passport photos taken and then hesitated again. Ruth was ill. Julius, climbing walls, gave them four thousand dollars more, but they told him they were going to stay and face punishment. Eleven days later the FBI picked David up. He then had to choose between his wife and his sister. He chose Ruth. Early one summer evening while the Rosenbergs were listening to The Lone Ranger the FBI knock came. Only Julius was taken then; Ethel was left to care for their two sons. Then she had to make other arrangements. She too was jailed. They had betrayed the country in wartime, and Sing Sing and electrocution lay ahead for both of them.

  That was real treason, not the paranoid fantasies of superpatriots demanding loyalty oaths of kindergarten teachers and movie extras. Beyond doubt the Rosenberg-Greenglass-Gold-Fuchs-Nunn-May ring was one of the most successful in the history of international espionage. In Moscow it disgorged charts, formulae, and hundreds of pages of closely written data describing in detail everything from Oak Ridge’s gaseous diffusion process for separating U-235 and U-238 to blueprints of the missile itself. The Russians could scarcely have learned more about nuclear weapons had they been full partners in the undertaking. At the cost of two billion dollars America had assembled the best scientific minds in western Europe and the United States, mobilized American industry, and united the two in a three-and-a-half-year search that culminated in success at Alamogordo and terror over Japan. By then the Soviet director of intelligence had a full account of the making of the bomb and even an eyewitness account, from Fuchs, of that first blast in the New Mexico desert. The information was beyond price. USSR physicists could not have duplicated it then. They grasped the theoretical physics involved, but in the late 1940s Russia simply did not have adequate industrial resources for so huge a venture. Treachery permitted them to close the nuclear gap. The Anglo-American traitors had hastened the onset of the Cold War by at least eighteen months.

  So enormous were their crimes, and so leaky the British and American counterespionage nets through which they slipped, that public opinion might well have demanded new governments at 10 Downing Street and 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Nothing of the sort happened. As far as the electorate was concerned, the whole thing might have been an act of God. The security failures were lamented, of course, but in neither country was there any sustained search for scapegoats in the laboratories. The man in the street lacked sufficient scientific sophistication to appreciate what had happened. Gaseous diffusion processes would have made poor campaign issues. Furthermore, none of the guilty persons could be identified with any party except the Communist party. What the Republicans needed was a ring of full-fledged New Dealers, or at least one of them, who had turned U.S. secrets over to the USSR.

  It is a central fact of mid-century American politics that they found what they wanted. Not the real thing, perhaps, but close enough to it to divide the country and make heads roll. If their Communists-in-government had not betrayed atom bomb plans, it was only because they didn’t know any. All were out from the same cloth as the spies in the labs—intelligent, sensitive and idealistic men who had been born shortly after the turn of the century and retained grim memories of the First World War. They had witnessed the collapse
of the economy after the Crash, the unchecked aggression which had followed in Spain, Ethiopia, China, and central Europe, and the shame of Munich. Despairing of the western democracies, they had embraced Communism as the faith that would remake the world. Like religious fanatics they would do anything for the cause. Most of them were denied the golden opportunity of the physicists, but everyone could do something. Those in the administration could filch state secrets. If in the sub-cabinet, one might recommend Soviet solutions, such as the plowing under of Germany’s Ruhr. Even ordinary people could serve as couriers. Harry Gold was a courier. Whittaker Chambers was another.

  This is very complicated, and even today it cuts across beliefs so deeply held that confessions and overwhelming evidence are denied; Dean Acheson went to his grave believing Harry Dexter White innocent and the Hiss affair a “mystery.” To comprehend the enormity of what began happening in the summer of 1948, one may imagine a large household whose children insist that they are pursued by a bogeyman. Others in the family repeatedly assure them that there is no such thing as a bogeyman. The house is searched over and over. Nothing is found, and although the children persist in their preposterous stories, everyone else in the home ignores them. Then one evening when the family is gathered together one child notices that a closet door is ajar. He flings it open—and out steps a real bogeyman, ten feet tall and all teeth. Igor Gouzenko in Canada had been such a child. Three years afterward American defectors began giving other evidence in Washington. The difference was that their door didn’t open on a closet. It led to the master bedroom.

  Early in the Age of Suspicion liberals and intellectuals tried to drown the Red bogey in laughter. For ten years the House Committee on Un-American Activities had been trying to discredit Roosevelt reforms by frightening the country. It seemed inconceivable that anything of consequence could turn up now. When Elizabeth Bentley began testifying before a subcommittee of the Senate Committee on Expenditures in the Executive Department, the New Yorker turned the pitiless wit of A. J. Liebling on her. “Behind Schrafft’s saccharine facade,” he wrote, “Miss Bentley had handed Al6 the secret formula for making synthetic rubber out of garbage, which has not yet been discovered, or a redundant tip on the approximate date of D Day, which the Allied Chiefs of Staff had communicated to their Russian colleagues as soon as it was decided upon. I forget where she passed on the information that she had received from a man who, she testified, told her he got it from Lauchlin Currie, former administrative assistant to President Roosevelt, on a subject that Currie has since sworn he knew nothing about—the breaking of a Russian code.”