American Empire

by Joshua Freeman

  To produce nuclear weapons the government built an archipelago of secret nuclear facilities. The Nevada Test Site, set up in 1951, grew to be larger than Rhode Island. More than nine hundred nuclear weapons were detonated there, most in underground shafts but ninety-six above ground, leaving behind a desert expanse contaminated by radiation, pockmarked with craters, and dotted with partially destroyed buildings that had been erected to measure the destructive impact of blasts. A few bombs were so large that officials worried that testing them at the Nevada site would damage buildings in Las Vegas, fifty miles away, so they blew them up on an island off Alaska.

  The major nuclear test sites in the continental United States and most uranium mines lay on or near Indian land, so Native Americans disproportionately suffered from the environmental and health problems that came with nuclear armament. Nearby residents were inadvertently exposed to radiation from bomb testing, while thousands of soldiers and sailors were deliberately exposed in order to study the ability of military units to survive atomic attack. Also, in a series of bizarre experiments justified in the name of national security, doctors under government contract secretly exposed hospital patients, prisoners, pregnant women, and mentally retarded boys to various types of radioactivity and then clandestinely tracked their health for decades thereafter.

  The AEC was one of a series of new federal agencies that funded and shaped science, engineering, and, more broadly, intellectual life during the Cold War years. During World War II, the federal government vastly increased its spending on research and development. Unlike during the prewar years, when the modest amount of federally funded research had been conducted for the most part directly by government agencies, much of the wartime research was contracted out to universities and corporations. After the war, there was broad support among science administrators and federal officials for continuing this approach, but disagreement over how to implement it. No centralized science agency emerged. Instead, each of the military services embarked on its own large-scale research and development program, contracting out projects to academic institutions and private laboratories. To fund nonmilitary research, Congress established the National Science Foundation and greatly increased appropriations for the National Institutes of Health.

  The massive federal investment in research and development, and the decision to funnel much of it through universities and private companies, helped transform the United States from a scientific and technological borrower into the global leader. During the postwar decades, the United States spent far more on research and development than Britain, France, West Germany, and Japan combined. Federal priorities helped determine how science and academic life developed. In 1948, nearly two-thirds of federal research and development money went to military-related projects. Only in a few exceptional years during the decades that followed did spending on nonmilitary projects match or exceed defense work. Academic disciplines with national security relevance, like electrical engineering and Russian studies, flourished, while others, without obvious importance to state interests, lagged behind.

  Federal funding and military priorities could take research in odd directions. During the 1950s, for instance, military and civilian agencies funded studies of dolphins by neurophysiologist John Cunningham Lilly, who claimed that they had exceptional intelligence and advanced communication abilities. His work led to the Navy Marine Mammal Program, which trained dolphins for military missions (they were used during the Vietnam War to defend ammunition depots at Cam Ranh Bay and thirty-five years later to sweep for mines during the Iraq War). But it also produced the cultural projection of dolphins as pacific, spiritual, altruistic companions for humans, first in the 1963 movie Flipper, inspired by Lilly’s research, then in the counterculture of the late 1960s (by which time Lilly had become deeply involved with using psychedelic drugs for research), and finally in dolphin exhibits and encounter opportunities at marine parks across the country.

  The military influenced academic life not only by funding research but also by sponsoring hundreds of Reserve Officer Training Corps programs on campuses. At many schools, marching cadets were a common sight. Civilian intelligence officers hovered around universities too, developing clandestine relationships with faculty and administrators, commissioning research, and recruiting students. The government even secretly funded, through the CIA, political and literary journals, like the New Leader and Partisan Review, whose outlook it found congenial.

  All this cost money, and lots of it. During the first two decades of the Cold War, defense-related outlays accounted for nearly two-thirds of all federal spending. During the Cold War as a whole (from 1947 to 1989), military spending averaged 7.4 percent of the GNP, nine times the figure before World War I and five times the rate between the two world wars. Korea ushered in a new phase in American history, when even in peacetime national security laid claim on a significant share of the total productive output of the society, dominated federal spending, and significantly reduced the resources available for private spending or other public investments.

  Domestic Anticommunism

  Ideological fervor promoted public acceptance of the costs and dangers of the Cold War. The late 1940s and 1950s saw an intensification of patriotic zeal of the sort normally associated with wartime, even during the years when there was no actual fighting. Patriotism, anticommunism, religiosity, and a search for traitors fortified the country in its contest with the Soviet bloc. They limited internal dissent, weakened the political left, and set the tone for daily living.

  Antiradicalism and fear of domestic subversion were not new features of American society; they had been woven into the fabric of the nation almost from its founding, episodically dominating political life. Still, the anticommunist crusade that came after World War II, in its scope, intensity, and duration, exceeded even such past moments of internal repression as the late-eighteenth-century anti-Republican campaign under the Alien and Sedition Acts and the post–World War I Red Scare.

  Anticommunism began swelling before the Cold War. During the late 1930s, conservatives used anticommunist charges and investigations to attack the New Deal and the labor movement. Even during World War II, when the Soviet Union and the United States were allied, anticommunism continued to bubble up. During the 1944 presidential campaign, John Bricker, the Republican vice presidential candidate, proclaimed that the Democrats had become a “communistic party with Franklin Roosevelt as its front.” After the war, anticommunism grew even more prominent, used as an electoral weapon by some Republican candidates, including Richard Nixon in his successful 1946 bid for a House seat from California, and given legitimacy by a new round of congressional investigations.

  Postwar anticommunism had multiple sources and purposes, but without the Cold War it is hard to imagine that it would have become so powerful and pervasive. Patriotism and anticommunism came to define one another during the Cold War. Cold War patriotism contrasted the United States as a land of freedom with tyrannical communist states abroad. World War II Manichean imagery, which juxtaposed the “free world” of the Allied powers with the “slave world” of fascism, morphed into a new, polar vision in which the Soviet Union, once part of the “free” Allied powers, became repositioned as the center of a reconstituted unfree world, now defined by communism instead of fascism. The adoption by conservative newspapers and commentators of the term “Red Fascism” to describe communism aimed to tar it with the near universal public rejection of Nazism and posit continuity between the anti-Axis struggle and the Cold War. So did the use by intellectuals and politicians of the category “totalitarian” to encompass both fascism and communism. The phrase “un-American activities” also originally referred to both fascism and communism, but after World War II it became almost exclusively associated with the latter. As opponents repeatedly described communism as, by definition, un-American, anticommunism came to be equated with Americanism.

  The Freedom Train, which travel
ed around the country with an exhibit of national historical documents, including the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, illustrated the ideological reconfiguration. Conceived of by the Truman administration in 1946 as a way to contrast American freedom with “Hitler tyranny,” by the time the train began its tour it had become reconceived as a way of countering what the attorney general termed “foreign ideologies” and “subversive elements” at home. The huge outpouring of visitors to the traveling exhibit revealed an eagerness to take advantage of what for most people was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see the nation’s key political documents, but it also suggested a widespread desire to join in a public display of patriotism at a time of growing international tension.

  Other new patriotic commemorations also, implicitly or explicitly, contrasted American virtue with communist evil. June 14 had been informally celebrated as Flag Day since the late nineteenth century, but only in 1949 did Congress formally designate it for national observance, furthering the widespread display and veneration of the flag that so many foreign observers were struck by when visiting America. The idea of designating May 1 as “Loyalty Day” to counter the communist celebrations of May Day reportedly came from aging publisher William Randolph Hearst. In the late 1940s, Loyalty Day parades, heavily promoted by the Hearst newspapers, outdrew May Day parades, even in the New York area, a stronghold of the by then shrinking political left.

  The Cold War allowed veteran anticommunist crusaders to move from the margins of American politics to its center by focusing on links, real or alleged, between domestic radicalism and the Soviet bloc. The Special House Committee on Un-American Activities (widely called HUAC) helped establish the pattern. Before Pearl Harbor, the committee devoted itself largely to trying to undermine the New Deal by airing charges that communists and their supporters played significant roles in various federal agencies and in labor unions allied with the Roosevelt administration. After the war, HUAC continued to use charges of communist infiltration to attack liberal institutions and policies, but it added a dimension of national security by highlighting connections between domestic and foreign communism. As part of a highly publicized investigation into communist influence in the entertainment business, begun in 1947, HUAC called witnesses like libertarian novelist and screenwriter Ayn Rand to testify about pro-Soviet films, such as Mission to Moscow and Song of Russia, made in Hollywood during World War II with the support of the Roosevelt administration. The committee presented a picture of communists and fellow travelers working covertly to advance the interests of another nation, soon to be America’s enemy, while government officials did nothing or egged them on.

  The Truman administration more explicitly portrayed domestic radicalism as a threat to national security when it launched the Federal Employee Loyalty Program in April 1947. Upon taking office, Truman had rejected the idea that subversive activities presented a serious threat to the country and generally refused to allow executive agencies to cooperate with HUAC. Over time, however, pressure grew on him to act. Some came from evidence of security breaches in the government and the uncovering of a Soviet spy ring in Canada, with indications that it might have been active in the United States as well. Equally important were charges made by Republicans during the 1946 elections of inadequate attention to communist penetration of the government.

  Under Truman’s program, all new federal employees had to undergo a full-scale loyalty check. Current employees were given a more cursory examination but were fully investigated if any “derogatory information” appeared in their files, which meant that a single informer or complaint could set off an inquiry. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) carried out the investigations, increasing in size from 3,559 agents in 1946 to 7,029 in 1953. Federal law already called for firing government workers who belonged to a political party or organization that advocated the overthrow of the government, but the Truman program went beyond that to make disloyalty, a term it did not clearly define, a basis for dismissal. Membership in or even “sympathetic association” with any group the attorney general judged totalitarian, fascist, communist, subversive, or dedicated to force or violence could be deemed a possible sign of disloyalty.

  Though Truman’s loyalty program covered only federal workers, the attorney general’s list of suspect organizations and a list of purportedly communist-linked groups HUAC issued became used by other employers in loyalty investigations of their own. Membership in a listed group often led to firing. Not surprisingly, groups on these lists saw members drop out, contributions dry up, and their political efficacy greatly diminish. While some extreme right-wing groups did appear on the attorney general’s list, most of the listed groups were left-wing organizations or left-liberal coalitions. By creating directories of disapproved organizations, the federal government went a long way toward limiting the freedom of association and defining what was and was not acceptable political behavior for loyal Americans.

  The government also moved to define what was and was not acceptable sexual behavior, making deviations from delineated sexual norms, most importantly homosexuality, cause for dismissal too. The growth of a lively gay subculture in Washington, D.C., during the New Deal and World War II, along with a general increased national awareness of homosexuality, led congressional conservatives and federal security officers to call for the firing of homosexuals working for the government at the same time that they pressed for a political cleansing. In 1947, Congress authorized the secretary of state to dismiss any employee he considered a security risk even if they were not judged disloyal, a power soon given to other federal agencies too. Grounds for being considered a security risk included alcoholism, financial irresponsibility, a criminal past, and homosexuality. In 1950 a State Department official testified that his agency had fired ninety-one employees for homosexuality, a revelation that led to a full-scale Senate investigation of government employment of homosexuals and a widespread hunt for gay and lesbian federal workers.

  Publicly, officials in the Truman and Eisenhower administrations, including President Eisenhower himself, argued that homosexuality was unacceptable among federal employees because it created opportunities for blackmail that foreign enemies might exploit. No such case, though, ever surfaced. Among themselves, government officials stressed their moral repugnance with homosexuality and their belief that it reflected an individual’s poor character. From the late 1940s through the 1960s, the State Department, which remained the center of the drive for sexual conformity, fired far more employees, roughly a thousand (the overwhelming majority male), for homosexuality than for suspected communist ties.

  By 1952, some two million federal employees had undergone some level of loyalty or security investigation. Under Truman, about twelve hundred federal workers were dismissed for disloyalty or security risk, and another six thousand resigned in the course of investigations. A slightly higher number were fired or resigned during the first three years of the Eisenhower administration.

  Spies

  The loyalty and security programs, by making the dangers of communism seem more immediate than events abroad by themselves suggested, helped build support for Truman’s foreign policy. Charges of espionage even more vividly drove home the point that the danger of communism was present even at the very heart of the country’s government and defense programs. The Alger Hiss case dramatically raised this possibility. Hiss had been a rising star in the New Deal, accompanying Roosevelt to the Yalta conference and having primary responsibility for organizing the founding conference of the UN. A friend of both Dean Acheson and John Foster Dulles, a leading Republican foreign policy expert who became Dwight Eisenhower’s secretary of state, Hiss first surfaced as a purported secret communist agent during a 1948 HUAC hearing on communist infiltration of the government.

  HUAC’s star witness was Elizabeth Bentley. During World War II, Bentley had carried messages and documents from communists and communist sympathizers working for the fede
ral government in Washington to Communist Party leaders and Soviet agents in New York. At the end of the war, fearful that she might be apprehended, she went to the FBI with her story. A second former communist courier, Whittaker Chambers, also testified before the House committee. Between them, Bentley and Chambers named dozens of current and former government employees whom they claimed had passed on classified information to the Communist Party, Soviet agents, or both. They included Harry Dexter White, the second in command at the Treasury Department before Truman appointed him to a post at the International Monetary Fund, and Hiss.

  White denied the charges against him, dying of a heart attack just three days later. Hiss too denied the accusations made against him, but after he sued Chambers for libel, Chambers revealed new evidence to support his claims. In December 1948, a grand jury indicted Hiss for perjury for denying that in the late 1930s he had given Chambers State Department documents. His first trial ended in a hung jury, but a retrial resulted in his conviction. Many liberals believed Hiss’s continued claims of innocence, but for people who did not, his conviction demonstrated that even the most respectable officials might be communists or spies.

  Other espionage cases soon followed. In 1949, the FBI arrested a Justice Department employee, Judith Coplon, as she was about to hand over information about FBI investigations to a Soviet UN employee. Though she was found guilty of espionage, her conviction was overturned because the FBI refused to reveal what had raised suspicions about her. The tip-off had come from encrypted wartime Soviet diplomatic cables that the American government had begun deciphering in a huge effort later known as the Venona Project.

  Venona also led to the exposure of Soviet espionage in the wartime atomic bomb program. Decrypted cables revealed that British scientist Klaus Fuchs had given the Soviet Union information on the Anglo-American effort to develop atomic weapons. Arrested in early 1950, Fuchs confessed, leading the FBI to Harry Gold, who had been his liaison to Soviet agents. Gold in turn confessed, leading to the arrest of others charged with conspiring to commit atomic espionage, including a communist couple from New York, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. The government’s case against the Rosenbergs at their 1951 trial had holes, but in the atmosphere of the Korean War it won a conviction. Once again, the FBI did not want to reveal the existence of Venona. Evidence from it would have confirmed that Julius had passed on classified information to the Soviets but suggested that Ethel had at most a very peripheral involvement in his illegal activities. The Rosenbergs continued to assert their innocence until June 19, 1953, when, amid international protests, they were executed.