Fear Itself (113 page)

72
Peter J. Kuznick,
Beyond the Laboratory: Scientists as Political Activists in the 1930s
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987); Alice Kimball Smith,
A Peril and a Hope: The Scientists’ Movement in America, 1945–1947
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965).

73
For an overview, see Jessica Wang, “Scientists and the Problem of the Public in Cold War America, 1945–1960,”
Osiris
17 (2002): 323–47.

74
For a discussion written at the time, see Gellhorn,
Security, Loyalty, and Science.

75
Wang, “Science, Security, and the Cold War,” p. 238; see also David Caute,
The Great Fear: The Anti-Communist Purge under Truman and Eisenhower
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1978).

76
Edward A. Shils,
The Torment of Secrecy: The Background and Consequences of American Security Policies
(Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1956), p. 185.

77
This scientific system had an elective affinity with democratic currents, the sociologist Robert K. Merton had insisted in 1942, because of its ethos of universalism, open collaboration, and organized skepticism. His 1942 “Note on Science and Democracy” is reprinted as “Science and Democratic Social Structure” in Robert K. Merton,
Social Theory and Social Structure
(Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1957), pp. 550–61.

78
Committee on Security and Clearance, “Loyalty Clearance Procedures in Research Laboratories,”
Science
107 (1948): 333–37; Scientists Committee on Loyalty Problems, “Loyalty and Security Problems of Scientists: A Summary of Current Clearance Procedure,” ibid., 109 (1949): 21–24.

79
Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev,
The Haunted Wood: Soviet Espionage in America—The Stalin Era
(New York: Random House, 1999).

80
New York Times,
November 10, 1999.

81
For a review of the key studies of the Rosenberg case, which after a long period of controversy have developed a consensus about guilt, based in part on evidence that has come to light since the fall of the Soviet Union, raising questions about the definitiveness of our knowledge, see Bernice Schrank, “Reading the Rosenbergs after Venona,”
Labuor/Le Travail
49 (2002): 189–210. The authors of the leading work that argued they had been framed, Walter and Miriam Schneir, have concluded otherwise decades later. See Walter and Miriam Schneir,
Invitation to an Inquest
(New York: Doubleday, 1965); Walter Schneir (with a preface and afterword by Miriam Schneir),
Final Verdict: What Really Happened in the Rosenberg Case
(Brooklyn, NY: Melville House, 2010).

82
Wang, “Scientists and the Problem of the Public in Cold War America,” pp. 335–336.

83
Morton Grodzins,
The Loyal and the Disloyal: Social Boundaries of Patriotism and Freedom
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956). “The danger,” he warned, “is that democracy will fail because it fails to be democratic” (p. 258). For a different perspective, one that argued in 1952 that “perhaps it is a calamitous error to believe that because a vulgar demagogue [referring to Wisconsin senator Joseph McCarthy] lashes out at both Communism and liberalism as identical, it is necessary to protect Communism in order to defend liberalism,” see Irving Kristol, “‘Civil Liberties,’ 1952: A Study in Confusion,” in Irving Kristol,
The Neoconservative Persuasion: Selected Essays, 1952–2009
(New York: Basic Books, 2011), p. 49. This position, he predicted, “will surely shock liberals.”

84
Andrew D. Grossman and Guy Oakes, “The Fifth Column Tactic: Predatory Investigations and the Politics of Internal Security in the 80th Congress,” unpublished paper presented at the September 2004 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, p. 6.

85
See Robert C. Carr,
The House Committee on Un-American Activities, 1945–1950
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1952); Telford Taylor,
Grand Inquest: The Story of Congressional Investigations
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1955).

86
Wang’s “Science, Security, and the Cold War” is devoted to an examination of “the case of E. U. Condon.” See also Wang,
American Science in an Age of Anxiety
, pp. 130–47.

87
On McCarran, see Michael J. Ybarra,
Washington Gone Crazy: Senator Pat McCarran and the Great American Communist Hunt
(Hanover, NH: Steerforth Press, 2004).

88
For a discussion, see Cornelius P. Cotter and J. Malcolm Smith, “An American Paradox: The Emergency Detention Act of 1950,”
Journal of Politics
19 (1957): 27.

89
A memorandum of September 18, 1950, outlining “Pros and Cons on Signature or Veto of the McCarran Bill,” was prepared for President Truman by Richard Neustadt, who, after his service in the White House, went on to a distinguished career in political science at Columbia and Harvard. See William Randolph Tanner, “The Passage of the Internal Security Act of 1950” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Kansas, 1971), pp. 463–64.

90
See http://trumanlibrary.org/publicpapers/viewpapers.php?pid=883.

91
Schlesinger Jr., “What Is Loyalty?,” pp. SM7, 50, 48. A similar search for a balanced policy was written for the Committee on Economic Development by Harold D. Lasswell. See Lasswell,
National Security and Individual Freedom
(New York: McGraw-Hill, 1950).

92
Clinton L. Rossiter, “Constitutional Dictatorship in an Atomic Age,”
Review of Politics
11 (1949): 418, 395. For an exception to Rossiter’s lament about the absence of relevant considerations, see Arthur Bromage, “Public Administration in the Atomic Age,”
American Political Science Review
41 (1947): 974–55. Bromage drew on the experience of desolation after the mass bombing of German cities during World War II to project the political and administrative aftermath of an atomic attack on the United States.

93
Rossiter, “Constitutional Dictatorship in an Atomic Age,” p. 398.

94
Ibid., pp. 408, 412.

95
Ibid., p. 418.

96
For a discussion of this recursive possibility, see John Fabian Witt, “Anglo-American Empire and the Crisis of the Legal Frame,”
Harvard Law Review
120 (2007): 786.

EPILOGUE
JANUARY 1953

1
Christian Science Monitor,
December 6, 1952.

2
New York Times,
November 17, 1952.

3
Ibid.

4
Los Angeles Times,
December 6, 1952.

5
Ibid.;
New York Times,
December 6, 1952.

6
Robert Patrick McCray, “Project Vista, Caltech, and the Dilemmas of Lee DuBridge,”
Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences
34 (2004): 339;
New York Times,
December 5, 1951;
Washington Post,
December 8, 1951.

7
Manchester Guardian,
December 21, 1953; Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin,
American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005), pp. 474–76; http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/rmhttp/radio4/transcripts/1953_reith6.pdf.

8
Roger Dingman, “Atomic Diplomacy during the Korean War,”
International Security
13 (1988/1989): 50–91; the discussion of the January 25 NSC meeting appears on p. 69.

9
See http://www.bartleby.com/124/pres13.html.

10
Alan Brinkley,
Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin, and the Great Depression
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1982). See also Sander Diamond,
The Nazi Movement in the United States, 1924–1941
(New York: Disc-Us Books, 1974); Francis Macdonnel,
Insidious Foes: The Axis Fifth Column and the American Home Front
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), Philip Jenkins,
Hoods and Shirts: The Extreme Right in Pennsylvania, 1925–1950
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997).

11
New York Times,
November 2, 1952;
Washington Post,
November 22, 1952;
New York Times,
November 28, 1952, December 4, 1952;
Chicago Daily Tribune,
December 14, 1952;
New York Times,
January 13, 1953, January 18, 1953, January 19, 1953.

12
New York Times,
January 21, 1953.

13
See http://www.bartleby.com/124/pres54.html.

14
Guy Oakes,
The Imaginary War: Civil Defense and American Cold War Culture
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1944); Andrew D. Grossman,
Neither Dead nor Red: Civil Defense and American Political Development during the Early Cold War
(New York: Routledge, 2001).

15
Wall Street Journal,
January 21, 1953.

16
Both editorials are cited in the review by the
Los Angeles Times
of “How Nation’s Press Viewed Ike Address,” January 21, 1953.

17
http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/eisenhower001.asp.

18
Martin Conway, “Democracy in Postwar Western Europe: The Triumph of a Political Model,”
European History Quarterly
32 (2002): 59–84.

19
Arthur Schlesinger Jr.,
The Vital Center: The Politics of Freedom
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1949), p. 1.

20
Washington Post,
January 21, 1953. When Johnson first was elected to the Senate, his maiden speech of March 9, 1949, was repeatedly punctuated by the phrase “We of the South.” Lasting well over an hour, this was a contribution to a southern filibuster that opposed President Truman’s civil rights program. Fifteen years later, it was President Johnson who had become a rhetorical and practical leader of racial change. Southern Democrats no longer could prevent such laws as the Civil Rights Act of 1964 or the Voting Rights Act of 1965 in the face of defections from their ranks by some border-state colleagues. Over the course of the decades that followed, the South shifted partisan allegiances. By the mid-1990s, the once-unthinkable had happened. Most white southerners voted Republican. Most southern House and Senate seats were held by Republicans. And the core constituency of the Democratic Party in the South had become African-American. While southern congressional influence eroded within the Democratic Party, it was propelled into a leading role for the Republican Party.

21
Alexis de Tocqueville,
The Old Regime and the French Revolution
(1856; reprint, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), p. 95.

22
David B. Truman,
The Governmental Process: Political Interest and Public Opinion
, 2d ed. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1971), p.xlvii.

23
“By a ‘boundary condition,’ I mean a set of relatively permanent features of a particular context that affect causal relationships within it.” See J. David Greenstone,
The Lincoln Persuasion: Remaking American Liberalism
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), p. 42.

24
Karl Polanyi,
The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time
(Boston: Rinehart, 1944), pp. 257, 244 (italics in original).

25
Gilbert Murray,
Liberality and Civilization: Lectures Given at the Invitation of the Hibbert Trustees in the Universities of Bristol, Glasgow, and Birmingham in October and November 1937
(London: George Allen and Unwin, 1938), p. 57.

26
Bruce Ackerman,
We the People, vol. 1, Foundations
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991); Bruce Ackerman,
We the People, vol. 2, Transformations
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998). For a contrary view, minimizing the importance of the New Deal in shaping a constitutional revolution, see G. Edward White,
The Constitution and the New Deal
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), p. 311. For an earlier statement by Ackerman, focusing on the radical challenge to legal doctrine by both the quality and quantity of New Deal interventions in the market economy, see Ackerman,
Reconstructing American Law
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), especially pp. 6–11. Accounts of the centrality of shifts in governing authority are central to Karen Orren and Stephen Skowronek,
The Search for American Political Development
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

27
This is the position inscribed in the subtitle to the second edition of Theodore J. Lowi,
The End of Liberalism: The Second Republic of the United States
(New York: W. W. Norton and Company. 1979). The first edition (1969) was subtitled
Ideology, Policy, and the Crisis of Public Authority.
Lowi has often portrayed the New Deal as revolutionary. See, for an example, Theodore J. Lowi, “The Roosevelt Administration and the American State,” in
Comparative Theory and Political Experience: Mario Einaudi and the Liberal Tradition
, ed. Peter Katzenstein, Theodore J. Lowi, and Sidney Tarrow (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990).