Introduction

There are today many Communists in America. They are everywhere—in factories, offices, butcher stores, on street corners, in private businesses. And each carries in himself the germ of death for society.

—J. HOWARD MCGRATH,

Attorney General under Harry Truman, 1949

Today we call it the McCarthy Era. While convenient, the tribute is not without reason. McCarthy’s villainy was so plain that his name became a malediction in the very year of his ascendancy.¹ Characterized by one historian as “crass and unprincipled, an unimaginative opportunist, and a distinctly second-rate politician,” McCarthy was also a “shrewd judge of public attitudes and temper.” The blend made him a formidable adversary.²

Elected to the Senate in 1946, McCarthy was almost invisible on the public scene until February 1950. It was then, in Wheeling, West Virginia, that he stumbled upon his cause. The Wheeling Intelligencer reported his remarks the next day. “I have here in my hand a list of 205 that were known to the secretary of state as being members of the Communist Party and who, nevertheless are still working and shaping the policy of the State Department.”

His timing was propitious: his charges followed upon guilty verdicts in the Alger Hiss and Judith Coplon cases, the disclosure of the first Soviet atomic explosion, and the arrest of nuclear scientist Klaus Fuchs as a Soviet spy, as well as the victory of the Chinese Communists the previous year. Backed with seemingly solid evidence and a certain convincing sincerity, McCarthy explained these unsettling developments to a disturbed America. Communists, subversives, and fellow travelers, he said, had occupied positions of power in the government and betrayed America’s vital interests to the worldwide Soviet conspiracy.

For the next five years, McCarthy’s shrill accusations dominated public life, influenced foreign and domestic policy, and held two Presidents hostage. He waged a guerrilla war against the establishment, accusing the State Department, the Democratic Party, the U.S. Army—even Truman and Eisenhower themselves—of treasonous pro-Communist behavior.

Within time, McCarthy’s increasingly reckless charges and suspect methods wearied his reactionary supporters in Congress. The 1954 Army–McCarthy hearings finally sent them scurrying. By the end of the year, McCarthy was a spent force, censured by the Senate and ignored by the press. By 1957, he was dead.

But the elements of “McCarthyism”—defined in Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary as the use of “indiscriminate allegations” and “unsubstantiated charges”—were hardly McCarthy’s alone, nor did he usher them into America’s mid-century war against the Left, nor did they diminish after his fall. Joe McCarthy was just one (and certainly not the brightest) of the many Inquisitors who adorned American life in those dreary days. He was not nearly as resourceful as J. Edgar Hoover, whose harmful doings were not fully exposed until after his death; nor was he as cunning as Richard Nixon, an early McCarthy tutor,³ who paved his way to the White House (and to eventual public disgrace) with equally bad intentions. While McCarthy made the notion of security risks in the federal bureaucracy a national obsession from 1950 to 1954, the ground in which he flourished had been well prepared before his arrival.

On the afternoon of April 12, 1945, a stroke ended the life of Franklin Roosevelt. On the following day, the man who succeeded him spoke with the press. “Boys, if you ever pray, pray for me now . . . when they told me yesterday what had happened, I felt like the moon, the stars, and all the planets had fallen in on me.” It was with good reason that Harry Truman felt this weight, for he was woefully unprepared for the job. A compromise candidate for the vice presidency, Truman knew little of foreign affairs and had been viewed with indifference by Roosevelt. Truman was told nothing of the crucial deliberations at Yalta, or of the existence of the atom bomb, or of Roosevelt’s plans for the postwar world. In fact, Truman had met with the President only two or three times during the eighty-two days of his vice presidency. Harry was the first to admit his own ignorance. “They didn’t tell me anything about what was going on here,” he complained a month after the succession.⁴

Just as Harry’s new job was largely a cipher to him, so was Harry a puzzle to nearly everyone else. In those first few days, the men who had served Roosevelt could do little more than speculate about the unknown Missourian. “No one knows what the new President’s views are—at least I don’t,” observed Secretary of War Henry Stimson.

One thing was certain: Harry Truman was no Franklin Roosevelt. While Roosevelt was an internationalist—urbane, worldly, and long used to the subtleties of power—Truman was a domestic politician, devoutly religious and parochial, in many ways a holdover from nineteenth-century America. Raised to maturity in a turn-of-the-century neofrontier society, largely self-educated, and politically bred in the rough-and-tumble of Missouri machine politics, Truman carried with him all the weaknesses and strengths of the “self-made man.” Critics and admirers alike have tended to depict him as a straightforward and simple personality, decisive, energetic, and optimistic. In dedicating a volume of his memoirs to Truman, Dean Acheson, his Secretary of State, referred to him as “the captain with the mighty heart” and portrayed the man as an inspirational and inexhaustible leader “deeply trained in the moral values of Graeco-Judaic-English thought . . . sturdy and confident . . . alert and eager to gain additional knowledge and new insights.”⁵

But other writers have pointed to the limitations of the Truman personality. “When he was finally confronted with foreign policy questions,” wrote Daniel Yergin of Truman’s first months in office, “all he had as background was his storybook view of history and a rousing Fourth of July patriotism. He tended to see clearly defined contests between right and wrong, black and white. Neither his personality nor his experience gave him the patience for subtleties and uncertainties.”⁶ In a similar vein, David McCullough contrasted Truman with his patrician predecessor. “Roosevelt loved the subtleties of human relations. . . . He was sensitive to nuances in a way Harry Truman never was and never would be. Truman, with his rural Missouri background, and partly too, because of the limits of his education, was inclined to see things in far simpler terms, as right or wrong, wise or foolish. He dealt little in abstractions.”⁷

Alonzo Hamby, another Truman biographer, has indicated darker shades, depicting him in part as a man “who felt constantly unappreciated and harassed by others, was frequently suspicious of many of those around him . . . vindictive, seething with unfocused hostility,” a man whose negative experiences left him with a lifelong “sense of insecurity and frustration” that called forth “recurrent fears of failure and feelings of anger, and leading to frequently bungling attempts at compensation”—perhaps explaining Truman’s at times almost overwhelming “need to show the world who was boss.”⁸

All are reasons that travel well in explaining why Truman held little appreciation for the idealists, liberals, and radicals who were the spurs of the New Deal. Many of them were Ivy League intellectuals, eager to promote bold new ideas, at ease in a world shaded with gray. “Crackpots and the lunatic fringe” was Truman’s characterization of the men who had surrounded Roosevelt. Nor did he care for the terms “progressive” and “liberal,” and he made it clear he believed the American people wanted a “rest from experiments.”⁹

Under Truman, the New Dealers drifted away; the ones who remained would either be fired or forced out. In searching for comfort at the White House, Truman reached out to the familiar and surrounded himself with cronies, a number of whom would later involve his administration in a series of debilitating scandals. I. F. Stone, always a sharp observer of the capital scene, described the new crowd in the White House as “big-bellied, good-natured guys who . . . saw Washington as a chance to make useful ‘contacts,’ and were anxious to get what they could for themselves out of the experience. . . . The Truman era was the era of the moocher. The place was full of Wimpys who could be had for a hamburger.”¹⁰

Roosevelt was a hard act to follow, and that could only have aggravated Truman’s flagging confidence. For twelve years, FDR had imbued the nation with his own exuberant courage and confidence. No one was more aware of that fact than Truman himself. “There have been few men in all history the equal of the man into whose shoes I am stepping,” Truman remarked to a newsman on the first morning of his new job. “I pray God I can measure up to the task.” Truman entered the White House a highly insecure man, at a point when the world was changing radically. To compensate for that insecurity, he was determined to establish that he was in fact in charge. He would be as tough as the toughest. There would be no “appeasement.” Within twenty-four hours of taking office, he announced to an aide that it was time to “get tough” with the Russians.¹¹

Another group Truman held in little regard was the American Communist Party. He made no secret of his conviction that they were a “despicable minority,” and he would voice similar opinions throughout his life. As early as the fall of 1946, Truman was confiding to his diary the motif that would mark his era: “The Reds, phonies and the parlor pinks seem to be banded together and are becoming a national danger. I am afraid they are a sabotage front for Uncle Joe Stalin.”¹²

On March 12, 1947, President Truman appeared before a joint session of Congress to request support for a global war against communism. It was the unveiling of the Truman Doctrine, the foundation of our foreign policy for the next three decades. Wherever aggression threatened peace or freedom, Truman intoned, America’s security was involved, and it would be necessary to “support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or outside pressures.” Although the Soviet Union was never mentioned by name, the inference was plain: America was challenged by a worldwide campaign of Communist subversion and Soviet expansion.

The underlying, and almost reflexive, assumption was that the Soviet Union had replaced Nazi Germany as the implacable expansionist foe. As Averell Harriman, the U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union, had warned Truman on April 20, 1945, America was faced with a “barbarian invasion of Europe.” To Harriman’s delight, Truman replied that he was “not afraid of the Russians” and intended to be “firm.”

While the Second World War bequeathed superpower status to the Soviet Union and the United States, it is difficult to overstate how much the postwar power of the United States overshadowed that of the war-ravaged Soviets. For decades, the Soviet Union would view its need for secure borders through the searing lens of the German blitzkrieg.¹³

“Economically the Soviets are exhausted,” reported U.S. Naval Intelligence in January 1946. The following year, State Department consultant John Foster Dulles contended that war was “one thing which Soviet leadership does not want and would not consciously risk.”

Nevertheless, mistrust between the two powers flourished in the chaos of the postwar world, with both nations securing spheres of control. Stalin, desperate to shield his western borders with a buffer of friendly or subservient states, viewed with intense suspicion any efforts by the United States and Britain that might allow anti-Soviet forces to predominate in Eastern Europe. Truman and his colleagues, morally repelled by Soviet police-state tactics and burdened with a reflexive anticommunism that presumed the Russians were bent on world revolution and hegemony, were either unable or refused to distinguish between the Soviets’ revolutionary rhetoric and Stalin’s essentially conservative and nationalistic aims. A Soviet sphere in Eastern Europe was only the first step to world conquest, they reasoned, conveniently ignoring America’s own sphere of control.¹⁴ When they tried to break the Russian sphere, the Soviets only moved to strengthen their grasp.

Truman saw the Soviet hand everywhere, and ascribed to Stalin motives and powers of influence over European Communists and leftists that were greatly exaggerated. From this ingrained misconception, as played out during the Greek crisis of 1947, came the Truman Doctrine, which by conjuring a world divided into irreconcilable realms of good and evil committed the United States for a generation to a policy of containment and global intervention.¹⁵

The roots of the Greek crisis lay in the Second World War, when the German occupation had been opposed with great success by the People’s Liberation Army (ELAS), the military arm of the National Liberation Front (EAM). EAM, spearheaded by the Greek Communists, was a coalition of six parties. According to American historian W. H. McNeil, who was in Greece during the war: “By the time of liberation, the EAM numbered about two million members, out of a population of seven million. They were incomparably superior to all rivals in their organization and enthusiasm.”¹⁶

When the British landed in 1944, upon the evacuation of the Germans, they found EAM with control over nearly four-fifths of Greece. C. M. Woodhouse, a staunch conservative, and the British commander of the Allied Military Mission in Greece at the time, characterized the Communists within EAM as “a tiny numerical minority,” while London estimated nine-tenths of ELAS members were non-Communist.¹⁷

Churchill’s decision to reinstate the discredited King George II,¹⁸ rebuild a Greek army loyal to the monarchy, and disarm ELAS soon led to fierce fighting in Athens between EAM and British troops—the only battle during the Second World War in which a resistance movement fought the West.

Churchill would later comment that “getting peace restored in Greece . . . involved the killing of large numbers of Communists.”¹⁹ Stalin, who had agreed to Churchill’s free hand in Greece for similar freedom of his own in Rumania and Bulgaria, held “strictly and faithfully” to the agreement and uttered not a word of protest.²⁰ Roosevelt was made well aware of the agreement, as he was of Stalin’s subsequent neutrality in Greece.²¹

In February 1945, the Varkiza Agreement ended the conflict. EAM agreed to surrender its arms and the three-fourths of Greece it still controlled to the British and their royalist allies in exchange for recognition of EAM and the Communist Party, elections, a constitutional plebiscite, an end to reprisals against resistance fighters, and a purge of profascist elements from the Greek army and police.

With the royalists firmly in power, however, the agreement proved to hold little substance. The Greek government and its rightist allies soon launched a campaign of terror against the Left, which included torture, beatings, mass arrests, the destruction of printing presses, the assassination of journalists,²² and massacres. By late 1946, bands of angry EAM veterans, perhaps ten thousand in all, had taken to the mountains and resumed their armed struggle.

On February 21, 1947, Dean Acheson received startling news from the British ambassador. Britain could ill afford its commitments in the Balkans and would withdraw in six weeks. His Majesty’s Government devoutly hoped that the United States could assume the burden of both Greece and Turkey. Joseph Jones of the policy planning staff noted the implications: “Great Britain had within the hour handed the job of world leadership, with all its burdens and all its glory, to the United States.”²³

Truman and the State Department were elated at the prospect of replacing the British in Greece. Congressional leaders, however, were hardly as eager. As Republican conservatives, they balked at what most feared would prove to be a largely inflationary entanglement.

Two weeks before the President announced his doctrine, Truman and his top advisers held a meeting with congressional leaders to warm the path for his initiative. The reception was cool, until Dean Acheson spoke up. He declared that Soviet success in Greece “might open three continents to Soviet penetration. . . . The corruption of Greece would affect Iran and all the east. It would also carry the infection to Africa through Asia Minor and Egypt and to Europe through France and Italy, already threatened by the strongest Communist parties in Western Europe. The Soviet Union [is] playing one of the greatest gambles in history at minimal cost. . . . We and we alone [are] in a position to break up the play.”²⁴

Actually, internal conditions and indigenous support made the play almost entirely a Greek affair. Stalin, maintaining his end of the Anglo-Soviet bargain, wavered between indifference and hostility toward the Greek Communists. Earlier, he had attempted to reassure Truman on the matter, writing to the new President that the Soviet Union “understands the whole importance of . . . Greece for the security of Great Britain.”²⁵

Nevertheless, Truman chose to present the Balkan imbroglio as a bold move in the Soviet gambit for control of the free world. With this, the alarm of falling dominoes first sounded in postwar politics, and the congressmen responded. Senator Vandenberg encouraged Truman to speak just as forcefully to the nation, and suggested that he “scare hell out of the American people.”

The President took Vandenberg’s advice to heart. In a speech on March 6 at Baylor University in Texas, Truman declared that if the expansion of state-controlled economies did not stop, and if an open world market for private business was not restored, then severe depression would return and the government would have to intervene massively in society. Americans might then lose their traditional economic and personal freedoms. “Freedom of worship—freedom of speech—freedom of enterprise,” Truman observed. “It must be true that the first two of these freedoms are related to the third,” for “peace, freedom, and world trade are indivisible.” He concluded, “We must not go through the thirties again.”²⁶

Much of the same thinking animated early drafts of the Truman Doctrine. Presidential adviser Clark Clifford promoted a draft asserting that “continued chaos in other countries and pressure exerted upon them from without would mean the end of free enterprise and democracy in those countries and the disappearance of free enterprise in other countries would threaten our economy and our democracy.”

According to Truman, the early drafts “made the whole thing sound like an investment prospectus.”²⁷ Framed in these terms, the speech would have little popular appeal. “The only way we can sell the public on our new policy,” noted one memorandum, “is by emphasizing . . . Communism vs. Democracy” as the “major theme.”²⁸

Truman characterized the reaction to his speech in his Memoirs: “All over the world, voices of approval made themselves heard, while Communists and their fellow travelers struck out at me savagely.”²⁹ Actually, Truman’s speech met immediate criticism from a broad spectrum of Americans, more than a few from within the President’s camp.

Columnist Walter Lippmann warned that the United States was “not rich enough to subsidize reaction all over the world or strong enough to maintain it in power.” Senator Taft, an archconservative, assailed it as an attempt to divide the world into Communist and anti-Communist spheres. “If we assume a special position in Greece and Turkey,” he said, “we can hardly . . . object to the Russians continuing their domination in Poland, Yugoslavia, Rumania, and Bulgaria.”³⁰ Secretary of State Marshall was caught off guard by the exaggerated weight of the “anti-Communist element of the speech” and cabled Truman rather tactfully that the speech “was overstating the case a bit.” The President replied that from “all his contacts with the Senate, it was clear that this was the only way in which the measure could be passed.” Presidential adviser Bernard Baruch put the case more bluntly, calling the speech “tantamount to a declaration of . . . an ideological or religious war.”³¹

Less than two weeks later, President Truman brought his anti-Communist war home to America. On March 25, 1947, he put his signature to Executive Order 9835 and launched the Federal Employees Loyalty Program, the most sweeping loyalty inquiry in the nation’s history.³² E.O. 9835 authorized investigations into the beliefs and associations of all federal employees. This first such peacetime program was so vaguely worded that in time every aspect of an employee’s personal life would be opened to federal scrutiny. Moreover, the accused would not have the right to confront the accuser or, in almost every case, even be privy to the accusation.

Included in E.O. 9835 was what David Caute characterized as “the most destructive departure in postwar domestic politics”—the Attorney General’s list of subversive organizations with its catch-all notion of “sympathetic association.”³³ For the most part, the list of seventy-eight organizations³⁴ was a grab bag of left-wing political parties, peace groups, relief organizations, defense committees, and labor schools. High on the list, of course, was the Communist Party, USA. Membership in or association with any of the listed groups was the spark for an investigation and, in the majority of cases, dismissal.

With a stroke of his pen, Truman had sowed the ground from which would spring the worst excesses of the Red Scare. The Attorney General was not required to hold hearings before listing an organization; nor was there any provision for appeal or judicial review. The list was quickly adopted by state and local governments, defense-related industries, and schools; it became a qualifying test for passports, occupancy of federal public housing, and even tax exemptions. Within time, it became the yardstick of loyalty in almost every area of American life and operated, in effect, as a presidentially approved blacklist.

Writing in his Memoirs years later, Truman would lamely defend his loyalty program as having started out as fair as possible “under the climate of opinion that then existed.” Privately, however, he would concede it had been a terrible mistake.³⁵

Clark Clifford, who, as counsel to the President, met with Truman every day, spoke of the motives behind the loyalty program in a 1978 interview with Carl Bernstein. “We never had a serious discussion about a real loyalty problem. . . . the President didn’t attach fundamental importance to the so-called Communist scare. He thought it was a lot of baloney. . . . It was a political problem. . . . [Truman] had to recognize the political realities. He’d gotten a terrible clobbering in 1946 in the congressional elections. We gave a good deal of thought to how to respond. We had a presidential campaign ahead of us and here was a great issue, so he set up this whole kind of machinery.”³⁶

Historians continue to debate Truman’s motives for issuing the order, and in doing so, his culpability for what followed. His supporters have it that he acted out of necessity; had he not moved first, the newly elected 80th Congress, many of whom had campaigned on charges of subversion in high places, would have pushed through a program far worse.

Some of his detractors hold that he acted not to waylay reactionary appetites, but to ensure passage of the Truman Doctrine. The argument follows that Truman surely understood the role increased international tensions would play in producing demands for action against domestic “subversives.” If he did not preempt the field at home, then Congress, tightfisted and isolationist, would have used this cudgel to attack his program against subversion abroad. Thus, the inevitability of the loyalty program lay in Truman’s presentation of his foreign policy in the crisis-laden rhetoric of an international crusade.³⁷

There is evidence that Truman was aware of the salutary effects a domestic Red Scare might have on his foreign policy. In June 1945, the State Department completed a top-secret study on the “Possible Resurrection of the Communist International, Resumption of Extreme Leftist Activities, Possible Effect on United States,” and sent it to Truman for his careful consideration. The study offered a word of advice: “Decisive action against the American Communists would be a convincing demonstration to Stalin of the inherent strength of this country and would strengthen relations between the two countries.”³⁸

The Clifford-Elsey Report submitted in late September 1946, which provided the core of the Truman Doctrine, also made a pressing argument for a loyalty program: “The Soviet Government, by utilizing the membership of the Communist Party in the United States, has thousands of invaluable sources . . . in various industrial establishments as well as in the departments of the Government. . . . Every American Communist is potentially an espionage agent . . . requiring only the direct instruction of a Soviet superior to make the potentiality a reality.” In its final recommendations, the report urged that “within the United States, Communist penetration should be exposed and eliminated” and cited the “armed forces, government agencies, and heavy industry” as the “principal targets for communistic infiltration.”³⁹

It is not unlikely that all of these considerations played a role in Truman’s thinking. Faced with domestic political pressures and congressional resistance to his dramatic change in foreign policy, and inured by his own antipathy for radicalism to the dire consequences of unleashing a Red Scare, Truman may recklessly have chosen the most expedient route.

But in those years, it must have been difficult to determine which face Truman presented on this issue, for in an effort to seize the anti-Communist banner from his congressional opponents, he ran his 1948 campaign with a dual policy on Red-baiting—his was good, the Republican’s was bad—and maintained it throughout his remaining years in office.

In late September, Truman campaigned for the Catholic vote in Boston: “All this talk about Communism . . . is in the pattern with [Republican] appeals to religious prejudice against Al Smith in 1928. . . . I want you to get this straight now. I hate Communism.” This was the essential Truman tactic: to disparage Republican anti-Communist rhetoric as a threat to Catholics, while exploiting Catholic anti-Communist passions for his own gain.

Not long after, Truman derided those who were “much wrought up about the Communist bugaboo,” but then allowed his Justice Department to indict twelve leaders of the Communist Party under the Smith Act four months before the election.⁴⁰

To isolate the third-party candidacy of former Vice President Henry Wallace, Clark Clifford recommended that “every effort must be made . . . to identify him in the public mind with the Communists.” Truman followed suit faithfully. “I do not want and will not accept the political support of Henry Wallace and his Communists,” pronounced Truman in accents of McCarthy to come. “These are days of high prices for everything, but any price for Wallace and his Communists is too much for me to pay.”

In a successful attempt to shore up sagging union support, Truman vetoed the antilabor Taft-Hartley Act, as it conflicted “with important principles of our democratic society.” Yet, after his veto was overridden, he never instructed his Solicitor General to press the courts for a ruling on Taft-Hartley’s constitutionality. After the election, his administration then used the act’s anti-Communist provision to persecute those unions that had opposed Truman’s foreign policy and supported Henry Wallace. In fact, Truman invoked Taft-Hartley more times in 1948 alone than Eisenhower did in eight years.

In May 1950, Truman wrote to the national commander of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, “All this howl about organizations a fellow belongs to gives me a pain in the neck,” while forgetting that he himself had codified the Attorney General’s list.

In January 1951, Truman voiced fears that his loyalty program was infringing on civil liberties. Three months later, he amended his program for the worse. With the signing of Executive Order 10241, he altered the basis for dismissal from “reasonable grounds” for belief in disloyalty to “reasonable doubt” as to loyalty, thus shifting the burden of proof onto the accused.⁴¹

The public, rather than question the loyalty program, naturally assumed the existence of the disloyal and the subversive—for why else would there be a program to uncover them? Far from being placated, congressional reactionaries, now armed with the President’s admission of subversive dangers, wrested the initiative from Truman and called for more purges and investigations. Given this opportunity, Joe McCarthy emerged to join in the vilification of the State Department.

With the Eisenhower administration came new twists in the loyalty game and a new Republican determination to ferret out the “traitors.” Ike scrapped Truman’s program, criticizing it for ignoring the security threat from loyal employees. Now the nation was endangered by “bad tendencies.” Eisenhower’s Executive Order 10450 mandated immediate suspension without pay for “any behavior, activities, or associations which tend to show that the individual is not reliable or trustworthy.” No provisions for hearings were made, leaving it up to the discretion of the agency or department head. A few months later, Eisenhower added exercising an article of the Bill of Rights to the criterion for automatic dismissal. Now employees would be summarily sacked for pleading the Fifth Amendment before a congressional committee.

By 1954, the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee warned that “the threat to civil liberties in the United States today is the most serious in the history of our country.” It was indeed a desperate time. Following the lead of the federal government, thirty-nine states had made it a criminal offense to advocate violent governmental change, or to join any organization so advocating. The determination of which organization was advocating what was left to the discretion of prosecutors. More than three hundred federal, state, and local laws had been passed prohibiting “subversive activities.” In Texas, membership in the Communist Party was worth twenty years in prison. In Michigan, the act of “writing or speaking subversive words” was good for life imprisonment. Tennessee punished “unlawful advocacy” with the death penalty. Virginia also proposed execution for anyone caught “lurking with intent to spy.”

Beginning in May 1952, the State Department officially curtailed freedom of travel. Hundreds of suspected heretics were denied passports, including Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas. It was the boast of Scott McLeod, the State Department’s new chief of security, that no one who had criticized American foreign policy would be allowed to leave the country. It was just as difficult to get into the country: from 1947 on, entry visas were denied to anyone with beliefs outside the newly narrowed margins of American thought.

In 1954, Samuel Stouffer of Harvard University attempted to measure the breadth of that thought with a national poll. His findings revealed that 73 percent of the respondents would turn in their neighbors or acquaintances “whom they suspected of being Communists.” Seventy-seven percent of those polled wanted to strip admitted Communists of their citizenship, while 51 percent were in favor of imprisoning them.

Yet only 3 percent of Mr. Stouffer’s respondents had ever met an admitted Communist, even though 10 percent harbored suspicions about certain acquaintances. “He was always talking about world peace,” responded a housewife from Oregon. “I saw a map of Russia on a wall in his home,” said a locomotive engineer from Michigan. “I just knew. But I wouldn’t know how to say how I knew,” from a Kansas farmer. “She had more money to spend and places to go than seems right,” reasoned a woman from Iowa. “He had a foreign camera and took so many pictures of the large New York bridges,” from another housewife in New York.

Nevertheless, these statistics may well reflect the shallow roots of the Red Scare, measuring only the uncritical ease with which many Americans take on the attitudes evinced by politicians and the media. For when asked, “What kind of things do you worry about most?” 80 percent responded in terms of personal or family problems, with the largest block expressing concern over business and economic problems—less than 1 percent worried about the threat of Communists in the United States. In fact, 30 percent of Stouffer’s sample could not even identify Senator McCarthy.

While the majority of Americans were concerned with paying their rent and medical bills, government committees were ferreting out heretics by quizzing them on their reading habits (The Nation and The New Republic were suspect), on their sexual habits (“When did you first reach an understanding with your wife?”), their voting patterns (“Did you vote for Henry Wallace?” “How did you feel about a fourth term for FDR?”), their political opinions (“You have been heard criticizing the Korean War effort”), or for even having political opinions at all (“You have been accused of belonging to a group that engages in political discussions”).

The loyalty contagion spread from the government and military into private business and the professions, and then into entertainment and communications. It hit assembly-line workers, plumbers, and telephone operators; merchant seamen and dock workers. Even the defenders of civil liberties capitulated; the NAACP and the ACLU purged their ranks of the suspected, and several leaders of the ACLU dutifully informed the FBI on the politics of their members. Recreation-minded citizens signed loyalty oaths to acquire fishing licenses, high school students signed them to receive their diplomas, and tenants of public housing projects handed them over with their rent.

A private industry sprang up that specialized in security investigations. Dun and Bradstreet offered corporate America a Personnel Security Service on a subscription basis, as did the Better America Federation, the Western Research Foundation, and Fidelifax, Inc., staffed by forty-five former FBI agents in thirty cities. But towering above all the firms specializing in the listing, monitoring, and surveillance of radicals was the American Security Council. Founded in 1955 by former FBI agents and servicing such major corporations as GE, Honeywell, Motorola, Lockheed, and U.S. Steel, the ASC by 1961 boasted of over one million Americans in its files.

No one knows exactly how many Americans fell under the shadow of the loyalty investigations. By 1956, it was estimated that 13.5 million Americans were required to undergo some form of loyalty test or investigation as a condition of employment. But this figure only reflects the workforce at a given moment and does not take into account high job turnover, nor the continued activity after 1956. The actual number might well be twice as high.

How many Americans lost their jobs or were blacklisted as a consequence of the Red Scare? Those figures are difficult to determine. Many who were about to be fired chose to resign rather than risk adverse publicity. Others were fired on any available pretext (as management associations openly recommended in those days).

A tally of the suicides and premature deaths is equally difficult. No doubt they were more numerous than the occasional references in the literature would lead us to believe. To be targeted as a Communist or a subversive was to endure enormous pressures. One could face unrelenting harassment from the FBI, the loss of one’s livelihood, impoverishment, vilification in the press, estrangement from friends and family, physical attacks, and, many times, imprisonment. The hounding that drove Professor F. O. Matthiessen out a high window, actor Philip Loeb to a lethal dose of sleeping pills, and scientist William Sherwood to take poison just as surely took the lives of actor John Garfield and economist Harry Dexter White from heart attacks.

As the anti-Communist purges mounted and were condoned and applauded, societal restraints loosened, and a number of Red Scare victims met with violent deaths. Robert Now, chairman of the Charleston Wallacefor-President committee, was stabbed to death in 1948 by a rabid anti-Communist. In 1961, John Farmer, having read that Thomas Parkinson, a Berkeley poet and Yeats scholar, was both a Communist and a homosexual, burst into Parkinson’s campus office and shot him in the face at close range and killed his teaching assistant, Stephen Thomas. Both William Remington and Bob Thompson were put in prison by the Red Scare, and both died as a result of violence suffered there, so they too enter the lists.

As a nation we paid a hard price as well: the loss of political diversity, of the Old Left community of labor schools and progressive unions; the mechanical rejection of any notion that smacks of “socialism”; and the strait-jacket of “responsible opinion” that has narrowed our public discourse to the breadth of a child’s hand.

Playwright Arthur Miller, himself a target of the witch hunts, once noted that “an era can be said to end when its basic illusions are exhausted.” The worst of the persecution was not over until 1960, and even then it limped on for another five years or so. The government attacks against the antiwar movement during the late 1960s, in particular the persecution of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and the destruction of the Black Panthers, were a more violent continuation of policies begun during the Cold War against an earlier radical group—the Communist Party of the United States.

During the 1980s, the Reagan administration attempted to silence its critics with Red-baiting tactics. The President charged that “pro-Soviet agents” were spreading “disinformation” in the media and Congress. Out of the Interior Department came charges that “extreme environmentalists” were a “left-wing cult” hostile to “our very form of government” and that the Sierra Club and the Audubon Society were “infiltrated” by Communist sympathizers. The President attacked the nuclear freeze movement as “Soviet-inspired,” lamented the passing of the House Un-American Activities Committee, and sent the FBI to hound the detractors of his policy in Central America. Reagan also greatly expanded the powers of the FBI and the CIA in domestic surveillance and dusted off the McCarran-Walter Act to exclude critics of the United States from entering the country. Even films were deemed “anti-American” and excluded.⁴²

During the 1988 presidential campaign, George Bush’s daily reminder that Michael Dukakis was “a card-carrying member of the ACLU”⁴³ turned “liberal” into a synonym for subversive. Even more recently, Tara O’Toole, a Clinton appointee, was attacked by two Republican senators because the feminist study group to which she belonged had used the word “Marxist” in its name two years before she became a member. In 1993, Fortune magazine reached back forty years to assail the father of Clinton nominee Lani Guinier as “a devotee of Joe Stalin” for his associations with the American Labor Party and the United Public Workers.⁴⁴

Even though the debate is unresolved, the passage of nearly fifty years since the unveiling of Truman’s loyalty program has blessedly diminished the hunt for the “enemy within,” but the residual remains clear. While the Communist Party of the United States was the first victim of the repression, the nation as a whole suffered the consequences.

¹On March 29, 1950, Herblock, a political cartoonist with the Washington Post, portrayed a struggling GOP elephant being dragged and pushed by right-wingers toward a stack of dripping tar buckets topped by a barrel labeled “McCarthyism.” The term caught on immediately and soon entered dictionaries. According to Thomas C. Reeves in The Life and Times of Joe McCarthy (New York: Stein & Day, 1982), McCarthy was privately stung by the term and despised it, but publicly exclaimed that “McCarthyism” was a synonym for “Americanism” and that he welcomed the new word.

²Athan Theoharis, Seeds of Repression: Harry S. Truman and the Origins of McCarthyism (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1971).

³For several months following the Wheeling, West Virginia, speech, Nixon met privately with McCarthy, attempting to educate him in the politics of anticommunism. Nixon recalled later that he had constantly urged restraint, but that McCarthy did not listen (Reeves, Life and Times, pp. 246–47).

⁴Daniel Yergin, Shattered Peace: The Origins of the Cold War and the National Security State (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1978), p. 70.

⁵Dean Acheson, Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department (New York: Norton, 1969), pp. 927–30.

⁶Yergin, Shattered Peace, p. 72.

⁷David McCullough, Truman (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992), p. 325.

⁸Alonzo L. Hamby, “An American Democrat: A Reevaluation of the Personality of Harry S. Truman,” Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 106, No. 1 (1991), pp. 33–55.

⁹Yergin, Shattered Peace, p. 241.

¹⁰I. F. Stone, The Truman Era: 1945–1952 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1972), p. xxi.

¹¹Walter LaFeber, America, Russia, and the Cold War, 1945–1975, 3d ed. (New York: Wiley, 1976), p. 17.

¹²Richard M. Freeland, The Truman Doctrine and the Origins of McCarthyism: Foreign Policy, Domestic Politics, and Internal Security, 1946–1948 (New York: Schocken, 1974), p. 140.

¹³The United States suffered more than 400,000 dead during its four years of war, but was virtually unscathed in any other measure. At war’s end, its economy was booming with a gross national product that had more than doubled. With 6 percent of the world’s population, the United States held three-fourths of the world’s invested capital and two-thirds of its industrial capacity. In contrast, the Soviet Union, which had taken the brunt of the Nazi effort, suffered an estimated 20 to 25 million war dead, nearly half of the war’s total. The German army had completely or partially destroyed fifteen large cities, 1,710 towns, and 70,000 villages, leaving 25 million homeless. The invaders destroyed 31,850 industrial concerns, 65,000 kilometers of railroad track, 90,000 bridges, 10,000 power stations, 98,000 collective farms, and immense quantities of livestock and poultry—in all, an estimated $128 billion worth of property. As a result, Soviet industrial output had dropped 42 percent from its 1940 level. Lawrence S. Wittner, Cold War America: From Hiroshima to Watergate (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1978), pp. 8–9.

¹⁴While decrying the lack of political democracy in the Axis nations newly liberated by the Soviet Union, the United States firmly controlled its own sphere. To confound the growing popularity of the Community Party in Italy, for instance, the American military government banned political activity, imposed press censorship, jailed antifascists, and relied on fascist institutions and personnel to run the bureaucracy. To achieve the same aims, the United States intervened massively in Italy’s 1948 elections. Gabriel Kolko, The Politics of War: The World and United States Foreign Policy, 1943–1945 (New York: Random House, 1990), pp. 55–57.

¹⁵Daniel Yergin, “Harry Truman—Revived and Revised,” New York Times Magazine, October 24, 1976.

¹⁶Wittner, Cold War, p. 31.

¹⁷Kolko, Politics of War, pp. 172–75.

¹⁸The king’s popularity had been damaged by his support of military dictator General John Metaxis, whose reign lasted from 1936 until the German takeover in 1941.

¹⁹Yergin, Shattered Peace, p. 295.

²⁰Winston S. Churchill, Memoirs of the Second World War (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1959), pp. 885–904.

²¹Warren F. Kimball, Churchill and Roosevelt: The Complete Correspondence, vol. 3 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1984).

²²Among the eventual casualties was CBS correspondent George Polk. In May 1948, his corpse was found in Salonika Bay. Bound hand and foot, he had been shot in the back of the head. The subsequent cover-up, in an effort to maintain American public support for the rightist regime, threw the blame onto the leftist guerrillas Polk was attempting to contact for a story. Edmund Keeley, The Salonika Bay Murder: Cold War Politics and the Polk Affair (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1989).

²³Howard Zinn, Postwar America (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Mcrrill, 1973), pp. 43–44.

²⁴Acheson, Present at the Creation, p. 293.

²⁵Wittner, Cold War, p. 6.

²⁶LaFeber, America, Russia, p. 55.

²⁷Harry S. Truman, Memoirs, vol. 2 (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1956), p. 106.

²⁸Wittner, Cold War, p. 33.

²⁹Truman, Memoirs, vol. 2, p. 106.

³⁰Wittner, Cold War, p. 33.

³¹Freeland, Truman Doctrine, pp. 100–1.

³²Previous loyalty programs existed during both world wars, but neither approached the scope of Truman’s peacetime effort.

³³David Caute, The Great Fear: The Anti-Communist Purge Under Truman and Eisenhower (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1978), p. 269.

³⁴Thirty-two more were added in May 1948. By November 1950, the number was up to 197. Under Eisenhower, an additional 62 were tagged on, bringing the total to 254. At the same time, the House Un-American Activities Committee kept its own separate and equally potent list. By 1950 it numbered 624 organizations.

³⁵McCullough, Truman, p. 553.

³⁶Carl Bernstein, Loyalties: A Son’s Memoir (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989), pp. 197–200.

³⁷See Freeland, Truman Doctrine.

³⁸Kolko, Politics of War, p. 447.

³⁹In his memoirs, Counsel to the President (New York: Doubleday, 1991), Clark Clifford characterizes the extent of this argument within the report as “a paragraph” and hands the authorship to Attorney General Tom Clark and J. Edgar Hoover. Clifford writes that it “hinted at the rationale for a loyalty program, although we did not realize it at the time.” Referring to it as “the most unfortunate section of the Clifford-Elsey Report,” he goes on to say that there were no grounds to believe the government to be “riddled with Reds” but that the assertion was included in the final report only because “it represented the deeply held views” of Clark and Hoover. Actually, the argument extends over several pages and begins with the assertion that the “Soviet Government is actively directing espionage and subversive movements in the United States.” Its open inducement to expose and eliminate “Communist penetration” is surely more than a hint at a rationale, and suggests that Clifford, in advance of the disastrous 1946 elections, may have already been inducing Truman to seize the initiative against Communists at home. Clifford-Elsey Report quoted form Arthur Krock, Memoirs: Sixty years on the Firing Line (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1968), pp. 472–475, 481.

⁴⁰Caute, Great Fear, pp. 33–35.

⁴¹For Truman’s statement that he would do just the opposite, see Joseph Rauh under “The Purge of the Civil Service.”

⁴²Richard Fried, Nightmare in Red: The McCarthy Era in Perspective (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1990), pp. 199–200.

⁴³According to Haynes Johnson, a number of North Carolina voters said they believed Dukakis to be a Communist after viewing Bush commercials naming him as a member of the ACLU with a close-up of a card reading: “ACLU, American Communist Labor Union.” Sleepwalking Through History: America in the Reagan Years (New York: Norton, 1991), p. 398.

⁴⁴“Lani’s Father,” Fortune, July 12, 1993.