Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974

by James T. Patterson

The homophobia that pervaded American culture had many sources, but some of it rested on the view that homosexuals were not only perverted but also subject to blackmail.

Analysts who focus on elites, however, probably have the better case, for the majority of Americans in the late 1940s and early 1950s only slowly grew worried about subversion.

Civil liberties also came under siege in the world of education. Those who knew much about the history of education in the United States were not surprised by this development, for taxpayers long had demanded that schools and colleges promote national values.

Moving with excruciating slowness, the AAUP did not censure universities that violated civil liberties until 1956.53

It is an exaggeration to conclude that the Red Scare terrorized American academe in general.56 Most universities—and many individual faculty members—defended academic freedoms.57

By all odds the most durable villain of the drama was Hoover, who had begun his hunt for subversives when Woodrow Wilson's Red-hunting Attorney General, A. Mitchell Palmer, placed him in charge of the Justice Department's newly created General Intelligence Division in 1919. Hoover was then 24.62

By 1924 he was head of the FBI, a post he retained for forty-eight years until his death in office in 1972.

No rumor, it seemed, was too trivial for Hoover to follow up, especially if it involved sexual activities.

A co-villain in the Red Scare drama was HUAC, which had attracted some of the most reactionary and bigoted men in public life.67

In 1947 HUAC concentrated on probing into left-wing activity in Hollywood.

Walt Disney contended that the Screen Cartoonists Guild was Communist-dominated and had earlier tried to take over his studio and make Mickey Mouse toe the party line.

His cooperation with HUAC and Hoover was a milestone on his road from New Deal liberalism to the Republican Right.

If Hoover and HUAC were the villains of the anti-Communist drama, Truman and his advisers clumsily—and sometimes recklessly—acted as spear-carriers.

In practice Truman's loyalty program was careless of civil liberties. The very word "loyalty" was problematic, encouraging zealots to bring charges on vague and imprecise grounds.

He hoped that "in calmer times, when present pressures, passions, and fears subside, this or some later court will restore the First Amendment liberties to the high preferred place where they belong in a free society."78

Thereafter it was estimated that party membership plummeted to 5,000, of whom so many were FBI agents that Hoover considered taking over the party by massing his men at its next convention.80

But the prosecutions were otherwise unfortunate, for two reasons. First, they engaged the government in further attacks on civil liberties. Second, they drove the remaining leaders underground, where it proved harder to keep track of their activities.

In one of the most theatrical moments of the controversy Chambers brought reporters to a field on his Maryland farm and showed them microfilmed documents that he had hidden in a hollowed-out pumpkin.

The Hiss trials had still wider symbolic value for many conservatives and anti-Communists in the United States.84

"For eighteen years," HUAC Republican Karl Mundt of South Dakota exploded, the United States "had been run by New Dealers, Fair Dealers, Misdealers and Hiss dealers who have shuttled back and forth between Freedom and Red Fascism like a pendulum on a Kukoo clock."85

Advertising himself as "Tail Gunner Joe," he falsely maintained that he had flown up to thirty combat missions when in fact he had gone on none.

McCarthy was in fact a pathological liar throughout his public life.

If there was a core of consistency to McCarthy, it was an emotional one of class and regional resentments.

But McCarthy was not an ideologue. He was above all a demagogue seeking attention, re-election, and—maybe in the future—the presidency.

Testimony before the Tydings Committee exposed many of McCarthy's lies and exaggerations, which the majority report later concluded were a "fraud and a hoax perpetrated on the Senate of the United States and the American people."99

Others who lament McCarthy's climb to fame have blamed the press. Reporters, they say, should more insistently have demanded that he produce evidence. Some newspeople were indeed appalled by his behavior.

Rigorous investigative journalism of the sort that arose in the 1960s and 1970s would probably have weakened McCarthy. But it is ahistorical to expect such journalism to have existed in the 1950s.

Others analysts of McCarthyism in retrospect have concluded pessimistically that it demonstrated the susceptibility of the American people to demagogic appeals.

McCarthy's rampage also appealed to people who nursed hostility toward elites, especially in government.

McCarthy, like Alabama's George Wallace in the 1960s, often appealed to all these groups by highlighting the influence of those who were wealthier and more influential.

Rather, three things may be said about McCarthyism. First, it derived much of its staying power from the frightened and calculating behavior of political elites and of allied interest groups, not from the people at large. Second, many partisan Republicans took the lead in backing their reckless colleague. Third, McCarthyism rode on anti-Communist fears—again, strongest among elites—that were already cresting in early 1950.105

Neither as a representative nor (after 1952) as a senator did Kennedy speak out against McCarthy.

Many Republican senators eagerly supported their colleague.

But McCarthy also got the backing of Robert Taft, "Mr. Republican," the most influential GOP politician on Capitol Hill.

Taft, although influential among his Republican colleagues, could not silence all senatorial opposition to McCarthy. In June 1950, seven liberal Republican senators led by Margaret Chase Smith of Maine issued a "Declaration of Conscience" that complained about the Senate being used as a "publicity platform for irresponsible sensationalism."

A political system and a public opinion, it seemed to me, that could be so easily disoriented by this sort of challenge in one epoch would be no less vulnerable to similar ones in another.

Kennan, moreover, was correct in lamenting two broader results of the postwar Red Scare. First, it constricted public life and speech.

During the Red Scare, however, liberal politicians and intellectuals became vulnerable to the charge of being "soft" on Communism—or worse.

Second, McCarthyism helped to tie a straitjacket of sorts on America's foreign and defense policies.

The Red Scare, finally, dampened a little the otherwise upbeat, can-do mood of American life at the time. "A little" is the way to put it, for postwar prosperity increased even more rapidly from 1950 through 1954 than it had between 1945 and 1948.

Far from an insigificant little police action, it was a brutal, bloody conflict that devastated Korea and inflicted nearly 4 million casualties (dead, wounded, and missing), more than half of whom were civilians.

Kim II Sung, a charismatic young Communist, took over control in the North; Syngman Rhee, an American-educated anti-Communist, gathered the reins of power in the South.

Stalin and Kim may have paid special attention to Dean Acheson's "defense perimeter" speech in January 1950.

Whatever the sources of North Korea's decision, it was clear that Kim and Stalin had badly misjudged the situation.

Kim's misjudgment, based at least in part on the irresolute signals of the Truman administration, was one of the most portentous in the history of the Cold War.

His decision produced the development that virtually all American political and military leaders, MacArthur included, had dreaded until that time: United States soldiers were to fight on the land masses of Asia.

But Truman had gone farther than that, asserting that his constitutional role as commander-in-chief justified executive action alone. Many later Presidents, notably Lyndon Johnson, followed in Truman's footsteps by committing the United States to fighting without securing congressional sanction.

Truman also erred in calling the war a "police action." When he held a press conference on June 29, he declared, "We are not at war."

Opinions such as these revealed a profound truth about Americans in the post-World War II era: they were not only patriotic but also eager—in the short run—to back decisive presidential actions in the field of foreign affairs.

The troops who were rushed from Japan to Korea—most of them to the port of Pusan on the southeast corner of the peninsula—were poorly equipped and out of shape.