Dyed-In-The-Wool History
The McCarthy Hearings
Jim Pederson January 18, 2025 R2
Were there Communists in the American government prior to, during, and after World War II? Part of this question is easy to answer while in other respects it’s a bit more involved. The Communist Party in the 1920’s was a fringe group but in a few short years that was changed dramatically. The Fish committee (Hamilton Fish) on communism in 1930 had found the Party to be a militant revolutionary group predominantly headed by alien leaders and drawing on recent immigrants for their base, many of whom didn’t speak English (1 pp. 50-51). By the mid-30’s, the party would undergo a makeover. They put aside their violent rhetoric and were recast by party leader Earl Browder and his core followers as being true Americanism updated for the modern era (1 pp. 50-51). They partnered with other left leaning organizations and were largely mainstream. Some of the memorable oddities of youth during this time period like dancing marathons and flagpole sitting weren’t what that appeared to be and were neither spontaneous nor indigenous to the United States. They were propaganda and recruiting operations and were generally designed by German communist Willi Munzenberg who was instrumental in managing communists’ front groups and publications.
The party demographics also changed as native born Americans, mostly young people right off of the college campuses, made up the bulk of the new followers or “travelers”. Party members integrated into all walks of life especially in colleges, media, and government. This was aided by the rapid and drastic expansion of the federal government under the New Deal (1 pp. 50-51). The variety of social engineering projects were very attractive to collectivists and Utopians and there was very little vetting during this time period. This brought together a dense population of communists and Marxists along with others who were very receptive to being recruited. In the main federal agencies, the travelers were especially concentrated in the Departments of Agriculture and Labor along with the treasury department (1 p. 52). The Treasury Dept in particular was home to some notable people who have been remembered in history as communist sympathizers and/pr collaborators like Dexter White, Solomon Adler, V. Frank Coe, and others. Much of what came to be known about the infiltration process as well as many of the people came to be known from the testimony of Whitaker Chambers who was a Soviet courier who worked principally with federal employees. (1 p. 52)
Outside of the American left, the term “communist” was seen as a general label for leftists but amongst the American left there were distinctions. European and American Marxists were largely Trotskyites that Stalin had purged after coming to power. The degree to which a follower of Leon Trotsky would feel allegiance to towards Stalin’s Russia is certainly debatable. It was common for Trotskyites to actually be “reborn” or at least rebranded as new right conservatives and especially neo-conservatives later. American Marxists commonly did have a liberal or progressive orientation or background but Lenin in particular didn’t see a strong commonality. Lenin had written a book in 1921 titled “Left Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder” that he saw no direct linkage or comparison between the Russian revolution and world communism (2 p. ch. 1)
Author Thomas Fleming in his book “The New Dealers War” concluded that there were at least 329 communist spies in the Roosevelt administration and no one in either party, including the president himself, had any idea of it (3 p. 459) although how the term is defined is also relevant and must be seen in the context of the time. The Roosevelt administration had a close working relationship with the Russians and saw them as partners in shaping the peace. It would have been very difficult to foresee then that the Cold War would develop shortly after WWII or that the people who would initiate it would be right out of FDR's administration in the form of the "Wise Men". Along with the domestic conditions, the degree of synergy and interaction between the Soviet and American militaries was moving the two societies toward a moral convergence (4). This factor was especially important with regard to intelligence and Foreign Service. In light of these things, it would have been remarkable if there wasn’t a good deal of infiltration or interaction depending on one’s political orientation. One of the most notable cases was that of Henry Dexter White who was a leading thinker in Henry Morgenthau’s Treasury Department and was “arguably the most important U.S. government economist of the 20th century.” (5 p. 177) He was accused of being a spy in 1948 by the House Committee on Un-American Activities and vigorously denied the charges when called to testify. He died of a heart attack a few days after his testimony and the matter is still contested today.
In the late 40’s and early 50’s the rooting out of Communists and sympathizers immediately leads to Joe McCarthy, the firebrand senator from Wisconsin who, as author M. Stanton Edwards clearly stated in the title of his work on McCarthy, has been effectively “blacklisted by history”. Prior to McCarthy during the 1930’s there was Martin Dies who was a conservative Democrat from East Texas. Dies like McCarthy was bitterly opposed and attacked by those on the political left and the media. In the 30’s though, the political climate and flow of events worked against these efforts. After the war as the “vital center” formed and the Communists and far left groups and individuals were forced out of the mainstream there was a political will to act.
Joe McCarthy is portrayed today as a reckless dimwitted populace tyrant who ruined people’s lives without cause and shut down free speech by accusing anyone who opposed him as being a communist. While there was certainly some truth to that, Senator McCarthy was also highly intelligent and hard working. Critics of McCarthy would frequently point out that “he never exposed a single communist mole of soviet spy” (1 p. 37). If exposed meant someone was tried and convicted that would be true but McCarthy’s senate committee’s goal wasn’t to try and convict but to expose and remove communists moles and spies from the government and he used the power his role gave somewhat recklessly and for political advantage. Moreover, information that became available later to the general public confirmed that many of the people he targeted including all of the major figures were, at least, associated with the Soviets. The Venona decrypts from a secret program started in 1943 but not released until 1995 are primary documents used by Evans in his study of McCarthy that largely compromised the exculpatory claims of many of McCarthy’s opponents and validated that McCarthy was at least partially right (1). It should be noted though that there is some controversy still surrounding the Venona decrypts and the circumstances surrounding their release. Some have concluded that the Venona decrypts validated McCarthy’s allegations and to an extent they did. A counterpoint to this would be that when a country is seen as an ally, information is shared far more freely and Russia went from an ally to an adversary in a remarkably short period of time following FDR’s death (as depicted in the chart below).
McCarthy definitely stoked the Cold War and made it difficult for voices of moderation to be heard. More importantly, he created a real sense of fear in the American people that America, Christianity, and Democracy were under an eminent threat from the forces of world communism and that these threats were both internal and external. He brought large numbers of generally younger Catholics into the ranks of the Cold War supporters by enforcing the idea that they were defending their faith in an existential battle against a Godless foe. The Senator speaking before a Republican Women’s Club in Wheeling, West Virginia said, “Today we are engaged in a final, all-out battle between communistic atheism and Christianity.… As one of our outstanding historical figures once said, “When a great democracy is destroyed, it will not be because of enemies from without, but rather because of enemies from within.…”(6 p. 314) McCarthy became friends with the Kennedy’s including the patriarch Joe.
A fundamental question regarding McCarthy is determining where his information was fed from and how he got started in his crusade. McCarthy’s attack on Marxism goes back to before the Korean War and was largely built around events in China and Korea. According to author Bruce Cummings, “McCarthy was supplied documentation on alleged subversives, most of it classified, by J. Edgar Hoover, Willoughby and Whitney of MacArthur’s staff, and even Walter Bedell Smith of the CIA” (7 p. 111). General Charles Willoughby had started investigations of his own in 1947 targeting academics especially those associated with the Institute of Pacific Relations with his first case being that of Andrew Grajdanzev who authored a report of Japanese rule of Korea in 1944 (7 p. 111). The primary allegations against him were that he had received a recommendation from John Hopkins professor Owen Lattimore and that he wanted to purge Japanese leaders with problematic pre-1945 records. Willoughby held that “American Communist brains planned the communization of China,” fellow-traveling people who had “an inexplicable fanaticism for an alien cause, the Communist ‘Jehad’ of pan-Slavism for the subjugation of the Western world.” (7 pp. 111-2)
McCarthy specifically began to focus on Lattimore but his real target was Dean Acheson who was the last high profile American, other than Truman, in early 1950 standing in the way of further American backing for Chiang Kai-Shek. In April of 1950 McCarthy claimed to have a document incriminating Lattimore as a Soviet agent which prompted Lattimore to release the document to the press. In this memorandum he wrote for the State Department in 1949 he stated, “the U.S. should disembarass itself as quickly as possible of its entanglements in South Korea.” He referred to Korea as a “little China,” and Rhee as another Chiang saying, “If we could not win with Chiang how could we win with “a scattering of ‘little Chiang Kai-sheks’ in China or elsewhere in Asia”? He also criticized the developing bureaucratic momentum in summer and fall of 1949 for not just containing communism, but rolling it back (7 p. 112). An excerpt from his memo is as follows:
It certainly cannot yet be said … that armed warfare against communism in the Far East … has become either unavoidable or positively desirable. Nor can it be said with any assurance that … the Far East would be the optimum field of operation. There are still alternatives before us—a relatively long peace, or a rapid approach toward war. If there is to be war, it can only be won by defeating Russia—not northern Korea, or Viet Nam, or even China. (8)
Lattimore with specific regard to Korea stated, “chief power is concentrated in the hands of people who were collaborators of Japan.… Southern Korea, under the present regime, could not resume close economic relations with Japan without a complete reinfiltration of the old Japanese control and associations … the kind of regime that exists in southern Korea is a terrible discouragement to would-be democrats throughout Asia.… Korea stands as a terrible warning of what can happen.” (7 pp. 113-4) Yet he eventually went along with supporting the Korean War (9) which gives an indication of how difficult it was to stand against the tide of political hysteria at this time. Liberals and Progressives were generally willing to abandon their beliefs and opinions to fit into the rapidly moving window of allowable opinion as noted in the following two passages:
“One of the major ironies of the period was the unexpected role which liberals played, first in constructing a new liberalism which rejected the American left, and then in accepting some of the basic assumptions and tactics of the Red Scare itself.” Historian Mary McAuliffe (7 p. 113)
“Liberals were almost always more concerned about distinguishing themselves from the Left than about distinguishing themselves from conservatives.” Thus they joined “the citadel of … a conservative liberalism.” If the fear of being investigated had shown the intellectuals “the stick” in the early 1950s, “the hope of being consulted had shown them the carrot” thereafter. (7 p. 114)
McCarthy was especially influential in shaping Asian policy and fostering the idea the China was lost to the communists. Speaking to the American Society of Newspaper editors, he said, “Communists and queers have sold 400 million Asiatic people into atheistic slavery and they now have the American people in a hypnotic trance, headed blindly toward the same precipice.”(6 p. 342)(9 p. 104) This sort of thinking that was largely devoid of any real knowledge of China and Asia and created career risks that drove most analysts’, sometimes referred to as “China Hands”, to seek other employment creating a void of knowledge in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations and strongly influenced US policy in Asia through the Viet Nam time period. (6 pp. 355-6) Eventually the political impact of focusing solely on Asia began to fade and McCarthy moved on to other bigger targets.
Early in the Eisenhower administration McCarthy challenged the confirmation of Charles Bohlen as Ambassador to Moscow. Bohlen was one of the “Wise Men” who could largely be considered the architects of the Cold War and the thought that he could be considered some form of Communist sympathizer shows how far and how rapidly the dialogue had shifted. Bowen was certainly not the preferred choice for the Dulles’s but they chose to support the president’s selection. Bohlen’s nomination was forwarded to the Senate on February 26th of 1953 and on March 2nd he testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (10). Republican Senators pressed him on his role at Yalta led by Senator Homer Ferguson of Michigan whose election slogan was “betrayal at Yalta”. Bohlen thought this went relatively well but his defense of Yalta became headlines the next day.(10)
Republican big guns of the anti-communist campaign, Senators Styles Bridges of New Hampshire, William Knowland of California, and Joe McCarthy demanded that the nomination be withdrawn. Rumors circulated about adverse information in the FBI background check. Dulles dismissed the allegations as “spotty and unsubstantiated”(10) . Dulles supported Bohlen to the committee after there were some fears he wouldn’t. A State Department employee who also had access to the file and was associated with McCarthy, Scott McLeod, went around Dulles saying in his diary, that Bohlen was “the keystone son of a bitch” of the Foreign Service, and the president should know he was a grave security risk” (10). Dulles and Eisenhower were furious but thought it too politically risky to fire McLeod (10). Dulles’s support for Bohlen was largely due to other losses he had suffered at the hand of McCarthy and others. Isolationist Republican Senator Taft, who was narrowly defeated by Eisenhower for the Republican nomination, then intervened. Taft and Senator John Sparkman of Alabama were allowed to review the report and found the allegations against him to be baseless and filed their own report with glowing recommendations from other prominent Republicans like General McArthur and Henry Cabot Lodge. The report specifically found Bohlen’s marriage to be strong.(11 pp. 568-70). This was the first loss McCarthy would suffer but it wouldn’t be the last.
Below is a video from the Army - McCarthy hearings that eventually brought McCarthy down
There was a clear cultural aspect to McCarthy’s appeal that author Bruce Cummings reflected in The Korean War: A History writing: “For Americans who had to be told what a Communist looked like, McCarthy supplied plausible models: mainly Eastern establishment blue bloods, but also Foggy Bottom scribblers, tweedy professors, closet-bound homosexuals, and China experts who had been abroad too long—anyone who might be identified as an internal foreigner, alien to the American heartland. (The Freeman once said that Red propaganda appealed only to “Asian coolies and Harvard professors.”) Almost anybody with a good education might qualify; thus the bane of the liberal in the fifties was the threat of mistaken identity.”(7 p. 109) He expanded this with specific reference to McCarthy’s targeting of Wise Man Dean Acheson saying, “McCarthy came from a farm constituency of Catholics and German-Americans, giving colorful voice to their hatred of the British and Anglophile easterners, for whom Acheson, with his phony British accent, waxed mustache, top hat and tails, was the flypaper.” (7 p. 110)
So what brought McCarthy down? Most probably because he was a populace figure that went around the media and governmental establishment and he simply became too influential. Speaking of McCarthy’s populace appeal, Murray Rothbard observed, “It seemed to me that this was what McCarthy was trying to do; and that it was largely this appeal, the open-ended sense that there was no audacity of which McCarthy was not capable, that frightened the liberals, who, from their opposite side of the fence, also saw that the only danger to their rule was in just such a whipping up of populist emotions” (12 pp. 144-5). Noting the similarities between populist movements on both the left and right, commentator George Hamilton Combs further observed, “The resemblance between this crowd and their opposite members of the extreme left is startlingly close. This was a rightist version of the Henry Wallace convention crowd, the Progressive Party convention of ’48” (12 p. 157).
While these observations may be generally accurate, there was a specific string of events that brought McCarthy to an end. In 1952 and 53 immediately following Eisenhower taking office he took on John Dulles’s State Department with little resistance but when he moved on to the military and the CIA he crossed a line. Republican Senator Arthur Vandenberg told Truman at one point prior to a vote on aid to Greece, he would have to “scare hell out of the American people” to get the congressional votes he needed. (13 p. 157). McCarthy was useful in that he certainly succeeded in doing this on a grander scale but his usefulness had run out and he was a threat to his former allies – he had gone rogue. McCarthy specifically was targeting Bill Bundy for supporting Alger Hiss but Bundy was part of Allen Dulles’ inner circle. J Edgar Hoover and Allen Dulles started compiling information to compromise McCarthy. Hoover and Dulles also targeted each other. There were allegations of McCarthy being a homosexual but they were never confirmed and probably not true. The 43 year old Senator did, about this time, marry a lady significantly younger than him in a lavish Washington wedding. (5 pp. 220-2)
When McCarthy subpoenaed Bundy, Dulles stonewalled him and said that Bundy was on leave while keeping him at an undisclosed location. On July 9, 1953 McCarthy condemned Dulles on the Senate floor saying his actions were a “blatant attempt to thwart the authority of the Senate” and demanded Dulles appear before his subcommittee. Dulles refused but visited McCarthy in his office where he said that due to the nature of their work the CIA must be granted immunity. Eisenhower supported Dulles and assigned Vice President Nixon to meet with McCarthy to arrange a “face saving” path for the senator to back down, which he did (5 pp. 222-4). McCarthy’s defeat at the hands of Dulles gave Dulles and the CIA widespread support amongst liberals which made the agency even stronger and harder to control.
A weakened McCarthy then turned his attention to the Army. In February of 1954 Eisenhower ally Republican Senator Henry Cabot Lodge warned Eisenhower that the committee’s investigation was “an attempt to destroy the president politically. There is no doubt about it. He is picking on the Army because Eisenhower was in the Army.”(5 p. 225) Eisenhower then authorized Lodge to request a report from the Army that the Army had been secretly compiling on the ways McCarthy and his 26 year old chief counsel had attempted to intimidate and blackmail military authorities. Cohn was believed to be a homosexual and some of the specific allegations had to do with obtaining special treatment for Cohn’s boyfriend David Shine who was drafted into the Army in October of 1953. McCarthy’s subcommittee removed him as chairman and called for a hearing on the Army’s allegations which were televised. McCarthy’s standard presentation didn’t present well with him in the position of the defendant and the public generally found him repulsive. The hearing ended with the Army’s attorney Joseph Nye Welch saying “Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?” (5 p. 225) In December of 1954 the Senate voted to censure McCarthy from which point he continued to slide into alcoholism. In May of 1957 he was admitted to the Bethesda Naval Hospital where he died of liver failure at age forty-eight having drank himself to death.
While McCarty’s name has since become a euphemism for political name calling, he had a very significant impact on the politics of this time that brought about demographic shifts in political affiliation than had a lingering impact to current times. He made it impossible to have a rational discussion on Cold War policies and cemented the notion that China had been “lost” and Korea could be “lost” followed by Vietnam which is based on the assumption that America ever had them to lose in the first place. For several generations he and people like him created a very real fear in the population that America was not an aggressor but a victim defending itself against an external threat that sought to destroy both Christianity and the United States. Politically he brought a new demographic to the ranks of the Cold Warriors in the form of Catholics and sealed the fate of the isolationist “Old Right” that had struggled for control of the Republican Party. Religiously he collected both conservative Protestants and Catholics into the New Right where the developing Cold War and the conflicts that went along with it became a sort of 20th century crusade with Christianity and Western Liberalism becoming merged in the context of American Exceptionalism.
Bibliography
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