Authors: Ira Katznelson
The social whole, and with it the idea of a common good based on shared goals, disappeared. There was no attempt to galvanize agreement about the ends of government. That orientation served democracy by building a barrier against excessive ambitions of those who rule and as a means to constrain any potential tyranny of the majority. With government possessing no inherent goals of its own, the potential to abuse power is moderated. This procedural state thus advanced a robust version of democracy. In now classic studies, leading scholars writing in the early to mid-1950s celebrated what the political scientist Robert Dahl called “the American hybrid,” a democratic regime based on a plurality of independent and relatively autonomous organizations, and agreed with David Truman, who approved its rejection of a national or public interest, “because one does not exist.”
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But this particular type of democratic state opened the door to three kinds of deep problems that have persisted. First is a narrowing of politics to thin, confined, restricted, and potentially polarized interests. This contraction of civic sensibility to a politics without public purpose or norms can heighten conflict over limited matters and lead to gridlock or the rule of intense minorities.
Second is how putatively neutral rules favored those with more resources.
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Open rules can lead to the capture of key policies, agencies, congressional committees, even political parties, by outside interests with focused goals and concentrated means. A state without substance is a state ripe for special interests to grab hold of key elements of government.
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Although the procedural face of government did not officially recognize particular private interests as more privileged than any others, it effectively reduced the scope of labor as a national class, and in so doing helped enhance the power of capitalist firms and business ideology. This was quite an achievement, even a surprising one, in light of how much the Depression had shattered business prestige and had put market capitalism’s legitimacy in question.
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Especially with limits placed on organized labor, indeed with the steady decline in union membership since the mid-1950s, the political system has failed to counterbalance economic power. From time to time, efforts have been made to counter the imbalance of money, organization, and access, but unless strong counterpressures can be mobilized, inequality grows, poverty is neglected, and equal citizenship is compromised.
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Third is how, with “sovereignty . . . parceled out among the groups” and with public values trumped by private-regarding goals and power, the procedural state generates recurring crises of public authority and civic trust.
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Disillusionment and cynicism result when a system declared to be impartial and just by definition is found to be unfair. The result is either too little political participation or episodic and volatile participation by enraged citizens who are convinced that the putatively neutral rules of the game are rigged. Once the New Deal’s more assertive projects for managing capitalism ended and the prospects of a national labor movement diminished, both the result of actions by fearful southern representatives, the longer-term prospects of American democracy were sharply constrained, and the range of feasible options narrowed to a conservative return to business capitalism or a liberal defense of the fiscal policies that the New Deal ultimately fashioned.
If this domestic state was designated as dispassionate and disinterested, Washington’s other face was remarkably different. Fighting on behalf of a keen sense of national interest—itself an amalgam of power considerations and liberal democratic ideals—this crusading national security state did not shy away from being cruel, cunning, and faithless. These were the three harsh adjectives the leading realist theorist of international relations, Hans Morgenthau, used in December 1952 to designate how all nations, including the United States, must act when their interests are at stake in a world persistently threatened by “continuous conflict and the threat of war.” For the United States, such an orientation and such behavior, he argued, was both reasonable and rightful. When American security and liberty are jeopardized, he wrote, “the cause of liberty everywhere will be impaired.”
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With the United States shedding illusions and embracing a hardheaded assessment of its global adversary, this combination of power and value dominated the diplomatic, military, and clandestine activities of the postwar crusading state. A week after his November 4, 1952, landslide, General Eisenhower addressed the country. E
ISENHOWER
H
AILS
F
REEDOM
C
RUSADE
, the
New York Times
headlined. Calling for public support of the Crusade for Freedom campaign that “carries the message of freedom into all countries behind the Iron Curtain by means of Radio Free Europe and Radio Free Asia,” the president-elect endorsed a war of ideas as an aspect of the larger struggle for the indivisibility of freedom, a concept that he insisted applied to “any nation, no matter how powerful.”
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The president-elect was joined in this appeal by Adlai Stevenson, a signal that this aspect of U.S. policy crossed partisan boundaries.
This side of the new American state projected might to advance democracy, but, in so doing, it often traduced liberty at home, and promoted authoritarian, often repressive, and sometimes murderous regimes elsewhere. It did not so much supplant Congress as live off powers delegated to it by a mostly compliant House and Senate, creating a sensibility that opposition to American military expansion was simply un-American. It celebrated military virtues, promoted private armies, conducted foreign subversion even of legitimate and democratic governments, and planted hundreds of military bases around the world. Many of its key decisions were made by small groups of actors, often in secret. When the sociologist C. Wright Mills published the controversial book
The Power Elite
in 1956, every decision he singled out as having been made in this manner concerned violence and military might.
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Though a critic of Mills’s writing for underestimating America’s procedural state, Robert Dahl had already shown how, in the vital area of international and military affairs, especially atomic energy policy, “the political processes of democracy do not operate.” He cited as distinguishing characteristics the “
significantly
smaller” policymaking elite in this area, and the practice of secrecy. These traits, he cautioned, which diminish opportunities for popular control, had begun to produce “a kind of indigestible element in the operation of American democratic politics.” He concluded by stating that “atomic energy appears to be one of a growing class of situations for which the traditional democratic processes are rather unsuitable and for which traditional theories of democracy provide no rational answer.”
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This insulated state also stood guard at home, often exercising highly autonomous executive powers, all the while effecting profound changes on society at large. It watched closely over those who were thought to support external enemies, and it demanded a strong sense of unity, loyalty, and obligation from American citizens. This assertive state prized the kind of cohesion that was announced in 1940 by Justice Felix Frankfurter, writing for the 8–1 majority in
Minersville School District v. Gobitis,
a Supreme Court ruling that public schools could compel Jehovah’s Witnesses to salute the American flag and recite the Pledge of Allegiance despite their view that such actions signify idolatry. Though this decision was reversed three years later, the language he used to reject their claim of First Amendment rights anticipated the increasingly common understanding that “national unity is the basis of national security.”
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Not the full-blown garrison state famously feared in 1941 by the political scientist Harold Lasswell,
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the crusader state was partially contained by constitutional rules and congressional oversight, and by concern for international rights.
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But its ambitions, reach, and abilities were, and remain, astonishing.
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National security crowded individual freedom. Lasswell, a friend of civil liberty, opened his 1950 assessment by stating that “the central problem . . . is how to maintain a proper balance between national security and individual freedom in a continuing crisis of national defense.”
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This continuing crisis generated perpetual fear, especially atomic fear, that sometimes led not to the reasoned assessment Lasswell sought to promote but to hysterical witch-hunts marked by a quest for disciplined unity, suspicious about loyalty, distrust of privacy, limitations on dissent, and an obsession with safety. As the country faced predatory enemies who wished it ill, it became all too tempting to compromise constitutional guarantees and confine the democratic character of the procedural state to issues far from questions of might and global power. Conflict, diversity, open expression, and the representative process itself, in these circumstances, often fell victim to the zealous defense of liberty and democracy, to loyalty as a supreme value, and to an obsessive search for treason.
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A sense of permanent emergency governed by agencies specializing in security developed corrosive habits of enclosure that often eluded democratic accountability.
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Civil society, moreover, came to be bruised by these circumstances and demands. A leading example is how the physical sciences came to be defined as an instrument of the state, and owed more and more of their research capability to military support, and faced intense scrutiny about loyalty and obligation in an atmosphere of frenzied political pressure.
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In the early 1950s, Robert Oppenheimer offered a vivid example of how even a most important architect of American national security could fall prey to such suspicions and practices. Well before he led the Manhattan Project, he had been attracted by various popular-front organizations on the left periphery of the New Deal. He never joined the Communist Party, but his brother had, and so had his wife before they married. When he was accused by former Communists Paul and Sylvia Crouch of having hosted a secret Party meeting at his home in 1941, his effective denial, based on compelling evidence that he had been in New Mexico at the time, persuaded even Richard Nixon, then a member of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, to report that he had “complete confidence” in Oppenheimer’s loyalty. “I am convinced that Dr. Oppenheimer has been and is a completely loyal American, and further, one to whom the people of the United States owe a great debt of gratitude for his tireless and magnificent job in atomic research.”
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When an effort had been made in 1943 to turn Oppenheimer into a source of secret information for Soviet science, he had refused, and, after a period of reflection, he reported the effort.
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As it turned out, the FBI opened an investigation on Oppenheimer before Los Alamos, and had been tapping his phone and opening his mail ever since he had taken a lead role in building the bomb. With the end of the war, the Bureau renewed its surveillance, including more wiretapping, on the basis of his prewar associations. An intensive period of surveillance in 1947 turned up nothing, and Oppenheimer was assessed as loyal. In 1948, he openly recalled his former left-wing orientation, “with lots of Communist friends.” This, he wrote, had been a quite typical product of concern for the Depression and hatred of Nazi Germany, a country he had come to know well when he had done graduate work at Göttingen in the mid-1920s.
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It was this blemished past combined with his mostly persistent opposition to the development of the H-bomb that generated fresh suspicions and investigations, with such suspicions reinforced by the arrest of Soviet atomic spies in Britain and the United States. Most important was the search for evidence of subversion and disloyalty by the executive director of the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, William Borden. Based on the argument that Oppenheimer had contributed to the Communist Party before the war, had been in contact with Soviet agents, had weakened in his support of the atomic program after the war, and had opposed building the new bomb—arguments based on deeply flawed information and mere supposition; at most, the evidence was charged with ambiguity—Borden wrote to J. Edgar Hoover on November 7, 1953, to report his “exhaustively considered opinion, based upon years of study, of the available classified evidence that more probably than not J. Robert Oppenheimer is an agent of the Soviet Union.”
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Hoover, who had become a paradigmatic reflection of the worst aspects of the crusading state, followed up by warning the White House, and opened his own investigation. Though it found many of Borden’s charges to be “distorted,” its assessment concluded with the statement that Oppenheimer was “a serious security risk.”
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With this report, the White House was confronted with a political problem, and possibly with a security one. And with Senator Joseph McCarthy traveling a destructive and tortured path, the young Eisenhower administration decided to take no chances. At the start of December 1953, President Eisenhower ordered Oppenheimer’s security clearance to be lifted.
Oppenheimer demanded a hearing to be conducted by the Atomic Energy Commission. Now led by Adm. Lewis Strauss, a strong supporter of the H-bomb who wanted to marginalize Oppenheimer for policy and political reasons, this process proved to be much like a criminal trial, but without the usual protections and guarantees. The FBI flagrantly monitored conversations between Oppenheimer and his lawyers, thus presenting Strauss in advance with the defense they would offer. On May 27, 1954, the hearing board decreed by a 2–1 vote that this leading scientist was, in fact, a security risk, largely because of his opposition to the hydrogen bomb, and thus lifted all his access to classified information. He was not found to have been disloyal, but there was no affirmation of his loyalty. Ironically, the one hearing judge, Ward Evans, who had made anti-Semitic comments about Oppenheimer, “about Jewish scientists usually being guilty,” voted in his favor.
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Following an appeal, the Board of Review declared that it had “been unable to arrive at the conclusion that it would be clearly consistent with the security interests of the United States to reinstate Dr. Oppenheimer’s clearance, and, therefore, we do not so recommend.”
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