CHAPTER 4
National Security State
Very early on a rainy Sunday, June 25, 1950, on the Ongjin peninsula in western Korea, troops from the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) and the Republic of Korea (ROK) began exchanging artillery fire. In the past, the two armies had repeatedly skirmished along the 38th parallel, which divided the communist-led north, the DPRK, from the conservative-led south, the ROK. This time, it soon became clear that North Korea had launched a full-scale invasion. DPRK infantry, led by Soviet-built tanks, poured across the border, followed by an amphibious landing on South Korea’s eastern coast. Within days, the North Koreans had captured the South Korean capital, Seoul, while steadily advancing down the Korean peninsula.
Though surprised by the invasion, U.S. leaders reacted quickly. Almost immediately they got the UN Security Council to pass a resolution calling for North Korea to return to the 38th parallel, a move made possible by the absence of the Soviet Union, which had been boycotting the council since January 1950 to protest its failure to give China’s seat to its new communist government. Two days later, a second Security Council resolution called for UN members to assist South Korea in repulsing the attack. On July 5, the first American soldiers ordered to Korea by President Truman, a small unit flown in from Japan, spotted a North Korean infantry column approaching their position in the village of Osan, thirty-four miles south of Seoul. To the GIs’ surprise, the North Koreans, rather than being intimidated by U.S. forces, marched right through them, led by tanks with armor too thick to be stopped by American weapons.
By the time the Korean War ended three years later, fifty-four thousand U.S. troops had died in the fighting, and nearly twice that number had been wounded. For Koreans, the war took a staggering toll; nearly three million people—about 10 percent of the population—were killed, wounded, or missing. Another five million became refugees.
The Korean War has not loomed large in American memory or culture, in spite of its heavy cost. Yet the war had a profound impact on the way the United States developed. It locked the country into an unprecedented militarism, which continued after the war and included the long-term deployment of troops in Europe and Asia. It also brought domestic anticommunism, already a growing force, to new heights, marked by the rise of Senator Joseph McCarthy, political repression, and pressure for cultural conformity.
Neither militarism nor anticommunism broke the stalemate in domestic politics. If anything, they reinforced the status quo. When in 1953 a Republican moved into the White House for the first time in two decades, only modest changes occurred in the contours of domestic policy. The basic structures of an enduring postwar order were in place when the Korean War ended soon thereafter, the outcome of the struggles at home and abroad that had occurred since World War II.
Korea
The Korean War grew out of a combination of local and global circumstances related to the process of decolonization and the deepening division between the communist and capitalist camps. When World War II ended, 250 million people lived under colonial rule, but the war had undermined the ideological, economic, and military bases of colonialism. Starting in Asia and then moving to Africa and the Caribbean, independence movements succeeded with remarkable rapidity in freeing their countries from European rule. By 1970, only a few large territories, all in central or southern Africa, remained colonies.
In principle, the United States supported decolonization. In practice, its record was mixed. The United States gave its own colony, the Philippines, independence in 1946; encouraged the British to leave India, Burma (Myanmar), and Ceylon (Sri Lanka); and pressured the Dutch to abandon their military campaign to retain Indonesia. But American leaders gave a higher priority to winning support from Western European countries for U.S. policy toward the Soviet Union than to backing colonial independence movements, especially those that leaned to the left. Accordingly, the United States allowed its European allies to use Lend-Lease supplies to reoccupy their colonial possessions and looked the other way when they forcibly suppressed nationalist movements.
World War II brought Japanese colonial control of Korea to an end but left open how it would be organized as an independent entity. Korean nationalists, across the political spectrum, had long fought Japanese rule but did so through competing independence movements. During the Second World War, the United States, Britain, China, and the Soviet Union concurred that Korea should be given its independence after a transitional trusteeship, but they failed to develop a specific plan. As the war drew to an end, the United States and the Soviet Union hastily agreed to jointly occupy the country, with the Soviets staying north of the 38th parallel and the United States to its south.
Episodic postwar talks between the United States and the Soviet Union failed to come up with a plan for establishing a government for Korea as a whole. In the north, the Soviets backed a provisional government headed by communist Kim Il Sung. In the south, the United States backed a right-wing interim government headed by Syngman Rhee. On both sides of the border, the dominant factions, with the aid of the occupying powers, repressed their opponents and narrowed their ruling coalitions, so that by mid-1948, when the rival governments assumed full sovereignty over the former occupation zones, Korea had two fiercely antagonistic, authoritarian regimes, each cracking down on internal dissent while seeking control over the whole peninsula.
In early 1949, Rhee unsuccessfully sought U.S. backing for an invasion of the North, with the aim of taking it over. Kim had better luck with the Soviets. In early 1950, Stalin, after first rejecting the idea, agreed to support a North Korean invasion of the south, supplying military equipment and advice but not troops, with the expectation that, aided by communist uprisings in the south, the north would win a quick victory and the United States would not intervene.
In deciding to send U.S. ground troops to Korea, Truman sought to check what he and other policymakers saw as a Soviet probe of American will, believing, wrongly, that the Soviet Union had instigated the North Korean move. The United States cared less about the fate of Korea than the implications of the conflict for the larger Cold War. Dean Acheson, then serving as secretary of state, described Korea as a “vital . . . symbol,” a place where the United States had to demonstrate to its allies and enemies its determination to halt Soviet aggression or else face similar moves elsewhere. As in the earlier Iranian and Greek crises, a local conflict took on global dimensions because the United States saw it as test of strength between rival world blocs.
In Europe, in spite of the tension between the Soviet- and American-led camps, the border between them remained stable, essentially along the line where the Allied armies had met at the end of World War II. In Asia, by contrast, the demarcation between the communist and capitalist blocs remained ill-defined and shifting, as the political trajectories of decolonizing nations remained uncertain and the epic Chinese Civil War neared its end.
When the Chinese conflict had reignited after World War II, the Truman administration concluded that a communist victory could not be stopped, given the corruption, inefficiency, and unpopularity of Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist regime. Accordingly, it gave only token aid to the anticommunist forces. When in 1949 the communists won control over all of mainland China, the administration found itself on the defensive. Chinese Nationalist supporters and conservative Republicans charged Truman with “losing” China. Many Americans, bewildered by the limits of their country’s power and the failure to fully use it, found seductive the argument made by administration critics that the communist victory had been the result of treachery by communist sympathizers within the Department of State.
The successful test by the Soviet Union of an atomic bomb in August 1949 contributed to the growing sense that the communists were gaining momentum. American leaders had realized that the Soviet Union would eventually develop atomic weapons, but it happened sooner than they anticipated. With any realistic expectation of effective international control of atomic weapons over, both the Truman administration and public opinion reacted to the unsettling news of the Soviet test by supporting a push to make sure that the United States maintained nuclear superiority. After a heated, secret debate among atomic scientists and government officials, in January 1950 Truman approved the development of a “Super” bomb (or hydrogen bomb, as it was later called) that would unleash the enormous power of thermonuclear fusion.
The Korean fighting set off a broad American mobilization. In addition to dispatching troops to the battlefront, Truman positioned the Seventh Fleet to prevent a Communist Chinese attack on Formosa, where the Nationalists had retreated. He also increased military assistance for the French effort to retain its colonies in Indochina and stepped up aid to the Philippine government, which was fighting a peasant insurgency.
Truman militarized American policy in Asia on his own authority. Nominally, U.S. forces in Korea acted under United Nations command, though in practice the UN commander, General Douglas MacArthur, operated as part of the American command structure, with the forces that sixteen countries sent to Korea (in most cases token units) reporting to him. After Congress had ratified the UN Charter, it passed legislation requiring its consent for the large-scale assignment of U.S. forces to UN peacekeeping missions, but the Truman administration ignored that procedure. Nor did Truman seek a declaration of war or a congressional resolution of support before committing U.S. forces to Korea, though no doubt he could have gotten one. Instead, he rested his action on his view of his inherent power as president, a step that, in seeming contradiction to the Constitution, shifted the authority to make war from the legislative branch—more susceptible to popular pressure—to the executive branch.
Senator Robert Taft criticized Truman’s failure to get a declaration of war, but in the heated atmosphere of the early days of the Korean fighting, the constitutional issues surrounding the commitment of American military force received scant attention. Months later, when Truman decided to send a large Army force to Europe without congressional approval, a debate did arise in Congress over his power to do so (impelled in part by Republicans who wanted to see a less Eurocentric national security policy). However, the Senate ultimately ratified Truman’s move, and the controversy had little lasting effect on the long-term shift in governance that had taken place. Since Korea, presidents have sent U.S. forces into battle many times, but never with a declaration of war, instead seeking weaker forms of congressional approval, or none at all.
The demobilization of the Army after World War II left the United States ill-equipped for a new ground war. To fight in Korea, the Army had to quickly call up reservists as well as deploy draftees. Many arrived with little training. Corporal Merwin Perkins, a nineteen-year-old Army reservist, who had never received basic training, found himself on the front lines in Korea “one month to the day” after leaving “civilian life in Minnesota.” “I didn’t even know how to dig a foxhole,” he later recalled. “A gunnery sergeant told me how. ‘Make it like a grave.’”
The sergeant’s comments no doubt reflected the grim situation in which the troops found themselves. The dispatching of U.S. forces failed to stop the North Korean advance until it came within thirty miles of the port city of Pusan, at the southern tip of the Korean peninsula. Only there, in very heavy fighting, did the Americans manage to establish a stable defensive perimeter. Then the tide turned. The failure of communist uprisings to take place in the south, a steady flow of American troops and supplies into Pusan, and heavy American bombing denied the North Koreans the quick victory they had expected.
In mid-September 1950, the UN forces launched a counterattack, pushing north from Pusan and carrying out an amphibious landing at Inchon, not far south of the 38th parallel. The North Koreans, faced with the possibility of being cut off in their rear, rapidly retreated. The UN phalanxes linked up on September 26 and two days later recaptured Seoul in street-by-street fighting.
Now the North Koreans faced catastrophic defeat. When the United States sent troops to Korea, its stated goal was to reestablish the preinvasion status. But as the fighting proceeded, high-ranking policymakers, like John Allison and Dean Rusk at the State Department, argued that the United States should use its military power to unify Korea under a noncommunist government. Shortly before the Inchon landing, Truman approved sending U.S. forces north of the 38th parallel, a step that won UN General Assembly approval on October 7, just as the line was being crossed.
The success of the UN offensive led Kim Il Sung to ask Stalin to bail out the failing North Korean effort with Soviet troops. Stalin declined but urged the Chinese to come to the North Koreans’ aid. The Chinese signaled several times that if U.S. troops crossed the 38th parallel, they would enter the war, but American military and civilian leaders ignored the warnings. Instead, giddy with success, MacArthur kept moving his forces north toward the Yalu River, which separated North Korea from China, unaware that the Chinese had begun moving large numbers of troops across the border. An American soldier who arrived in Korea in November remembered that “the mood was, we were going to get up to the Yalu and we were all going to be home by Christmas.”
In late November the Chinese launched a massive offensive that panicked UN troops, who retreated in disarray. Washington panicked too; Truman told reporters that if necessary the United States would utilize every resource at its disposal in Korea, including atomic weapons, inaccurately stating that field commanders could authorize their use. In response, British prime minister Clement Attlee hastily flew to Washington for urgent discussions aimed at dissuading the United States from a full-scale war with China. (Britain had some fourteen thousand troops in Korea.) Cooler heads soon prevailed; when MacArthur sought permission to blockade the Chinese coast, bomb Chinese industry, and use National Chinese troops in Korea, his superiors turned him down.
By early 1951, Chinese troops had moved south across the 38th parallel and retaken Seoul. Within a month, though, the UN forces managed to stop the offensive, in part through the massive use of airpower. From the start of the war, the United States took advantage of its air supremacy to fly close tactical support and bomb North Korean industry and troop concentrations. Once the Chinese entered the conflict, MacArthur ended almost all restraints on bombing, calling for the destruction of “every installation, factory, city, and village” in North Korea (exempting targets near China and the Soviet Union, to avoid provoking further foreign intervention). Firebomb attacks, modeled after the raids against Japan late in World War II, caused heavy damage. A January 1951 raid on the North Korean capital, Pyongyang, burned down a third of the city. The United States also made extensive use of napalm (jellied gasoline that stuck to buildings and people while burning intensely).
By March 1951, momentum had shifted back to the UN forces, which recaptured Seoul. Sobered by recent events, the State Department now reversed its earlier position, opposing a new push north of the 38th parallel. MacArthur dissented, making known his desire to fight for the complete defeat of the Chinese in Korea, threatening to expand the war to China itself. After he repeatedly ignored orders not to publicly question U.S. policy, Truman relieved him of his command on April 11. When a new Chinese offensive failed to make headway, the war settled into a stalemate along a line not far from where it began.
On July 10, 1951, with all the major parties except the South Koreans reconciled to the restoration of the prewar situation, armistice negotiations began between U.S. military officials, the North Koreans, and the Chinese. After an agreement was reached for an armistice line along the battlefront, the talks stalled over prisoners of war. The Chinese and North Koreans demanded an exchange of all prisoners, while the United States insisted that captured soldiers who did not want to return to their homeland should not be forced to do so. As negotiations fruitlessly continued, so did the fighting. Some 45 percent of all U.S. casualties took place between the start of the talks and their conclusion two years later. To keep up pressure on the communists, the United States intensified its bombing campaign, demolishing dams and hydroelectric plants along the Yalu River and leaving eighteen of twenty-two major North Korean cities at least half destroyed.
Militarization
The outbreak of the Korean War began a long era of what Robert Taft called “semiwar,” in which the distinction between peace and war blurred. Military preparedness no longer was a response to particular crises but became an ongoing way of life. Militarizing the Cold War led to a restructuring of the federal government and its relationship to civil society, as the international contest became a formative presence in almost every sphere of American life.
Prior to Korea, the dominant Washington view saw the Soviet threat as primarily ideological, political, and economic, not military. The policy of containment, which George Kennan had popularized within and outside of the government, called for stopping further Soviet expansion with economic and political measures. Some State Department and military officials saw the need for a big military buildup to confront the Soviets, but Truman disagreed. Even after the Berlin blockade and the Chinese communist victory, he sought to restrain defense spending in order to achieve or at least move toward a balanced budget without cutting domestic programs or raising taxes.
Already, defense dominated federal outlays: national security expenses, including military spending, foreign assistance programs, veterans’ benefits, and atomic energy, accounted for three-quarters of the federal government’s fiscal 1950 budget. Truman proposed a modest cut for 1951, with $13.9 billion devoted directly to defense (less than an eighth of what the country spent at the height of World War II). Some officials within the administration thought that figure way too low. A National Security Council study of American strategy in light of Soviet nuclear capability, principally written by Paul Nitze, Kennan’s successor as head of the State Department Policy Planning Staff, depicted U.S. military strength as “dangerously inadequate” to meet the challenge from the Soviet Union, which it described as seeking “to impose its absolute authority over the rest of the world.” The document, labeled NSC-68, called for a buildup of conventional U.S. forces, nuclear weapons, and international assistance programs and new civil defense and psychological warfare efforts. Influenced by Leon Keyserling, a veteran New Dealer recently appointed head of the Council of Economic Advisers, the NSC-68 authors argued that increases in military spending “might not result in a real decrease in the standard of living, for the economic effects of the program might be to increase the gross national product by more than the amount being absorbed for additional military and foreign assistance purposes.” To support this Keynesian argument, NSC-68 cited the World War II experience.
Not pleased with the budgetary implications of NSC-68, Truman delayed acting on it. But once the Korean War started he approved its recommendations, ordering a massive increase in military spending. Various supplemental appropriations brought defense spending for fiscal 1951 to over three times the amount Truman had originally requested. Within a year, the armed services more than doubled in size.
The Korean War ended any possible American rapprochement with the Chinese communists. Before the war, some policymakers had argued, unsuccessfully, that the United States should accept the inevitable, recognize the new Chinese communist government (as the British had done), and try to woo it away from the Soviet Union. Instead, the war led the United States to build an anticommunist bloc in Asia, directed as much against the Chinese as the Soviets. The most dramatic turnaround came in Japan. During the first years of its occupation, the United States ordered the Japanese to embark on a radical program of disarmament, democratization, and economic restructuring, designed to make sure the country never made war again. But as the Cold War developed, the United States began reversing course. American occupation authorities took steps to weaken the political left and the labor movement and to reorient the Japanese economy away from China. After the start of the Korean War, the United States moved quickly to finalize a peace treaty with Japan and sign a mutual security agreement that gave it the right to maintain military bases there. American officials wanted Japan itself to rearm as part of an anticommunist bloc, but few Japanese leaders, even among the conservatives, desired to do so. Japan kept the ban on creating a military in its American-written constitution but did agree to create a “self-defense” force. Elsewhere in Asia, the United States, to bolster anticommunist forces and reassure its allies that Japan would not again threaten them, signed mutual security pacts with the Philippines, with Australia and New Zealand, and later with South Korea, the Nationalist Chinese, and Southeast Asian countries.
In Europe, too, the Korean War brought a militarization of American policy. Most dramatically, in September 1950 Acheson publicly proposed rearming Germany. To lessen European fears of possible German aggression, Truman sent four Army divisions to Europe—this sparked the congressional debate—beginning what became a permanent, large-scale deployment of U.S. troops on the continent. The United States also began including nondemocratic states in its anticommunist alliances. Truman had refused to recognize the fascist government in Spain, but after the start of the Korean War he reversed that policy and began negotiations that led, the year after he left office, to a treaty that gave it substantial economic and military aid in return for bases. In Libya, Morocco, and Saudi Arabia as well, the United States secured new military bases without regard to the nondemocratic practices of the host governments.
In 1950 the United States began a massive program to accelerate its production of atomic weapons, part of a nuclear arms race that accompanied the Korean fighting. From an estimated two hundred atomic bombs in mid-1949 the United States upped its arsenal to a thousand in mid-1953 and to an astounding stockpile of some eighteen thousand weapons by 1960. The first thermonuclear device (the “H-bomb”), tested by the United States on November 1, 1952, on the Pacific island of Eniwetok, had a thousand times the force of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. It left behind a crater two miles wide and a half mile deep. The Soviets exploded their first hydrogen bomb less than a year later.
As national security became an overriding concern and a hegemonic ideology, the military won unprecedented influence within the government and on the broader society. The nuclear buildup provides a case in point. A 1946 law gave control over nuclear research and weaponry to the civilian-led Atomic Energy Commission (AEC). Though the military lost out in its desire to have direct control over atomic energy, in a compromise arrangement it did get a statutory role in running the AEC. Over time, it steadily increased its influence, in part through a series of political attacks, coordinated with congressional allies, on the agency’s civilian leaders for supposedly allowing security breaches. (Soviet spies had penetrated the atomic energy program, but had done so when the Army ran it, before the creation of the AEC.)
The AEC operated under a shroud of secrecy and outside of various laws and regulations that normally governed civilian society. Workers at AEC-run facilities could not go on strike, nor would the agency allow unions with left-wing leaders to represent employees at plants operated by its contractors. Denying security clearances to critics of government policy—including J. Robert Oppenheimer, who had led the scientific team that developed the atomic bomb—shut them out of AEC-sponsored research and advisory committees.
To produce nuclear weapons the government built an archipelago of secret nuclear facilities. The Nevada Test Site, set up in 1951, grew to be larger than Rhode Island. More than nine hundred nuclear weapons were detonated there, most in underground shafts but ninety-six above ground, leaving behind a desert expanse contaminated by radiation, pockmarked with craters, and dotted with partially destroyed buildings that had been erected to measure the destructive impact of blasts. A few bombs were so large that officials worried that testing them at the Nevada site would damage buildings in Las Vegas, fifty miles away, so they blew them up on an island off Alaska.
The major nuclear test sites in the continental United States and most uranium mines lay on or near Indian land, so Native Americans disproportionately suffered from the environmental and health problems that came with nuclear armament. Nearby residents were inadvertently exposed to radiation from bomb testing, while thousands of soldiers and sailors were deliberately exposed in order to study the ability of military units to survive atomic attack. Also, in a series of bizarre experiments justified in the name of national security, doctors under government contract secretly exposed hospital patients, prisoners, pregnant women, and mentally retarded boys to various types of radioactivity and then clandestinely tracked their health for decades thereafter.
The AEC was one of a series of new federal agencies that funded and shaped science, engineering, and, more broadly, intellectual life during the Cold War years. During World War II, the federal government vastly increased its spending on research and development. Unlike during the prewar years, when the modest amount of federally funded research had been conducted for the most part directly by government agencies, much of the wartime research was contracted out to universities and corporations. After the war, there was broad support among science administrators and federal officials for continuing this approach, but disagreement over how to implement it. No centralized science agency emerged. Instead, each of the military services embarked on its own large-scale research and development program, contracting out projects to academic institutions and private laboratories. To fund nonmilitary research, Congress established the National Science Foundation and greatly increased appropriations for the National Institutes of Health.
The massive federal investment in research and development, and the decision to funnel much of it through universities and private companies, helped transform the United States from a scientific and technological borrower into the global leader. During the postwar decades, the United States spent far more on research and development than Britain, France, West Germany, and Japan combined. Federal priorities helped determine how science and academic life developed. In 1948, nearly two-thirds of federal research and development money went to military-related projects. Only in a few exceptional years during the decades that followed did spending on nonmilitary projects match or exceed defense work. Academic disciplines with national security relevance, like electrical engineering and Russian studies, flourished, while others, without obvious importance to state interests, lagged behind.
Federal funding and military priorities could take research in odd directions. During the 1950s, for instance, military and civilian agencies funded studies of dolphins by neurophysiologist John Cunningham Lilly, who claimed that they had exceptional intelligence and advanced communication abilities. His work led to the Navy Marine Mammal Program, which trained dolphins for military missions (they were used during the Vietnam War to defend ammunition depots at Cam Ranh Bay and thirty-five years later to sweep for mines during the Iraq War). But it also produced the cultural projection of dolphins as pacific, spiritual, altruistic companions for humans, first in the 1963 movie Flipper, inspired by Lilly’s research, then in the counterculture of the late 1960s (by which time Lilly had become deeply involved with using psychedelic drugs for research), and finally in dolphin exhibits and encounter opportunities at marine parks across the country.
The military influenced academic life not only by funding research but also by sponsoring hundreds of Reserve Officer Training Corps programs on campuses. At many schools, marching cadets were a common sight. Civilian intelligence officers hovered around universities too, developing clandestine relationships with faculty and administrators, commissioning research, and recruiting students. The government even secretly funded, through the CIA, political and literary journals, like the New Leader and Partisan Review, whose outlook it found congenial.
All this cost money, and lots of it. During the first two decades of the Cold War, defense-related outlays accounted for nearly two-thirds of all federal spending. During the Cold War as a whole (from 1947 to 1989), military spending averaged 7.4 percent of the GNP, nine times the figure before World War I and five times the rate between the two world wars. Korea ushered in a new phase in American history, when even in peacetime national security laid claim on a significant share of the total productive output of the society, dominated federal spending, and significantly reduced the resources available for private spending or other public investments.
Domestic Anticommunism
Ideological fervor promoted public acceptance of the costs and dangers of the Cold War. The late 1940s and 1950s saw an intensification of patriotic zeal of the sort normally associated with wartime, even during the years when there was no actual fighting. Patriotism, anticommunism, religiosity, and a search for traitors fortified the country in its contest with the Soviet bloc. They limited internal dissent, weakened the political left, and set the tone for daily living.
Antiradicalism and fear of domestic subversion were not new features of American society; they had been woven into the fabric of the nation almost from its founding, episodically dominating political life. Still, the anticommunist crusade that came after World War II, in its scope, intensity, and duration, exceeded even such past moments of internal repression as the late-eighteenth-century anti-Republican campaign under the Alien and Sedition Acts and the post–World War I Red Scare.
Anticommunism began swelling before the Cold War. During the late 1930s, conservatives used anticommunist charges and investigations to attack the New Deal and the labor movement. Even during World War II, when the Soviet Union and the United States were allied, anticommunism continued to bubble up. During the 1944 presidential campaign, John Bricker, the Republican vice presidential candidate, proclaimed that the Democrats had become a “communistic party with Franklin Roosevelt as its front.” After the war, anticommunism grew even more prominent, used as an electoral weapon by some Republican candidates, including Richard Nixon in his successful 1946 bid for a House seat from California, and given legitimacy by a new round of congressional investigations.
Postwar anticommunism had multiple sources and purposes, but without the Cold War it is hard to imagine that it would have become so powerful and pervasive. Patriotism and anticommunism came to define one another during the Cold War. Cold War patriotism contrasted the United States as a land of freedom with tyrannical communist states abroad. World War II Manichean imagery, which juxtaposed the “free world” of the Allied powers with the “slave world” of fascism, morphed into a new, polar vision in which the Soviet Union, once part of the “free” Allied powers, became repositioned as the center of a reconstituted unfree world, now defined by communism instead of fascism. The adoption by conservative newspapers and commentators of the term “Red Fascism” to describe communism aimed to tar it with the near universal public rejection of Nazism and posit continuity between the anti-Axis struggle and the Cold War. So did the use by intellectuals and politicians of the category “totalitarian” to encompass both fascism and communism. The phrase “un-American activities” also originally referred to both fascism and communism, but after World War II it became almost exclusively associated with the latter. As opponents repeatedly described communism as, by definition, un-American, anticommunism came to be equated with Americanism.
The Freedom Train, which traveled around the country with an exhibit of national historical documents, including the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, illustrated the ideological reconfiguration. Conceived of by the Truman administration in 1946 as a way to contrast American freedom with “Hitler tyranny,” by the time the train began its tour it had become reconceived as a way of countering what the attorney general termed “foreign ideologies” and “subversive elements” at home. The huge outpouring of visitors to the traveling exhibit revealed an eagerness to take advantage of what for most people was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see the nation’s key political documents, but it also suggested a widespread desire to join in a public display of patriotism at a time of growing international tension.
Other new patriotic commemorations also, implicitly or explicitly, contrasted American virtue with communist evil. June 14 had been informally celebrated as Flag Day since the late nineteenth century, but only in 1949 did Congress formally designate it for national observance, furthering the widespread display and veneration of the flag that so many foreign observers were struck by when visiting America. The idea of designating May 1 as “Loyalty Day” to counter the communist celebrations of May Day reportedly came from aging publisher William Randolph Hearst. In the late 1940s, Loyalty Day parades, heavily promoted by the Hearst newspapers, outdrew May Day parades, even in the New York area, a stronghold of the by then shrinking political left.
The Cold War allowed veteran anticommunist crusaders to move from the margins of American politics to its center by focusing on links, real or alleged, between domestic radicalism and the Soviet bloc. The Special House Committee on Un-American Activities (widely called HUAC) helped establish the pattern. Before Pearl Harbor, the committee devoted itself largely to trying to undermine the New Deal by airing charges that communists and their supporters played significant roles in various federal agencies and in labor unions allied with the Roosevelt administration. After the war, HUAC continued to use charges of communist infiltration to attack liberal institutions and policies, but it added a dimension of national security by highlighting connections between domestic and foreign communism. As part of a highly publicized investigation into communist influence in the entertainment business, begun in 1947, HUAC called witnesses like libertarian novelist and screenwriter Ayn Rand to testify about pro-Soviet films, such as Mission to Moscow and Song of Russia, made in Hollywood during World War II with the support of the Roosevelt administration. The committee presented a picture of communists and fellow travelers working covertly to advance the interests of another nation, soon to be America’s enemy, while government officials did nothing or egged them on.
The Truman administration more explicitly portrayed domestic radicalism as a threat to national security when it launched the Federal Employee Loyalty Program in April 1947. Upon taking office, Truman had rejected the idea that subversive activities presented a serious threat to the country and generally refused to allow executive agencies to cooperate with HUAC. Over time, however, pressure grew on him to act. Some came from evidence of security breaches in the government and the uncovering of a Soviet spy ring in Canada, with indications that it might have been active in the United States as well. Equally important were charges made by Republicans during the 1946 elections of inadequate attention to communist penetration of the government.
Under Truman’s program, all new federal employees had to undergo a full-scale loyalty check. Current employees were given a more cursory examination but were fully investigated if any “derogatory information” appeared in their files, which meant that a single informer or complaint could set off an inquiry. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) carried out the investigations, increasing in size from 3,559 agents in 1946 to 7,029 in 1953. Federal law already called for firing government workers who belonged to a political party or organization that advocated the overthrow of the government, but the Truman program went beyond that to make disloyalty, a term it did not clearly define, a basis for dismissal. Membership in or even “sympathetic association” with any group the attorney general judged totalitarian, fascist, communist, subversive, or dedicated to force or violence could be deemed a possible sign of disloyalty.
Though Truman’s loyalty program covered only federal workers, the attorney general’s list of suspect organizations and a list of purportedly communist-linked groups HUAC issued became used by other employers in loyalty investigations of their own. Membership in a listed group often led to firing. Not surprisingly, groups on these lists saw members drop out, contributions dry up, and their political efficacy greatly diminish. While some extreme right-wing groups did appear on the attorney general’s list, most of the listed groups were left-wing organizations or left-liberal coalitions. By creating directories of disapproved organizations, the federal government went a long way toward limiting the freedom of association and defining what was and was not acceptable political behavior for loyal Americans.
The government also moved to define what was and was not acceptable sexual behavior, making deviations from delineated sexual norms, most importantly homosexuality, cause for dismissal too. The growth of a lively gay subculture in Washington, D.C., during the New Deal and World War II, along with a general increased national awareness of homosexuality, led congressional conservatives and federal security officers to call for the firing of homosexuals working for the government at the same time that they pressed for a political cleansing. In 1947, Congress authorized the secretary of state to dismiss any employee he considered a security risk even if they were not judged disloyal, a power soon given to other federal agencies too. Grounds for being considered a security risk included alcoholism, financial irresponsibility, a criminal past, and homosexuality. In 1950 a State Department official testified that his agency had fired ninety-one employees for homosexuality, a revelation that led to a full-scale Senate investigation of government employment of homosexuals and a widespread hunt for gay and lesbian federal workers.
Publicly, officials in the Truman and Eisenhower administrations, including President Eisenhower himself, argued that homosexuality was unacceptable among federal employees because it created opportunities for blackmail that foreign enemies might exploit. No such case, though, ever surfaced. Among themselves, government officials stressed their moral repugnance with homosexuality and their belief that it reflected an individual’s poor character. From the late 1940s through the 1960s, the State Department, which remained the center of the drive for sexual conformity, fired far more employees, roughly a thousand (the overwhelming majority male), for homosexuality than for suspected communist ties.
By 1952, some two million federal employees had undergone some level of loyalty or security investigation. Under Truman, about twelve hundred federal workers were dismissed for disloyalty or security risk, and another six thousand resigned in the course of investigations. A slightly higher number were fired or resigned during the first three years of the Eisenhower administration.
Spies
The loyalty and security programs, by making the dangers of communism seem more immediate than events abroad by themselves suggested, helped build support for Truman’s foreign policy. Charges of espionage even more vividly drove home the point that the danger of communism was present even at the very heart of the country’s government and defense programs. The Alger Hiss case dramatically raised this possibility. Hiss had been a rising star in the New Deal, accompanying Roosevelt to the Yalta conference and having primary responsibility for organizing the founding conference of the UN. A friend of both Dean Acheson and John Foster Dulles, a leading Republican foreign policy expert who became Dwight Eisenhower’s secretary of state, Hiss first surfaced as a purported secret communist agent during a 1948 HUAC hearing on communist infiltration of the government.
HUAC’s star witness was Elizabeth Bentley. During World War II, Bentley had carried messages and documents from communists and communist sympathizers working for the federal government in Washington to Communist Party leaders and Soviet agents in New York. At the end of the war, fearful that she might be apprehended, she went to the FBI with her story. A second former communist courier, Whittaker Chambers, also testified before the House committee. Between them, Bentley and Chambers named dozens of current and former government employees whom they claimed had passed on classified information to the Communist Party, Soviet agents, or both. They included Harry Dexter White, the second in command at the Treasury Department before Truman appointed him to a post at the International Monetary Fund, and Hiss.
White denied the charges against him, dying of a heart attack just three days later. Hiss too denied the accusations made against him, but after he sued Chambers for libel, Chambers revealed new evidence to support his claims. In December 1948, a grand jury indicted Hiss for perjury for denying that in the late 1930s he had given Chambers State Department documents. His first trial ended in a hung jury, but a retrial resulted in his conviction. Many liberals believed Hiss’s continued claims of innocence, but for people who did not, his conviction demonstrated that even the most respectable officials might be communists or spies.
Other espionage cases soon followed. In 1949, the FBI arrested a Justice Department employee, Judith Coplon, as she was about to hand over information about FBI investigations to a Soviet UN employee. Though she was found guilty of espionage, her conviction was overturned because the FBI refused to reveal what had raised suspicions about her. The tip-off had come from encrypted wartime Soviet diplomatic cables that the American government had begun deciphering in a huge effort later known as the Venona Project.
Venona also led to the exposure of Soviet espionage in the wartime atomic bomb program. Decrypted cables revealed that British scientist Klaus Fuchs had given the Soviet Union information on the Anglo-American effort to develop atomic weapons. Arrested in early 1950, Fuchs confessed, leading the FBI to Harry Gold, who had been his liaison to Soviet agents. Gold in turn confessed, leading to the arrest of others charged with conspiring to commit atomic espionage, including a communist couple from New York, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. The government’s case against the Rosenbergs at their 1951 trial had holes, but in the atmosphere of the Korean War it won a conviction. Once again, the FBI did not want to reveal the existence of Venona. Evidence from it would have confirmed that Julius had passed on classified information to the Soviets but suggested that Ethel had at most a very peripheral involvement in his illegal activities. The Rosenbergs continued to assert their innocence until June 19, 1953, when, amid international protests, they were executed.
The most serious cases of Soviet espionage had occurred when the two world powers were not at odds. Nonetheless, spying that had taken place earlier but was uncovered only during the Cold War served to justify U.S. foreign policy and explain its failings, providing an outlet for frustrations over the enormous gap between official rhetoric and the practical limit of American power. Short of all-out war, the Truman administration could not have forced the Soviet Union out of Eastern Europe or prevented the Communist victory in China. Yet communist advances, rather than sparking a rethinking of American policy, led to a search for traitors who “gave away” Eastern Europe and China. For years, congressional conservatives and executive branch security officers launched one loyalty investigation after another of the wartime State Department officials who had correctly predicted the collapse of the Chinese Nationalist regime and advocated trying to reach an accommodation with the Chinese communists to further the fight against the Japanese. Disloyalty also provided a convenient explanation for America’s loss of its nuclear monopoly, inevitable given the sophistication of Soviet science and engineering (though information gotten through spying did speed up the effort).
McCarthyism
The career of Senator Joseph McCarthy reflected the close link between the Red Scare at home and events abroad. A Republican senator from Wisconsin, little known outside his home state, McCarthy captured national attention in February 1950 when he claimed to have a list of State Department employees with communist affiliations against whom the secretary of state had failed to act. Though in this instance and others to come, McCarthy largely recycled old charges with little concern about their veracity, his flamboyant manner and ever-shifting, dramatic accusations, replete with specific numbers and details (often later proved wrong), led to extensive press coverage, bitter partisan controversy, and congressional investigations. The term “McCarthyism,” coined in a Washington Post political cartoon, became widely used to describe the anticommunist drive, particularly its most lurid and sleazy forms.
The political climate ushered in by the Korean War eliminated any chance that concern about the dangers of domestic communism would begin to die down. Though by 1950 the American Communist Party was in steep decline, congressional conservatives, led by Pat McCarran, an anti–New Deal Democratic senator from Nevada, congressional liberals, and the Truman administration all put forth proposals to legally restrict communist activity and bolster national security laws. Elements of the various plans were combined into an omnibus Internal Security Act that Congress passed by huge margins. Truman, who had sought a more modest measure, vetoed the bill, saying that it would “greatly weaken our liberties,” but Congress easily overrode him. The new law required communist organizations and their members to register with the federal government; excluded foreigners who ever had been affiliated with groups advocating totalitarianism from visiting or emigrating to the United States; and authorized the detention without trial of suspected subversives in the event of a national emergency. By 1954, the FBI had over twenty-six thousand people on a list of those to be arrested.
Liberal Democrats had fallen over themselves to prove they were as staunchly anticommunist as conservatives. Nevertheless, in the 1950 election, Republicans, with McCarthy in the lead, charged the Democrats with being soft on communism. The tactic already was well worn. But with U.S. troops fighting in Korea, red-baiting—on the part of both parties—became more common and cruder. In a bitter Senate primary fight in Florida, Democratic congressman George Smathers called his opponent, the liberal incumbent Claude Pepper, “an apologist for Stalin” and claimed that “Red Pepper” was an “associate of fellow travelers.” In a California Senate primary, a Democratic opponent labeled liberal congresswoman Helen Gahagan Douglas, a former Hollywood actress married to a movie star, part of a “subversive clique,” asserting, in a not uncommon linking of political and sexual transgression, that she was “neither truly representative of her sex nor of her party.” After Douglas won the nomination, her Republican opponent, Richard Nixon (seeking to move from the House to the Senate), kept her on the defensive by repeatedly pointing out that her voting record on national security issues heavily overlapped that of New York’s radical congressman Vito Marcantonio.
Anticommunist politicians received backing from party leaders and economic interests who sought to use them to advance partisan and policy agendas that often had little to do with national security. Mainstream Republican leaders like Taft and Eisenhower either tacitly supported McCarthy or refrained from publicly criticizing him, seeing him as an electoral asset for their party. Anticommunism provided a way to attack the New Deal, the Fair Deal, and liberalism by implying that they were on a continuum with communism, pink if not red, softer versions of the ultimate evil. Conservative newspapers, elements of the Catholic Church, business groups such as the Chamber of Commerce, and conservative civic organizations like the American Legion and the Daughters of the American Revolution clamored about the dangers of communism as part of a broader effort to roll back the New Deal, or at least stop its expansion.
Business found anticommunism a useful weapon against labor, charging that unions, rather than simply trying to help their members, were advancing an anti-American conspiracy. Within the labor movement, longtime anticommunists found their position bolstered by unfolding events. After a group of unions with ties to the Communist Party dissented from the CIO’s backing of Truman and the Marshall Plan, CIO leaders expelled them. The federal government, through congressional investigations, deportations, prosecutions, and an ever-growing web of anticommunist laws and regulations, isolated left-wing unionists and forced many out of the labor movement. The combination of internal battling, government action, and employer attacks left unions weakened and all but ended the historic ties between organized labor and political radicalism.
Real estate interests used anticommunism to try to stop the development of public housing. In 1947, as vice chairman of a joint congressional committee studying housing issues, Joe McCarthy, who raised money not only from businesses in his own state but also from the oil and real estate industries nationally, blamed government housing for broken homes and juvenile delinquency and for serving as “a breeding ground for communists.” In Los Angeles, a coalition of business groups, real estate agents, home builders, and the Los Angeles Times attacked an ambitious plan to build ten thousand units of public housing as “creeping socialism,” leading to a 1952 referendum vote that killed off much of the program. (The city then helped entice the Brooklyn Dodgers to move west by selling them a parcel of land in Chavez Ravine, originally taken for public housing, on which to build a stadium.)
In the South, anticommunism developed largely as a way to block the civil rights movement. The Red Scare started late in the region, which, with a one-party system and a high degree of ideological consensus among its ruling powers, had less occasion than elsewhere for anticommunism to be mobilized for partisan purposes. A 1954 poll found the South to be the only region of the country where more people opposed McCarthy than supported him. But as the movement for racial equality grew, particularly after the 1954 Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, southern defenders of segregation increasingly made use of anticommunism, portraying the push for civil rights as a conspiracy orchestrated by communists from outside the region. Most southern states passed laws and set up police agencies or legislative committees aimed at repressing civil rights efforts in the name of anticommunism, often with considerable success.
Sometimes it was unclear how much the Communist Party itself was actually a concern to anticommunists, who deemed disloyal a broad range of social, political, and religious views. McCarthyism was a quest for a conservative ideological and cultural consensus that went far beyond the issue of communism. Many anticommunists worried at least as much about atheists, intellectuals, integrationists, trade unionists, left-liberals, and homosexuals as they did about communists.
HUAC’s sustained investigation of the entertainment industries reflected this desire to control mass culture and popular values. In repeated probes searching for communist infiltration, committee members concerned themselves with the content of cultural products. They did not worry about open communist appeals; as actor Adolphe Menjou, a devoted anticommunist, said in HUAC testimony, “I have seen no such thing as Communist propaganda, such as waving the hammer and sickle in motion pictures.” Rather the issue was what Menjou called “things that I thought were against what I considered good Americanism.”
A large number of leftists worked at one time or another in the culture industries, including several hundred Communist Party members in Hollywood alone. Much of their work differed little from that of their more conservative colleagues, but when they had a chance, left-wing writers and directors tried to project their social values into films, be it prewar gangster movies that portrayed crime as an outgrowth of poverty, wartime antifascist movies, or postwar “message movies,” like Gentleman’s Agreement and The Big Clock, that attacked racism and anti-Semitism and were critical of big business. Since communists, former communists, and communist sympathizers were particularly active in pursuing such liberal themes, their expulsion from the industry provided a way to reorient mass culture. The movie studios and, to an even greater extent, the emerging television industry soon began shying away from controversial subjects and avoiding the kind of social-problem themes that had been commonly addressed in the mid-1940s. In commercial culture, as in political debate, the range of discourse narrowed.
A few Hollywood figures who refused to answer questions before HUAC went to jail for contempt of Congress, but in the movie industry, and more generally, the sanctions against those linked in one way or another to the Communist Party came largely from civil society. Congressional committees and other government agencies identified current and former leftists, but their punishment came from being fired by private employers and being put on blacklists of unhirables maintained by trade associations and professional red-hunting agencies. By the early 1950s, anyone who refused to sign a form declaring that they were not a communist or refused to testify before a congressional committee could not work in the movie, radio, or television industries, at least under his or her own name.
By one estimate, over thirteen million Americans, about a fifth of the workforce, came within the scope of government and private loyalty programs. Most simply had to fill out a questionnaire or take a loyalty oath. Even that could have a chilling effect. For tens of thousands, the consequences were direr. Nearly three thousand longshoremen and seamen lost their jobs under a federally established port security program, ostensibly aimed at preventing sabotage but in practice more concerned with ridding the maritime industry of left-wing unionists. On college campuses, some one hundred faculty members lost their jobs, mostly for refusing to cooperate with anticommunist investigations or name leftists they knew. Hundreds of state and municipal workers across the country—social workers, teachers, transit workers, and the like—lost their jobs, too, because of their political affiliations or refusal to testify about them.
The job-based loyalty system could exact a high personal cost. Thomas J. Coleman, an African American employee of the Detroit Garbage Department, was the first worker investigated by the loyalty commission city voters authorized in 1949. A high-ranking Mason with a son serving in Korea, and a civil rights and union activist, Coleman denied ever being a communist. Nonetheless, he was fired after a quarter century on the job. Veteran actor Philip Loeb, a star of the long-running television series The Goldbergs and a supporter of various left-wing causes, lost his job after the sponsor of the show, General Foods, refused to keep it going as long as he was employed. Four years later, blacklisted from most other work, running out of money, and no longer able to keep his mentally ill son in a private institution, Loeb committed suicide. Vera Shlakman, a pioneering economic historian, fared better. After being fired by Queens College in 1952 for refusing to tell a Senate committee if she had ever been a communist, she eventually built a second career teaching social work. But she never regained a position in economics.
The many purposes anticommunism served helped sustain it even as the domestic Communist Party all but disappeared. But anticommunism also had a noninstrumental side, an expressive side—often irrational, fantastic, carnivalesque—such as McCarthy’s attacks on Dean Acheson and George Marshall for being leaders of a pro-Soviet conspiracy or Indiana senator William Jenner’s claim that “this country today is in the hands of a secret inner coterie which is directed by agents of the Soviet Union.” Charges that defied common sense often had an emotional and partisan logic. Many were expressions of frustration over the lack of sustained peace after World War II, or reflections of populist antielitism, as in the case of charges against Acheson, whose immaculate tailoring and aristocratic pretensions won him wide dislike. McCarthy’s draw lay in part in the antiestablishment image he cultivated, as a drinker, racetrack regular, and harasser of the high and mighty. Hearings and trials served as a kind of theater, sometimes of statecraft, sometimes of cruelty, and sometimes of the absurd.
A semisubmerged current of antimodernism fed anticommunism, a discomfort many Americans felt with the changes wrought by the triumph of urban industrialism over rural life, of individualism and the market over communal ties, of abstract bureaucratic institutions over organic relations, of democracy over hierarchy. (However, plenty of modernist urban liberals embraced anticommunism too.) Antistatism often wore anticommunist clothes, as conservatives saw the growth of the national government (and taxes to sustain it) as a threat to republican values and individual freedom, a way station on the road to full-blown tyranny. Communists provided a symbolic target and anticommunism an organizing framework for a range of resentments and dislikes that in many cases had nothing to do with communism itself.
Cold War Religion
Religion complemented anticommunism and patriotism in bolstering support for Cold War foreign policy and the militarization of American society. In the decades after World War II, the United States experienced an increase in churchgoing and public religiosity. On the eve of World War II, half of all Americans belonged to a church or synagogue; by 1960, that had risen to nearly two-thirds, a remarkable change from a hundred years earlier, when only a fifth of the population had a formal religious affiliation. In its increasing religiousness, the United States differed from other industrialized nations, which generally experienced a decline in churchgoing and a general secularization after World War II.
From the earliest days of English colonization, many white Protestant Americans believed that God had given them a mission to create a model society, a living embodiment of the ideal godly community, which would inspire others to live like them. During the Cold War, some policymakers formulated U.S. foreign policy in this light, believing that in opposing communism and promoting its own values the country was engaged in divine work. Three Cold War secretaries of state had grown up in deeply Protestant environments as sons of ministers: Dean Acheson, whose father rose to be an Episcopalian bishop; John Foster Dulles, the son of a Presbyterian minister, who himself considered becoming a minister; and Dean Rusk, who served under Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. Each, to at least some extent, imbued U.S. policy with a sense of Christian mission.
In Cold War rhetoric, Americans often described their enemy as “godless communism.” Many Protestant anticommunist activists—like Billy Graham, who emerged in the early 1950s as the country’s best-known evangelist—were as distressed by the atheism of communism as by its collectivism. In 1952, Democratic presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson described the international battle the United States was engaged in as against “the anti-Christ.” His opponent, Dwight Eisenhower, described the contest with the Soviets as “a war of light against darkness, freedom against slavery, Godliness against atheism.”
Catholics, too, embraced anticommunism as a religious cause. New York’s Francis Cardinal Spellman and Los Angeles’s Archbishop James Francis McIntyre emerged as among the most militant and tenacious anticommunists in the country. Among the Catholic laity, a wave of Marian piety developed during the Cold War that had an explicitly anticommunist dimension. Millions devoted themselves to Our Lady of Fatima, who in 1917 had appeared to three Portuguese children, saying that newly communist Russia could be converted to Christianity and world peace guaranteed if her followers undertook a particular set of prayers and religious acts. In 1950, a homegrown apparition occurred when the Virgin Mary appeared before Mary Ann Van Hoof, a Wisconsin housewife living a few miles from the hometown of Joe McCarthy, then in the process of becoming one of the country’s most prominent Catholic politicians. At the height of the fervor about Mary’s appearance and her warnings to Van Hoof about communism and Satan, some 100,000 pilgrims gathered on the Van Hoof farm hoping to witness a miracle. Church officials condemned the cult that grew up around Van Hoof but encouraged hundreds of thousands of Catholic adults and schoolchildren to regularly participate in prayers and rallies for Catholic prelates imprisoned in Eastern Europe.
In 1954, President Eisenhower, who after an adult lifetime of nonattendance began regularly going to church upon taking office, backed the successful effort to add the phrase “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance. (The promotion of the idea of a “Judeo-Christian tradition” helped paper over the question of just what god the nation was putting itself under.) Later Eisenhower ordered “In God We Trust”—which Congress had declared the national motto—added to paper money (coins had carried the phrase since the Civil War). The armed services embraced religion too. Military leaders found it a useful tool for improving the behavior, discipline, and morale of their troops and projecting a clean-cut image to the public (rather than the hard-drinking, carousing reputation that the peacetime military had had in the past). In 1947, the Air Force began requiring all of its uniformed personnel to watch a series of religious films. Military chaplains increasingly came from evangelical denominations, which saw chaplaincy as a way to act on anticommunist beliefs while countering the influence of Catholics and liberal Protestants on American youth.
Official rhetoric and popular belief mirrored one another. Countless Americans of all faiths assumed that the struggle of the United States against the Soviet Union represented a battle between good and evil, not simply a contest between competing national interests, with their country acting on God’s side. For many, this moral and spiritual dimension justified the heavy cost of battling communism in Korea, at home, and around the world. Religion helped give meaning to the long, frustrating struggle.
Ike
While most Americans, at least at first, accepted the necessity of the fighting in Korea, they did not like the war, especially as it dragged on, with the chance for anything more than a return to the prewar status gone and U.S. soldiers continuing to die in large numbers. The Truman administration’s lack of strategy for either outright victory or disengagement contributed to the president’s plummeting popularity. So did his seeming indifference to a series of corruption and influence-peddling scandals that plagued his second term. Inflation and high taxes, in part the result of the Korean War and the broader anticommunist effort, further diminished support for the president. Privately, Truman pretty much ruled out seeking another term well before the 1952 election, but he allowed his name to be entered into the New Hampshire Democratic primary, the first in the country. An embarrassing defeat to Tennessee senator Estes Kefauver closed his options, leading him to announce that he would not run again. Adlai Stevenson, the liberal governor of Illinois, won the nomination with Truman’s support.
Among Republicans, the ongoing divide between East Coast moderates and midwestern conservatives again defined the contest for the presidential nomination. Robert Taft had the greatest support among party activists, but his more liberal opponents succeeded in recruiting as their standard-bearer Dwight Eisenhower, who was immensely popular thanks to his military record and nonpartisan demeanor. After besting Taft at the Republican convention, Eisenhower picked as his vice presidential running mate Richard Nixon, whose internationalist views on foreign policy generally coincided with the Dewey wing of the party but whose staunch anticommunism made him a conservative favorite.
As the campaign unfolded, Korea emerged as the leading issue. Though Eisenhower changed his position on the war several times, his pledge to make ending it his number one priority, his promise to personally visit Korea, and his military background gave him an edge over Stevenson, who defended Truman’s handling of the war. Boosted by his personal popularity, Eisenhower easily won the popular vote and carried the Electoral College by a landslide, even prevailing in four southern states, the best Republican showing in the region since 1928. Republican congressional candidates, including such leading anticommunists as McCarthy and Jenner, generally ran behind the national ticket, but the party managed to just barely win control of both houses of Congress.
As the first Republican president in twenty years, Eisenhower sought a smaller government, less involved in regulating the economy and everyday life. Like many conservatives, he wanted to transfer some power from Washington back to the states. But he did not reject wholesale the revolutionary expansion in the functions of the federal government that had come with the New Deal, World War II, and the Cold War. His decision at the start of his presidency not to try to undo the basic social welfare measures of the New Deal cemented the outcome of the postwar political and class contests, keeping in place the basic reform measures of the Roosevelt years but not further expanding the limited welfare state they created. Populating his cabinet with corporate executives, Eisenhower’s moderate, pro-business policies sparked liberal and labor opposition, but his acceptance of the basic contours of the evolved social order took many of the most contentious domestic issues of the past off the political agenda. Some of Eisenhower’s bitterest critics were on his right, conservatives deeply disappointed that the Republican capture of the White House and Congress did not lead to the dismantling of the New Deal.
Eisenhower faced conservative criticism over foreign policy as well. He generally supported the Cold War policies that the Truman administration had put into place and rejected the idea—though not always clearly, in public—that postwar communist gains had been the result of Democratic treachery. Also, he wanted the presidency to retain its dominant role in foreign policy. This put him at odds with conservative congressional Republicans who objected to the priority given to defending and bolstering Europe and who feared that the United Nations and the country’s growing web of international alliances would diminish the sovereignty of the American people.
The battle came to a head over the so-called Bricker Amendment. Introduced by Senator John Bricker (John Gunther wrote of him, “Intellectually he is like interstellar space—a vast vacuum occasionally crossed by homeless, wandering clichés”), the proposed constitutional amendment would have limited the enforceability of international agreements within the United States, not allowing them to go beyond the constitutional limits on domestic legislation and requiring acts of Congress to put them into effect. Though what practical consequences the amendment would have remained unclear, symbolically the measure was an attack on internationalism, the power of the presidency, and, after the fact, the Yalta agreement, which many conservatives blamed for the communist control of Eastern Europe. To Eisenhower’s dismay, Bricker’s amendment quickly won the support of almost every Republican senator, major veterans’ and business groups, southern politicians fearful that UN human rights provisions would mandate desegregation, and members of his own cabinet. After a bitter battle that lasted well over a year, the Senate rejected the amendment only because Minority Leader Lyndon B. Johnson decided that it was in the Democratic interest to ally with the president to defeat it.
While the Democrats helped Eisenhower win the battle over the general direction of foreign policy, Stalin helped the president with his greatest immediate challenge, ending the Korean War, by dropping dead. Upon taking office, Eisenhower rejected the military’s plan for a new ground offensive in Korea, but he sent various signals that the United States would escalate the war if a settlement did not come soon. Stalin’s death in early March 1953 made that unnecessary. The new Soviet leadership immediately launched a “peace initiative” to lessen international tensions, with Premier Georgy Malenkov saying at Stalin’s funeral, “There are no contested issues in U.S.-Soviet relations that cannot be resolved by peaceful means.”
After the Soviets and Chinese agreed among themselves to try to bring the Korean War to a rapid conclusion, armistice negotiations resumed in late March on the basis of a new Chinese proposal that no longer insisted on the immediate repatriation of all prisoners of war, whether or not they wanted to go home. The United States, still not satisfied with the terms, intensified the air war, bombing irrigation dams in North Korea to flood the rice fields and create food shortages. But growing dismay among its allies over U.S. inflexibility, along with recognition of the costs and difficulties of a new general offensive, led the Eisenhower administration to reverse course and make concessions of its own in late May. At that point Syngman Rhee, who had no desire to end the war with the north outside his control, tried to sabotage the negotiations, which had reached a tentative agreement that POWs who did not want to be repatriated would be handed over to an international commission. To make that impossible, Rhee unilaterally released some twenty-five thousand North Korean and Chinese prisoners. In spite of this provocation, with the major powers now all wanting the war over, an armistice agreement was signed on July 27, 1953, that divided the north and south along the current battle line, giving the south somewhat more territory than before the start of the war. A conference the following year to address long-term Korean political issues failed to make progress toward reunification, leaving the peninsula divided between two hostile states with little contact with each other. Both China and the United States kept troops in Korea through the late 1950s, when the Chinese withdrew and the United States reduced its force but armed it with atomic weapons.
The “New Look”
The end of the Korean War brought to a close the most dangerous, expensive, and ideologically charged phase of the Cold War (though in the early 1960s a series of confrontations once again raised the specter of all-out war between the United States and the Soviet Union). Even though tensions eased, the United States did not militarily demobilize. Instead, it remained in a state of high readiness, with a draft in place and a quantity of social resources allocated to war-making capacity that was unprecedented for peacetime. As a percentage of the gross domestic product (GDP), military spending did not return to the pre–Korean War level until the 1990s, after the end of the Cold War.
Even in peacetime, militarism shaped the pattern of American economic, technological, and geographic development. Military activities blocked off huge tracts of land from public use and polluted the soil, air, and water. (During the Cold War, in the United States, as in the Soviet Union, the military was the biggest single polluter, for the most part exempt from regulation and scrutiny in the name of national security.) In parts of the country with extensive military facilities, the military and military contractors helped set the cultural and political tone. In Washington, military leaders, the defense industries they sustained (and often went to work for upon retiring), and congressmen seeking military spending in their districts formed a political juggernaut (Eisenhower called it the “delta of power”) that kept military appropriations high and initiated the development of many costly, unneeded, technically flawed weapons systems.
Yet even as militarism played an unprecedented peacetime role, the country did not become the garrison state that many feared. In the 1950s, a person walking around an American city or driving through the countryside would have been less likely to see soldiers in uniform or military installations than in many other parts of the communist and noncommunist worlds, from China to France. The military almost never directly got involved in electoral politics, and career military men, with the large exception of Eisenhower himself, rarely held top government positions.
A deep-rooted hostility to federal power, high taxes, and centralized planning, lodged primarily within the Republican Party, mitigated the Cold War trend toward a militarized society and command economy. The broad support for the Bricker Amendment, as well as the demand from powerful figures like Robert Taft for steep cuts in defense spending, reflected substantial elite reservations about the national security state. So did the decision to keep control over civil defense preparedness in civilian hands, largely at the state and local level, and not fund a proposed massive fallout shelter program. Many conservatives who earlier in the century had supported the spread of U.S. power through arms in the Philippines and Latin America did not have the stomach for what it took to maintain a global military presence, fearing that high taxes and a powerful state apparatus would undermine the very republican values they held dear.
Over his long Army career, Eisenhower had worked to deepen the ties between the military and business, and as president he opposed efforts to restrict federal power. Nonetheless, he too remained skeptical of the Cold War arms buildup and the militarization of American life. Eisenhower fought hard to reduce military spending from the levels called for by the Truman administration. Motivated in large part by a desire to lower the cost of military power (“more bang for the buck”), the Eisenhower administration introduced a “New Look” military strategy that called for increased dependence on strategic bombing, nuclear weapons, military aid to allies, and covert action, all cheaper alternatives to maintaining a massive ground force.
Eisenhower spoke eloquently about the costs and perils of militarization. In a speech responding to the 1953 Soviet peace initiative, he cataloged the social price of military spending: “The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than thirty cities. It is two electric power plants. . . . We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than eight thousand people.” The Cold War arms race, he concluded was “not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.” Eight years later, in his farewell address, Eisenhower warned of the dangers of what he called the military-industrial complex: “This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence—economic, political, even spiritual—is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government.”
But Eisenhower succeeded only in modestly checking defense spending and ended up presiding over the elaboration of the very political and social arrangements he warned against. The New Look, with its stress on nuclear weapons and covert action, turned over inordinate power to an elite of scientists, engineers, and military managers whose activities few Americans could understand, let alone judge or control, and to secret operatives, whose activities most Americans did not even know of, far from the return to republican values many conservative critics of Cold War militarism professed to embrace. The United States did not become a garrison state, but in subtler ways militarism permeated society. At its zenith of power, the United States, as sociologist and left-wing critic C. Wright Mills put it, simultaneously had a “permanent-war economy and a private-corporation economy,” as the quests for national security, international power, personal autonomy, and unregulated corporate capitalism lived in complex tension with one another.
McCarthy Falls, McCarthyism Continues
Like militarization, anticommunism declined in intensity with the end of the Korean War but remained a pervasive presence. McCarthy himself became a liability to those in power. Once the Republicans controlled the federal government, his charges and investigations began hurting his own party, which no longer needed him as a partisan tool to overcome entrenched Democratic rule. When McCarthy began going after central institutions of state power, threatening an investigation of the CIA and holding hearings on allegations that the Army harbored communists, his downfall came quickly. Eisenhower, who had kept quiet about McCarthy, moved behind the scenes to undercut him, while public critics became emboldened. A March 1953 broadcast by Edward R. Murrow on the CBS television network, dissecting McCarthy’s methods, rebutting his charges, and blaming the country as a whole for allowing him to create an atmosphere of fear, reflected the changing political atmosphere and hastened the senator’s decline. A televised Senate hearing in 1954, considering charges that McCarthy had pressured the Army to give a member of his staff preferential treatment, further reduced his backing, to the point that in December of that year his colleagues voted by a large margin to censure him for behavior unbecoming of a member of the Senate.
McCarthy’s downfall did not end McCarthyism, which remained institutionalized, inside and outside of the government. Loyalty oaths and investigations continued, the State Department restricted the ability of communists and other dissenters to enter or leave the country, and Congress passed its most draconian anticommunist law yet in 1954, the Communist Control Act, which denied the Communist Party all legal rights. As the Communist Party shriveled, the FBI actually escalated its campaign against it with the 1956 creation of the Counterintelligence Program, or COINTELPRO, an effort to weaken the party through the use of agents provocateurs, the spread of false information, leaks to the media, tax audits, and the like. (Later, the FBI would use COINTELPRO to target other movements it disliked, including the civil rights movement.) In Hollywood, the blacklist remained solidly in place through the end of the 1950s. In television, it lasted even longer.
The hot war in Korea, and the Cold War before and after, narrowed political debate and cultural horizons for an entire generation. In 1952, Supreme Court justice William O. Douglas wrote that someone who left the country for several months would return to “be shocked at the arrogance and intolerance of great segments of the American press, at the arrogance and intolerance of many leaders in public office, at the arrogance and intolerance reflected in many of our attitudes toward Asia. He will find that thought is being standardized, that the permissible area of calm discussion is being narrowed, that the range of ideas is being limited, that many minds are closed.” Even after the Korean War ended, few voices challenged the fundamental premises of American foreign policy, as the diversity of views about domestic and international politics never matched that in the immediate post–World War II years. With left-wing radicalism all but eliminated from American life, and conservative antistatism contained, a cultural and political consensus reigned, at least for a while.