Nightmare in Redby Richard Fried
A new vocabulary entered political discourse. "Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?" "I refuse to answer on grounds that the answer may tend to incriminate me." "Fifth-Amendment Communist!" "Soft on communism.. ." "Witch-hunt!" "McCarthyism!" In the barrage of accusations that rumbled through the late '1940s and early 1950s, reputations were made or ruined, careers blasted or created, lives and families shattered.
It is tempting to locate "McCarthyism" only in the realm of high politics--as the combined sum of national news headlines, noisy rhetoric, and congressional inquiries. Yet it was more than that. The anti-Communist drive touched thousands of lesser figures: a printer in the U.S. Government Printing Office, linguists, and engineers at the Voice of America overseas broadcasting service, a Seattle fireman, local public housing officials, janitors, even men's room attendants. Called the "McCarthy era," loyalty oaths affected teachers, lawyers, other professionals, and, in Indiana, even wrestlers had to document their loyalty. Colleges policed students' political activities. Labor leaders and unions rose or fell according to their sympathy or hostility toward communism. Entertainers faced a "blacklist." Ordinary people responded to the anti-Communist fervor by reining in their political. activities, curbing their talk, and keeping their thoughts to themselves.
Yet paradoxically these bleak years are also remembered as happy times. America emerged from World War II with her continental expanse untouched by the ruin visited on other lands. An "arsenal of democracy," the nation had provided materiel for a global battlefront, food and fiber for friend and conquered foe. The joblessness that haunted the 1930s vanished. Though the postwar economy had its fits and starts, and prosperity did not drizzle on every garden, pessimists were confounded as the good times persisted.
Anti-communism had uses in local affairs too. For example, it was a recurrent element in the opposition to the adoption of a zoning ordinance for the city of Houston. In 1947 foes of zoning claimed that such planning "from Moscow . . . to Washington has backfired." It was a "legalistic monster, spawned in Europe and disguised in the slum-ridden eastern cities as a device to protect your homes." Oilman Hugh Roy Cullen (eventually a fervent McCarthy supporter) assailed zoning as "un-American and German." Such appeals persisted into the 1960s. In 1962 an opponent called zoning "socialized real estate." Water fluoridation was also termed by some critics a Communist plot.
The ease with which red-baiting discredited so many causes showed how deeply anti-Communist-assumptions permeated American culture. Indeed, they were a defining, rarely questioned characteristic of that culture. By and large, the debate over anticommunism among political and intellectual elites plumbed not goal but method. Liberal critics of McCarthy and of other extremists did not question the validity of anti-communism. Rather, they often began any exposition with the phrase, "I'm anti-Communist too, but....." It has been suggested that a less apologetic-indeed, less anti-Communist-orientation would have better served liberalism. But inglorious though the liberal anti-Communist posture sometimes appeared in the early 1950s, it is unlikely that a less pragmatic, more absolutist civil-libertarian position would have brought benefits. Such an argument assumes that the ultimate leverage in national politics at the Cold War's height was in the liberals' hands. Assuredly, it lay elsewhere.
For some denizens of the Right, threats of Communist influence materialized almost anywhere. For instance, Illinois American Legionnaires warned that the Girl Scouts were being spoon-fed subversive doctrines. Jack Latt and Lee Mortimer's yellow-journalistic U.S.A. Confidential warned parents against the emerging threat of rock a roll. It "bred dope use, interracialism and sex orgies. We know that many platter-spinners are hopheads. Many others are reds, left-wingers, or hecklers of social convention." Not every absurdity owed life to the vigilantes, however. A jittery Hollywood studio cancelled a movie based on Longfellow's "Hiawatha" for fear it would be viewed as "Communist peace propaganda."
Books and ideas remained vulnerable. It is true that the militant Indiana woman who abhorred Robin Hood's subversive rob-from-the-rich-and-give-to-the-poor message failed to get it banned from school libraries. Other locales were less lucky. A committee of women appointed by the school board of Sapulpa, Oklahoma, had more success. The board burned those books that is had classified as dealing improperly with socialism or sex. A spokesman claimed that only five or six "volumes of no consequence" were destroyed. A librarian in Bartlesville, Oklahoma was fired for subscribing to The New Republic, Nation and Negro Digest. The use of UNESCO materials in the Los Angeles schools became a hot issue in 1952. A new school board and superintendent were elected with a mandate to remove such books from school libraries.
Local sanctions against unpopular artists and speakers often were effective. In August 1950, a New Hampshire resort hotel banned a talk by Owen Lattimore after guests, apparently riled by protests of the Daughters of the American Revolution and others, remonstrated. Often local veterans--the American Legion and Catholic War Veterans--initiated pressures. The commander of an American Legion Post in Omaha protested a local production of a play whose author, Garson Kanin, was listed in Red Channels. A founder of Red Channels warned an American Legion anti-subversive seminar in Peoria, Illinois, that Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman, soon to appear locally was "a Communist-dominated play. Jaycees and Legionnaires failed to get the theatre to cancel the play, but the boycott they mounted sharply curbed the size of the audience.
Libraries often became focal points of cultural anxieties. Not every confrontation ended like those in Los Angeles or Sapulpa, but librarians felt they were under the gun. "I just put a book that is complained about away for a while," said one public librarian. Occasionally, books were burned. "Did you ever try to burn a book?" asked another librarian. "It's very difficult." One-third of a group of librarians sampled in the late 1950s reported having removed controversial" items from their shelves. One-fifth said they habitually avoided buying such books.
Academics, too, were scared. Many college and university social scientists polled in 1955 confessed to reining in their political views and activities. Twenty-seven percent had "wondered" whether a political opinion they had expressed might affect their job security or promotion; 40 percent had worried that a student might pass on "a warped version of what you have said and lead to false ideas about your political views." Twenty-two percent had at times "refrained from expressing an opinion or participating in some activity in order not to embarrass" their institution. Nine percent had "toned down" recent writing to avoid controversy. One teacher said he never expressed his own opinion in class. "I express the recognized and acknowledged point of view." Some instructors no longer assigned The Communist Manifesto.
About a hundred professors actually lost jobs but an even greater number of frightened faculty trimmed their sails against the storm. Episodes far short of dismissal could also have a chilling effect. An economist at a Southern school addressed a business group, his talk, titled "Know Your Enemy," assessed Soviet resources and strengths. He was denounced to his president as a Communist. Another professor was assailed for advocating a lower tariff on oranges. "If I'd said potatoes, I wouldn't have been accused unless I had said it in Idaho." Some teachers got in mild trouble for such acts as assigning Robert and Helen Lynds' classic sociological study, Middletown, in class or listing the Kinsey reports on human sexuality as recommended reading. A professor once sent students to a public library to read works by Marx because his college's library had too few copies. Librarians logged the students' names.
The precise effect of all this professed anxiety was fuzzy. Many liberals claimed that America had been cowed into silence that even honest anti-Communist dissent had been stilled, and that basic freedoms of thought, expression, and association had languished.