McCarthyism: The long shadow of a false narrative

Sen. Joseph McCarthy's anti-communist crusade lasted only four short years. Seven years after the Wheeling speech he was dead. The caricature of the man embedded in the historical narrative has persisted for decades. (Every one knows McCarthy is bad even if they do not know what he actually did.

Long after his fall, McCarthy and his supporters haunted the nightmares of the leading public intellectuals in the U.S. His brief ascendency upended their once rosy view of democracy.

In 1949, Arthur Schlesinger confidently announced that “we are changing from a market society to an administrative society.” For twenty years urban progressivism was in the driver's seat. FDR had won four elections while he expanded the federal government and staffed his alphabet agencies with intellectuals and the graduates of the best universities. Then unsuitable men like McCarthy and Nixon had garnered public support by attacking the competence, honesty, and loyalty of these same progressive avatars.

This demanded an explanation.

One explanation had the now obvious advantage of being true:

There is no mystery about Joe McCarthy. He just doesn't like Communists. What is so peculiar about this point of view that it calls for an explanation.
John T. Flynn

For there is one thing that the American people know about Senator McCarthy: he, like them, is unequivocally anti-Communist. About the spokesmen for American liberalism, they feel they know no such thing. And with some justification.
Irving Kristol

For young, ambitious intellectuals in the 1950s, this viewpoint was a nonstarter. It was an article of faith that the internal communist threat was nonexistent and that McCarthy was a liar. The key question, then, was why did millions of Americans believe his absurd lies?

One influential group of scholars and pundits thought they found the answer in psychology and sociology.

In The New American Right (1955) seven contributors set out to explain the McCarthy phenomenon and the nature of post- New Deal conservatism. It is a classic example of the Left diagnosing conservatives instead of debating them. (Here again we see ostensible liberals adopting the methods of LeninThink.

The editor, future neocon Daniel Bell, found McCarthy puzzling and in need of explanation because he had done the unthinkable: he attacked “intellecuals, Harvard, Anglophiles, internationalists, and the Army”. Bell could only conclude that the movement was not a rational reaction to real issues:
“The theme of conspiracy haunts the mind of the new rightists.”

These “new conservatives” fell victim to conspiracy theories because they were uneducated, close-minded, losing ground economically, or anxious about their social status.

The net message was clear. The new, post-McCarthy right was not a legitimate political movement. It was symptomatic of social and psychological pathologies. There was no reason to engage its arguments or care about its issue. Better to ignore and marginalize them.

As I said, classic Lenintink:

Don't argue with them, Make them stink in the nose of the world. Make people curse and abominate them, Make them shudder with horror.
Willi Munzenberg

This line of thinking also underlies much of Richard Hofstadter's work – especially Anti-intellectualism in American Life and The Paranoid Style in American Politics. Hofstadter took to calling this new right wing “pseudo-conservative” – a term he borrowed from Marxist thinker Theodor Adorno of the Frankfurt School.

James Pierson:

According to liberal writers like Richard Hofstadter and, Daniel Bell, and others, the far right were disconnected from reality, its followers semi-delusional in their belief that communism represented a domestic threat to the United States.

In short, a multi-decade academic industry took root that was based on an egregious fallacy. “Commie subversion” was not a paranoid delusion; it was a central feature of Soviet statecraft and a prime function of the CPUSA. Once again, McCarthy was directionally correct while his critics were wildly wrong.

It is also worth noting that while Bell, Hofstadter, et. al. were sorely vexed by rightwing conspiracy theories, they ignored the popular leftwing conspiracy theories such as those which posited grovernmental frame-ups of Alger Hiss, Judith Coplon, and the Rosenbergs.

McCarthyism: The competence canard (2)

The initial case against Sen. Joseph McCarthy declared that he was engaged in a veritable witch-hunt-- a demagogic campaign against an imaginary problem. He confused liberals with Communists and progressive idealists with Stalinist agents. He conjured up fanciful networks of conspirators out of thin air to frighten ignorant and parochial voters.

When the VENONA files and Soviet archives came to light, this leftwing dogma was shattered. It turned out that the New Deal was penetrated from top to bottom by conspiratorial networks working for the benefit and at the direction of Stalin's spy organs.

It was (and is) an article of faith among the Left that McCarthy was, is, and must ever be “unredeemable”. So the revelations created a big problem.

What to do? What to do?

The “solution” united far Left academics, New Republic liberals, and neocons like Ron Radosh. The new narrative seemed to address the most troubling facts while still condemning McCarthy: There had been spies in the 1930s and during WWII, BUT Harry Truman and J. Edgar Hoover had cleared them all out by 1950. So McCarthy was still whipping up public hysteria over a nonexistent problem.

While it is true that Truman instituted procedures to remove security risks he was hardly a determined redhunter. He took action only after his party suffered a landslide defeat in the 1946 elections and lost both the House and Senate.

To critics, the Truman security program looked like a political fig leaf rather than a dedicated effort to identify and root out the “Red webs” which stretched throughout the whole of the federal government.

That is what the “never caught a spy” canard attempts to hide. McCarthy and other critics were not hunting spies: they were warning that our spy hunting bureaucracy was failing to carry out its mission.

On this question McCarthy and his allies were right. His critics were wrong then and are wrong today.

Truman himself never owned up to the unprecedented scope of the Soviet apparatus that had penetrated FDR's alphabet agencies. At every turn he was prone to minimize the evidence when it was presented to him, to dismiss credible charges as red herrings, and to attack whistle blowers. For fifty years after the Katyn massacre only one government organization published the truth about the Soviets' guilt: The Madden committe in the House of Representatives. Truman opposed this inquiry and his State Department lobbied against its formation.

Truman wanted to abolish the House Committee on Unamerican Activities-- a committee which actually did “catch a real spy”. It also identified Russian assets who went on to service the atomic spies and the Britain's Cambridge Ring. Neither Truman nor Hoover cared to follow up.

The Truman administration also had an odd penchant for defending Soviet agents when they came under public scrutiny. Alger Hiss, Harry Dexter White, Lauchlin Currie, and Laurence Duggan were all defended by Truman or members of his cabinet.

This is hard to reconcile with the modern image of Truman as a more effective spy hunter than McCarthy.

The Truman security program was more political theater than anything else. HST's closest political aide admitted as much to Carl Bernstein decades later.

"There was no substantive problem. It was a political problem. We did not believe there was a real problem. A problem was being manufactured. There was a certain element of hysteria."

Clark Clifford

As was the case with the Tydings Committee, Truman and his allies were vexed by the political embarrassment the communists presented to his party; the risk they presented to the country was of lesser concern.

As a consequence the Truman security program was half-hearted and insincere. Its primary purposes was to show that the executive branch was doing something about the problem of Stalinist infiltration of the executive branch without embarrassing the Democrats or the administrative state.

McCarthy was slipshod in his methods and sometimes exaggerated the danger. The Truman administration was consciously dishonest in addressing the problem. Yet, the anti-McCarthy narrative is so locked in place that even some conservatives and most neocons praise Truman in order to condemn McCarthy.

McCarthy must remain unredeemable no matter what new revelations come from the archives.