Rethinking Post-World War II Anticommunism
Posted: Tue Nov 27, 2018 1:44 am
Rethinking Post-World War II Anticommunism
Journal of The Historical Society
Volume 10, Issue 1, Pages 1-41
Published Online: 2 Mar 2010
Rethinking Post-World War II Anticommunism
Jennifer Delton 1
Copyright © 2010 The Historical Society and Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
POSTWAR LIBERALISM WHAT LIBERALS STOOD TO GAIN THE TRUMAN ADMINISTRATION UNION PURGES AND THE HOLLYWOOD BLACKLIST CONCLUSION
Article Text
"As a liberal, I must ask how Hiss's guilt changes anything of fundamental importance about modern American history … "1
However fiercely historians disagree about the merits of American communism, they almost universally agree that the post-World War II red scare signified a rightward turn in American politics. The consensus is that an exaggerated, irrational fear of communism, bolstered by a few spectacular spy cases, created an atmosphere of persecution and hysteria that was exploited and fanned by conservative opportunists such as Richard Nixon and Joseph McCarthy. This hysteria suppressed rival ideologies and curtailed the New Deal, leading to a resurgence of conservative ideas and corporate influence in government. We may add detail and nuance to this story, but this, basically, is what we tell our students and ourselves about post-World War II anticommunism, also known as McCarthyism.2 It is fundamentally the same story that liberals have told since Whittaker Chambers accused Alger Hiss of being a Communist spy in 1948.
And yet the most famous and effective anticommunist measures were carried out not by conservatives, but by liberals seeking to uphold the New Deal. It was the liberal Truman administration that chased Communists out of government agencies and prosecuted Communist Party leaders under the Smith Act. It was liberal Hollywood executives who adopted the blacklist, effectively forcing Communists out of the movie business. The labor leaders who purged Communists from their unions were, similarly, liberals. Most anticommunism—the anticommunism that mattered—was not hysterical and conservative, but, rather, a methodical and, in the end, successful attempt on the part of New Deal liberals to remove Communists from specific areas of American life, namely, the government, unions, universities and schools, and civil rights organizations. It is true that the FBI and the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) helped carry out these measures, but it is a mistake to assume that J. Edgar Hoover or HUAC could have had much power without the cooperation of liberals who wanted Communists identified and driven out of their organizations.
New evidence confirming the widespread existence of Soviet agents in the U.S. government makes the Truman administration's attempts to purge Communists from government agencies seem rational and appropriate—even too modest, given what we now know.3 But even in those cases where espionage was not a threat—such as in unions, political organizations, and Hollywood—there were still good reasons for liberals to expel Communists. Communists were divisive and disruptive. They had the ability to cripple liberal organizations, especially at the local and state levels. Removing Communists from labor and political organizations was necessary for liberal Democrats like Hubert Humphrey, Chester Bowles, and Paul Douglas to be elected to Congress, where they supported Truman's Keynesian economic policies, raised the minimum wage, fought for health insurance, defended unions, taxed the rich, and laid the political groundwork for civil rights and desegregation.4
Contrary to liberals' fears at the time and historical scholarship since, a strong claim can be made that New Deal liberalism was not subverted during the early Cold War era, but rather solidified and strengthened. This claim will be greeted with skepticism because so much historical scholarship characterizes the early Cold War era as a step backward for liberals, a time when the New Deal was abandoned, Republicans gained control of Congress, corporate interests triumphed, and American society became militarized.5 But from the perspective of the twenty-first century, when conservatives have all but destroyed the New Deal state, the Cold War era seems like it might have been the most liberal era in American history, if by liberal we mean progressive tax policies (91 percent for the highest income tax bracket!), economic equality, strong unions, civil rights legislation, and acceptance of unparalleled federal power.6 Whatever radical possibilities were snuffed out in the late 1940s are less important than the triumph of liberal assumptions and political power—commonly known as the liberal consensus—that occurred with the Cold War. And that consensus was born out of liberals' anticommunist efforts.
To say that liberals were the driving force behind post-World War II anticommunism is not to deny or downplay the violation of civil liberties, the ruined lives, or the betrayal of democratic principles that resulted from these purges. This was an ugly, painful episode in American history, which is why so many liberals continue to blame conservatives for it. My aim is not so much to justify what liberals did (although I do think many of their actions can be justified), but more to challenge the entrenched—and misleading—characterization of post-World War II anticommunism as hysterical and conservative. That worn convention forces us to fit liberal New Dealers into conservative boxes and to ignore the real threat communism represented, which was not to an abstraction called "democracy," but rather to the ascendant liberal political agenda. Anticommunism did not subvert New Dealism, but rather preserved and expanded it. No new research is required to demonstrate this; all we need is a new perspective on the facts and information already at hand.
Postwar Liberalism
Abstract POSTWAR LIBERALISM WHAT LIBERALS STOOD TO GAIN THE TRUMAN ADMINISTRATION UNION PURGES AND THE HOLLYWOOD BLACKLIST CONCLUSION
Let us begin by defining the term "liberal." By the end of the Second World War, those who called themselves liberals stood for an expansive, activist federal state that could regulate the excesses of a free market capitalist economy and balance the interests of the various organized groups in American society. During the 1930s and early 1940s they had been New Dealers, but the parameters and possibilities of the New Deal were unsettled then and so too was the term liberal.7
World War II clarified what a liberal state might look like. Radical interventions such as planned economies, cradle-to-grave welfare, or shared corporate governance were discarded as American liberals embraced regulatory and fiscal policies that worked within the framework of free market capitalism.8 The post-World War II version of liberalism sought to empower the federal government with the ability to meet the disparate needs of the various groups in American society. Laissez-faire capitalism was a myth, liberals said. The federal government had always intervened in economic matters, but usually to the benefit of industrial leaders. Tariffs, land grants to railroads, police protection for industry, and loose immigration laws were all examples of the federal government's intervention in the economy. What liberals sought was the expansion of these favors to other sectors of society, a democratization of go
vernment largesse brought about by the political organization of once marginal or inchoate groups like workers, blacks, and middle-class consumers under the aegis of the Democratic Party. The domestic policies liberals favored in the postwar era—a progressive income tax, full employment, fair employment and civil rights, economic growth through government spending, and national health insurance, for example—were designed to bring about a greater equality between different social groups, to relieve longstanding class and racial tensions, and to help individuals in all groups attain a level of economic independence that would contribute to economic growth.
Liberals who helped define the new postwar liberalism saw themselves as upholding the New Deal, not abandoning it. They included labor leaders such as Phillip Murray, Walter Reuther, and A. Philip Randolph; politicians such as Henry Wallace, Hubert Humphrey, and Chester Bowles; business leaders such as Chamber of Commerce president Eric Johnston and General Electric's Owen D. Young; and intellectuals and economists such as Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., James Wechsler, Reinhold Niebuhr, Daniel Bell, John Kenneth Galbraith, Walter Heller, and Sidney Hook. By the end of the Second World War, most—though not all—of this group had come to see communism as a form of totalitarianism that could not be reconciled with liberalism.9 As anticommunists, they honed the principles and agenda of what would become the liberal consensus, the broad bipartisan acceptance of New Deal and Cold War policies that dominated American politics from the late 1940s until the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980.
Although their vision of an active federal state seemed to reject classical Lockean liberalism, postwar liberals insisted it did not. State activism was intended to enhance individual opportunity by leveling the economic playing field. Political freedom alone did not guarantee the economic independence so essential to real Lockean freedom, as the Depression had shown. To those who worried that increasing the power of the federal government might simply create a leviathan, a dictatorship, liberals replied that the state's power was limited by a democratic process that gave ultimate control of the government to organized groups of citizens and voters.10
Still, the underlying philosophy of postwar liberalism was a critique of the classical liberal ideas of John Locke, Adam Smith, and nineteenth-century American industrialists, which envisioned a limited role for the state in the private affairs of commerce and business. Whereas classical liberals saw individuals as the primary components of society, postwar liberals, influenced by social scientists in anthropology and sociology, believed groups were society's basic units. Even if the ends of liberal democratic government remained individual freedom and the protection of individual rights, the means by which this would occur had to take into account the group-based reality of society. In a society as large and diverse as the United States, individuals expressed their political needs and aspirations by organizing into groups. Lone individuals were powerless in the political system, but as part of a group—a union, a trade association, a civil rights organization, a political party—they could attain real power.11 With the help of their allies in education and the social sciences, liberals disseminated their ideas about the interdependence of social groups. If Americans could be made aware of how their own interests were connected to groups remote from themselves they would be more likely to give up their ideas about "rugged individualism" and accept that the purpose of democratic government was to ensure the needs and interests of all groups. Americans could be educated to understand, for instance, how a fair employment law that seemed designed for African Americans could also help their own group by making consumers and taxpayers out of a previously disfranchised group.
New Deal liberals had developed these ideas in the 1930s to sell and explain the New Deal to Americans, but postwar liberalism represented a more solid and permanent ethos. The New Deal had been a diverse, experimental, and pragmatic set of responses to the crisis of economic depression. Postwar liberalism was not a response to a particular crisis, but rather the logical, seemingly inevitable governing principle of all advanced democracies—the answer to the old "labor question." Writing in 1955, historian Richard Hofstadter noted that while deficit spending had once seemed bizarre and radical, now it was accepted because "we have learned things about the possibilities of our economy that were not dreamed of in 1933." Hofstadter continued: "While men still grow angry over federal fiscal and tax policies, hardly anyone doubts that in the calculable future it will be the fiscal role of the government that more than anything else determines the course of the economy."12 Hofstadter's blithe dismissal of those who might have opposed the government's determination of the economy—commonly known as conservatives—is indicative of liberals' belief that this question had been settled by 1955.
Since the era of the Vietnam War, historians have generally been critical of postwar liberals, who, among other things, led the United States into that conflict. Influenced by the New Left, historians of this generation—often called "revisionists"—portrayed postwar liberals as fundamentally conservative, beholden to corporate capital.13 According to revisionists, postwar liberals allowed anticommunism to destroy the left and any viable alternative for real progressivism. The resulting political order was one in which, as Robert Griffith put it, "the left was in virtual eclipse and the distinction between liberals and conservatives became one of method and technique, not fundamental principle."14 Gradualist in regard to civil rights and fixated on legislative solutions, liberals stymied the grassroots activism that could have led to real racial and economic progress. This interpretation affirms the idea that the New Deal was abandoned during the 1940s; it has been extremely influential among historians, many of whom continue to focus on radical alternatives and grassroots movements that were derailed by elites in Washington.15
Still, there have been those who, while recognizing the shortcomings of postwar liberalism, have also appreciated how truly monumental liberals' achievements were, especially given the persistent conservatism of the United States. Paul Starr's Freedom's Power, Kevin Mattson's When America Was Great, and Paul Krugman's Conscience of a Liberal all look back to the era of the liberal consensus as a time when a strong federal government promoted racial progress, economic equality, and a labor movement. It is this liberalism with which I am concerned.
What Liberals Stood to Gain
Abstract POSTWAR LIBERALISM WHAT LIBERALS STOOD TO GAIN THE TRUMAN ADMINISTRATION UNION PURGES AND THE HOLLYWOOD BLACKLIST CONCLUSION
It has often been assumed that conservatives had the greatest motivation for attacking Communists. Under the legitimating cloak of national security, conservatives deployed traditional red-scare tactics to paint anyone who fought for social justice or a stronger welfare state as a "commie." In this way, they were able to stop the expansion of the New Deal state and to mute liberal aspirations, while at the same time furthering their own political careers. Liberal anticommunism in this scenario was mainly reactive—a self-protective, even cowardly, response to the conservative version.16
This line of reasoning is not wholly wrong, but it has two shortcomings. First, it posits that the objective of anticommunism was to thwart liberals and progressives, not to get rid of Communists. In this explanation, anticommunism is merely a pretext for the real goal of subverting progressi
ve activity in general. But progressive activity survived (albeit in altered forms); Communist activity did not. Second, most of the major anticommunist cases involved real Communists, not wrongly accused noncommunists. Except for the Loyalty-Security Program, which ensnared fellow travelers as well as Communists, most of the repression was, by and large, limited to Communists and ex-Communists.17 The problem with post-World War II anticommunism for many, including Ellen Schrecker, was not that it swept up "innocent" noncommunists, but that it criminalized membership in and support for the Communist Party. It did—and that is my point: Cold War era anticommunism was more specific in its targets, unlike the amorphous sort that followed World War I, when thousands of immigrants were deported because of vaguely defined radical activity and an underlying xenophobia.18
Instead of assuming that conservatives fomented the Cold War red scare, let us reconsider who had the most to gain from the removal of Communists from American society. Conservatives gained nothing from the disappearance of Communists because getting rid of Communists did not end the progressive, liberal activism that threatened their conception of laissez-faire individualism, limited government, and free market capitalism. Conservatives hated communism, of course, but they also hated socialism, New Dealism, and other forms of progressive activity. Communism, socialism, liberalism—it was all the same to them. Thus, their efforts were unfocused and ineffective. Not so for the liberals. Liberals could only benefit from the disappearance of Communists, who disrupted their organizations, challenged their ideas, alienated potential allies, and invited conservative repression.
Liberal anticommunists were motivated primarily by a principled rejection of Communist ideas and doctrine, which, it had finally become clear, contradicted their belief in individual freedom and democratic self-rule. Much has been written about this "awakening"; there is no need to recount it here.19 Rather, I will focus on two more practical factors that animated—and hence explain—liberal anticommunism: liberals' past experiences with Communists and liberal political aspirations in postwar America. When combined, these pragmatic factors indicate that liberals had a stronger motivation for excising Communists from American life than did conservatives.
Liberals and Communists in the Interwar Years
Conservatives like J. Edgar Hoover had a conception of communism that came from their study of it; their anticommunism was one of principle. Many liberals came to oppose communism on principled grounds as well, but their impressions of communism also came from working with Communists in myriad movements for social change over the course of almost three decades. Revisionist historians have painted a heroic picture of American communism at the grassroots level. Robin D.G. Kelley has argued that black Communists in Alabama represented an indigenous American radicalism rooted in specific historical and regional experiences. Others have shown that Communist-led unions represented grassroots democracy, won the support of their rank-and-file members, and secured substantial gains for workers and other marginalized groups.20 Such claims may well be true; I will not dispute them here. But it is also true that Communists constantly alienated the people with whom they worked. Communists were quick to make enemies. This was due in large part to their participation in an international movement that was directed from Moscow.21
The Communist Party USA's (CPUSA) connections to an international Communist movement gave the party panache, discipline, and gravitas. The old dream of an international working-class movement, dashed during World War I, was revived under Communist Party auspices and was a major reason so many American radicals joined or defended the party. It was also, however, the source of much animosity toward party members, mainly because of the infamous "party line." The party line not only required Communists to embrace unpopular policies, such as the dual-union policy of the Third Period that called for Communists to organize competing unions separate from those being organized by other labor leaders, but it also suggested that American Communists were in thrall to a foreign power that put the interests of international communism and the Soviet Union before the particular needs of social justice in America. No change to the party line did more to discredit the Communist Party than the one following the 1939 Hitler-Stalin pact, which ended the party's Popular Front policy against fascism and directed party members to oppose Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal. Not only did this end what had been a popular, membership-building policy, it also represented such an abrupt about-face in policy—from antifascism to accommodation with the leading fascist power—that Communist motives would forever afterward be suspect. When Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, the policy changed back again to one of cooperation with liberals and leftists. This sequence of events, more than anything else, convinced liberals and other leftists that Communists could not be trusted. They could be used, certainly, and tolerated, perhaps, but they could not be counted on for the long-term real work of social change.
But directives from Moscow only partly explain why Communists alienated large numbers of the progressives with whom they worked. After all, there is plenty of research indicating that Communist leaders, even though they followed the party line, were not merely puppets of the Soviet Union.22 Revisionists' work is premised on the idea that Moscow was less a factor in shaping American communism than had previously been supposed. I agree. American Communists did not need Moscow to alienate progressives and other activists. Their own ideological radicalism and fierce commitment to an international Communist ideal did that. Communists' overblown rhetoric and sloganeering could be obnoxious and was often out of step with the thinking and experiences of progressives and other noncommunist activists. Calling Franklin Roosevelt a "fascist" after 1939 or describing Hubert Humphrey, then mayor of Minneapolis, as a "man of Hitlerian psychology" in 1946 confirmed to many noncommunist progressives and liberals just how out of touch Communists and their allies were with what was happening in the world.23 Communists' disdain for middle-class progressivism and legislative reform was attractive to radicals and contrarians, but frustrating if one happened to be a middle-class progressive or labor leader who just wanted to improve conditions for the working class and other disfranchised groups.
Still, the sloganeering and the contempt many Communists felt toward their erstwhile allies were not enough to turn progressives and liberals against them, given the progressive community's natural opposition to red-baiting and political repression. Rather, what led so many liberal activists to ban Communists from their organizations, what turned them into anticommunists, was Communists' propensity to infiltrate and take over their organizations. Here is Wilson Record's description of how the Communists took over the National Negro Congress (NNC) at its third annual meeting in 1940.
Party strategists prepared the resolutions beforehand, forced them through committees, and supported them on the floor with speeches that bordered on hysteria. Opposition speakers were hooted down. [NNC president A. Philip] Randolph's efforts to provide non-Communists an opportunity to express their views were sabotaged by boos, catcalls, and other disturbances.24
After gaining control, they passed a series of resolutions upholding the party line positions on the European war and African American rights. Randolph resigned from the NNC as a result and the Communists prompt
ly condemned him as part of the "frightened Negro petty bourgeoisie." In response to this episode, Randolph explicitly excluded Communists from other organizations he founded, such as the March on Washington Movement, which fought for fair employment for blacks.
Liberal Minnesotans in the Democratic Farmer-Labor Party (DFL) would never have dreamed of becoming anticommunists—until Communists actually took over their party and attacked Hubert Humphrey because of his ability to win over Republican voters and corporate leaders (in other words, because of his political popularity). Eugenie Anderson, then a housewife and later an ambassador to Denmark, recalled the takeover at the 1946 DFL convention: "The methods they used, the way they marched up and down the aisle, and kept their eye on everybody, and the way they vilified Humphrey's character, said the most outrageous things against him, against you [Arthur Naftalin], against me, against all of us. … It woke me up. It woke Humphrey up."25 After that, Anderson, Humphrey, Naftalin, and their allies began their campaign to purge the Communists from the DFL, a process that included helping to found the liberal anticommunist organization, Americans for Democratic Action (ADA).
Communists' habit of taking over leftist and liberal organizations did not necessarily arise from Moscow's directives but from a fundamental contradiction in their relationship to mass movements, a contradiction which was the basis of many sectarian arguments and rifts among Communists. Communists were supposed to represent the working-class masses, yet the working-class masses almost always formed alliances with discontented bourgeois and petit-bourgeois groups like farmers, skilled workers, reformers, and even, occasionally, small business owners. The political and organizational energy for challenging the capitalist structure resided in grassroots political movements and organizations such as farmer-labor parties, labor unions, or black civil rights groups. Communists usually entered into informal alliances or federations with the working-class elements of these mass movements or organizations, but there were occasions when political circumstances or party policy led Communists to try to gain control of certain movements, parties, or organizations. Sometimes these attempts were successful, as with the Minnesota Farmer-Labor Party in 1938, the NNC in 1940, and the Minnesota DFL in 1946; often they merely resulted in a split organization, as with the Federated Farmer-Labor Party in 1924.26 Either way, Communists made lifelong enemies of the people they tried to help.
Even before Cold War tensions were felt in the political arena, then, progressive organizations had started to exclude Communists. Ellen Schrecker has conceded that Communists' behavior had made them enemies within the ranks of progressive organizations and labor, so that when Cold War tensions mounted and Communist spies were found in the government, few of their former allies stepped forward to defend them from persecution.27 Schrecker sees this as a real tragedy, which, depending on your perspective, it might have been. But it also suggests that liberals' antipathy to Communists was based not on fear or antiradicalism, but rather on a history of disruptive, unpleasant experiences with them.
The Liberal Political Agenda
Liberals succeeded in getting their ideas into government through their influence in the Democratic Party. The New Deal and Franklin Roosevelt had helped them gain a foothold there; the trick after the war was to hold and expand their control of the party. At first it seemed as though the Democratic Party without Roosevelt would simply disintegrate into its quarreling components: big city machines, unions, southern whites, northern blacks, and liberal New Dealers. But liberals took the lead in reuniting these components under a program of government-secured economic growth. Keynesian spending and military contracts won over big city mayors and white Southerners, as well as workers, blacks, and consumers.28 To be sure, liberals' focus on fair employment and desegregation alienated southern Democrats, but the Republican Party also promoted fair employment and, thus, as Harry Truman famously noted to Clark Clifford, southern Democrats had nowhere else to go.29 Similarly, Truman's Cold War foreign policy alienated the more progressive or left elements of the liberal community. But they, too, as the failed Wallace campaign would soon show, had nowhere else to go.
One of the most important elements of the liberal strategy to control political discourse and the Democratic Party was anticommunism, in both its domestic and foreign policy versions. Even though many liberals, like social democrats and other progressives, had come to oppose communism on principle, they were often reluctant to trumpet this anticommunism for fear of dividing their unions and political organizations. Unity was more important than criticizing Communists and no one wanted to be a red-baiter. Hubert Humphrey, for instance, repeatedly rejected advice to attack the Communists and their allies in the DFL during 1945–1946 in order to avoid factional warfare. Philip Murray, president of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), initially ignored warnings about the Communists in the CIO for the same reason.30 Responsible liberal leadership required neutral mediation between competing factions, not participation in the squabbling. But beginning in 1946, with Truman's hard-line policy toward the Soviet Union (which signified an end to whatever hopes had existed for a continuation of U.S.-Soviet cooperation), that sort of neutral aloofness became untenable. The foreign policy issue divided labor unions and political organizations, in large part because of the Communist presence in these organizations. There was no longer anything to be gained by "appeasing" (as longtime anticommunists saw it) Communists in the name of unity. There was no unity. In the ensuing struggles, Communists explicitly challenged liberals for control of local political parties (such as the DFL in Minnesota) and other progressive organizations (such as American Federation of Labor [AFL] and CIO locals across the nation). Liberals, in turn, were forced to articulate the danger of communism and the great promise of the liberal agenda.
Luckily for the liberals, the Communists and their allies supported Henry Wallace's third-party presidential campaign in 1948. Wallace's campaign opposed the militarism of the Cold War and also claimed to offer a more truly liberal program than Truman's, one that genuinely embraced civil rights for blacks. But it also had the potential to split the liberal/Democratic vote and deliver a victory to the Republicans. In Minnesota, the DFL's left-wing leadership not only attempted to align the DFL Party with Wallace's Progressive Party, thereby forcing Truman to run as an independent in Minnesota, it also sought to prevent the popular Humphrey from challenging incumbent Senator Joseph Ball, a Republican and coauthor of the antilabor Taft-Hartley Act. As the ADA explained, what was at stake in this election was the national political power of organized labor: if a Republican president were elected and Republicans retained control of Congress (secured in 1946), labor was sunk. Why would the Communists and their allies risk that outcome by supporting Wallace and refusing to support the one DFL-er who could beat Joe Ball? The absurdity of the Communist position, combined with the genuine fear that a split vote would kill what was left of the New Deal, energized the ADA in Minnesota, whose members set out to convince erstwhile Wallace supporters that Truman, the Democratic Party, and Humphrey could better represent their hopes and aspirations than Wallace and the left wing. They engaged in a ruthless, well-organized, county-by-county campaign to oust the Communists and their allies from the DFL, but they also
presented a positive program for labor, African Americans, and farmers, keeping the focus on Joe Ball and the Republicans.31 To those angry liberals who accused the ADA of red-baiting, Humphrey personally explained that this was a different kind of anticommunism, one that worked in favor of liberalism, not against it.32 In his victory over Joe Ball, Humphrey became one of eight new Democrats in the Senate, helping Democrats regain control of Congress in 1948.
Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., echoed the ADA's arguments about the political necessity of defeating Wallace and marginalizing Communists in The Vital Center (1949), a manifesto that gave philosophical justification and political purpose to liberals' on-the-ground struggles against Communists in unions and local political contests. Schlesinger identified the real threat Communists in the United States posed, which was not to the status quo or to conservatives, but to the left.33 Communists were dangerous to American democracy not because they could mount a revolution (Schlesinger laughed at the idea), but because they divided and neutralized the left, and thus threatened the New Deal. The New Deal offered the only viable way to expand democracy. Schlesinger's version of New Deal liberalism, represented by the ADA, was one that had, finally, shed its debilitating and naïve utopianism. It represented nothing less than a "revival of American radicalism," pragmatic, political, and savvy.34
As the Wallace campaign indicated, Truman's Cold War foreign policy divided the liberal community. Wallace had tapped into a genuine feeling of disappointment among many liberals that Truman had abandoned Roosevelt's policy of cooperation with the Soviet Union and, worse, was militarizing the country, maintaining the draft, exaggerating the Communist threat, and branding as Communist anyone who spoke for peace.35 There were, however, also many liberals who were sorely disenchanted by the Soviet Union's actions in Eastern Europe during 1947–1948 and who not only supported a strong anticommunist foreign policy, but also helped to formulate and enact it. Such architects of the Cold War as Dean Acheson, George Kennan, Averill Harriman, and George Marshall were all liberals in their outlook, and willing to use the power of the state to stop Soviet expansion. By 1950, they would disagree with each other about the nature of Communist expansion and over containment strategies, but initially they agreed that a hard-line, realist foreign policy with regard to the Soviet Union was necessary if some semblance of free market internationalism were to survive.36
In fighting Wallace's bid for the presidency, liberals who supported Truman's foreign policy emphasized how Soviet totalitarianism subverted liberal ideals and aims. That is, they justified the Cold War largely on ideological grounds. As it turned out, however, the Cold War—its infrastructure, military contracts, and commitment to internationalism—would prove crucial to the fulfillment of the liberal domestic agenda in the 1950s and 1960s. As historian H.W. Brands has argued, the Cold War justified the increased power of the federal government, allowing the state to enact sweeping economic and social regulations in the name of national security.37 The Cold War justified a wide assortment of federal policies and programs during the 1950s, including income tax rates over 90 percent, interstate highways, farm subsidies, space programs, education, foreign aid, and even desegregation. Defense spending, which would constitute 70 percent of President Eisenhower's budgets in the 1950s, not only created union jobs, but also allowed the government to regulate contractors. Defense monies had strings attached and helped create an explicitly interdependent relationship between the government and industry—one that Eisenhower worried about, but that comported well with postwar liberal ideas about government-industry cooperation. Among the liberal regulations implemented, for instance, was one requiring contractors to practice fair employment (secured in part through the efforts of Randolph's March on Washington Movement).38
Cold War competition with the Soviet Union also spurred the United States to take steps to fulfill its promise of democracy and freedom for all people. As fair employment advocate John A. Davis told the readers of Fortune in 1952: "In a world that is about 65 percent nonwhite the Communist charge of racial exploitation in America reverberates with a crashing emphasis."39 While domestic anticommunism may have hindered grassroots civil rights activism in the South, the Cold War drew attention to America's racial hypocrisy and thus was tremendously helpful to civil rights activists who sought to persuade white people in power that racial inequality damaged American credibility in the international arena.40
It is unlikely that liberals understood the extent to which the Cold War would help them enact their program, but it is clear that they knew that Communists' continued presence in American life threatened their political viability. Communists in the government potentially threatened U.S. security and thus also the Truman administration's political viability if it did not take steps to purge them. Communist control of those organizations vital to liberal political success—unions, civil rights groups, political parties—impeded liberals' ability to win elections. If a union was divided over the Marshall Plan, or if its leaders were badmouthing the liberal candidate in a state election, or if its members were alienated by factional fighting, then its potential for unified political action on behalf of liberal candidates was diminished. If the leadership of a union or civil rights group opposed the Marshall Plan it could polarize the group, sowing division and inviting attacks from anticommunists.41 The disadvantages Communists brought to an organization—their secretiveness, their allegiance to Stalin, their unreliability, their capacity to divide, their criticism of the Truman administration, their susceptibility to attacks—combined with their diminished ability to organize made them not just unappealing but also detrimental to effective liberal organizations. They had often been more trouble than they were worth; now, in the context of the Cold War, they were poisonous. Liberals had to expunge Communists in order to save and expand their program. They were methodical in doing so and without their leadership and cooperation, HUAC and Hoover's FBI would not have had the power they did.
It is true that many liberals at the time decried anticommunism and viewed the Truman administration's measures as repressive red-baiting. They were alarmed by the ritualized renunciations that those with past connections to Communists were forced to perform before HUAC. They were horrified at the purges and the destruction of once effective unions. To show how liberalism benefited from anticommunism is not the same as showing that liberals intentionally instigated it. And yet, if we look more closely at the most significant cases of Cold War era anticommunism, those that most successfully removed Communists from political life, we will see that liberals were indeed in charge and in control.
Cont...
Journal of The Historical Society
Volume 10, Issue 1, Pages 1-41
Published Online: 2 Mar 2010
Rethinking Post-World War II Anticommunism
Jennifer Delton 1
Copyright © 2010 The Historical Society and Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
POSTWAR LIBERALISM WHAT LIBERALS STOOD TO GAIN THE TRUMAN ADMINISTRATION UNION PURGES AND THE HOLLYWOOD BLACKLIST CONCLUSION
Article Text
"As a liberal, I must ask how Hiss's guilt changes anything of fundamental importance about modern American history … "1
However fiercely historians disagree about the merits of American communism, they almost universally agree that the post-World War II red scare signified a rightward turn in American politics. The consensus is that an exaggerated, irrational fear of communism, bolstered by a few spectacular spy cases, created an atmosphere of persecution and hysteria that was exploited and fanned by conservative opportunists such as Richard Nixon and Joseph McCarthy. This hysteria suppressed rival ideologies and curtailed the New Deal, leading to a resurgence of conservative ideas and corporate influence in government. We may add detail and nuance to this story, but this, basically, is what we tell our students and ourselves about post-World War II anticommunism, also known as McCarthyism.2 It is fundamentally the same story that liberals have told since Whittaker Chambers accused Alger Hiss of being a Communist spy in 1948.
And yet the most famous and effective anticommunist measures were carried out not by conservatives, but by liberals seeking to uphold the New Deal. It was the liberal Truman administration that chased Communists out of government agencies and prosecuted Communist Party leaders under the Smith Act. It was liberal Hollywood executives who adopted the blacklist, effectively forcing Communists out of the movie business. The labor leaders who purged Communists from their unions were, similarly, liberals. Most anticommunism—the anticommunism that mattered—was not hysterical and conservative, but, rather, a methodical and, in the end, successful attempt on the part of New Deal liberals to remove Communists from specific areas of American life, namely, the government, unions, universities and schools, and civil rights organizations. It is true that the FBI and the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) helped carry out these measures, but it is a mistake to assume that J. Edgar Hoover or HUAC could have had much power without the cooperation of liberals who wanted Communists identified and driven out of their organizations.
New evidence confirming the widespread existence of Soviet agents in the U.S. government makes the Truman administration's attempts to purge Communists from government agencies seem rational and appropriate—even too modest, given what we now know.3 But even in those cases where espionage was not a threat—such as in unions, political organizations, and Hollywood—there were still good reasons for liberals to expel Communists. Communists were divisive and disruptive. They had the ability to cripple liberal organizations, especially at the local and state levels. Removing Communists from labor and political organizations was necessary for liberal Democrats like Hubert Humphrey, Chester Bowles, and Paul Douglas to be elected to Congress, where they supported Truman's Keynesian economic policies, raised the minimum wage, fought for health insurance, defended unions, taxed the rich, and laid the political groundwork for civil rights and desegregation.4
Contrary to liberals' fears at the time and historical scholarship since, a strong claim can be made that New Deal liberalism was not subverted during the early Cold War era, but rather solidified and strengthened. This claim will be greeted with skepticism because so much historical scholarship characterizes the early Cold War era as a step backward for liberals, a time when the New Deal was abandoned, Republicans gained control of Congress, corporate interests triumphed, and American society became militarized.5 But from the perspective of the twenty-first century, when conservatives have all but destroyed the New Deal state, the Cold War era seems like it might have been the most liberal era in American history, if by liberal we mean progressive tax policies (91 percent for the highest income tax bracket!), economic equality, strong unions, civil rights legislation, and acceptance of unparalleled federal power.6 Whatever radical possibilities were snuffed out in the late 1940s are less important than the triumph of liberal assumptions and political power—commonly known as the liberal consensus—that occurred with the Cold War. And that consensus was born out of liberals' anticommunist efforts.
To say that liberals were the driving force behind post-World War II anticommunism is not to deny or downplay the violation of civil liberties, the ruined lives, or the betrayal of democratic principles that resulted from these purges. This was an ugly, painful episode in American history, which is why so many liberals continue to blame conservatives for it. My aim is not so much to justify what liberals did (although I do think many of their actions can be justified), but more to challenge the entrenched—and misleading—characterization of post-World War II anticommunism as hysterical and conservative. That worn convention forces us to fit liberal New Dealers into conservative boxes and to ignore the real threat communism represented, which was not to an abstraction called "democracy," but rather to the ascendant liberal political agenda. Anticommunism did not subvert New Dealism, but rather preserved and expanded it. No new research is required to demonstrate this; all we need is a new perspective on the facts and information already at hand.
Postwar Liberalism
Abstract POSTWAR LIBERALISM WHAT LIBERALS STOOD TO GAIN THE TRUMAN ADMINISTRATION UNION PURGES AND THE HOLLYWOOD BLACKLIST CONCLUSION
Let us begin by defining the term "liberal." By the end of the Second World War, those who called themselves liberals stood for an expansive, activist federal state that could regulate the excesses of a free market capitalist economy and balance the interests of the various organized groups in American society. During the 1930s and early 1940s they had been New Dealers, but the parameters and possibilities of the New Deal were unsettled then and so too was the term liberal.7
World War II clarified what a liberal state might look like. Radical interventions such as planned economies, cradle-to-grave welfare, or shared corporate governance were discarded as American liberals embraced regulatory and fiscal policies that worked within the framework of free market capitalism.8 The post-World War II version of liberalism sought to empower the federal government with the ability to meet the disparate needs of the various groups in American society. Laissez-faire capitalism was a myth, liberals said. The federal government had always intervened in economic matters, but usually to the benefit of industrial leaders. Tariffs, land grants to railroads, police protection for industry, and loose immigration laws were all examples of the federal government's intervention in the economy. What liberals sought was the expansion of these favors to other sectors of society, a democratization of go
vernment largesse brought about by the political organization of once marginal or inchoate groups like workers, blacks, and middle-class consumers under the aegis of the Democratic Party. The domestic policies liberals favored in the postwar era—a progressive income tax, full employment, fair employment and civil rights, economic growth through government spending, and national health insurance, for example—were designed to bring about a greater equality between different social groups, to relieve longstanding class and racial tensions, and to help individuals in all groups attain a level of economic independence that would contribute to economic growth.
Liberals who helped define the new postwar liberalism saw themselves as upholding the New Deal, not abandoning it. They included labor leaders such as Phillip Murray, Walter Reuther, and A. Philip Randolph; politicians such as Henry Wallace, Hubert Humphrey, and Chester Bowles; business leaders such as Chamber of Commerce president Eric Johnston and General Electric's Owen D. Young; and intellectuals and economists such as Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., James Wechsler, Reinhold Niebuhr, Daniel Bell, John Kenneth Galbraith, Walter Heller, and Sidney Hook. By the end of the Second World War, most—though not all—of this group had come to see communism as a form of totalitarianism that could not be reconciled with liberalism.9 As anticommunists, they honed the principles and agenda of what would become the liberal consensus, the broad bipartisan acceptance of New Deal and Cold War policies that dominated American politics from the late 1940s until the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980.
Although their vision of an active federal state seemed to reject classical Lockean liberalism, postwar liberals insisted it did not. State activism was intended to enhance individual opportunity by leveling the economic playing field. Political freedom alone did not guarantee the economic independence so essential to real Lockean freedom, as the Depression had shown. To those who worried that increasing the power of the federal government might simply create a leviathan, a dictatorship, liberals replied that the state's power was limited by a democratic process that gave ultimate control of the government to organized groups of citizens and voters.10
Still, the underlying philosophy of postwar liberalism was a critique of the classical liberal ideas of John Locke, Adam Smith, and nineteenth-century American industrialists, which envisioned a limited role for the state in the private affairs of commerce and business. Whereas classical liberals saw individuals as the primary components of society, postwar liberals, influenced by social scientists in anthropology and sociology, believed groups were society's basic units. Even if the ends of liberal democratic government remained individual freedom and the protection of individual rights, the means by which this would occur had to take into account the group-based reality of society. In a society as large and diverse as the United States, individuals expressed their political needs and aspirations by organizing into groups. Lone individuals were powerless in the political system, but as part of a group—a union, a trade association, a civil rights organization, a political party—they could attain real power.11 With the help of their allies in education and the social sciences, liberals disseminated their ideas about the interdependence of social groups. If Americans could be made aware of how their own interests were connected to groups remote from themselves they would be more likely to give up their ideas about "rugged individualism" and accept that the purpose of democratic government was to ensure the needs and interests of all groups. Americans could be educated to understand, for instance, how a fair employment law that seemed designed for African Americans could also help their own group by making consumers and taxpayers out of a previously disfranchised group.
New Deal liberals had developed these ideas in the 1930s to sell and explain the New Deal to Americans, but postwar liberalism represented a more solid and permanent ethos. The New Deal had been a diverse, experimental, and pragmatic set of responses to the crisis of economic depression. Postwar liberalism was not a response to a particular crisis, but rather the logical, seemingly inevitable governing principle of all advanced democracies—the answer to the old "labor question." Writing in 1955, historian Richard Hofstadter noted that while deficit spending had once seemed bizarre and radical, now it was accepted because "we have learned things about the possibilities of our economy that were not dreamed of in 1933." Hofstadter continued: "While men still grow angry over federal fiscal and tax policies, hardly anyone doubts that in the calculable future it will be the fiscal role of the government that more than anything else determines the course of the economy."12 Hofstadter's blithe dismissal of those who might have opposed the government's determination of the economy—commonly known as conservatives—is indicative of liberals' belief that this question had been settled by 1955.
Since the era of the Vietnam War, historians have generally been critical of postwar liberals, who, among other things, led the United States into that conflict. Influenced by the New Left, historians of this generation—often called "revisionists"—portrayed postwar liberals as fundamentally conservative, beholden to corporate capital.13 According to revisionists, postwar liberals allowed anticommunism to destroy the left and any viable alternative for real progressivism. The resulting political order was one in which, as Robert Griffith put it, "the left was in virtual eclipse and the distinction between liberals and conservatives became one of method and technique, not fundamental principle."14 Gradualist in regard to civil rights and fixated on legislative solutions, liberals stymied the grassroots activism that could have led to real racial and economic progress. This interpretation affirms the idea that the New Deal was abandoned during the 1940s; it has been extremely influential among historians, many of whom continue to focus on radical alternatives and grassroots movements that were derailed by elites in Washington.15
Still, there have been those who, while recognizing the shortcomings of postwar liberalism, have also appreciated how truly monumental liberals' achievements were, especially given the persistent conservatism of the United States. Paul Starr's Freedom's Power, Kevin Mattson's When America Was Great, and Paul Krugman's Conscience of a Liberal all look back to the era of the liberal consensus as a time when a strong federal government promoted racial progress, economic equality, and a labor movement. It is this liberalism with which I am concerned.
What Liberals Stood to Gain
Abstract POSTWAR LIBERALISM WHAT LIBERALS STOOD TO GAIN THE TRUMAN ADMINISTRATION UNION PURGES AND THE HOLLYWOOD BLACKLIST CONCLUSION
It has often been assumed that conservatives had the greatest motivation for attacking Communists. Under the legitimating cloak of national security, conservatives deployed traditional red-scare tactics to paint anyone who fought for social justice or a stronger welfare state as a "commie." In this way, they were able to stop the expansion of the New Deal state and to mute liberal aspirations, while at the same time furthering their own political careers. Liberal anticommunism in this scenario was mainly reactive—a self-protective, even cowardly, response to the conservative version.16
This line of reasoning is not wholly wrong, but it has two shortcomings. First, it posits that the objective of anticommunism was to thwart liberals and progressives, not to get rid of Communists. In this explanation, anticommunism is merely a pretext for the real goal of subverting progressi
ve activity in general. But progressive activity survived (albeit in altered forms); Communist activity did not. Second, most of the major anticommunist cases involved real Communists, not wrongly accused noncommunists. Except for the Loyalty-Security Program, which ensnared fellow travelers as well as Communists, most of the repression was, by and large, limited to Communists and ex-Communists.17 The problem with post-World War II anticommunism for many, including Ellen Schrecker, was not that it swept up "innocent" noncommunists, but that it criminalized membership in and support for the Communist Party. It did—and that is my point: Cold War era anticommunism was more specific in its targets, unlike the amorphous sort that followed World War I, when thousands of immigrants were deported because of vaguely defined radical activity and an underlying xenophobia.18
Instead of assuming that conservatives fomented the Cold War red scare, let us reconsider who had the most to gain from the removal of Communists from American society. Conservatives gained nothing from the disappearance of Communists because getting rid of Communists did not end the progressive, liberal activism that threatened their conception of laissez-faire individualism, limited government, and free market capitalism. Conservatives hated communism, of course, but they also hated socialism, New Dealism, and other forms of progressive activity. Communism, socialism, liberalism—it was all the same to them. Thus, their efforts were unfocused and ineffective. Not so for the liberals. Liberals could only benefit from the disappearance of Communists, who disrupted their organizations, challenged their ideas, alienated potential allies, and invited conservative repression.
Liberal anticommunists were motivated primarily by a principled rejection of Communist ideas and doctrine, which, it had finally become clear, contradicted their belief in individual freedom and democratic self-rule. Much has been written about this "awakening"; there is no need to recount it here.19 Rather, I will focus on two more practical factors that animated—and hence explain—liberal anticommunism: liberals' past experiences with Communists and liberal political aspirations in postwar America. When combined, these pragmatic factors indicate that liberals had a stronger motivation for excising Communists from American life than did conservatives.
Liberals and Communists in the Interwar Years
Conservatives like J. Edgar Hoover had a conception of communism that came from their study of it; their anticommunism was one of principle. Many liberals came to oppose communism on principled grounds as well, but their impressions of communism also came from working with Communists in myriad movements for social change over the course of almost three decades. Revisionist historians have painted a heroic picture of American communism at the grassroots level. Robin D.G. Kelley has argued that black Communists in Alabama represented an indigenous American radicalism rooted in specific historical and regional experiences. Others have shown that Communist-led unions represented grassroots democracy, won the support of their rank-and-file members, and secured substantial gains for workers and other marginalized groups.20 Such claims may well be true; I will not dispute them here. But it is also true that Communists constantly alienated the people with whom they worked. Communists were quick to make enemies. This was due in large part to their participation in an international movement that was directed from Moscow.21
The Communist Party USA's (CPUSA) connections to an international Communist movement gave the party panache, discipline, and gravitas. The old dream of an international working-class movement, dashed during World War I, was revived under Communist Party auspices and was a major reason so many American radicals joined or defended the party. It was also, however, the source of much animosity toward party members, mainly because of the infamous "party line." The party line not only required Communists to embrace unpopular policies, such as the dual-union policy of the Third Period that called for Communists to organize competing unions separate from those being organized by other labor leaders, but it also suggested that American Communists were in thrall to a foreign power that put the interests of international communism and the Soviet Union before the particular needs of social justice in America. No change to the party line did more to discredit the Communist Party than the one following the 1939 Hitler-Stalin pact, which ended the party's Popular Front policy against fascism and directed party members to oppose Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal. Not only did this end what had been a popular, membership-building policy, it also represented such an abrupt about-face in policy—from antifascism to accommodation with the leading fascist power—that Communist motives would forever afterward be suspect. When Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, the policy changed back again to one of cooperation with liberals and leftists. This sequence of events, more than anything else, convinced liberals and other leftists that Communists could not be trusted. They could be used, certainly, and tolerated, perhaps, but they could not be counted on for the long-term real work of social change.
But directives from Moscow only partly explain why Communists alienated large numbers of the progressives with whom they worked. After all, there is plenty of research indicating that Communist leaders, even though they followed the party line, were not merely puppets of the Soviet Union.22 Revisionists' work is premised on the idea that Moscow was less a factor in shaping American communism than had previously been supposed. I agree. American Communists did not need Moscow to alienate progressives and other activists. Their own ideological radicalism and fierce commitment to an international Communist ideal did that. Communists' overblown rhetoric and sloganeering could be obnoxious and was often out of step with the thinking and experiences of progressives and other noncommunist activists. Calling Franklin Roosevelt a "fascist" after 1939 or describing Hubert Humphrey, then mayor of Minneapolis, as a "man of Hitlerian psychology" in 1946 confirmed to many noncommunist progressives and liberals just how out of touch Communists and their allies were with what was happening in the world.23 Communists' disdain for middle-class progressivism and legislative reform was attractive to radicals and contrarians, but frustrating if one happened to be a middle-class progressive or labor leader who just wanted to improve conditions for the working class and other disfranchised groups.
Still, the sloganeering and the contempt many Communists felt toward their erstwhile allies were not enough to turn progressives and liberals against them, given the progressive community's natural opposition to red-baiting and political repression. Rather, what led so many liberal activists to ban Communists from their organizations, what turned them into anticommunists, was Communists' propensity to infiltrate and take over their organizations. Here is Wilson Record's description of how the Communists took over the National Negro Congress (NNC) at its third annual meeting in 1940.
Party strategists prepared the resolutions beforehand, forced them through committees, and supported them on the floor with speeches that bordered on hysteria. Opposition speakers were hooted down. [NNC president A. Philip] Randolph's efforts to provide non-Communists an opportunity to express their views were sabotaged by boos, catcalls, and other disturbances.24
After gaining control, they passed a series of resolutions upholding the party line positions on the European war and African American rights. Randolph resigned from the NNC as a result and the Communists prompt
ly condemned him as part of the "frightened Negro petty bourgeoisie." In response to this episode, Randolph explicitly excluded Communists from other organizations he founded, such as the March on Washington Movement, which fought for fair employment for blacks.
Liberal Minnesotans in the Democratic Farmer-Labor Party (DFL) would never have dreamed of becoming anticommunists—until Communists actually took over their party and attacked Hubert Humphrey because of his ability to win over Republican voters and corporate leaders (in other words, because of his political popularity). Eugenie Anderson, then a housewife and later an ambassador to Denmark, recalled the takeover at the 1946 DFL convention: "The methods they used, the way they marched up and down the aisle, and kept their eye on everybody, and the way they vilified Humphrey's character, said the most outrageous things against him, against you [Arthur Naftalin], against me, against all of us. … It woke me up. It woke Humphrey up."25 After that, Anderson, Humphrey, Naftalin, and their allies began their campaign to purge the Communists from the DFL, a process that included helping to found the liberal anticommunist organization, Americans for Democratic Action (ADA).
Communists' habit of taking over leftist and liberal organizations did not necessarily arise from Moscow's directives but from a fundamental contradiction in their relationship to mass movements, a contradiction which was the basis of many sectarian arguments and rifts among Communists. Communists were supposed to represent the working-class masses, yet the working-class masses almost always formed alliances with discontented bourgeois and petit-bourgeois groups like farmers, skilled workers, reformers, and even, occasionally, small business owners. The political and organizational energy for challenging the capitalist structure resided in grassroots political movements and organizations such as farmer-labor parties, labor unions, or black civil rights groups. Communists usually entered into informal alliances or federations with the working-class elements of these mass movements or organizations, but there were occasions when political circumstances or party policy led Communists to try to gain control of certain movements, parties, or organizations. Sometimes these attempts were successful, as with the Minnesota Farmer-Labor Party in 1938, the NNC in 1940, and the Minnesota DFL in 1946; often they merely resulted in a split organization, as with the Federated Farmer-Labor Party in 1924.26 Either way, Communists made lifelong enemies of the people they tried to help.
Even before Cold War tensions were felt in the political arena, then, progressive organizations had started to exclude Communists. Ellen Schrecker has conceded that Communists' behavior had made them enemies within the ranks of progressive organizations and labor, so that when Cold War tensions mounted and Communist spies were found in the government, few of their former allies stepped forward to defend them from persecution.27 Schrecker sees this as a real tragedy, which, depending on your perspective, it might have been. But it also suggests that liberals' antipathy to Communists was based not on fear or antiradicalism, but rather on a history of disruptive, unpleasant experiences with them.
The Liberal Political Agenda
Liberals succeeded in getting their ideas into government through their influence in the Democratic Party. The New Deal and Franklin Roosevelt had helped them gain a foothold there; the trick after the war was to hold and expand their control of the party. At first it seemed as though the Democratic Party without Roosevelt would simply disintegrate into its quarreling components: big city machines, unions, southern whites, northern blacks, and liberal New Dealers. But liberals took the lead in reuniting these components under a program of government-secured economic growth. Keynesian spending and military contracts won over big city mayors and white Southerners, as well as workers, blacks, and consumers.28 To be sure, liberals' focus on fair employment and desegregation alienated southern Democrats, but the Republican Party also promoted fair employment and, thus, as Harry Truman famously noted to Clark Clifford, southern Democrats had nowhere else to go.29 Similarly, Truman's Cold War foreign policy alienated the more progressive or left elements of the liberal community. But they, too, as the failed Wallace campaign would soon show, had nowhere else to go.
One of the most important elements of the liberal strategy to control political discourse and the Democratic Party was anticommunism, in both its domestic and foreign policy versions. Even though many liberals, like social democrats and other progressives, had come to oppose communism on principle, they were often reluctant to trumpet this anticommunism for fear of dividing their unions and political organizations. Unity was more important than criticizing Communists and no one wanted to be a red-baiter. Hubert Humphrey, for instance, repeatedly rejected advice to attack the Communists and their allies in the DFL during 1945–1946 in order to avoid factional warfare. Philip Murray, president of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), initially ignored warnings about the Communists in the CIO for the same reason.30 Responsible liberal leadership required neutral mediation between competing factions, not participation in the squabbling. But beginning in 1946, with Truman's hard-line policy toward the Soviet Union (which signified an end to whatever hopes had existed for a continuation of U.S.-Soviet cooperation), that sort of neutral aloofness became untenable. The foreign policy issue divided labor unions and political organizations, in large part because of the Communist presence in these organizations. There was no longer anything to be gained by "appeasing" (as longtime anticommunists saw it) Communists in the name of unity. There was no unity. In the ensuing struggles, Communists explicitly challenged liberals for control of local political parties (such as the DFL in Minnesota) and other progressive organizations (such as American Federation of Labor [AFL] and CIO locals across the nation). Liberals, in turn, were forced to articulate the danger of communism and the great promise of the liberal agenda.
Luckily for the liberals, the Communists and their allies supported Henry Wallace's third-party presidential campaign in 1948. Wallace's campaign opposed the militarism of the Cold War and also claimed to offer a more truly liberal program than Truman's, one that genuinely embraced civil rights for blacks. But it also had the potential to split the liberal/Democratic vote and deliver a victory to the Republicans. In Minnesota, the DFL's left-wing leadership not only attempted to align the DFL Party with Wallace's Progressive Party, thereby forcing Truman to run as an independent in Minnesota, it also sought to prevent the popular Humphrey from challenging incumbent Senator Joseph Ball, a Republican and coauthor of the antilabor Taft-Hartley Act. As the ADA explained, what was at stake in this election was the national political power of organized labor: if a Republican president were elected and Republicans retained control of Congress (secured in 1946), labor was sunk. Why would the Communists and their allies risk that outcome by supporting Wallace and refusing to support the one DFL-er who could beat Joe Ball? The absurdity of the Communist position, combined with the genuine fear that a split vote would kill what was left of the New Deal, energized the ADA in Minnesota, whose members set out to convince erstwhile Wallace supporters that Truman, the Democratic Party, and Humphrey could better represent their hopes and aspirations than Wallace and the left wing. They engaged in a ruthless, well-organized, county-by-county campaign to oust the Communists and their allies from the DFL, but they also
presented a positive program for labor, African Americans, and farmers, keeping the focus on Joe Ball and the Republicans.31 To those angry liberals who accused the ADA of red-baiting, Humphrey personally explained that this was a different kind of anticommunism, one that worked in favor of liberalism, not against it.32 In his victory over Joe Ball, Humphrey became one of eight new Democrats in the Senate, helping Democrats regain control of Congress in 1948.
Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., echoed the ADA's arguments about the political necessity of defeating Wallace and marginalizing Communists in The Vital Center (1949), a manifesto that gave philosophical justification and political purpose to liberals' on-the-ground struggles against Communists in unions and local political contests. Schlesinger identified the real threat Communists in the United States posed, which was not to the status quo or to conservatives, but to the left.33 Communists were dangerous to American democracy not because they could mount a revolution (Schlesinger laughed at the idea), but because they divided and neutralized the left, and thus threatened the New Deal. The New Deal offered the only viable way to expand democracy. Schlesinger's version of New Deal liberalism, represented by the ADA, was one that had, finally, shed its debilitating and naïve utopianism. It represented nothing less than a "revival of American radicalism," pragmatic, political, and savvy.34
As the Wallace campaign indicated, Truman's Cold War foreign policy divided the liberal community. Wallace had tapped into a genuine feeling of disappointment among many liberals that Truman had abandoned Roosevelt's policy of cooperation with the Soviet Union and, worse, was militarizing the country, maintaining the draft, exaggerating the Communist threat, and branding as Communist anyone who spoke for peace.35 There were, however, also many liberals who were sorely disenchanted by the Soviet Union's actions in Eastern Europe during 1947–1948 and who not only supported a strong anticommunist foreign policy, but also helped to formulate and enact it. Such architects of the Cold War as Dean Acheson, George Kennan, Averill Harriman, and George Marshall were all liberals in their outlook, and willing to use the power of the state to stop Soviet expansion. By 1950, they would disagree with each other about the nature of Communist expansion and over containment strategies, but initially they agreed that a hard-line, realist foreign policy with regard to the Soviet Union was necessary if some semblance of free market internationalism were to survive.36
In fighting Wallace's bid for the presidency, liberals who supported Truman's foreign policy emphasized how Soviet totalitarianism subverted liberal ideals and aims. That is, they justified the Cold War largely on ideological grounds. As it turned out, however, the Cold War—its infrastructure, military contracts, and commitment to internationalism—would prove crucial to the fulfillment of the liberal domestic agenda in the 1950s and 1960s. As historian H.W. Brands has argued, the Cold War justified the increased power of the federal government, allowing the state to enact sweeping economic and social regulations in the name of national security.37 The Cold War justified a wide assortment of federal policies and programs during the 1950s, including income tax rates over 90 percent, interstate highways, farm subsidies, space programs, education, foreign aid, and even desegregation. Defense spending, which would constitute 70 percent of President Eisenhower's budgets in the 1950s, not only created union jobs, but also allowed the government to regulate contractors. Defense monies had strings attached and helped create an explicitly interdependent relationship between the government and industry—one that Eisenhower worried about, but that comported well with postwar liberal ideas about government-industry cooperation. Among the liberal regulations implemented, for instance, was one requiring contractors to practice fair employment (secured in part through the efforts of Randolph's March on Washington Movement).38
Cold War competition with the Soviet Union also spurred the United States to take steps to fulfill its promise of democracy and freedom for all people. As fair employment advocate John A. Davis told the readers of Fortune in 1952: "In a world that is about 65 percent nonwhite the Communist charge of racial exploitation in America reverberates with a crashing emphasis."39 While domestic anticommunism may have hindered grassroots civil rights activism in the South, the Cold War drew attention to America's racial hypocrisy and thus was tremendously helpful to civil rights activists who sought to persuade white people in power that racial inequality damaged American credibility in the international arena.40
It is unlikely that liberals understood the extent to which the Cold War would help them enact their program, but it is clear that they knew that Communists' continued presence in American life threatened their political viability. Communists in the government potentially threatened U.S. security and thus also the Truman administration's political viability if it did not take steps to purge them. Communist control of those organizations vital to liberal political success—unions, civil rights groups, political parties—impeded liberals' ability to win elections. If a union was divided over the Marshall Plan, or if its leaders were badmouthing the liberal candidate in a state election, or if its members were alienated by factional fighting, then its potential for unified political action on behalf of liberal candidates was diminished. If the leadership of a union or civil rights group opposed the Marshall Plan it could polarize the group, sowing division and inviting attacks from anticommunists.41 The disadvantages Communists brought to an organization—their secretiveness, their allegiance to Stalin, their unreliability, their capacity to divide, their criticism of the Truman administration, their susceptibility to attacks—combined with their diminished ability to organize made them not just unappealing but also detrimental to effective liberal organizations. They had often been more trouble than they were worth; now, in the context of the Cold War, they were poisonous. Liberals had to expunge Communists in order to save and expand their program. They were methodical in doing so and without their leadership and cooperation, HUAC and Hoover's FBI would not have had the power they did.
It is true that many liberals at the time decried anticommunism and viewed the Truman administration's measures as repressive red-baiting. They were alarmed by the ritualized renunciations that those with past connections to Communists were forced to perform before HUAC. They were horrified at the purges and the destruction of once effective unions. To show how liberalism benefited from anticommunism is not the same as showing that liberals intentionally instigated it. And yet, if we look more closely at the most significant cases of Cold War era anticommunism, those that most successfully removed Communists from political life, we will see that liberals were indeed in charge and in control.
Cont...