McCarthyism

I frequently despair over the current state of our politics and our public discourse.  Pretty much everyone else does too.  And there is a consensus on this across the political divide.  Conservatives decry the "liberal media" as doing a bad job.  They want them to be more like the conservative media.  People outside the world of conservatism decry the same bunch.  Only they call them the "mainstream media" and they want them to go after conservatives and the conservative media for their lack of fidelity to and interest in the truth.

I have a dog in this fight.  But instead of going straight at it I want to approach things from a different angle.  Were things as bad then as they are now?  With this ultimate objective in mind I am going to dive into the McCarthy era and see what things looked like then.  To do that I need a short, concise example of thinking from that bygone time.  I found it in the most unlikely of places.

I read a lot.  And a some of what I read, or in this case reread, is the fiction of my youth.  That and the fiction my parents read and filed in the bookshelf in the hall.  One example is the "Shell Scott" books by Richard S. Prather.  Even in the less exalted halls of '50s detective pulp fiction, Shell was definitely considered Junior Varsity.  When I read one a few years ago I still found it to be JV level work.  But I also found it quite entertaining.  So I set out to read a bunch more.

Shell was your standard issue two fisted hunk who beat people up and got beat up in return.  And did I mention he screwed a lot of women.  And, like many of his contemporaries, he was actually a model of gentlemanly behavior when it came to the ladies.  It's just that the babes kept throwing themselves at him.  They were all voluptuous and, in the case of the Scott books, frequently made it known to our boy that they were not wearing a brassiere. And this was in spite of the fact that these women's proportions proudly advertised the need for substantial support.

So anyhow, here I am peacefully plowing through what is supposed to be '50s escapist pulp fiction when I come across this tirade.  It was unexpected to say the least.  Mostly this type of fiction restricts tirades to the subject of the bad guy kicking the crap out of the good guy or vice versa.  This tirade was actually on a political subject.  Generally speaking these books avoid politics.  Why jeopardize a part of your customer base unnecessarily?

Our boy Shell is supposed to be chasing, or being chased by babes, beating people up and getting beaten up, drinking far beyond wretched excess while suffering little or no consequence, and generally providing me with a good time.  But in this book he stops to provide a lecture in the form of a "debate".  The only thing I can think of is that the author thought that the words he was put into Shell's mouth were so non-controversial that it was unlikely that they would turn off a significant portion of his readership.  As such, I think it is fair for me to take them as representative of mainstream thought of the time about the subject at hand.  So I will.

The book in question is "Pattern for Panic" published in 1954.  It was originally rejected by the publisher so Prather changed the name of the lead character to something else and got it published by someone else.  But the Shell Scott books continued to gain in popularity.  So Prather re-edited his manuscript to change the name of the lead character back to Shell Scott and republished it in 1961.  The version I read was the 1961 version.  As far as I can tell, other than a quick edit to change the name of the lead character back and forth, the books are the same.

As I indicated, the book contains a "debate" between a minor character and our boy Shell.  The books are first person narrations so we only get Shell's perspective.  So let's start by looking at Shell's description of his debating opponent.  He is described as:

A modern "liberal" [quotation marks in the original] and egghead; and he was always shooting off his mouth on subjects he knew nothing about.

He is also described as "something of a fathead".  He is, in fact, a microbiologist.  Egghead attempts to make an argument for peaceful coexistence with communists in general and the USSR (the then name for what is now roughly Russia) in particular.  Scott belittles his arguments and interrupts a lot.  Here's Scott's argument:

We've got a very clever gang of pro-Red salesmen in the States -- in the press, television, and radio, publishing, movies, schools, government agencies -- any place where spoken and written words can be used to shape opinion or policy. 

And a little later in a response to Egghead he says:

 O.K.  But the next time some fat issue involving Russia or Communism comes up, watch the same pink and pro-Red cats start shoving the Russia-Communist angle into the background and concentrating instead on America's errors, or Red hysteria, or McCarthyism -- whatever the current party line happens to be.  Watch them play up Russia's successes and America's failures, while at the same time playing down Russia's failures and America's successes.  With the natural result that a lot of people gradually start believing the Russian molehill is a mountain, and the American mountain is a molehill.

He completes his thesis with the following statement:

Shaping public opinion, whether it's in international relations or homegrown subversion is like the public relations business.  Control enough of the words reaching people and you can make them believe damn near anything.  You can make them believe -- falsely -- that Chiang is a 'corrupt dictator' and Mao Tse-tung is simply an agrarian reformer; that Batista is a 'corrupt dictator' and Castro's a Cuban Robin Hood; that Rhee and Trujillo are 'corrupt dictators' but Red dictators are democratic reformers -- hell , isn't that's what happened, what's happening right now?

At this point let me go through the players as many may be unfamiliar to modern audiences.

Fidel Castro is still well known as the dictator of Cuba until a few years ago.  Cuba is now run by his brother Raoul.  Fidel, either directly or indirectly through his brother, is still running Cuba 60 years later.  It may be that he has maintained a first class propaganda machine all that time.  But he was and still is liked, trusted, and respected by the bulk of Cuban people.  Cuba is a poor country.  But it has little abject poverty and probably the best medical system in the third world.  The rest of the players are no longer with us.

Mao Zedong (as it is now spelled) led an uprising against Chiang Kai-shek, the leader (his title changed regularly) of the government of China.  The communist forces eventually routed the Chiang forces on the mainland and Chiang retreated to Formosa, also known as Taiwan, in 1950.  At that point the communists took complete control of mainland China.  They maintain that control to this day although many argue that their economic system can no longer accurately be described as communist.

Syngman Rhee was the President of South Korea from 1948 to 1960.  South Korea was created when Korea was partitioned in to North and South areas at the end of World War II.  He was described as a strongman and was only ousted from power after an election dispute.

Rafael Trujillo was President of the Dominican Republic from 1930 until 1961.  His nickname was El Jefe, a phrase popularized by movies and TV shows.  El Jefe is inevitably a corrupt, sneering, Hispanic bad guy.  Trujillo ruled until he was assassinated.  And that leaves us with McCarthy.

Joseph McCarthy was a Republican Senator from Minnesota.  He took office on January 3, 1947 and served until his death on May 2, 1957.  He ended up lending his name to an era, "The McCarthy Era" and to a movement, "McCarthyism".  So what's the story?

The Democrats became immensely popular under President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.  Most people gave him credit for fighting the Great Depression.  Then he was Commander in Chief during World War II, an eventually very popular war.  At the end of the war the Republicans were at a loss as to what to do.  Then the whole Iron Curtain thing happened.  A (very) little background:

During World War I the Germans smuggled some prominent communists, notably Trotsky and Lenin, into Russia with the idea that they would be a disruptive force and weaken one of the countries fighting against the Germans.  The plan worked far better than it was supposed to.  The communists not only caused disruption.  They took over the government in a coup and took Russia out of the war.  So far so good.

The problem was that they stuck around and kept running the country in spite of substantial allied efforts to prop up the "White Russians" in the '20s.  The German government was taken over by the Nazis in the early '30s and Russia, now known officially as the USSR, came in against the Germans in World War II.  That was not so good for the Germans.  That was all well and good in the US while the War was still going on, however.  But it quickly became a problem starting in the immediate postwar period.  And by this time Stalin had been running things in the USSR for some time.

Stalin decided he needed a buffer to prevent the Germans from invading a third time.  (The Germans attacked Russia in both World War I and World War II.)  So he forcefully took control of Eastern Europe.  He used, shall we say, non-democratic means to do this.  The Republicans seized on this as an opportunity.  They started loudly asking "who lost Eastern Europe?"  And, of course, the obvious answer, as far as they were concerned, was "the Democrats".  And this led to the obvious follow on question:  How was it done?  The Republican answer was "subversion from the inside done by the communists but aided and abetted by the Democrats".  Why?  Because "they are soft on communism".  And, of course, "the evidence is all around us".  The principal spokesman for this line was Senator McCarthy.

He launched numerous "investigations" in the expectation of finding communists everywhere.  Why do I use scare quotes around the work "investigations"?  Because McCarthy and his staff did little or no investigating.  The FBI and some other agencies actually did some investigating and they actually turned up some spies and sympathizers.  They decided it was to their political advantage to reveal these results through McCarthy so they did and McCarthy got the public credit.  But what little actual investigation was done was done poorly.

Stalin was running a large spy operation in the US at the time.  The most obvious success this spying operation chalked up was the theft of both of the Atomic Bomb designs that the U.S. developed during the War.  They were the "implosion" and the "gun" designs.  The gun design was subsequently abandoned but the implosion design is the basis of all subsequent A-bomb and H-bomb designs developed since.

There were several spies at Los Alamos.  The most important one was Claus Fuchs.  He came to the program as part of the British contingent.  So he was vouched for by the Brits.  But it turns out that British intelligence was riddled with Soviet spies.  A group called the Cambridge 5 had been successfully recruited by Soviet Intelligence in the '30s.  They became long term assets that were able to continue operating into the '60s.  With their fingers everywhere in British Intelligence the Russians were able to use the British pipeline to get their people into all kinds of places both in the UK and in the US.

After the theft of the bomb designs was completed Soviet Intelligence later had a second less well known but equally important success.  The CIA attempted to infiltrate agents into Eastern Europe starting in the late '40s.  All of these efforts, 100%, were failures.  It was obvious that there was a leak somewhere.  A man by the name of James Jesus Angleton was put in charge of finding the leak.  He had "all access" within the CIA.  And it was important that no one be able to track his activities as this might allow the bad guys to counter them.  So Angleton had access to pretty much anyone and anything in the CIA but no records of his activities were kept.  So if you tried to track down who knew about a certain blown program Angleton's name would not show up even if he actually knew all about it.

And it turned out that Angleton was the source of the leak.  Was he a spy?  No!  He just chose his friends poorly.  He was friends with Kim Philby, the most highly placed of the Cambridge 5 Russian spies.  Angleton trusted Philby.  So when Philby came from London to Washington DC, which he did frequently, the two would get together.  They would then have off the record discussions of what the CIA in general and Angleton in particular was up to.  Philby was able to suss out information on all the CIA infiltration efforts and pass enough information about them back to Moscow for the Russians to thwart them all.

None of this, the Cambridge 5, the Angleton to Philby hemorrhaging of operational information, nothing was turned up by McCarthy or his operatives.  Actual spies were all uncovered by investigations happening elsewhere.  And little enough of that happened either.  A lot of this was only uncovered after McCarthyism died down and ceased to be a distraction.  McCarthy's ineffectiveness was well known to insiders.  But this secret was carefully kept from the public by those who benefitted politically from his antics.  He was only brought down when ABC decided to broadcast the Army-McCarthy hearings on TV.  There the public got to see for themselves how he operated instead of having to rely on the highly sanitized media version of his activities.

Angleton was well liked by the CIA top brass.  So in spite of his spectacular blunder and the incredible amount of damage he did he was kept on at the CIA in a senior position until 1975.  This was in spite of the fact that Philby had defected in 1963.  So if Angleton, who richly deserved it, wasn't dumped, who was?

During World War II it was a US priority to keep Russia in the war and there was good reason for this.  Russia suffered tremendous losses and inflicted tremendous losses on the Nazis.  As an example the largest tank battle in history was fought between the Nazis and the Russians.  This "largest" is also true if you measure the number of soldiers involved, the number of airplanes involved, the number of casualties involved, the amount of land involved.  Clashes on the "Eastern Front" were either the largest or one of the largest clashes of the War as measured by any of these criteria.  So keeping Russia in the war was sound strategic thinking.  And who manned the front lines of diplomatic efforts to achieve this critical strategic objective?  State Department officials.  After the war they became targets of opportunity for cheap shots, all as a result of them doing their jobs.

There was another group of people who became targets of opportunity.  The communist takeover of Russia in roughly 1920 was the first example of communist thinking put into action.  Up until then it was just a theoretical concept.  As such it had its good points and its bad points.  And no one knew whether it was practical or not.  So in the '20s communism became fashionable in some circles.  In these early days a lot of things happening in the USSR could be dismissed as "teething problems" or working out the kinks.  But particularly after Stalin came to power excusing bad behavior became more and more difficult.  First, industry was nationalized.  This could be excused as being only fair because the rich and powerful (the owners), often abused their powers.

Then Stalin collectivized agriculture.  Many small family farms were consolidated into a few large collective farms.  This too might have been a good idea.  But it quickly became obvious that the whole endeavor was a giant disaster that benefitted no one and definitely did not benefit the former family farmers.  Then Stalin started the purges.  He killed and imprisoned large numbers of people.  It quickly became apparent that the only goal of this was to consolidate power into the hands of Stalin and his close associates.  This shed a new light on the collectivization of agriculture.  It too could now be seen as part of a plan to consolidate power into the hands of Stalin and his close associates.  The purges were so destructive that the Soviet military was unable to operate effectively early in the War because so many senior officers had been purged.

So we have an early period where communism is legitimate.  Then we have the time when communism loses its legitimacy under the leadership of Stalin.  Then, for pragmatic reasons, the USSR (and by extension Stalin and communism) is rehabilitated so it can contribute to the War effort.  A lot of people were swept up in one or the other of these honeymoon periods.  In many cases well before the late '40s start of the McCarthy era, and definitely by the late '40s, most of those who had gotten involved with communism at one point or another had rightly abandoned it.  But the cry became "are you or have you ever been" a communist or a communist sympathizer.  If the answer is yes then you should be hounded out of your job and your place in polite society.  Any subtlety was lost on McCarthy and his sympathizers.  You can see this in the statements I have quoted above.  They are the oft voiced sentiments of the pro-McCarthy side.  Let's go back and take another look at them.

In the second quotation we are given a list of "the press, television, and radio, publishing, movies, schools, government agencies" where communist stooges are supposed to running things and brainwashing the masses.  Yet many of these same institutions, and specifically "the press, television, radio, publishing, the movies" are all part of large companies run by people who are strongly anticommunist.  And if you look at what was actually printed, broadcasted, etc., it is loaded with material that is similar to what I have reproduced above.  It is loaded with "don't trust those dirty commies and their dirty propaganda" messages rather than "trust what those fine communist gentlemen are saying" messages.  As for the schools, they were run by local groups and those groups by and large followed the anticommunist line.  That left government agencies.

The State Department and many of its staff was guilty of saying nice things about the USSR.  And many of those nice things were wrong.  But those people engaged in misleading the American public were doing their jobs.  And their job was "do what it takes to keep the USSR in the war".  And unfortunately "what it takes" frequently involved looking the other way when Russian bad behavior was involved and saying nice things about the USSR that were not justified.  But diplomats are employed and paid to do what they are told whether it comports with their beliefs (or even the truth) or not.  It makes their jobs incredibly difficult in the best of times.  So the whole second statement was B.S.

Let's look at the third statement. The first thing the third statement does is accuse the media of playing up Russian successes and playing down American failures.  Yet that is exactly what the pro-McCarthy statement does.  It plays up Russian successes and plays down American failures.  Why?  Because the McCarthyites needed a powerful enemy to justify the drastic measures they wanted to enact.  If the bad guys are wimps then you don't have to work very hard to beat them.  You only need maximal effort if the bad guys are formidable.  So the McCarthyites accuse the other side of the very bad behavior they themselves are engaged in.  But wait, it gets worse.

Look at the last quotation.  We are told that Chiang Kai-shek has been falsely accused of being a 'corrupt dictator' as have Syngman Rhee and Rafael Trujillo.  The noted historian Barbara Tuchman has written a wonderful biography of General Joseph Stillwell.  Stilwell had extensive dealings with Chiang.  He concluded that Chiang and his entire administration was deeply corrupt.  The matter is no longer in dispute.  You can find plenty of other sources that come to the same conclusion and provide abundant documentation to support their conclusion.

I alluded to Trujillo's nickname. I note that it took decades of effort to turn Taiwan (Chiang), South Korea (Rhee) and the Dominican Republic (Trujillo) into democracies after these three characters were removed from power, typically by death.  So all three actually were corrupt dictators.  And now that the McCarthy era is long over that characterization is no longer in dispute.  So in case of all four individuals cited above as being unfairly characterized as 'corrupt dictators' they actually were fairly characterized as corrupt dictators.  So we see McCarthyites being apologists for corrupt dictators while loudly protesting that these same individuals are not corrupt dictators.

And no one referred to Mao as merely an "agrarian reformer".  Instead he was seen as either the head of the Chinese government or a powerful player in the Chinese government. His power was diminished by the failure and chaos that marked the Cultural Revolution.  But that happened long after the time period we are examining.   In spite of the damage the Cultural Revolution did to his reputation and power base he was still considered a powerful figure right up until his death in 1976. 

So McCarthyites are wrong on who is not a corrupt dictator.  They are wrong on how people characterized Mao's position in China.  The only place they come close is where they claim it is inaccurate to characterize Fidel Castro as a "Cuban Robin Hood".  But many Cubans see him just that way.  So the most you can do is give the McCarthyites credit for being possibly right in this one instance.  That's a pretty poor track record.

Finally, let me circle back to the first quotation.  Here Scott assassinates the character of his opponent then opines that he is "shooting off at the mouth about subjects he knew nothing about".  But, what are Scott's credentials?  He is a pulp private detective.  But let's put that aside and enter his fictional world.  There he is an L.A. private detective who does a lot of work in Hollywood.  He is not known for his intellectual prowess nor for his careful research into the issues of the day.  Instead he is a guns, fists, and babes, kind of guy.  It is possible but unlikely and out of character that Shell has studied up on the subjects of communism and McCarthyism.  But we are told by none other than Shell himself that Egghead has also studied up on the subject.

So, at worst, it is studious amateur versus studious amateur.  In other words, their credentials are about equal, and that's assuming Scott has done something out of character and studied up on the subject himself.  But it is more likely that Shell has not studied up.  Instead he has absorbed the McCarthyite ranting that populated much of the, dare I say it, sensational press of the day.  I have demonstrated that Scott is singularly uninformed on the subject he claims expertise on.  And that's exactly what you expect from the sensational press.  So it is more likely that he is the one who is soaked up a bunch of propaganda and is "shooting off at the mouth about subjects he knew nothing about".

In defense of the author, he needs a good conflict to drive the action.  To that extent, and only to that extent, his approach is justified.  But if he frames his conflict in a way that is at odds with the understanding of a large segment of his reading audience he risks losing a lot of readers.  So it behooves him to stick to sentiments he believes are broadly held.  I think that's just what the author did.

This book was in the middle of the ascent of the Shell Scott phenomenon.  The ascent was not impeded by this book so I judge that Prather's calculation was correct.  He in fact put beliefs in the mouth of his main character that were widely held at the time by a large segment of the general public.  That's why I think my selection of this source, odd though it may seem, as an accurate and reliable representation of the arguments advanced at the time by McCarthyites to support their position is justified.

Now back to the present.  The McCarthy era is widely seen in retrospect as a terrible time for the state of public discourse.  For those with less familiarity with the period I hope I have given you an understanding of why that is so.  The best I can conclude with respect to my initial thesis is "it's bad now but it has been roughly as bad in the past".  That's not good.  But it's the best I have.  And, on the bright side, things eventually did get better after the McCarthy era peaked and subsided.  So there is hope for a brighter future now.