by Jay Feldman
In so doing, they not only abandoned their Communist and fellow-traveler friends but also allowed the FBI to frame the parameters of the Cold War debate. As a result, the argument centered not on the question of whether the government had the right to investigate law-abiding citizens who held unpopular political views but instead on who exactly was worthy of investigation and who exactly should carry out those investigations; not on whether red-baiting in itself was un-American but instead on who exactly was a permissible and appropriate target.
Because HUAC’s witch-hunting tactics were so odious, liberals misguidedly put their faith in the FBI and its supposedly nonpolitical brand of red-baiting as the more acceptable and responsible alternative. In fact, the bureau’s methods and agenda were every bit as antidemocratic and subversive as the committee’s. As noted, the two bodies covertly worked together, sharing confidential information, with the FBI often using HUAC as a front to maintain the ruse of its own nonpolitical nature. “It is as necessary to the success of this committee that it reveal its findings to the public,” said a 1948 HUAC report, “as it is to the success of the FBI that it conceal its operations from the public.”40 Or, as Hoover put it, HUAC “served a useful purpose in exposing some … activities which no Federal agency is in a position to do, because the information we obtain in the Bureau is either for intelligence purposes or for use in prosecution, and committees of Congress have wider latitude in that respect.”41 When the committee came to Hoover for help with its investigation of the movie industry in mid-1947, the director—after receiving the committee chairman Thomas’s assurance that such assistance would not be made public—wrote an internal memo to his assistants, saying, “I do think that it is long overdue for the Communist infiltration in Hollywood to be exposed, and as there is no medium at the present time through which this Bureau can bring that about on its own motion I think it is entirely proper and desirable that we assist the Committee of Congress that is intent upon bringing to light the true facts in the situation.”42
In choosing the FBI over HUAC, liberals thus willingly forsook certain key, bedrock principles. As Kenneth O’Reilly points out in Hoover and the Un-Americans, “In this new climate, mainstream liberalism abandoned a tolerant set of beliefs for an ideology that denied traditional First Amendment rights to Communists and, to a lesser extent, fellow travellers.”43 In the process, postwar liberals helped open the door to McCarthyism and became its red-baiting allies as they sought to dissociate themselves from their more radical colleagues on the left. Such liberal bastions as the American Civil Liberties Union, Americans for Democratic Action, the Congress of Industrial Organizations, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and many more, along with such liberal luminaries as Francis Biddle, Sidney Hook, Irving Kristol, Dwight Macdonald, Reinhold Niebuhr, Walter Reuther, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., Norman Thomas, Diana Trilling, Roy Wilkins, and countless others, all joined the red-baiting rush to draw the distinction between themselves and the Communists. Ironically, their efforts were hardly well served, for in the end Hoover had a file on every one of them, and many, despite their support for the bureau, were classified by the FBI as enemies all the same.
In The Nightmare Decade, Fred J. Cook observes that repressing Communists was merely “the smoke screen” and that liberals were the “true target” all along. “The real foe,” writes Cook, “was always the American liberal—the New Dealer, the innovator, the idealist who saw the injustices in American society and advocated the use of the instrumentalities of democratic government to effect reforms. To the emperors of the status quo, such shakers and movers were dangerous men.”44 Through intimidation, the great majority of these voices were silenced.
The climate was chilling rapidly. In the first weeks of the new Eightieth Congress, over two hundred antilabor bills were introduced, and on June 23 the crushingly restrictive Taft-Hartley Act was passed over Truman’s veto. By the middle of 1947, the ACLU described “an atmosphere increasingly hostile to the liberties of organized labor, the political left and many minorities … Excitement, bordering on hysteria, characterized the public approach to any issue related to Communism.”45
In June, the Senate Appropriations Committee wrote to Secretary of State George C. Marshall to warn that the State Department was the target of “a deliberate, calculated program being carried out not only to protect Communist personnel in high places but to reduce security and intelligence protection to a nullity.”46 Marshall quickly set up the Personnel Security Board to formulate a set of security guidelines for the agency. That same month, the McCarran rider to the State Department appropriations bill, which gave the secretary of state absolute discretion to terminate an employee in the interests of national security, was used to summarily dismiss ten State Department workers, without benefit of charges, evidence, or hearings.
In October, HUAC’s investigation of the movie industry, secretly supported by confidential information from the FBI, resulted in the Hollywood blacklist, as accused Communists who refused to deny allegations about themselves were shut out of work. In December, the Attorney General’s List of Subversive Organizations was made public.*
The civil libertarian Alan Barth condemned it as “a kind of official blacklist,” which represented “perhaps the most arbitrary and far-reaching power ever exercised by a single public official in the history of the United States,” as it gave the attorney general the ability to “stigmatize and, in effect, proscribe any organization of which he disapproves.”47 The publication of the list, observed Richard M. Freeland in The Truman Doctrine and the Origins of McCarthyism, was “a deliberate attempt by the Department of Justice to neutralize various political organizations that were, among other subversive things, impeding the Administration’s efforts to win support for Cold War foreign policy.”48
The cumulative effect of these types of actions was a pervasive stifling of dissent, as Americans became increasingly reluctant to question or criticize the government and increasingly intolerant of anyone who did. The February 1948 Communist coup in Czechoslovakia further amplified paranoia, as the Russians appeared to be bent on unlimited expansion through satellite governments. As the prominent Republican attorney Richard Scandrett commented in a letter to a friend, “Even to suggest in a whisper here nowadays that every Russian is not a cannibal is to invite incarceration for subversive activities.” In mid-1948, the ACLU reported “a confusion and uncertainty over the basic principles of civil liberty unmatched in years.”49
Developments during one week in the summer of 1948 cast even greater doubt over the state of civil liberties in the United States. First, on July 28, a federal grand jury in New York indicted twelve high-level Communist Party officials, charging them with violating the Smith Act. The charge against them was not attempting or advocating the overthrow of the government, not conspiring or instructing how to overthrow the government, but conspiring to advocate the overthrow of the government. In effect, Communists were now being indicted simply for being Communists, even though the Communist Party was not outlawed. In fact, the previous March, at a HUAC hearing on “bills to curb or outlaw the Communist Party of the United States,” Hoover himself had advised against any such bills, expressing “grave doubts” about “restrictive legislation that might later be declared unconstitutional.”50
Three days after the New York indictments, with the presidential election looming, the Republican-controlled HUAC—whose staff had increased from ten in 1947 to forty-seven in 1948—launched a sensational inquiry into espionage within the federal government. Most of the individuals subpoenaed had been identified by Elizabeth Bentley and Whittaker Chambers, two former Communist Party members who professed to having themselves previously been engaged in espionage, although their reliability as witnesses was questionable. Many of the accused individuals had also been subpoenaed the previous spring by the same New York federal grand jury that later charged the twelve Communist leaders, but when not one was indicted in the New York hear
ings, HUAC stepped in and took over.
Bentley, often called the “blond spy queen” in the press, accused dozens of current and former government employees—including FDR’s administrative assistant Lauchlin Currie and Treasury Secretary Morgenthau’s former assistant Harry Dexter White, who had been the principal architect and executive director of the International Monetary Fund. The biggest fish named by Chambers, an editor at Time, were White and Alger Hiss, who had been a law clerk for the Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, had held various positions in the Roosevelt administration, and at the time of Chambers’s revelations was serving as president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
An irate White demanded to appear on his own behalf and, in his testimony, vehemently denied his accusers’ allegations. He suffered from a weak heart, and the humiliation and stress of his appearance before HUAC were too much for him. White died three days after testifying.
Hiss, a former Roosevelt protégé and confirmed New Dealer, was a perfect pawn for HUAC and the Republicans, who were out to associate the Democrats and the New Deal with Communism going into the election. (Chambers himself adamantly believed that the New Deal was “a genuine revolution” and every bit as extreme a movement as international Communism.)51 As Alistair Cooke noted in his account of the Hiss case, “The House Committee wanted to prove that the New Deal was a calculated flirtation with Communism, and … thus succeeded, before he ever came to trial, in making a large and very mixed public identify Hiss with what was characteristic of the New Deal.”52
Hiss was indicted. The first of two high-profile trials ended in a hung jury, but in the second he was convicted—not of espionage but of perjury—and sentenced to five years.
As a junior member of HUAC, Richard Nixon found the Hiss case a perfect vehicle to ride to national prominence. Just as the committee had been covertly aided by the FBI in its investigation of the movie industry, Nixon was now clandestinely supplied with confidential FBI information on Hiss. His tough questioning of Hiss catapulted him to the forefront of anti-Communist crusaders, and he used his newfound celebrity to advance both himself and the cause. “Like the exposed tip of an iceberg,” Nixon solemnly lectured the American public, “the Alger Hiss case is only a small part of the whole shocking story of Communist espionage in the United States.”53
On August 3, three days after the HUAC hearing began, the Justice Department submitted to the FBI an emergency detention plan it had been developing since Hoover, following Assistant Director Ladd’s suggestion, originally proposed such a program early in 1946. In the course of developing the plan, the department had rejected Hoover’s request for a bill that would justify widespread detentions, saying, “The present is no time to seek legislation. To ask for it would only bring on a loud and acrimonious discussion.”54 Ladd tended to agree, telling his boss that what was needed instead was “sufficient courage to withstand the courts … if they should act.”55
The top-secret Justice Department plan—only three copies were made, two of which were kept by the FBI and the other by the Justice Department—was referred to as “the Department’s Portfolio.” According to Ladd, the guidelines laid out in the Portfolio were the basis of the FBI’s “entire planning and operational procedure to apprehend individuals contained in our Security Index.”56
The Portfolio has never been made public, but a 1952 memo from Ladd to Hoover, which has been published, outlines its stipulations in detail.57 It provided for suspending habeas corpus; arresting all individuals on the Security Index under one “master warrant,” without any criminal charges needing to be filed; and carrying out searches and seizures of contraband. Detainees could be held incognito for forty-five days, after which hearings would be conducted, but they would not be bound by “the rules of evidence.” Appeals could be made only to the president and not through the courts. Moreover, just three years after the end of the war that saw the internment of well over a hundred thousand aliens and citizens, the Portfolio endorsed the establishment of what the civil liberties champion Frank Wilkinson called “the ultimate weapon of repression: concentration camps to intern potential troublemakers” in the event of some future “national emergency.”58
In its intentions and provisions, the Justice Department Portfolio was a blueprint for a police state.
• • •
As the election approached, it appeared a certainty that the Republicans would both win the White House and retain control of Congress. The support for Henry Wallace, who had broken with the Democrats to run for president on the Progressive Party ticket, seemed certain to split the Democratic vote and doom the Democrats’ chances. Accordingly, Truman and the liberals adopted a policy of red-baiting Wallace in order to undermine his support.
Truman’s main campaign strategist, Clark Clifford, had spelled out the strategy a year earlier, when Wallace was still contemplating a third-party candidacy. In a memo to the president, Clifford wrote, “Every effort must be made … to identify him and isolate him in the public mind with the Communists,” by enlisting “prominent liberals and progressives—and no one else—to … point out that the core of the Wallace backing is made up of Communists and the fellow-travellers.”59
Truman took up the theme, alluding to “Wallace and his Communists,” and legions of liberals jumped in to add their voices.60 The social critic Dwight Macdonald called Wallace the “mouthpiece of American communism,” while the columnist Dorothy Thompson said, “The Communist Party—let’s tell the truth—initiated the movement for Wallace.” The labor leader Walter Reuther declared, “It is tragic that he is being used by the Communists the way they have used so many other people … They write your speeches, attend your meetings, applaud what you say and inflate your ego. That’s what is wrong with Henry Wallace.” (While it was true that many members of the Communist Party enthusiastically supported Wallace, the party’s chairman, William Foster, scoffed at the notion that the party was running Wallace’s campaign, saying, “Who but a fool can believe that the Communist party had or believed it had any such power over Wallace?”)61
But it was the Americans for Democratic Action that did the most complete and effective hatchet job on Wallace, collecting, producing, and distributing a plethora of materials, including a pamphlet called Henry A. Wallace: The First Three Months, that portrayed the Progressive Party candidate—and all other opposition to the Truman Doctrine—as Soviet inspired and unpatriotic.
The tactic succeeded brilliantly. Wallace’s support evaporated, and in the most stunning upset of American electoral politics not only did Truman defeat Thomas E. Dewey, who had soft-pedaled his red-baiting of Truman during the campaign, but the Democrats recaptured both houses of Congress.
Throughout 1949, the hysteria quickened as fears of espionage were highlighted by both domestic and international events. At home, Americans’ fears were kept alive by the ongoing Hiss case, which commanded daily headlines, and by the March arrest and subsequent trial of the Justice Department employee Judith Coplon, who was charged with copying and delivering FBI reports to the Russians.†
Internationally, there was the triumph of the Chinese revolution in August, for which Republicans blamed the State Department, portraying the agency as a viper’s nest of traitors, dominated—as the Ohio senator Robert Taft put it—by “a left-wing group who … were willing … to turn China over to the Communists.”62 When the Soviet Union detonated its first atomic bomb in September, the prevailing view in the United States was that the only way the Russians could have obtained the necessary knowledge for such a feat would have been through espionage. The successes of the Chinese revolution and the Soviet A-bomb program, thus seen as having been aided and abetted by Communist agents in the United States, translated into yet an even more severe clampdown, as the twin threats to national security were now perceived to be both an external power and unpatriotic and disloyal Americans.
Truman played an active role in feeding the fears, publicly denouncing as trait
ors the twelve CP leaders who were being tried under the Smith Act and endorsing, together with the U.S. commissioner of education, Earl J. McGrath, the National Education Association’s stand that “members of the Communist Party shall not be employed in the American schools.”63
By now, most Americans were convinced that there were Communists hiding under every rock. “They are everywhere,” warned Attorney General J. Howard McGrath (no relation to the education commissioner), “in factories, offices, butcher stores, on street corners, in private businesses. And each carries in himself the germ of death for society.”64
The ACLU annual report of August 1949 was titled In the Shadow of Fear and declared:
The imagined insecurity of the strongest democracy in the world in the face of the cold war with Communism has created an atmosphere in which fear makes the maintenance of civil liberties precarious. Not only the liberties of real or suspected Communists are at stake. Far beyond them, the measures to protect our institutions from Communist infiltration have set up an unprecedented array of barriers to free association, of forced declarations of loyalty, of black-lists and purges, and most menacing to the spirit of liberty, of taboos on those progressive programs and principles which are the heart of any expanding democracy.65
The scene was set. Enter Joe McCarthy, stage right.
*The list consisted of more than seventy groups and schools, including the Communist Party, the Ku Klux Klan, the National Negro Congress, the Protestant War Veterans, and the Washington Bookshop Association.