McCarthyism

The Realities, Delusions and Politics Behind the 1950s Red Scare

Jonathan Michaels

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781135021214
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Historia
• Categoria: Historia de Norteamérica

In this succinct text, Jonathan Michaels examines the rise of anti-communist sentiment in the postwar United States, exploring the factors that facilitated McCarthyism and assessing the long-term effects on US politics and culture. McCarthyism: The Realities, Delusions and Politics Behind the 1950s Red Scare offers an analysis of the ways in which fear of communism manifested in daily American life, giving readers a rich understanding of this era of postwar American history. Including primary documents and a companion website, Michaels' text presents a fully integrated picture of McCarthyism and the cultural climate of the United States in the aftermath of the Second World War.

CHAPTER 1
The Origins of Red Scare Anti-Communism

It was 10:30 pm in the city of Chicago on May 4, 1886, in Haymarket Square and what had been, according to eyewitnesses, a “peaceful gathering of upwards of 1,000 people listening to speeches and singing songs” assembled to protest police violence was drawing to a close, the crowd scattering, when 176 policemen arrived, armed with rifles, ordering the dispersing crowd to disperse. Scuffles broke out and someone whose identity is still unknown threw a bomb, a “hissing fiend, hurled by some practiced hand to perform its hellish mission” which “exploded with a detonation which seemed to shake the city from center to circumference.”¹ Panicked, the police opened fire in all directions, including into their own ranks. Some in the crowd returned fire, and when it was all over, between the bomb and the shooting, seven policemen and four demonstrators were dead and more than 60 policemen and 50 demonstrators were injured.

The newspapers whipped up public opinion with incendiary language: the New York Times headlined “Anarchy’s Red Hand”² while the Chicago Tribune railed against “[n]ihilistic agitators” and the St. Louis Globe-Democrat thoughtfully opined that “There are no good anarchists except dead anarchists.”³ Authorities hurriedly rounded up 31 suspects and eventually, eight men, “all with foreign sounding names” as one newspaper pointed out, were indicted on charges of conspiracy and murder. No evidence tied the accused to the explosion of the bomb and, indeed, several of the suspects had not even attended the rally. Nonetheless, all were convicted and sentenced to death. Four were quickly hanged while a fifth committed suicide in his cell. Then, the governor of Illinois, Richard Oglesby, who had privately expressed doubts “that any of the men were guilty of the crime,” commuted the remaining men’s death sentences to life in prison. A short time later Oglesby’s successor, John Peter Altgeld, pardoned the three surviving men, declaring, “The deed to sentencing the Haymarket men was wrong, a miscarriage of justice.”

The background of the Haymarket bombing was a growing grassroots movement to reduce the laborers’ workday from 12 or 14 hours (six days a week) down to 8. Chicago had become the focal point of this struggle with local anarchists taking the lead in organizing protests and strikes. On May 3, Chicago police attacked and killed picketing workers at the McCormick Reaper Plant—hence the Haymarket protest. The resultant bombing and the supposed threat to law and order were widely blamed on the labor movement, with the focus, quite unfairly, on the largest union in the United States, the Knights of Labor; as a result, that organization fell into a decline from which it never recovered. More broadly, the response nation-wide to this event of those not sympathetic to the labor movement was a precursor to red scares that would follow it; fearing that the Haymarket bomb was the signal for a general uprising, vigilante groups launched attacks on radicals and labor groups while police intensified raids.

AMERICAN CAPITAL, AMERICAN LABOR: THE ROOTS OF “UN-AMERICANISM”

So, though the immediate causes of the red scare of the 1950s can be found in the events surrounding it—the Soviet domination of eastern Europe, the acquisition of nuclear weapons by the Soviet Union, the discovery that American spies had played a role in that acquisition, the takeover of China by Communist forces and the outbreak of the Korean War—the phenomenon called a “red scare” was not something new to America; it was something that had its roots in the first phase of industrialization in the United States, some 80 years earlier, and in the conditions for workers that had arisen from industrialization. And to genuinely understand the red scare of the McCarthy period we need to understand that it arose from a broader and, in some ways, consistent context, i.e., a bitter struggle, from the 1870s to the 1950s and beyond, between owners of large industrial businesses and their workers over the status of labor in business: was labor just another commodity to be purchased as needed at the lowest possible cost? Or did workers have rights in a business as an integral part of that business? And, if so, what were those rights and how far did they extend?

The most extreme view on the side of labor was that which held that private property altogether was an institution that was oppressive to human beings, so oppressive that it should be abolished altogether. These radicals—a group that included anarchists, Socialists, syndicalists and Communists—came with an assortment of different theories about how this end should be brought about, but most Americans did not bother themselves with the fine distinctions among them; rather, they were often lumped together in a poorly defined and poorly understood but threatening mass called “reds.”

A Glossary of The Red Scare

Conservative: One who believed that untrammeled private property was the basis of all freedom and that the operation of unregulated markets would provide the best results for all people.

Liberal: One who believed that private property and markets were socially valuable but who also believed that, left completely uncontrolled, both those institutions could produce bad results for people. Therefore, liberals believed in a strong role for government to: (1) set limits on property and markets so that the basic needs of all members of society were provided for, and (2) provide a social safety net with programs such as old age pensions, unemployment insurance, workmen’s compensation and other programs to help middle and lower income Americans meet economic challenges.

Marxism: The fundamental tenet of Marxism as expressed in The Communist Manifesto, as Marx and Engels wrote, “may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.” In speaking of private property, they did not mean personal possessions but rather what they called the “means of production,” i.e., those things like farms and factories that produce the necessities that keep society going.

Socialists: Socialists were those American Marxists, including Eugene V. Debs and Norman Thomas, who are often called “Democratic Socialists” because they believed in arriving at the goal of socialism, i.e., a society based not on private property and individual acquisition but rather on the basis of responsiveness to the needs of all of society’s members, through the process of democratic elections. That is, they believed that it was necessary to educate a majority of citizens to understand the desirability of socialism; having done so, that majority would essentially elect socialism into being.

Communists: “Communist” was originally a term used by Marx to describe socialists generally; however, after the 1917 Bolshevik takeover of Russia, communist came to be used to describe those Socialists who followed the teachings of Vladimir IIyich Lenin. Lenin argued (in contrast to the Democratic Socialists) that socialism could not be arrived at through the democratic process but only through violent revolution.

Red: A Communist; often used to smear those who were not communists but rather Socialists or liberals.

Pink or Pinko: Derogatory term used by conservatives to describe a range of non-Communists from Liberals to Socialists.

Parlor Pink: A dilettante radical; usually a wealthy person who espoused radical views from the comfort of his or her living room without actually doing anything about them.

Fifth Amendment Communist: A person who, because they invoked their Constitutional right not to incriminate themselves before a committee investigating Communist activities and therefore remained silent, was presumed to be a communist. These people, though immune to punishment by the courts, were often punished by employers through dismissal from their jobs. (See Chapter 4.).

Fellow Traveler: A person who, though not a member of the Communist Party, was in strong sympathy with its ideals and who was generally uncritically supportive of the Soviet Union; historian David Caute noted,

the fellow-traveller’s [sic] commitment takes a different form from that of a communist because his disillusionment with Western society is less … total. The fellow-traveller retains a partial faith in the possibilities of progress under the parliamentary system; he appreciates that the prevailing liberties, however imperfect and however distorted, are nevertheless valuable.⁴

This term was often used to smear those who embraced liberal programs (such as racial equality) that were also backed by the Communist Party.

However, the conflict between the owners of businesses and their workers did not take shape simply as an abstract disagreement over the issue of private property or even as a more concrete disagreement over issues of wages and hours; from motives that were perhaps partially genuine but certainly also tactical employers framed it as a battle over national identity, that is, what it meant to be an American. One of the central institutions of the red scare of the 1950s was the House Committee on Un-American Activities, more often, though incorrectly, shortened to HUAC. It was a committee that was dedicated to one purpose: the exposure of “reds,” people considered to be, by virtue of their beliefs about economics, quintessentially un-American and dangerous to the United States as a free nation. In short, the underlying message was that to be pro-employer was American; to be pro-employee was un-American.

The word “un-American” is a bit strange; strictly speaking, it should simply mean someone or something that is not American but it does not. From an early time in our national history there has been a tendency among some Americans—often, though not always, coming from families who have been in the country for at least a couple of generations—to label others—usually newcomers with different beliefs, manners and/or appearance—as “un-American.” What that fundamentally means is “outsiders.” Another term for this dislike of outsiders is nativism; nativism usually has emerged most intensely as an issue during periods of especially intense immigration into the United States. So, for example, many Protestants of English derivation felt overwhelmed by the Irish Catholics, fleeing from famine back home, who poured into the country in the mid-1800s and saw these newcomers as un-American; anti-Irish cartoons for reputable magazines such as Harper’s Weekly featured cartoons stereotyping Irish immigrants as ape-like barbarians, lawless, lazy and drunk.

In the years between the Civil War and the Great Depression of the 1930s eastern and southern Europeans came to the United States in large numbers, often invited and sought after by large businesses seeking a cheap source of labor. A few of the newcomers were political and social radicals and a very few of these were willing to resort to violence to achieve their ideals, so the archetypal image of the American who was deemed to be “un-American” became a bearded eastern or southern European fanatic, armed with a bomb and motivated by radical ideas.

BIG BUSINESSES IN SEARCH OF CHEAP LABOR

This new stereotype emerged out of that period in the late 1800s when modern, large-scale industries such as steel, coal and oil, spurred by the rapid expansion of American railroads, began to dominate the US economy. As businesses like Carnegie Steel, Standard Oil and others grew into industrial giants, their need for workers grew as well and it is not surprising that in order to maximize profits, businesses employing many thousands of people should want to pay them as little as possible. Industrial enterprises in the United States produced the highest profits when there were too many workers for the jobs available for the simple reason that with a labor surplus, numerous workers would compete with each other for scarce jobs, compelling them to accept low wages.

When the great economist Adam Smith described the workings of market economies in 1776, he conceived them to comprise individuals in competition with other individuals. It was recognized at a very early date that if economic actors combined to work together, the extra economic power they would accrue would distort the model, giving what were considered to be unfair advantages to those who combined over those who acted as individuals. This would be equally true for employers who combined with other employers (which could be in the form of a cartel or, later on, a corporation) or workers combining with other workers (in a labor union). To prevent such combinations the British Parliament passed the Combination Acts in the early 1800s; according to these laws, neither employers nor workers could legally band together. Also, in the early days of the American Republic, there was a vigorous political battle over the legitimacy of combined capital (corporations). However, by the end of the nineteenth century, the corporation had won an accepted role in the US economy and an accepted place in American law while its counterpart, the labor union, still struggled on both fronts.

The problem for wage workers was that, in the face of a labor glut, with many workers competing for every available job, the only way they could reclaim some control over their wages and conditions of work would be to stop competing against each other as individuals for jobs and join together as an economic unit, that is, to form a labor union. An easily-replaced individual worker demanding higher wages or safer working conditions from a large business or corporation had little clout, but an entire workforce capable of bringing production to a halt would have a significant voice, one that employers would be forced to heed.

For businessmen, then, there were two major impediments to keeping wages low: one was the existence of labor unions that had some power to protect the wages and working conditions of workers, the other, was the fact that few native-born Americans were willing to work at very low-paying, often dangerous, jobs for long hours. So when Andrew Carnegie and his partner, Henry Clay Frick, wanted to lower labor costs, they first went to work systematically to destroy the power of the union representing the skilled workers in Carnegie’s Homestead steel mills, the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers. Once that had been accomplished, wages fell drastically, with men who had once earned $4 for an eight-hour day being compelled to work 12 hours a day, seven days a week for half the pay. By 1890 the average industrial worker was earning around $10 a week, barely more than the poverty line of $500 a year. And many workers made less than the average, forcing them to send their children to work along with both parents. One young immigrant girl, Rahel Golub, sadly asked her father, “Does everybody in America live this way? Go to work early, come home late, eat and go to sleep?”⁵

Jobs like those in th...

Indice dei contenuti

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Series Introduction
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 The Origins of Red Scare Anti-Communism
• 2 The Big Red Scare
• 3 The New Deal
• 4 The Red Scare Begins
• 5 The Red Scare at Full Tide
• 6 Culture Wars
• Epilogue: Consequences
• Documents
• Bibliography
• Index