These Truths

by Jill Lepore

  Three weeks after McCarthy’s Wheeling address, John Peurifoy, deputy undersecretary of state, said that while there weren’t any communists in the State Department, there were ninety-one men, homosexuals, who’d recently been fired because they were deemed to be “security risks” (another euphemism was men whose “habits make them especially vulnerable to blackmail”). It was, in part, Peurifoy’s statement that gave credibility to McCarthy’s charges: people really had been fired. One Republican representative from Illinois, getting the chronology all wrong, praised McCarthy for the purge: “He has forced the State Department to fire 91 sex perverts.”67

  The purge had begun years earlier, in 1947, under the terms of a set of “security principles” provided to the secretary of state. People known for “habitual drunkenness, sexual perversion, moral turpitude, financial irresponsibility or criminal record” were to be fired or screened out of the hiring process. Thirty-one homosexuals had been fired from the State Department in 1947, twenty-eight in 1948, and thirty-one in 1949. A week after Peurifoy’s statement, Roy Blick, the ambitious head of the Washington, DC, vice squad, testified during classified hearings (on “the infiltration of subversives and moral perverts into the executive branch of the United States Government”) that there were five thousand homosexuals in Washington. Of these, Blick said, nearly four thousand worked for the federal government. The story was leaked to the press. Blick called for a national task force: “There is a need in this country for a central bureau for records of homosexuals and perverts of all types.”68

  The Nixon-McCarthy campaign against communists can’t be separated from the campaign against homosexuals. There had been much intimation that Chambers, a gay man, had informed on Hiss because of a spurned romantic overture. By March of 1950, McCarthy’s charges had been reported in newspapers all over the country. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee convened hearings into “whether persons who are disloyal to the United States are or have been employed by the Department of State.” The hearings, chaired by Millard Tydings, a Democrat from Maryland, proved unilluminating. In the committee’s final report, Tydings called the charges “a fraud and a hoax.” This neither dimmed the furor nor daunted McCarthy, who masterfully manipulated the press and escalated fears of a worldwide communist conspiracy and a worldwide network of homosexuals, both trying to undermine “Americanism.” (So great was McCarthy’s hold on the electorate that, for challenging him, Tydings was defeated when he ran for reelection.)69

  Who could rein him in? Few critics of McCarthyism were as forceful as Maine senator Margaret Chase Smith, the first woman to serve in both houses of Congress. In June 1950, she rose to speak on the floor of the Senate to deliver a speech later known as the Declaration of Conscience. “I don’t want to see the Republican Party ride to political victory on the Four Horsemen of Calumny—Fear, Ignorance, Bigotry, and Smear,” said Smith, a moderate Republican in the mold of Wendell Willkie. Bernard Baruch said that if a man had made that speech he would be the next president of the United States. Later, after Smith was jettisoned from the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, it was Nixon who took her place.70

  In September 1950, Congress passed the Internal Security Act, over Truman’s veto, requiring communists to register with the attorney general and establishing a loyalty board to review federal employees. That fall, Margaret Chase Smith, who, despite her centrist leanings, had no qualms about the purging of homosexuals, joined North Carolina senator Clyde Hoey’s investigation into the “Employment of Homosexuals and Other Sex Perverts in Government.” The Hoey committee’s conclusion was that such men and women were a threat to national security.71

  The crusade, at once against communists and homosexuals, was also a campaign against intellectuals in the federal government, derided as “eggheads.” The term, inspired by the balding Illinois Democrat Adlai Stevenson, was coined in 1952 by Louis Bromfield to describe “a person of spurious intellectual pretensions, often a professor or the protégé of a professor; fundamentally superficial, over-emotional and feminine in reactions to any problems.” The term connoted, as well, a vague homosexuality. One congressman described leftover New Dealers as “short-haired women and long-haired men messing into everybody’s personal affairs and lives.”72

  One thing McCarthyism was not was a measured response to communism in the United States. Membership in the Communist Party in the United States was the lowest it had been since the 1920s. In 1950, when the population of the United States stood at 150 million, there were 43,000 party members; in 1951, there were only 32,000. The Communist Party was considerably stronger in, for instance, Italy, France, and Great Britain, but none of those nations experienced a Red Scare in the 1950s. In 1954, Winston Churchill, asked to establish a royal commission to investigate communism in Great Britain, refused.73

  In 1951, McCarthy’s crusade scored a crucial legal victory when the Supreme Court upheld the Smith Act of 1940, ruling 6–2 in Dennis v. United States that First Amendment protections of free speech, press, and assembly did not extend to communists. This decision gave the Justice Department a free hand in rounding up communists, who could be convicted and sentenced to prison. In a pained dissent in Dennis, Justice Hugo Black wrote, “There is hope, however, that in calmer times, when present pressures, passions and fears subside, this or some later Court will restore the First Amendment liberties to the high preferred place where they belong in a free society.” That calm did not come for a very long time. Instead, McCarthy’s imagined web of conspiracy grew bigger and stretched further. The Democratic Party itself, he said, was in the hands of men and women “who have bent to the whispered pleas from the lips of traitors.” William Jenner, Republican senator from Indiana, said, “Our only choice is to impeach President Truman and find out who is the secret invisible government.”74

  Eggheads or not, Democrats failed to defeat McCarthyism. Lyndon Johnson had become the Democratic Party whip in 1950 and two years later its minority leader; the morning after the 1952 election, he’d called newly elected Democrats before sunrise to get their support. “The guy must never sleep,” said a bewildered John F. Kennedy. Johnson became famous for wrangling senators the way a cowboy wrangles cattle. He’d corner them in hallways and lean over them, giving them what a pair of newspaper columnists called “The Treatment.” “Its velocity was breathtaking, and it was all in one direction,” they wrote. “He moved in close, his face a scant millimeter from his target, his eyes widening and narrowing, his eyebrows rising and falling.” Johnson despised McCarthy. “Can’t tie his goddam shoes,” he said. But, lacking enough support to stop him, Johnson bided his time.75

  Liberal intellectuals, refusing to recognize the right wing’s grip on the American imagination, tended to dismiss McCarthyism as an aberration, a strange eddy in a sea of liberalism. The historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., writing in 1949, argued that liberals, having been chastened by their earlier delusions about socialism and even Sovietism and their romantic attachment to the ordinary and the everyday, had found their way again to “the vital center” of American politics. Conservatives might be cranks and demagogues, they might have power and even radio programs, but, in the world of ideas, liberal thinkers believed, liberalism had virtually no opposition. “In the United States at this time, liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition,” insisted literary critic Lionel Trilling. “For it is the plain fact that nowadays there are no conservative or reactionary ideas in general circulation.”76

  This assessment was an error. McCarthyism wasn’t an eddy; it was part of a rising tide of American conservatism.77 Its leading thinkers were refugees from fascist or communist regimes. They opposed collectivism and centralized planning and celebrated personal liberty, individual rights, and the free market. Ayn Rand, born Alisa Rosenbaum, grew up in Bolshevik Russia, moved to the United States in 1926, and went to Hollywood to write screenplays, eventually turning to novels; The Fountainhead appeared in 1943 and Atlas Shrugged in 1957.
Austrian-born Friedrich von Hayek, after nearly twenty years at the London School of Economics, began teaching at the University of Chicago in 1949 (in 1961, he moved to Germany). While engaged in vastly different projects, Hayek and Rand engaged in many of the same rhetorical moves as Whitaker and Baxter, who, like all the most effective Cold Warriors, reduced policy issues like health care coverage to a battle between freedom and slavery. Whitaker and Baxter’s rhetoric against Truman’s health care plan sounded the same notes as Hayek’s “road to serfdom.” The facts, Whitaker said in 1949, were these:

  Hitler and Stalin and the socialist government of Great Britain all have used the opiate of socialized medicine to deaden the pain of lost liberty and lull the people into non-resistance. Old World contagion of compulsory health insurance, if allowed to spread to our New World, will mark the beginning of the end of free institutions in America. It will only be a question of time until the railroads, the steel mills, the power industry, the banks and the farming industry are nationalized.

  To pass health care legislation would be to reduce America to a “slave state.”78

  But perhaps the most influential of the new conservative intellectuals was Richard M. Weaver, a southerner who taught at the University of Chicago and whose complaint about modernity was that “facts” had replaced “truth.” Weaver’s Ideas Have Consequences (1948) rejected the idea of machine-driven progress—a point of view he labeled “hysterical optimism”—and argued that Western civilization had been in decline for centuries. Weaver dated the beginning of the decline to the fourteenth century and the denial that there exists a universal truth, a truth higher than man. “The denial of universals carries with it the denial of everything transcending experience,” Weaver wrote. “The denial of everything transcending experience means inevitably—though ways are found to hedge on this—the denial of truth.” The only way to answer the question “Are things getting better or are they getting worse?” is to discover whether modern man knows more or is wiser than his ancestors, Weaver argued. And his answer to this question was no. With the scientific revolution, “facts”—particular explanations for how the world works—had replaced “truth”—a general understanding of the meaning of its existence. More people could read, Weaver stipulated, but “in a society where expression is free and popularity is rewarded they read mostly that which debauches them and they are continuously exposed to manipulation by controllers of the printing machine.” Machines were for Weaver no measure of progress but instead “a splendid efflorescence of decay.” In place of distinction and hierarchy, Americans vaunted equality, a poor substitute.79

  If Weaver was conservatism’s most serious thinker, nothing better marked the rising popular tide of the movement than the publication, in 1951, of William F. Buckley Jr.’s God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of “Academic Freedom,” in which Buckley expressed regret over the liberalism of the American university. Faculty, he said, preached anticapitalism, secularism, and collectivism. Buckley, the sixth of ten children, raised in a devout Catholic family, became a national celebrity, not least because of his extraordinary intellectual poise.

  Russell Kirk’s The Conservative Mind appeared in 1953. Kirk, an intellectual historian from Michigan, provided a manifesto for an emerging movement: a story of its origins. The Conservative Mind described itself as “a prolonged essay in definition,” an attempt at explaining the ideas that have “sustained men of conservative impulse in their resistance against radical theories and social transformation ever since the beginning of the French Revolution.” The liberal, Kirk argued, sees “a world that damns tradition, exalts equality, and welcomes changes”; liberalism produces a “world smudged by industrialism; standardized by the masses; consolidated by government.” Taking his inspiration from Edmund Burke, Kirk urged those who disagreed with liberalism’s fundamental tenets to call themselves “conservatives” (rather than “classical liberals,” in the nineteenth-century laissez-faire sense). The conservative, he argued, knows that “civilized society requires orders and classes, believes that man has an evil nature and therefore must control his will and appetite” and that “tradition provides a check on man’s anarchic impulse.” Conservatism requires, among other things, celebrating the “mystery of human existence.”80

  The battle, then, was a battle not so much for the soul of America as for the mind of America, for mystery over facts, for hierarchy over equality, for the past over the present. In 1955, Buckley founded the National Review. Whittaker Chambers joined the staff two years later. Kirk, who decried the “ritualistic liberalism” of American newspapers and magazines, contributed a regular column. In the first issue, Buckley said the magazine “stands athwart history, yelling Stop.”81

  But if it was chiefly men who advanced the ideas and wrote the books of the new conservatism, it was women who carried the placards and worked in the precincts, not yelling, but politely whispering, “Stop, please.” Betty Farrington, head of the National Federation of Republican Women’s Clubs, filled those clubs with housewives who were ardent in their opposition to communism and support of McCarthy. After Dewey lost in 1948, Farrington had argued that the GOP needed a strong man: “How thankful we would have been if a leader had appeared to show us the path to the promised land of our hope. The world needs such a man today. He is certain to come sooner or later. But we cannot sit idly by in the hope of his coming. Besides his advent depends partly on us. The mere fact that a leader is needed does not guarantee his appearance. People must be ready for him, and we, as Republican women, in our clubs, prepare for him.” Farrington believed McCarthy was that man. It is no accident that McCarthy’s Wheeling, West Virginia, speech was an address, made by invitation, to a Republican women’s club, nor that his language was the language of the nineteenth-century female crusade. “The great difference between our western Christian world and the atheistic Communist world is not political—it is moral,” McCarthy said.82 Temperance, abolition, suffrage, populism, and prohibition weren’t part of Russell Kirk’s intellectual genealogy of conservatism, but they were the foundational experiences of its core constituency.

  Suburban housewives served as the foot soldiers of the conservative movement; here, women rally in support of Joseph McCarthy. Housewives were to the Republican Party infrastructure what labor union members were to the Democrats’. “If it were not for the National Federation of Republican Women, there would not be a Republican Party,” Barry Goldwater admitted. (Nixon couldn’t stand them: “I will not go and talk to those shitty ass old ladies!” he’d fume. All the same, gritting his teeth, he went.)83 By the 1950s, a majority of GOP activists were women, compared to 41 percent of Democratic Party activists. In 1950, Farrington launched the School of Politics, three-day sessions in Washington to train precinct workers; the sessions were open to men and women, but most who attended were women, while, at the same sort of sessions run by the DNC, most attendees were men. In the GOP, party work was women’s work, work that the party explained, structured, and justified by calling it housework. Republican Party aspirants were told to “be proud of the women who work on the home front, ringing the doorbells, filling out registration cards, and generally doing the housework of government so that the principles of the Republican Party can be brought to every home.” Republican women established Kitchen Kabinets, appointing a female equivalent to every member of the president’s cabinet, who shared “political recipes on GOP accomplishments with the housewives in the nation” by way of monthly bulletins on “What’s Cooking in Washington.”84 As a senator speaking to the federation of women’s clubs suggested, the elephant was the right symbol for the GOP because an elephant has “a vacuum cleaner in front and a rug beater behind.”85

  By the mid-1950s, the conservative critique of the academy as godless and of the press as mindless were in place, along with a defense of the family, and of women’s role as housewives, however politicized the role of housewife had become. A moral crusade against homosexuality and in favor of a newly i
magined traditional family had begun.

  Meanwhile McCarthyism abided: mean-spirited, vulgar, and unhinged. McCarthy’s rise, the lunacy of his conspiracy theory, and the size of his following struck many observers as a symptom of a disease at the very heart of American politics. It left George Kennan with a lasting doubt: “A political system and a public opinion, it seemed to me, that could be so easily disoriented by this sort of challenge in one epoch would be no less vulnerable to similar ones in another.”86 What had made so many Americans so vulnerable to such an implausible view of the world?

  INSIDE CBS, the plan was known as “Project X.” It was top secret until, a month before Election Day in 1952, the television network announced that it would predict the winner using a “giant brain.” One local station took out a newspaper ad promising that “A ROBOT COMPUTER WILL GIVE CBS THE FASTEST REPORTING IN HISTORY.”87

  That giant brain was called UNIVAC, the Universal Automatic Computer, and it was the first commercial computer in the history of the world. In May 1951, John Mauchly and Presper Eckert, who’d unveiled ENIAC in 1946, invited members of the press to a demonstration of their new machine; they’d built it for the U.S. Census Bureau. Half the size of ENIAC, UNIVAC was even faster. This lickety-split sorting of the population would prove invaluable to the Census Bureau. Soon, all calculations relating to the federal census were completed by UNIVAC, work that was called “data processing.” Commercially applied, UNIVAC and its heirs would transform American business, straightaway cutting costs and accelerating production by streamlining managerial and administrative tasks, such as payroll and inventory, and eventually turning people into consumers whose habits could be tracked and whose spending could be calculated, and even predicted. Politically, it would wreak havoc, splitting the electorate into so many atoms.