I will not get into a pissing contest with that skunk [Joseph McCarthy].
—DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER
THE COMMUNIST PARTY (CPUSA) BEGAN TO GAIN strength in America at the time of the Red Scare in the 1920s. The party founded a newspaper, the Daily Worker, in 1924. In the early 1930s, some Americans devastated by the collapse of the stock market and the ensuing Great Depression felt that capitalism had failed them, and they saw hope in communism.
The Russians were of course happy to take advantage of the situation.
William Zebulon Foster, a militant, communist union organizer, and member of the Industrial Workers of the World, ran for president in 1932. Foster came to prominence as a leader of the bloody 1919 steel strike—an attempt to organize steel workers in the US. In 1921 the Russians supported his Foster Trade Union Education League to make inroads in the United States. Three times Foster ran for president, calling for the end of capitalism and the rise of a workers’ republic. In 1932 he won 102,991 votes. Afterward, he suffered a serious heart attack and leadership passed to Earl Browder, who in 1940 ran for president.
By the 1930s there were 65,000 members of the Communist Party in America. The hotbed for support was New York City, as members fought for fair housing for African Americans and the poor. Nightclubs in Greenwich Village owned by communists and communist sympathizers were some of the few places in the country where African American performers like Billie Holiday, Buster Brown and the Speed Kings, Beige & Brown, and Bill “Bojangles” Robinson could perform in front of white audiences.
CPUSA was founded in Chicago, but in 1927 its headquarters was moved to 35 East 12th Street in New York City, two blocks from Union Square. In the 1920s American communists were predominantly immigrants, some of them Eastern European Jews.
But unlike in Weimar Germany, where communists were often more than 10 percent of the vote, the CPUSA was a nothing party. The Socialist Party, which became strong in the 1930s, ran Norman Thomas for president in 1932 and garnered 884,781 votes, almost nine times the 102,991 votes that the Communist William Foster received. Almost all of the nearly 40 million votes in that election were split between the Republican, President Herbert Hoover (39.7 percent), and Democratic challenger Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt of New York (57.4 percent). The Socialists stood at about 2 percent and the Communists at about 0.25 percent.
Hardly a threat to American democracy.
As Stalin took over Russia and murdered millions, American communists put on blinders and pretended it wasn’t happening. These misguided idealists rooted for Russia to show the world that socialism and communism were workable systems.
When the Nazis seized power in Germany in 1933, American communists stressed the importance of uniting to defeat the Nazis.
By the late 1930s, a left-wing movement had grown up around the Communist Party. Most people who identified as communists didn’t belong to CPUSA. They were “small-c” communists, sympathizing with the party’s goals, but not submitting to its discipline. Dozens of organizations rose up to fight for racial equality, unions, and freedom for Spain in the (Spanish) Republicans’ civil war against fascist dictator Francisco Franco. Most of these were not actually part of the Communist Party.
By 1938 half the 75,000 members of the American Communist Party lived in New York City.
Communist candidate Pete Cacchione was elected to the city council in 1941, as was Benjamin Davis, an African American from Harlem, in 1943.
In Harlem the Communist Party’s commitment to fighting racism helped attract the support of African Americans. Meanwhile, some members of the Teachers Union, the American Newspaper Guild, the Transport Workers Union, and the National Maritime Union expressed their support for the Communist Party. Hundreds of students and professors at Columbia, New York University, Brooklyn College, and the City College of New York signed up for Communist fronts such as the American Youth Congress, but it’s unclear how many actually joined.
Most American communists were “fellow travelers.” They weren’t communists—because they disliked like the party discipline—but they sympathized with at least some of its ideals. During the May Day Parade, marchers with the Daily Worker wore baseball uniforms and carried signs that read: END JIM CROW in BASEBALL.
Even though communists were very few in number, heavily concentrated in New York City and a few other urban areas, and even though they supported civil rights when FDR’s Democrats, beholden to Southern politicians, did relatively little, they were perceived as a threat. Although they earned far less than one percent of the vote in presidential elections, they were perceived as dangerous for democracy.
They needed to be investigated.
In 1940 the New York State legislature appointed a committee to investigate teachers and professors in New York City. The committee, headed by two staunch conservatives, Republican state assemblyman Herbert Rapp and Republican state senator Frederic Coudert, sought to curb the influence of the Jewish teachers and professionals. Some of the outrage was also over CCNY’s hiring of a black professor, Dr. Max Yergan, who was a member of the Communist Party.
The final straw came when CCNY announced it intended to hire peace activist and leader of the antiwar movement Bertrand Russell.
Within a year, eight hundred public school teachers and college faculty members were targeted. The key informant at City College, William Canning, named more than fifty of his colleagues and got them fired.
Though the teachers were fired solely because they had once been members of the Communist Party, the courts upheld these decisions until 1957, when the Supreme Court finally ruled that such flimsy grounds of dismissal were unconstitutional.
Most of the victims of the Rapp-Coudert investigation never taught again in New York City or anywhere else. Morris Schappes, who acknowledged membership in the Communist Party, was pressed to name other communists he knew, but he only named those he knew who had been killed in the Spanish Civil War. He was charged with perjury and sentenced to fourteen months in “the Tombs” in New York City. The Rapp-Coudert Committee had worked outside the normal prosecutorial and judicial framework—outside of the rule of law—to have an American put in jail.
Perhaps the communists Schappes knew had received support from the Soviet Union. Perhaps. But there were at least three or four degrees of separation between Schappes and the Kremlin’s meddling in American elections through the CPUSA, an endeavor that year after year garnered far less than 1 percent of the vote. And this was when the USSR was ostensibly our ally in World War II.
Imagine what would have happened back then if people working close to the US president had direct contacts with Russian agents seeking to influence American elections and then lied about it to the FBI. Imagine what would have happened if a presidential candidate urged the Russians to obtain, read, and publicly release the private correspondence of an opposing candidate.
But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.
On far more flimsy grounds, leading Democrats were uncomfortable with Vice President Henry Wallace during World War II. Rumors spread that Wallace was more sympathetic to our Soviet allies than the administration officials and congressmen who saw Stalin as a brutal and untrustworthy dictator. That—and various unsubstantiated rumors about Wallace’s personal associations with people who might be communists—got him thrown off the Democratic ticket in 1944 and replaced with Harry Truman.
By the end of World War II, the Communist Party had very little influence left. Russia, no longer an ally, almost overnight had become an enemy.
In 1940, Julius Rosenberg had joined the Army Signal Corps Engineering Laboratories at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey, where he worked as an engineer-inspector until 1945. He was fired when the US Army discovered his previous membership in the Communist Party.
Six years later, on March 29, 1951, Rosenberg and his wife, Ethel, were convicted of espionage. They were accused of sharing secrets about the atomic bomb with Russians. They were sentenced to death on April 5 under Section 2 of the Espionage Act of 1917, which prohibits transmitting or attempting to transmit to a foreign government information “relating to the national defense.”
Prosecutor Roy Cohn, a shadowy, controversial figure who assisted Joseph McCarthy with his hearings as his chief counsel, later bragged that his influence led to the appointment of US attorney Irving Saypol, who prosecuted the case, and of the judge who ordered the Rosenberg death sentence. Cohn patted himself on the back when he bragged that the judge, Irving Kaufman, had imposed the death penalty on Cohn’s personal recommendation.
When the reprisals came, it was open season on anyone who had ever been a member of the Communist Party or one of its many organizations.
The law that gave rise to the anti-communist persecutions in the 1940s and 1950s was written by an anti-labor, segregationist congressman named Howard W. Smith, a Democrat from Virginia. Formally titled the Alien Registration Act, but more widely called the Smith Act, the law made it a federal offense for anyone to “knowingly or willfully advocate, abet, advise or teach the duty, necessity, desirability or propriety of overthrowing the government of the United States or any State by force or violence, or for anyone to organize any association which teaches, advises or encourages such an overthrow, or for anyone to become a member of or to affiliate with any such association.”
It was the first statute since the Alien and Sedition Act of 1789 to make a crime out of advocating an idea.
The bill was signed into law by Franklin Roosevelt in 1940.
The first prosecution under the act was against Communist leaders in Minnesota who encouraged the teamsters to strike for better wages. The party was simultaneously campaigning to stay out of the war.
The prosecution used the Communist Manifesto and writings by Lenin and Trotsky as evidence. They also called two witnesses who said that some of the defendants had told antiwar soldiers to complain about the food and living conditions.
On December 8, 1941, one day after the bombing of Pearl Harbor frightened the country, the jury handed down its sentences. Twelve defendants got sixteen-month terms, and eleven others received a year in jail.
The framework for the House Un-American Activities Committee, with its platform for hunting out Communists in the 1950s, was established in 1938 with the Dies Committee. The sole function of this body was to “expose” threats to America’s way of life. It was supported by liberals such as Congressman Samuel Dickstein, who had become alarmed at the growth of the German Bund and of anti-Semitism. Its focus, however, was anti-communism.
Representative Martin Dies Jr. of Texas originally supported the New Deal, but by the late 1930s he opposed Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal programs, as he had become obsessed with what he saw as the subversive threat from the left. He introduced a resolution calling for a special committee to investigate “un-American propaganda” instigated by foreign countries. His intention was to investigate Communists, Socialists, Trotskyites, and those who held similar beliefs. On May 26, 1938, the House established the committee, and Dies became its chairman. His chief investigator was J. B. Matthews, publisher of Father Charles Coughlin’s anti-Semitic book, Social Justice.
Dies wanted to go after his political enemies. But there was one roadblock in the way—President Franklin Roosevelt.
As long as Roosevelt was alive, Dies and the committee would be frustrated and blunted. But even Roosevelt couldn’t stop them from wreaking some havoc.
The American Federation of Labor (AFL) was battling the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) for control of labor unions. Dies’s first witness was John Frey, the president of the Metal Trades Department of the AFL. Frey testified—without any evidence—that the CIO was filled with Communists. He identified as Communists 283 CIO organizers. Dies accepted his testimony, and headlines and firings followed.
The next witness, Walter Steele, a self-appointed “patriot,” testified that there were communists in the Boy Scouts and Camp Fire Girls. Reporters rushed to print the allegations but, again, nobody was accused of having done anything. Belonging to the Communist Party at any point in one’s life—or merely having expressed interest in the Party—was enough to find one in the wrong.
The politics of Dies’s actions were highlighted when he went after the Federal Theater Project, of the Works Project Association, which employed several thousand writers and actors.
When the director, Hallie Flanagan, was asked about an article she had written about the English playwright Christopher Marlowe (who died in 1593), Congressman Joe Starnes ignorantly questioned, “Is he a Communist?” All across America there were howls of protest—and laughter. Nevertheless, the investigation killed the theater project.
Dies’s House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) was scheduled to expire in 1938, but he petitioned to keep it going, all the while accusing President Roosevelt of refusing to pursue subversives.
In 1939 Dies went after an organization called the American League for Peace and Democracy (ALPD). It had twenty thousand members, and it presented Dies with yet another opportunity to try to embarrass President Roosevelt.
When the offices of the ALPD were raided, on the list of members were Harold Ickes, the secretary of the interior, and Solicitor General Robert Jackson, who later became a justice of the Supreme Court. The release of 560 names on the list created a firestorm.
President Roosevelt condemned HUAC’s action as a “sordid procedure.”
Dies pushed to prosecute the organization, but Attorney General Francis Biddle said the ALPD hadn’t broken any laws. Nevertheless, the accusation was enough to cause the organization to dissolve.
In 1940 Dies began to investigate the Communist Party itself. Under the law, Dies had to ask the full House for contempt citations. He ignored the law, and he got warrants without approval. Dies brought the hearings to a close without further action.
Then in 1940 Congress passed the Smith Act. The bill passed the House by 382 to 4.
Dies, maniacally pursuing his political agenda, went after Vice President Henry Wallace, accusing him of being too close to the KGB. Then in 1941 he ordered the Justice Department to investigate more than a thousand federal employees accused of “subversive” activities. In all 1,121 were investigated, but Attorney General Biddle fired exactly two. Dies, furious, accused Biddle of dereliction of duty.
Dies released yet another long list of federal employees to be investigated. One employee, William Pickens, who was black, was singled out, and the House moved to cut his salary. An uproar ensued. The resolution to reduce his salary was killed.
When Roosevelt ran for a fourth term in 1944, Dies went after him again. He attacked Sidney Hillman, chairman of the CIO Political Action Committee and close advisor to FDR. The CIO PAC had been campaigning to defeat all the members sitting on HUAC. Dies said that this proved they were pro-Communist.
In 1945 Dies, in poor health, announced he would not seek reelection. But HUAC continued on.
The man who saved HUAC was Democratic congressman John E. Rankin, a segregationist from Mississippi. Using his knowledge of procedure, Rankin made HUAC a permanent committee and gave it broad investigative powers.
When FDR died on April 12, 1945, HUAC could operate without its most powerful foe. Harry Truman became president.
In 1945 Rankin went after subversives in Hollywood. None was found guilty of doing anything. They were convicted of either contempt or perjury for citing their right to remain silent and refusing to answer the committee’s questions. Then in November 1946 Republicans took over control of the House and Senate. One of the new members of HUAC was Republican congressman Richard Nixon of California.
One of President Harry Truman’s first requests was to ask Attorney General Tom Clark to identify subversive organizations. The list included all groups for workers’ rights and especially civil rights. Said Jack O’Dell, a civil rights activist, “Every organization in Negro life which was attacking segregation per se was put on the subversive list.”
In 1947 Truman warned the nation of the Cold War with Russia, saying it was up to the United States to support “free peoples of the world in maintaining their freedom.” His approach would be called the Truman Doctrine. The Communist threat now would be seen in global, apocalyptic terms.
On March 21, 1947, nine days after his Truman Doctrine speech, he signed an executive order creating a loyalty program for federal employees.
J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI enforced the loyalty program, which meant he had carte blanche to repeat, if not improve on, his performance during the Palmer raids of 1919. He would determine who was loyal and who was not.
Hoover became a lawyer in 1917 by going to night school while working as a messenger at the Library of Congress. He may have been a file clerk at heart, but he had the power to conduct an inquisition. His domain was secret. He used hearsay, rumor, snitching, backbiting, and innuendo. Hoover, moreover, was not above blackmail, even against the nine presidents he served.
Hoover was a Red hunter the way that the Puritans of Salem were witch hunters.
Hoover, a closeted gay man, began attacking Americans’ sexuality in the 1920s. He went after those who violated the Mann Act by crossing state lines to have sex. He said it was essential to attack “the problem of vice in modern civilization,” and he was not going to rest until America’s cities were “completely cleaned up.” He also gathered lists of gay people that could easily be used for blackmail.
Hoover talked about communists in sexual terms, calling them “lecherous enemies of American society.” He often referred to the left wing as “intellectual debauchery,” and warned his agents of the “depraved nature and moral looseness” of student radicals.
Later, the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. was his special target. Hoover called him a “tom cat with obsessive degenerate sexual urges.”
Hoover needed a front man in Congress to help him conduct the witch hunt that he so desperately desired. That man appeared to Hoover quite by accident on February 9, 1950, in Wheeling, West Virginia, at a meeting before the Ohio Country Women’s Republican Club. The man was Joseph McCarthy, a senator from Wisconsin who had defeated the incumbent senator, Progressive-turned-Republican Bob La Follette, in the 1946 Republican primary.
During dinner McCarthy discussed his flagging political fortunes with cronies. When he got up to speak, he told the assemblage, “While I cannot take the time to name all of the men in the State Department who have been named as members of the Communist Party and members of a spy ring, I have here in my hand a list of 205 names …” McCarthy said that though the secretary of state had their names and knew they were communists, he allowed them to work anyway. In a similar speech in Salt Lake City the next day, McCarthy, perhaps after looking at a bottle of Heinz ketchup, told that assemblage that he had a list of “fifty-seven Communists in the State Department.”
It was exactly the fake news that J. Edgar Hoover wanted to hear.
Once the media spread McCarthy’s falsehoods, it wasn’t long before he convened a Senate committee to launch his infamous witch hunt.
Some tried to stop McCarthy in June 1950. Senator Millard Tydings (D-MD) issued a report on McCarthy’s allegations, calling the senator a “fraud and a hoax on the Senate.” McCarthy, before seeing the report, undermined the findings by saying any such report would be a “disgrace to the Senate, a green light for the Reds.”
When McCarthy pushed on, he was backed by Republicans wanting to give President Harry Truman and the Democrats a black eye. In the next Senate election, Millard Tydings was defeated. The winner, John Butler, had received a potful of money from McCarthy’s backers. In the campaign, Butler’s henchmen doctored a photo of Tydings standing with Earl Browder, the former head of the Communist Party.
With Tydings out of the way, McCarthy repeatedly demanded Truman be impeached and Secretary of State Dean Acheson be fired. For the next four years McCarthy poisoned America’s air. Truman couldn’t stop him. The next president, Dwight Eisenhower, decided to remain quiet for political reasons, a mistake he later regretted.
McCarthy undermined the rule of law by bringing people against their will in front of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, which, along with the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, was a counterpart to the HUAC in the House, to testify about whether they had ever been a member of the Communist Party and to name friends known to be communists.
The committee became McCarthy’s real source of power. Those who lied could be tried criminally for lying to Congress. Those who took the Fifth Amendment—refusing to incriminate themselves—ruined their careers.
McCarthyism’s rampage was fueled by fear, and the greatest fear came when the Soviet Union tested its first atomic bomb in 1949. That same year, Mao Zedong took over in China and declared it communist. Americans built bomb shelters to house their families in case the worst occurred. And here was a US senator saying members of the State Department were harboring communists.
Once the inquisition began, the question was not whether you were a communist but, rather, whether you were not an anti-communist. If you dared criticize McCarthy, you became one of them. Throwing away the Constitution, the investigators snooped, accused, and informed as they looked for communists in civil service, unions, industry, universities, local school boards, and churches. We truly were back to the bad old days of the Salem witches.
McCarthy scared people, calling anyone who disagreed with him either Communist, pro-Communist, a tool of the Communists, or a “Fifth Amendment Communist.” It was hunting season; anyone McCarthy and his minions accused of being a Communist was a dead man. The truth had nothing to do with it.
McCarthy went after intellectuals like former students at City University of New York who had joined the Communist or Socialist Parties in the 1930s. Many were high school and college teachers, and some ended up in Hollywood as directors and writers.
McCarthy’s witch hunt had strong anti-Semitic undertones. As in 1940, when the Rapp-Coudert Committee targeted Jewish teachers, ten years later McCarthy in the Senate and his allies in the House on the HUAC came back for a second shot. Never bother with academic freedom or the fact that personal politics has nothing to do with the ability to teach: the way Joe McCarthy and the HUAC witch hunters defined it, anyone who was ever a member of the Communist Party or who refused to testify surrendered the right to teach.
Most of those who were fired had exercised their Fifth Amendment right.
Firings were usually permanent. The victim’s name remained on a blacklist that everyone denied existed, and getting another job in the field was impossible.
The McCarthy era only came to an end after he picked a fight with the US Army. McCarthy’s lawyer, Roy Cohn, became infatuated with his close friend David Schine, a wealthy heir to a hotel fortune who was brought onto McCarthy’s staff and later drafted into the army. After failing to get Schine transferred to a base closer to home and to get him a commission, Cohn did everything he could to make sure Schine lived like a king at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey, where Schine was stationed. Cohn enlisted McCarthy’s help in getting these favors for Schine.
When the army would not do this personal favor for Cohn and McCarthy, the senator and his lawyer used the power of Congress to subpoena and demand testimony, crashing down like a hammer on high-ranking army officials who dared challenge them.
McCarthy decided to investigate whether there were subversives at Fort Monmouth.
The whole thing smacked of blackmail. During the hearings McCarthy attacked Fort Monmouth’s commanding officer, General Ralph Zwicker—who had led a key regiment at the Battle of the Bulge—for granting a dentist an honorable discharge even though he had refused to answer questions about being a member of a “subversive organization.” McCarthy tried to humiliate Zwicker, a close friend of President Eisenhower, by accusing the general of protecting a Russian spy. The charge, entirely false, was absurd.
Roy Cohn was the legal arm supporting McCarthy. Cohn tried to fit all his boss’s actions within the framework of a rule of law (including endless investigations, subpoenas, and witness intimidation) while in fact he and McCarthy were undermining the rule of law.
On the March 3, 1954, episode of his show See It Now, moderator Edward R. Murrow aired clips of McCarthy terrorizing witnesses and patronizing the president. Murrow intoned, “The actions of the junior senator from Wisconsin have caused alarm and dismay amongst our allies abroad and given considerable comfort to our enemies. And whose fault is that? Not really his. He didn’t create the situation of fear. He merely exploited it, and rather successfully. Cassius was right. The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars but in ourselves. Good night—and good luck.”
Then the White House released a memo revealing McCarthy’s and Cohn’s requests for favors for David Schine, listing forty-four counts of improper behavior.
The next day, in one of the most dramatic exchanges of the hearings, McCarthy responded to aggressive questioning from army counsel Joseph Welch, when Welch challenged Cohn to turn over McCarthy’s list of 130 subversives in defense plants to the FBI and the Department of Defense “before the sun goes down.”
McCarthy suggested that Welch check on Fred Fisher, a young lawyer in Welch’s own Boston law firm whom Welch planned to have on his staff for the hearings. McCarthy accused Fisher of once belonging to the National Lawyers Guild, a group Attorney General Herbert Brownell had called “the legal bulwark of the Communist Party.”
Welch then reprimanded McCarthy for his needless attack on Fisher.
“Until this moment, Senator,” said Welch, “I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness.”
McCarthy, accusing Welch of filibustering the hearing and baiting Cohn, dismissed Welch’s dissertation and casually resumed his attack on Fisher, at which point Welch angrily cut him short.
“Senator, may we not drop this?” asked Welch. “We know he belonged to the Lawyer’s Guild … Let us not assassinate this lad further, Senator; you’ve done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?”
It was a line for the ages.
When Welch was finished, the room broke into thunderous applause. It was all caught on national TV. In that one dramatic moment McCarthy became a liability to the Republicans and the cause of anti-Communism.
On June 17, 1954, after thirty-six days of testimony, the army hearings were recessed. Said Arkansas senator John McClellan, the Democrat who led the walkout, “I think this will be recognized and long remembered as one of the most disgraceful episodes in the history of our government.”
On December 2, 1954, McCarthy was censured by the Senate, sixty-seven votes to twenty-two. He was finished. Eisenhower vowed never to invite him to state dinners. Worse, reporters stopped writing about him, even when he called press conferences.
Roy Cohn went back to New York to practice law. He became known as one of the meanest lawyers in New York City. Mean and effective enough to be hired in the early 1970s by Queens real estate developer Fred Trump and his son Donald when the Nixon Justice Department sued them for refusing to rent apartments to African Americans. Cohn remained a lawyer for the Trump Organization until he died of AIDS in 1986.
Joe McCarthy died on May 2, 1957, of an acute hepatitis infection. Though he had hepatitis, he didn’t stop drinking, and the combination killed him. The far right has never stopped defending, even praising McCarthy. Right-wing publicist Ann Coulter said in an editorial in the Fort Worth Southern Conservative, “Joe McCarthy was slowly tortured to death by the pimps of the Kremlin.”
After all the hearings and firings, McCarthy never uncovered one single subversive. Instead, he just smeared innocent people with impunity. Most of the names, documents, and statistics McCarthy brought were phony. Said historian David Oshinski, “He understood intuitively that force, action, and virility were essential prerequisites for a Red-hunting crusade.”
Finally President Eisenhower, his administration, and many Republicans in Congress stood for the rule of law. When the United States Senate censured McCarthy, and when the general counsel of the army gave his famous decency speech, Joe McCarthy was shut down forever.