by John Egerton
But for all its overpowering force in world affairs, communism couldn’t establish an influential presence in this country, either underground or in the public arena. The Communist Party in the United States was never outlawed in those years of deep anxiety (not that its enemies didn’t yearn to do it in, had they been able to get past the U.S. Constitution’s protection of political expression). Various legal shackles were applied to hobble it, though, such as requiring party members to register as agents of a foreign power. In part because of those restrictions, the party was unable to offer a presidential candidate after 1940, when it garnered only 46,000 votes. It never elected anyone to Congress or to any significant state office.
By 1944, Communists in the United States were in such turmoil and disarray that they finally dissolved the party and tried to reorganize as a new entity. One faction was allied with former presidential candidate Earl Browder; it was so near to the political mainstream that Browder himself publicly endorsed FDR. A rival wing headed by William Z. Foster, the aging former party chief and three-time candidate for the White House, stuck to its more radical guns and to its international party allegiance.
The American Socialist Party limped along under the leadership of Norman Thomas, meanwhile, as another left-wing presence in American politics but an implacable foe of the Communists—a basic reality that most Democrats and Republicans seemed unable to grasp. Thomas ran for president three times in the 1940s and six straight times in all, going back to 1928, but like the Communist candidates, he never received as many as a million votes.
The things Thomas dreamed of and fought for in his heyday—a minimum wage, unemployment insurance, a five-day workweek, reform of child labor, old-age pensions—were destined to become essential elements of American democracy, eventually to be institutionalized by the progressive wings of both major political parties, but the Socialist Party itself remained a splinter group. The entire left-of-center alternative to two-party politics in the United States thus showed itself to be microscopic, fragmented to the point of open dissension, and largely impotent against the prevailing political might of a more conservative nation.
As for subversive activity, the hard evidence and end results support the conclusion that it, too, was largely ineffectual. Communism never became a serious threat to the ruling parties or to the social order. No alien menace emerged as a clear and present danger on American soil; there were no sophisticated conspiracies to seize government power, no attempted coups d’état, no elaborate terrorist plots, no major acts of sabotage. There was, in sum, a minimum of action—but a maximum of reaction.
Right-wing organizations in the private sector generated much of the postwar hysteria that surged through the society, but that energy would have been dispersed and spent with little effect had it not been for the focusing power of the reactionary wing in Congress. Together, these public and private forces were potent enough to drive the Truman executive branch and the courts further to the right. Looking back on those frenetic times, it is clear that disruptive or criminal acts by Communists inside this country were less frequent and less harmful than the paranoid and reactionary behavior of rabid anticommunists driven by fear or hatred or insecurity.
President Truman’s performance in office in 1946 made him look like both a victim and an instigator of the red scare—and neither image was becoming. The lift he got from his trip to Missouri with Churchill was quickly erased by the controversy that enveloped the “iron curtain” speech. Liberals had been poor-mouthing the President, and he had answered with sour notes of his own—and when the right wing joined the fray, and he returned their fire too. The economy was reeling, management and labor were at each other’s throats, and the South was staggering into a violent summer of civil rights abuses. It was a season of discontent, and Truman was as unhappy as everyone else. He had fallen out of favor with the American people, and out of enthusiasm for his job.
And that was only the beginning. The tide of anticommunist passion was running strong. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce weighed in, charging that the federal government was infested with reds and fellow travelers. The Catholic Church flailed away at the godless Communists. The Republican Party, smelling blood, declared that the 1946 elections would be a national referendum on Communist versus Republican values. Truman got rid of his left-wing Secretary of Commerce, Henry Wallace, in September, but that appeased no one; then he appointed his civil rights committee in October, and that didn’t help either.
Meanwhile, from his unassailable fortress, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover—entrenched there for nearly twenty-five years already, and with that many more still ahead of him—had declared war on the Communists. Claiming that 100,000 undercover reds were already running loose in the country, he kept a steady stream of messages and secret reports flowing to the President, warning him that it was time to clamp down hard on radicals, subversives, and all other disloyal persons.
The Republicans won big in November and took control of both houses of Congress. (Two of the GOP newcomers who rode red-baiting campaigns to victory, incidentally, were a Wisconsin senatorial candidate named Joseph R. McCarthy and a young California congressional campaigner, Richard M. Nixon.) Organized labor, on reading the election returns, virtually capitulated to the right wing; both the American Federation of Labor (with Truman-hater John L. Lewis and his United Mine Workers union back in its good graces) and the Congress of Industrial Organizations loudly proclaimed their loyal and patriotic Americanism and their newfound hostility to left-wing causes.
From all sides, Truman was beset by demands that he stand up to the red menace. His White House team showed signs of internal stress. As 1947 began, Jimmy Byrnes left the State Department and returned to his native South Carolina, publicly giving ill health as his reason, but privately citing policy differences with the President. General George C. Marshall, one of the heroes of World War II, became the new Secretary of State (he was soon to be celebrated as the architect of the Marshall Plan for European postwar recovery), but that popular appointment was offset by deepening alarm over Communist incursions on the global stage and at home.
In a desperate effort to reassert his administration’s authority, Truman went before a joint session of Congress on March 12 to spell out the details of a new foreign policy. Its principal features were two: “containment” of Soviet expansion in Europe, and an open-ended pledge to defend our “free world” allies from threatened aggression by the Communist powers.
This so-called Truman Doctrine was a hard-line strategy advocated by the President’s more conservative advisers, but it still didn’t satisfy his harshest critics in the reactionary new Congress. The Republican majority and its supporting cast of rebellious Southern Democrats, embittered and enraged by Truman’s civil rights pronouncements, were making a mockery of his leadership and threatening to shove his administration into oblivion. As the liberal remnant on Capitol Hill grew smaller and quieter, a chorus of angry voices both in and out of the government demanded action against the threat of Communist infiltration at home.
A clever parliamentary maneuver by Mississippi Congressman John Rankin in 1945 had given the House Un-American Activities Committee permanent status and greater power; now it was moving recklessly under its rabid new chairman, Republican J. Parnell Thomas of New Jersey, to throw a red blanket of suspicion over thousands of government employees. Only slightly less alarmist in their counsel to the President were J. Edgar Hoover and the Attorney General, Tom Clark of Texas.
In his heart of hearts, Harry Truman thought people were too wrought up over what he called “the Communist bugaboo,” but he finally concluded that firm action on his part had become a political necessity. And so, on March 21, 1947, he signed Executive Order 9835, calling for a comprehensive loyalty and security review program for all federal employees. Hoover and Clark were its principal drafters, and would be its chief enforcers. Armed with a list of groups declared by Clark to be subversive organizations, Hoover commanded an investigat
ive task force that included units of the Civil Service Commission as well as his own agents. They were free to question the loyalty of any and all government workers and to take action against those deemed to be suspect. Loyalty boards were set up in every government department to legitimize the FBI probes; there was no provision for judicial review.
Definitions and rules of procedure were vague at best, and abuses were inevitable. Truman himself would admit in his memoirs years later that the investigations were “not in the tradition of fair play and justice.” But at the time he testily defended his own action in tones of righteous indignation. Henry Wallace once remarked that the President had a way of feeling and acting “completely sincere and earnest at all times,” even when he had abruptly changed his position on an issue. The loyalty order was a perfect example of that unblinking certitude.
In a climate of extreme secrecy and suspicion and fear, the federal government, in the words of Truman biographer Robert J. Donovan, “placed a perceived need for national security ahead of the traditional rights of individuals.” At the same time, it also gave license to right-wing zealots who concentrated their fiercest attacks on enemies other than Communist subversives. The interrogation of some government employees included such questions as these: “Do you ever entertain Negroes in your home?” “Did you ever write a letter to the Red Cross about the segregation of blood?” “How do you explain the fact that you have an album of Paul Robeson records in your home?”
The loyalty review program and other reactionary moves on Truman’s part were acts of political expediency calculated to improve his standing with the general public. Sure enough, as the year wore on, he inched upward in the polls. On the liberal side, he also won praise from many blacks and some whites for appointing the civil rights study committee, and for the tough antidiscrimination speech he delivered to the NAACP at the Lincoln Memorial in June. The President was still at odds with right-wing Republicrats, and with much of the left—especially those who backed Henry Wallace and his new third party, the Progressive Citizens of America, in their open challenge to Truman’s candidacy in 1948. Seeing himself as a sane moderate between two extremes, Truman didn’t object when his top political advisers began to chart a campaign strategy rooted in the broad center of the American electorate.
Congress passed a tough anti-labor law, the Taft-Hartley Act, in June 1947, and then rammed it through over the President’s veto. His willingness to go to the mat on that issue, knowing that he would lose, won back for him a few friends in organized labor. In a similar way, he was praised by some once-friendly liberals after his civil rights panel issued its report in October calling for an end to segregation. Here and there, signs of his rehabilitation peeked out like spring crocuses. These little bouquets, together with his rise in the polls, told the President that he might at last be regaining a little momentum. In just over a year, he had made enough of a comeback to feel a new energy for his job, and to start his political adrenaline flowing again. To the surprise of many in his administration— and even some members of his family—the scrappy Missourian decided before the year ended that he was ready to make an underdog fight for a full term in the White House.
But even as Truman dreamed of redemption, the increasingly frantic hunt for Communist demons went on, unaffected by presidential politics. Having taken on a life of its own, the purge would lurch clumsily into the late forties and early fifties. The concerted efforts of the Attorney General, the FBI, the loyalty boards, the military, various congressional committees, and other divisions of the federal government to expose, prosecute, convict, and punish disloyal Americans eventually touched virtually everyone who drew a check from the U.S. Treasury—millions of people. After four years and more than three million FBI and Civil Service investigations, the massive dragnet would cause about three thousand employees to resign “without prejudice”; another two hundred or so were dismissed from their jobs for “reasonable doubt” about their loyalty. Not one person exposed by this penetrating and invasive scrutiny was hauled into court and found guilty of high crimes against the government and people of the United States.
Over the course of the first postwar decade, a tiny handful of citizens— perhaps two dozen in all—were indicted following investigations incidental or totally unrelated to the presidential loyalty order. These individuals were charged with serious crimes—spying, conspiracy, treason, selling government secrets, or plotting to overthrow the government. Some of them had to face sensational trials that dominated the news for weeks on end. Finally, in an atmosphere of extreme divisiveness and controversy, a few convictions were obtained—in one trial against eleven top leaders of the U.S. Communist Party (including Benjamin J. Davis, Jr., far removed in time and thought from his Atlanta Republican upbringing), and in separate proceedings against about a dozen others. Two of them, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, were convicted of espionage and paid the supreme penalty of death by electrocution in 1953.
At a cost far greater than it could possibly measure, the United States government thus made a presentment of having cleansed itself. Historians of the period have found otherwise; most have come to share the assessment of William Manchester that “the anti-Communist terror was pathological,” a hysterical overreaction that couldn’t be calmed by evidence or reason. Like a fever, it had to run its course.
It was probably inevitable that the campaign against communism in the nation would be joined in common cause with the campaign against social change in the South. Racial equality had always struck the Southern ruling elite as an insanely radical notion, probably Communist in origin. Anxiously, they stayed on the lookout for subversive outsiders—agitators sent to stir unrest among the black masses. Whites who harped on racial issues, and those who tiptoed into the social arena by talking about class inequality or the scourge of poverty and ignorance, were maligned as troublemakers—and Southern whites of that ilk were singled out as the most dangerous of all. From the narrow perspective of the rulers, anyone who believed that the existing social contract needed revision was already a fellow traveler and an enemy of the public good.
“Communism has chosen the Southern Negro as the American group most likely to respond to its revolutionary appeal,” wrote U.S. Army Major R. M. Howell in an intelligence report in 1932. Eight years later, Congressman Martin Dies expanded the assertion: “Moscow has long considered the Negroes of the United States as excellent potential recruits for the Communist Party.” In his militantly anticommunist book, The Trojan Horse in America, Dies said the House Un-American Activities Committee had uncovered evidence of a massive attempt by the Soviets to win black support—mounted, he said, because “Moscow realizes that it can never revolutionize the United States unless the Negro can be won over to the Communist cause.” But even the Texas congressman, fulminating reactionary that he was, conceded that the strategy wasn’t working. Its failure, he concluded, was “a tribute to the patriotism, loyalty, and religion of the Negro.”
African-Americans never had much use for communism. According to the most widely quoted estimates, the number of blacks who belonged to the Communist Party in the United States probably never exceeded eight thousand—a tiny fraction of one percent in a population of over thirteen million. Aside from a few highly visible converts, blacks kept their sights on the long-standing promise of democracy. You could almost count on the fingers of one hand all of the prominent Americans of African descent who became entangled with the Communist Party in the thirties and forties— and several of them were out of the picture by the time the war was over.
Richard Wright gave up on the party in the early 1940s—and then, a few years later, more or less gave up on his country. James W. Ford, thrice the Communist Party’s vice-presidential candidate, was seldom heard from after his last appearance on the ticket in 1940. John Preston Davis, linked to communism through the National Negro Congress, an organization he sparked in the thirties, went on to write for the Pittsburgh Courier, to publish his own journal, Our World,
and finally to gravitate to the political mainstream as a paid employee of the Democratic Party. The few who continued to stand on the firing line as left-wing activists in the fight against discrimination eventually paid a heavy price: Paul Robeson, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Benjamin J. Davis, Jr., all of whom had butted heads with white authority throughout their careers, were to find in the Cold War deep freeze that their political troubles as “dissidents” were just beginning.
But the near-universal rejection of communism by Southern blacks did nothing to convince the spy-chasers of their loyalty. As far back as the 1920s, secret U.S. police and military units were closely monitoring suspected Communist efforts to recruit black Americans; they kept up the surveillance without interruption for fully half a century, stealthily invading the privacy of thousands of individuals but uncovering virtually no enemy agents. The black minority was not the only target, of course. Throughout most of that period, spying by government operatives on all kinds of left-wing organizations suspected of having the remotest interest in communism—including virtually every group seeking social reform in the South—was a routine practice and an open secret.
Despite all the dire warnings about Communist infiltration in the South, the fact was that only two or three states—Alabama and North Carolina, and possibly Louisiana—registered enough of a red presence during and after the war to leave even a trace fifty years later. The labor movement in Louisiana was said by some to be deeply tinted with a red hue, but in all the charges and countercharges of patriotism and disloyalty that swirled around the CIO and the AFL, it was hard to separate fact from fiction. In any event, the militantly anticommunist Catholic Church, an unsleeping watchdog and a dominant public force in the state, was always far more influential with the working-class population of New Orleans and south Louisiana than any other religious or political body.