The Legacy of McCarthyism
by Ellen Schrecker
from the book
The Age of McCarthyism
Bedford Books of St. Marvin's Press, 1994
In the late 1950s a group of graduate students at the University
of Chicago wanted to have a coffee vending machine installed outside
the Physics Department for the convenience of people who worked
there late at night. They started to circulate a petition to the
Buildings and Grounds Department, but their colleagues refused
to sign. They did not want to be associated with the allegedly
radical students whose names were already on the document.
This incident and it is not unique exemplifies the kind of
timidity that came to be seen, even at the time, as the most damaging
consequence of the anti-Communist furor. Since political activities
could get you in trouble, prudent folk avoided them. Instead,
to the despair of intellectuals, middle- class Americans became
social conformists. A silent generation of students populated
the nation's campuses, while their professors shrank from teaching
anything that might be construed as controversial. "The Black
Silence of Fear" that Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas
deplores in Document 22 seemingly blanketed the nation, and meaningful
political dissent had all but withered away.
Was McCarthyism to blame? Obviously the congressional hearings,
loyalty programs, and blacklists affected the lives of the men
and women caught up in them. But beyond that, it is hard to tell.
The statistics are imprecise. Ten thousand people may have lost
their jobs. Is that few or many? It may well be useful to reflect
on an earlier debate among historians about the application of
sanctionsin this case the apparently low number of whippings administered
under slaveryto realize that it may not be necessary to whip many
slaves to keep the rest of the plantation in line.
Quantification aside, it may be helpful to look at the specific
sectors of American society that McCarthyism touched. Such an
appraisal, tentative though it must be, may offer some insight
into the extent of the damage and into the ways in which the anti-Communist
crusade influenced American society, politics, and culture. We
should keep in mind, however, that McCarthyism's main impact may
well have been in what did not happen rather than in what didthe
social reforms that were never adopted, the diplomatic initiatives
that were not pursued, the workers who were not organized into
unions, the books that were not written, and the movies that were
never filmed.
The most obvious casualty was the American left. The institutional
toll is clear. The Communist party, already damaged by internal
problems, dwindled into insignificance and all the organizations
associated with it disappeared. The destruction of the front groups
and the left-led unions may well have had a more deleterious impact
on American politics than the decline of the party itself. With
their demise, the nation lost the institutional network that had
created a public space where serious alternatives to the status
quo could be presented. Moreover, with the disappearance of a
vigorous movement on their left, moderate reform groups were more
exposed to right-wing attacks and thus rendered less effective.
In the realm of social policy, for example, McCarthyism may
have aborted much-needed reforms. As the nation's politics swung
to the right after World War II, the federal government abandoned
the unfinished agenda of the New Deal. Measures like national
health insurance, a social reform embraced by the rest of the
industrialized world, simply fell by the wayside. The left liberal
political coalition that might have supported health reforms and
similar projects was torn apart by the anti-Communist crusade.
Moderates feared being identified with anything that seemed too
radical, and people to the left of them were either unheard or
under attack. McCarthyism further contributed to the attenuation
of the reform impulse by helping to divert the attention of the
labor movement, the strongest institution within the old New Deal
coalition, from external organizing to internal politicking.
The impact of the McCarthy era was equally apparent in international
affairs. Opposition to the cold war had been so thoroughly identified
with communism that it was no longer possible to challenge the
basic assumptions of American foreign policy without incurring
suspicions of disloyalty. As a result, from the defeat of third-party
presidential candidate Henry Wallace in the fall of 1948 until
the early 1960s, effective public criticism of America's role
in the world was essentially nonexistent. Within the government,
the insecurities that McCarthyism inflicted on the State Department
lingered for years, especially with regard to East Asia. Thus,
for example, the campaign against the "loss" of China
left such long-lasting scars that American policymakers feared
to acknowledge the official existence of the People's Republic
of China until Richard Nixon, who was uniquely impervious to charges
of being soft on communism, did so as president in 1971. And it
was in part to avoid a replay of the loss-of-China scenario that
Nixon's Democratic predecessors, Kennedy and Johnson, dragged
the United States so deeply into the quagmire of Vietnam.
The nation's cultural and intellectual life suffered as well.
While there were other reasons that TV offered a bland menu of
quiz shows and westerns during the late 1950s, McCarthy-era anxieties
clearly played a role. Similarly, the blacklist contributed to
the reluctance of the film industry to grapple with controversial
social or political issues. In the intellectual world, cold war
liberals also avoided controversy. They celebrated the "end
of ideology," claiming that the United States' uniquely pragmatic
approach to politics made the problems that had once concerned
left- wing ideologists irrelevant. Consensus historians pushed
that formulation into the past and described a nation that had
supposedly never experienced serious internal conflict. It took
the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War to end this complacency
and bring reality back in.
Ironically, just as these social commentators were lauding
the resilience of American democracy, the anti-Communist crusade
was undermining it. The political repression of the McCarthy era
fostered the growth of the national security state and facilitated
its expansion into the rest of civil society. On the pretext of
protecting the nation from Communist infiltration, federal agents
attacked individual rights and extended state power into movie
studios, universities, labor unions, and many other ostensibly
independent institutions. The near universal deference to the
federal government's formulation of the Communist threat abetted
the process and muted opposition to what was going on.
Moreover, even after the anti-Communist furor receded, the
antidemocratic practices associated with it continued. We can
trace the legacy of McCarthyism in the FBI's secret COINTELPRO
program of harassing political dissenters in the 1960s and 1970s,
the Watergate-related felonies of the Nixon White House in the
1970s, and the Iran-Contra scandals in the 1980s. The pervasiveness
of such wrongdoing reveals how seriously the nation's defenses
against official illegalities had eroded in the face of claims
that national security took precedence over ordinary law. McCarthyism
alone did not cause these outrages; but the assault on democracy
that began during the 1940s and 1950s with the collaboration of
private institutions and public agencies in suppressing the alleged
threat of domestic communism was an important early contribution.
McCarthyism
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