McCarthyism

McCARTHYISM. During the late 1940s and 1950s, thousands of men and women who were or had been active in the Left fell victim to a massive wave of political repression. Named McCarthyism in honor of the senator from Wisconsin who dominated the news with his reckless charges of subversion in the federal government, the movement was actually a far broader and more effective campaign that not only helped destroy the American Communist Party as an effective political organization, but also drove the Left out of American politics for more than a decade. Nonetheless, when compared with political repression in other societies, McCarthyism was comparatively mild. Only two people (Julius and Ethel Rosenberg) were executed and a few hundred others sent to jail; unemployment and the threat of deportations were the main punishments.

Though anticommunism had long been an important element of American politics, it was not until the United States became involved in the Cold War that it became the dominant element. At that point, the anticommunist program of the political Right was transformed into a national crusade to eliminate Communism and all the groups, individuals, and ideas associated with it from any position of influence within American society. The McCarthyist crusade operated on several levels and contained several different strands. A common thread, however, was the proposition that Communism was such a serious threat to the nation’s security that its adherents did not deserve the political and civil rights that other Americans enjoyed. In this period, even the most extreme McCarthyites—like those who believed that the United Nations was as subversive as the Communist Party—often had enough political or economic power to pass legislation or to get people fired.

The McCarthyist crusade began in Washington, D.C., where the Truman administration, under pressure from the traditionally more anticommunist Republican Party, mounted a campaign against domestic Communists as a way of defending itself against charges that it was soft on Communism. The centerpiece of that campaign was a loyalty-security program for government employees. The program, embodied in President Truman’s Executive Order 9835 of March 1947, barred Communists, fascists, and other totalitarians as well as anybody guilty of “sympathetic association” with them. Though there was some criticism of Executive Order 9835 at the time, most of it was directed against the program’s lack of procedural safeguards and reliance on unnamed informers. The core of the program, the institution of a political test for employment, was not seriously questioned and, in fact, quickly spread from the federal government to private employers. The fact that some Communist Party members within the federal government did, indeed, spy for the Soviet Union during World War II gave considerable plausibility to the later witch hunt.

Though whatever threat domestic Communism posed to American security essentially ended after the war, the Truman administration’s loyalty-security program made the campaign against it a national priority. It also established the two-stage procedure that was to characterize McCarthyism. First the supposed subversives were identified, then they were punished. The first stage, that of identification, was usually handled by some kind of governmental organization, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, for example, or a congressional investigating committee, though conservative journalists and right-wing vigilante groups also fingered people, often with help from the Bureau.

The second stage of the McCarthyist process was the application of sanctions. Federal, state, and local governments sometimes administered this stage as well. Most of the time, however, the second stage of McCarthyism was handled by private employers who readily collaborated with the process by firing the individuals who had been identified as politically undesirable during the first stage. Although the first-stage identification procedure is quite well known and is, in fact, what most people usually identify as McCarthyism, it is clear that without the second-stage application of sanctions, the anticommunist offensive would have been much less effective. That second stage not only made it difficult for Communists and other leftists to remain politically active and lead normal lives, but also drew the private sector into the picture.

Most of the people affected were Communists or former Communists who refused to repudiate their past political activities. The Party’s leaders probably suffered the most severe penalties. Although the federal government never actually outlawed the Party, it harassed it so severely that it had to devote most of its activities to its own defense. Probably the most significant action in that regard was the indictment and conviction of the Party’s top leaders under the 1940 Smith Act for “conspiring to teach and advocate” the forcible overthrow of the government of the United States. Though the Smith Act was a clear violation of the First Amendment’s protection of free speech, in 1951 the Supreme Court upheld the Communist leaders’ conviction, thus reinforcing the notion that the Party’s activities constituted a “clear and present danger” to the nation’s security.

Another important element in the McCarthyist campaign was the anticommunist investigations carried out by conservative congressmen. These investigations performed several functions. They not only identified individuals as politically undesirable, but they also provided a forum for the Republican Party’s charges that Democratic administrations had tolerated communist subversion. These charges gained substance after the House Un-American Activities Committee’s (HUAC) hearings on Communists in government in the fall of 1948 uncovered in the Alger Hiss case what appeared to be an example of high-level espionage. Accused of having been a Communist and then of having passed government documents, Hiss, a former State Department official, denied the charges and was ultimately convicted of perjury, primarily on the testimony of Whittaker Chambers, a self-confessed former spy. The Hiss case not only gave substance to the Republican charges that the New Deal regime had been harboring Communists, but it also enhanced the stature of HUAC and the other anticommunist investigating committees.

Joseph McCarthy was only the most notorious of the congressional anticommunist investigators. He differed from the rest only in that he attacked liberals as well as radicals. But the burden of his charges was the same: he was trying to pin responsibility for such supposed American setbacks as the Communist victory in China on internal subversion. When McCarthy got out of control and continued his attacks even after a Republican administration had taken over, he was finally stopped. But his earlier charges and those of the other congressional investigators did enormous damage, both to the careers and personal lives of the individuals they targeted as well as to the rest of society.
Because employers collaborated with the anticommunist investigating committees by firing the people who refused to cooperate with them, the committees’ witnesses had few options. Cooperation, as the committees defined it, meant giving the names of former political comrades, a degrading procedure designed to force people to repudiate their left-wing pasts. Witnesses who named names usually kept their jobs; witnesses who did not usually lost theirs. In addition, they risked going to jail for contempt of Congress. The Supreme Court, whose majority apparently condoned the anticommunist crusade, did not protect people from having to answer the committees’ questions about their political beliefs and associations. The only protection the Court upheld was that embodied in the Fifth Amendment’s privilege against having to testify against oneself. The committees, which knew that many of their witnesses had invoked the Fifth Amendment only to avoid becoming informers, exploited these people’s predicament by branding them as “Fifth Amendment Communists.”

Though the men and women who faced congressional investigators received the most publicity during the McCarthy period, thousands of other people also lost their jobs or were harassed in other ways. Loyalty oaths proliferated, especially for government employees at the state and local level. Security clearances for defense-related work affected scientists and engineers. Exact figures are hard to come by, though one source estimates that approximately ten thousand people may have lost their jobs. Unemployment was not the only sanction. The Immigration and Naturalization Service threatened to deport foreign-born radicals and the State Department denied passports to suspected Reds. There were unofficial harassments as well, from the entertainment industry blacklists to anonymous telephone calls. Many people who did not lose their jobs or go to jail nonetheless suffered considerable personal strain and anxiety.

It is difficult to assess the damage that McCarthyism did to the American Left. Certainly, it contributed to the demise of the American Communist Party as a politically viable movement, though the Party’s own internal problems and self-destructive behavior in the face of the campaign against it was also a factor. More important, by increasing the personal risks associated with political radicalism, McCarthyism created a climate that discouraged people from participating in left-wing activities. Those radicals who remained active had to devote most of their attention to self-defense. As a result, it was not until McCarthyism began to subside in the late 1950s that the American Left could again focus on such issues as peace, racial equality, and economic justice.

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