McCarthyism | The Threat of Cultural Evil (Part 1)
This episode is the first in a two-part series that will wrap up our season on villains. Part two will air on Monday, May 27th, and a long discussion of both episodes will follow on Monday, June 3rd, 2024
“It is not new. It is, in fact, man’s second oldest faith. Its promise was whispered in the first days of the Creation under the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil: ‘Ye shall be as gods.’ It is the great alternative faith of mankind. Like all great faiths, its force derives from a simple vision…Man without God. It is the vision of man’s mind displacing God as the creative intelligence of the world.”
- Whittaker Chambers, “Letter to My Children” -
A sense of moral panic had gripped the country that everyone in the room at the Republican Women’s Club could feel. The audience fell silent as the senator walked to his podium and organized his notes. He had been in the upper house for only three years, and few outside his home state of Wisconsin knew of his service as a tail gunner on bombers in the Second World War. His fingers brushed across his main prop, a long list of names, while he took a breath and raised his hands for silence. As he prepared to deliver what became a career-defining address, Joseph McCarthy could not have known that his name would soon be among the most reviled in modern American history.
The List
The term “McCarthyism” has evolved over time but began as an attack on the senator’s claim that Soviet agents had infiltrated the US government. McCarthy’s work paralleled other investigations at the Central Intelligence Agency and in the House of Representatives’ Un-American Activities Committee. Fear of communist influence throughout the United States was rampant in the early years of the Cold War, and these investigations were immensely popular with the American people—at least in the beginning. But both HUAC and Senator McCarthy soon came under fire for their claims that members of America’s governing and cultural elites were agents of the Soviet Union. So did those men and women who testified to so-called “un-American activities.” Whittaker Chambers, a former member of the Communist Party USA, was denounced as a liar, accused of homosexuality and perversion, and called “criminally insane” in newspapers and radio broadcasts for alleging that Alger Hiss was a communist spy. Hiss was a high-ranking State Department civil servant and very popular in East Coast high society. Most press accounts during the hearings ignored the evidence being presented and instead praised Hiss for his composure, good looks, and confident tone on the stand and contrasted these with Chambers’ dumpy appearance and squinting, shifty eyes.
Senator McCarthy’s announcement of a list of Red subversives in the speech that made him famous turned him instantly into a pariah, a right-wing extremist, and a dangerous ideologue. Senators from both parties regularly criticized his efforts in Congress, and the press turned a patriotic American into a threat to the nation’s freedom. Outrage grew even louder in 1951 when McCarthy accused George Marshall of being both a communist and a traitor for his inaction when Mao Zedong and the Chinese communists won their civil war. The senator accused the respected former secretary of state, architect of Europe’s postwar recovery, and victorious wartime general of being part of a “conspiracy so immense and an infamy so black as to dwarf any previous adventure in the history of man.” Marshall emerged with his reputation intact—correctly, since he was without question not a Soviet agent. McCarthy continued to clash with both Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower, accusing members of their administrations of pro-communist attitudes until he was censured by the Senate in 1954.
Members of HUAC and those who testified about communist activities in Hollywood and other cultural institutions also felt the media’s scorn. The committee’s most energetic member, freshman Congressman Richard Nixon of California, was a favorite target of press outrage, and he seemed to feed on their indignation. When The New York Times labeled him the “dark prince of American politics,” he adopted the nickname for himself and used it in speeches (and the tapes he later made while in the White House). Washington’s elite never forgave Nixon for his pursuit of left-wingers in Hollywood—many of whose associations with communism were never proven—and their rage followed him into the presidency. HUAC’s witnesses were often denounced as near-traitors to the cause of free association even when they refused to “name names.” Ronald Reagan experienced this in 1949 when he appeared before the committee; despite his insistence that membership in the Communist Party was protected by the Constitution and not a crime, his opponents in Hollywood howled to friendly press outlets that he was “collaborating with the enemy.”
The Truth
Despite Senator McCarthy’s efforts, few US government officials were convicted of espionage or treason, though Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were an exception for their role in helping the Soviets obtain nuclear technology. But in the 1970s, a CIA-funded counterintelligence program called the Venona Project revealed the true scope of Red infiltration in the Roosevelt, Truman, and Eisenhower administrations. Executive Branch employees, atomic scientists at the Los Alamos laboratory, and even the two-term Vice President of the United States, Henry Wallace, were paid spies or informers employed by the Soviet Union. (For context, imagine senior officials in the State and Treasury departments, White House staffers, Silicon Valley tech executives working on artificial intelligence, and Vice President Kamala Harris all receiving money for passing secrets to the Chinese or Russians.) The revelations seemed to prove McCarthy right in certain cases. But the senator had died in 1957, four years after his Senate censure.
The spread of communism in Hollywood is far murkier to historians because there is no Venona Project to either clear or condemn blacklisted individuals. However, Soviet archives opened after the Cold War provide some clarity on the extent of Red espionage in Tinsel-Town. Since their founding before the Great Depression, the major Hollywood studios had been owned by American media moguls whose patriotic values were usually mirrored in the films they produced and distributed. But in the late 1940s, a series of strikes by labor unions paralyzed the industry. Soviet documents now prove that American communists paid by Russian intelligence services were behind some of these efforts to wrest control of the studios from their owners. In fact, actor and SAG president Ronald Reagan got his first up-close look at communist brutality when protesters threatened to throw acid in his face and murder his family. Soon after he returned from Washington for his HUAC testimony, agitators tried to overturn his car during a rally-turned-riot as he departed a strike meeting. Like the case of Senator McCarthy, the HUAC investigators accused left-wingers on political views alone, and few convictions resulted. Eventually, the House Un-American Activities Committee fell under increasing scrutiny, especially after former president Harry Truman described it as “the most un-American thing in the country today” in 1959. But later documents proved that America’s enemies viewed Hollywood and its ability to shape popular culture as a target ripe for infiltration.
The “Red Scare” and moral panic created by fear of communist activity in the United States is a difficult page in American history. The Constitution is crystal clear on the point that Reagan made before HUAC: freedom of association, including in organizations that might pose a threat to national security or public safety is protected under the First Amendment. Those who argued for increased scrutiny and surveillance, to say nothing of blacklisting and removal from jobs, tried to make the case that individuals in positions of political and cultural influence are a danger to America’s continuation as a free nation. But the Supreme Court has continually upheld the principle written into our founding that Americans have the right to believe whatever they wish and can be prosecuted only for actions against their fellow man. Though proper from a legal standpoint, it is important to remember that these constitutional rights may not always protect us from villains in our midst.
The Danger
Without stories, there is no humanity. Everything we learn and believe comes to us from stories except mathematics—and even its history is a fascinating tale that deserves its own episode one day. From the earliest epics told around campfires in ages past to modern news and social media posts, we understand events and ideas from the context of stories. Allow me to explain. If you read a news story about a person risking their life to save a child from a burning building, you’d likely think, “Wow, what a hero.” Why? Because you’ve read stories in your past, real or fictional, about people facing danger to rescue the helpless. These tales showed those characters to be heroes, and your brain associates their actions with those of the person who ran into a fire. Here’s another example. You are sitting in science class as a young student, and your teacher is telling you about the theory of gravity. They describe the scientific principle of “what goes up must come down.” You understand this in part because you remember throwing a ball with your friends, or tossing a pencil across a room, or recalling when you jumped off a chair at your father’s house and broke your right arm (which is still in a cast). The stories in your past illuminate new ideas and help you to understand them.
Visual arts like film and television make these stories even more powerful. For example, I’d read the story of Christ’s crucifixion more times than I can count. But seeing it on screen in Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ left me in tear-filled shock at witnessing an admittedly extra-biblical adaptation of history’s darkest hour. Joe gave me a less dramatic example, him seeing the immense painting by Jacques-Louis David of Napoleon’s coronation at the Louvre versus watching a History Channel documentary. The art was static and conveyed grandeur but not context, while the show explained the event in relation to what had happened before and why it was such a historic moment. (And there weren’t even any aliens!) I’ve mentioned in several of our very popular “History on Film” episodes that students often ask me about whether movies, TV shows, and even video games get their history right. Some kids will give me a skeptical look when I answer because, to them, what they saw on screen is history.
This is why communist infiltration and control of Hollywood was at least as dangerous as their government espionage efforts. Had they succeeded, America’s enemy would have possessed their greatest propaganda tool to shape American popular culture. Like Hitler and Mao from two weeks ago, Vladimir Lenin knew that the young were keys to his success; he once commented, “Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted.” No one can know how history might have changed with a Red Hollywood, but there might just be a parallel phenomenon happening right now. And that, dear audience, is where we will pick up next week!
