The Enemy Within (38 page)

In late spring, a series of riveting labor conflicts unfolded across the border in Winnipeg, Canada. These were also of a “general” nature—and, unlike any of their predecessors, led to a virtual takeover of city government by a special strikers' “council.” Though outside U.S. territory, the Winnipeg strike was close enough, and violent enough, to frighten many who already sensed a tide of revolution gathering around them. Summer brought the threat of a national strike, and accompanying demonstrations, to the United States itself. Plans to begin were set for July 4; the immediate goal was to force the release of jailed labor activist Tom Mooney. When faced with another massive police mobilization, the organizers drew back; however, the mere prospect served to heighten still further a general feeling of alarm.

Autumn brought an absolute peak in the strike-ridden year of 1919: in early September, a police walkout in Boston; later the same month, the start of a nationwide steel strike; and six weeks after that, a broadscale stoppage by mineworkers in the coalfields of the East and upper Midwest. Each of these three major actions was met by forceful counteraction, both in the courts and on the streets. Each provoked sporadic, occasionally lethal, violence. (The Boston police strike led to citywide outbreaks of vandalism. And clashes between strikers and strikebreakers in several midwestern steel towns produced death, injury, and widespread property damage.) Each aroused fearful, outraged reaction from the public at large. And this, in turn, was effectively exploited—not to say, enhanced—by corporate employers and their politically conservative allies.

Finally, each was immediately, and heatedly, linked with “Red Revolution”—in spite of the fact that all were framed by quite limited, labor-related objectives. Consider some newspaper headlines: BOLSHEVIST NIGHTMARE. LENIN AND TROTSKY ARE ON THEIR WAY. SENATORS THINK EFFORT TO SOVIETIZE THE GOVERNMENT IS STARTED. REVOLUTION IS STAKE RADICALS PLAY FOR IN STRIKE OF MINERS. RED BOLSHEVISM DIRECTS BLOW AGAINST THE NATION. A cartoon in the
New York World
, with the caption “Steel Strike,” depicted a heavily muscled arm upthrust from a cluster of factory buildings, and holding high a banner bearing the single word “RED.” Another cartoon, in the
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
, portrayed an enormous foot labeled “Coal Strike” about to stomp on the dome of the nation's Capitol building.

In fact, this extraordinary year included many other tumultuous happenings: the discovery of bomb plots (especially in Seattle); the founding of two separate Communist parties; race riots in several cities (Chicago, Washington, Houston) as black citizens, including many recently returned veterans, fought off assault by whites. (Another newspaper headline to mention: REDS TRY TO STIR NEGROES TO REVOLT.) To list such events—and more could be added—is to acknowledge some genuine cause for alarm. Yet never was there the slightest prospect of actual “revolution”; and official response—including the actions of both federal and local authorities—was, by any measure, extreme.

The “Great Red Scare,” as it would later be called, rode atop a wave of angry public opinion. In the press, from church pulpits, in community forums across the land, the cry rang out: “Down with the Reds!” Suspicion turned in many directions—toward avowed radicals, first of all, but also toward labor organizers, teachers, some journalists and social workers, plus a large and more nebulous grouping of so-called parlor Reds (in short, anyone who might be construed as sympathetic to “Bolshevism”).

These attitudes would sustain a broad and severe campaign of suppression during the late fall and early winter. Its opening phase came in November, with antisubversive roundups by federal authorities in at least a dozen cities: the total of arrests ran into the hundreds. Local and state governments followed with raids of their own; in New York, for example, a legislative committee headed by state senator Clayton R. Lusk conducted investigations leading to the detention, and deportation, of numerous “alien” radicals. (Deporting those who were noncitizens was often the preferred strategy, since it involved only an administrative proceeding, not a full-blown prosecution in court.)

The climax came just after the New Year. On a single night ( January 2) the nation's attorney general, A. Mitchell Palmer, sent federal agents in 23 different states on a massive sweep directed largely at members of the two recently founded Communist parties. The net yield was over 6,000 detainees. Some of these would be quickly deported, while others were prosecuted under the criminal statutes of individual states. Public reaction was, at first, hugely enthusiastic and congratulatory. Opinion-makers across the land saluted Palmer and his corps of enforcers; the raids were seen as tolling the “death knell” of radicalism.

Subsequent events, however, proved anticlimactic. Protests against the treatment of detainees, including the sometimes disgraceful conditions of their incarceration, generated a growing backlash. Proceedings in the courts and the various administrative boards became increasingly bogged down; eventually, many of those held had to be released for lack of evidence. Palmer and his zealous young assistant, J. Edgar Hoover (soon to become the first director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation), sought to fan the flames of alarm by anticipating new conspiracies. But when their prediction of revolutionary violence on May Day failed to pan out, public interest began to fade.

Yet in many ways, the Great Red Scare had already achieved its goal of anchoring anti-radical attitudes at the center of the national mainstream. The rest of the 1920s would bring no reprise of the Palmer raids, but there was hardly any need. Sedition laws had by now gained a place on the statute books of a large majority of individual states. And, at the level of local governance, police “red squads” held political activists on a generally tight leash. The federal government, meanwhile, enacted and enforced a set of massively restrictive immigration measures, with quotas designed to maintain the demographic lead of “old-stock” Americans. Although the famous Sacco-Vanzetti trial of 1921 replayed the familiar “alien radical” theme, in actual fact aliens of all kinds were a rapidly shrinking presence. Culturally, too, the dominant note was a xenophobic brand of patriotism, nicely captured in the popular phrase “100 percent Americanism.”

 
If the 1920s were bounded at one end by the Great Red Scare, they were equally marked at the other by the Great Depression. Now the deck would be reshuffled once again, with large-scale anti-radical campaigns effectively coming to an end. Indeed, the era of the New Deal opened a door—at least partway—to radical change, in the face of ever-deepening, society-wide distress. The Communist Party itself gained a certain legitimacy denied it heretofore, and sought to exploit opportunities for “popular front” alliances with other left-of-center political forces.

Anti-communism retreated, but hardly disappeared. Indeed, the end of the 1930s saw its partial revival—and, in a preview of things to come, the beginnings of its transformation into a potent tool of partisan politics. New Deal Democrats were increasingly painted “pink” by Republican opponents. The House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) was born with a mandate to hunt down subversion. And the so-called Smith Act, passed by Congress in 1940, made it a crime to advocate overthrowing the government by force.

The Second World War introduced another abrupt break in this unfolding tableau; the “Reds” became allies, both at home and overseas, in the struggle against fascism. But once more the effect was temporary; and the immediate postwar era brought a rapid resurgence of anti-radical, anti-communist feeling.

The second great Red Scare of the 20th century was born in the aftermath of the 1946 congressional elections. Republicans had gained control of both Houses for the first time in nearly two decades, in part by associating their Democratic opponents with “radical” attitudes. The Cold War, though still in its infancy, was a source of growing public alarm. The administration of President Truman responded to these changed circumstances by instituting “loyalty” programs designed to weed out potential subversives within the federal government and by initiating a series of prosecutions under the Smith Act. Meanwhile, a reinvigorated HUAC undertook a new round of investigations, centering this time on infiltration of the movie industry; eventually these would lead to prison terms for a so-called Hollywood Ten, as well as a “blacklist” to prevent employment of other presumed radicals.

Truman's upset victory in the 1948 presidential elections did not deflect the onrushing anti-Communist tide. In the months to follow, the American side experienced a string of Cold War setbacks: the “fall” of China to Maoist forces, the acquisition by the Soviet Union of nuclear weaponry, and the invasion of South Korea by the Communist-ruled North. By now, too, public suspicion had turned forcefully toward (alleged) Communist penetration of the New Deal, personified in the figure of Alger Hiss (a high official in the Rooseveltera State Department). Hiss had been linked to espionage, and, in the fall of 1949, was tried, convicted, and jailed on charges of perjury. The Hiss case led to other loyalty proceedings against officials in the State and Justice departments; thus was a spiral of politically fraught investigations set in motion. Local and state governments joined the fray with loyalty campaigns of their own, while liberal groups and unions scrambled to rid themselves of the “Red” taint. The Truman administration was itself obliged to fight off politically damning charges of being “soft on Communism.”

With this, a stage was set for the emergence of the single most notorious anti-communist warrior of the entire century: Joseph R. McCarthy, a hitherto obscure Republican senator from Wisconsin. McCarthy's opening salvo was a speech delivered in February 1950, in Wheeling, West Virginia, in the course of which he brandished a list supposedly identifying 205 “card-carrying” Communists then at work in the State Department. The number would vary over time—205 one day, 57 the next—but the very idea of a list, with its implied specificity, was electrifying. Moreover, events soon conspired to lift McCarthy's profile enormously. Actual spies, it seemed, had penetrated to the heart of nuclear development programs both at home and abroad: hence the arrest, in quick succession, of Klaus Fuchs in Britain and Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in the United States. McCarthy had begun by targeting government officials of modest rank but would subsequently raise his aim to the level of Secretary of Defense George C. Marshall. Summing up the entire lot, he decried “a conspiracy so immense and an infamy so black as to dwarf any previous venture in the history of man.”

But McCarthy was just the centerpiece—in some respects more symbolic than substantive—of a steadily building, polity-wide “crusade.” Elected officials across-the-board, including many Democrats, were following a similar track. In 1950 the Senate passed an Internal Security Act, extending political surveillance from the operations of government to private organizations and individuals. Membership in the Communist Party would henceforth be a crime; and potential “security risk,” rather than simple “loyalty,” became the disqualifying marker for federal employment. The Senate Internal Security Subcommittee began a new round of investigations, paralleling and occasionally exceeding the efforts of HUAC. Meanwhile, too, the Justice Department stepped up the pace of prosecutions under the Smith Act; eventually, dozens of actual or supposed Communists would be jailed. The FBI under Hoover played an especially important role here, compiling secret dossiers on thousands of American citizens (plus some noncitizens) and selectively releasing the contents to those agencies and officials most fully sympathetic to the anti-communist agenda. And Hoover played an increasingly influential part as public spokesman. “Communists,” he declared in a widely noted 1950 address, “are today at work within the very gates of America. . . . They have . . . one diabolic ambition: to weaken and to eventually destroy American democracy by stealth and cunning.”

Thus did “McCarthyism” enter the mainstream of political life. And soon it would be augmented by powerful elements within the press, the business community (for example, a number of enormously wealthy Texas oilmen), the churches (especially evangelical Protestants and conservative Catholics), veterans groups, patriotic associations, and even some trade unions. Many of these sought to make a direct contribution to the anti-communist cause by weeding out “subversives” within their own ranks. Still, government itself remained the leading arm of attack. When Republicans triumphed in the 1952 national elections—taking control once again of both congressional Houses and making Dwight Eisenhower president—McCarthy gained a committee chairmanship to use as a forum for further investigation. The campaign had included much anti-communist rhetoric, with Democrats widely denounced for overseeing “twenty years of treason” and McCarthy cast in a central role; a respected political commentator could therefore conclude that “the voting majority indicated approval of . . . McCarthyism.” In the weeks and months to follow, the newly vindicated senator and his like-minded colleagues would pluck the fruits of their victory.