Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History (19 page)

Three years on, in 1944, Flynn once again used his connection with Nye and Wheeler to attack the men behind some of the books and articles that he believed had smeared America First and the antiwar movement. The truth about them was, Flynn alleged in an article published in the
Washington Times Herald
, that they were either Communists or had Communist links. His claims led to a congressional investigation of the most offensive book,
Under Cover
. The investigation’s conclusion was that there was a sinister Communist influence on American public life and that the party was deliberately making an “effort to create disunity among Americans,” a charge which Flynn had previously dismissed in the 1930s as a scare story got up by America’s wealthy elite.

From this point onward, communism and its apparent allies, rather than interventionism, were to become Flynn’s principal targets. As the war in Europe ended, he penned an unpublished piece, “Why the Americans Did Not Take Berlin,” charging Roosevelt with having allowed Stalin to occupy half of Germany and half of Europe in accordance with a secret promise made to the Soviet dictator at the Yalta conference in February 1945. Apparently, FDR, in addition to being a power-mad warmonger, was now soft on communism. No, worse: he was sympathetic to it. Quite how this accusation could be squared with Roosevelt’s cozy relationship with big business and war profiteers was a problem for later.

As the United States emerged from the Second World War, it was obvious that none of the America Firsters’ nightmares were coming true; their jeremiads were proved wrong in almost every conceivable way. Though thousands of Butler’s tousle-headed boys had indeed died, the country was much wealthier and far more powerful than ever before. It was therefore fruitless, in political terms, to go back over the approach to war and try to argue that it should never have happened. Far more potent was the accusation that the benefits of America’s hard-won triumph were being squandered. How had it come about, for instance, that the United States had gone to war against one totalitarian foe and made such sacrifices, only to find itself confronting another totalitarian power?

Un-American Activities

Long before the war, the American right had charged that the New Deal was communism in another guise, and that its leading proponents were sympathetic to Marxism. When, for example, the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) was set up in May 1938, supposedly with the task of sniffing out pro-Nazi sedition, it soon became apparent that Communist subversion was the preferred target.

This prewar hunt for Red influence led to one of the most celebrated exchanges in modern American history. In December 1938, the head of the Federal Theater Project, Mrs. Hallie Flanagan, was called before the committee to answer the accusation that the project was full of Communists. Flanagan was questioned by Representative Joe Starnes from Alabama about an article on workers’ theater that she’d written in an obscure periodical seven years earlier. Starnes read out a long passage that concluded with a reference to such theater having “a certain Marlowesque madness.” Starnes then addressed Mrs. Flanagan directly.

MR. STARNES:
You are quoting from this Marlowe. Is he a Communist?

MRS. FLANAGAN:
I am very sorry. I was quoting from Christopher Marlowe.

MR. STARNES:
Tell us who Marlowe is, so we can get the proper reference, because that is all that we want to do.

MRS.FLANAGAN:
Put in the record that he was the greatest dramatist in the period immediately preceding Shakespeare.

MR. STARNES:
Put that in the record because the charge has been made that this article of yours is entirely Communistic, and we want to help you.

MRS. FLANAGAN:
Thank you. That statement will go in the record.

MR.STARNES :
Of course, we had what some people call “Communists” back in the days of the Greek theater.

MRS. FLANAGAN:
Quite true.

MR. STARNES:
And I believe Mr. Euripides was guilty of teaching class consciousness also, wasn’t he?

MRS. FLANAGAN:
I believe that was alleged against all of the Greek dramatists.

MR. STARNES:
So we cannot say when it began.
³⁷

With such heroic wielders of the broad brush as Starnes, a former schoolteacher, it is hardly any wonder that, in short order, the HUAC had listed some 640 organizations, 438 newspapers, and 280 unions and labor groups as possible Communist fronts, including the American Civil Liberties Union and the Boy Scouts.
³⁸
The anti-Communist impulse waned during the war as the United States allied itself with Soviet Russia, which it supplied with arms and which bore the brunt of the fighting and dying, but as the war ended, that alliance was fracturing. Even before V-E Day, it was clear from intelligence intercepts that the Russians were attempting to run a serious espionage network in the United States. Toward the end of 1945, the director of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover, was once again describing Communists as “panderers of diabolic distrust.” As the Iron Curtain, so famously named by Winston Churchill, descended, the balance of political argument tilted back from the liberals, the internationalists, and the pro- New Dealers, toward populism and the right. In 1946, the Republicans won substantial victories in Congress, with a disproportionate number of Democratic casualties occurring among the liberals in the north and west of the country. President Truman trimmed to the new wind by launching his own program to combat internal Communist subversion through administering loyalty tests to public servants.

The following year, 1947, saw the resuscitation of HUAC and the famous procession of movie directors, producers, and actors being questioned on whether they or their friends were or had ever been members of the Communist Party. The proposition was familiar to those who had watched the abortive hearings about alleged Hollywood propagandizing before the war: Communists or fellow travelers had consciously used their power over the industry to influence the (sometimes obscure) political messages contained in their movies. And indeed we now know, not least from the autobiography of screenwriter Walter Bernstein, that there was some limited truth in the notion that left-wing writers and directors would sometimes attempt to smuggle ideologically compatible material into their work. However, the institution of an effective blacklist in the entertainment industry was a reaction out of all proportion to the actual threat. And so, what Flynn had attempted unsuccessfully to do in 1941, was now accomplished with exemplary ruthlessness just six years later.

Though Truman narrowly won the presidential election of 1948, that was just about the only break that the center and center-left of American politics was going to get. In the summer of 1949, the Russians tested their own atomic bomb; in September, the nationalist Chinese government of Chiang Kai-shek was finally defeated by the Chinese Communists and fled to the island of Formosa; and in June 1950, the North Koreans moved south of their disputed border, and Americans found themselves once more involved in a foreign war. Who, the Republicans asked, was responsible for this series of disasters?

The notion that much of this was due to some kind of inside job stemmed, as we have seen, from the belief that the Roosevelt administration had contained many crypto-Bolsheviks, one of whose objectives had been to make the world safe for communism. The case that seemed to prove this imputation involved a man named Alger Hiss, who as a young lawyer had worked with John Flynn on the Nye Munitions Investigating Committee in the mid- 1930s. From there Hiss had gone to the State Department, serving as special assistant to the director of the Office of Far Eastern Affairs, then as special assistant to the director of the Office of Special Political Affairs. At the end of the war, Hiss was intimately involved in the American effort to set up the United Nations. He was smooth, articulate, Ivy League, and an avid New Dealer, with powerful friends at the very top of the administration. He was everything, in short, that Flynn, American populists, Southern Democrats, and Republicans loathed. He had also, it turned out, been a Communist in the 1930s, and had handed American secrets over to the Russians via a clandestine agent named Whittaker Chambers.
^f
Hiss’s arraignment before the HUAC took place in a firestorm of publicity, but, as with Oscar Wilde, it was his attempt to clear his name through a libel action that led to Hiss’s eventual conviction and imprisonment for perjury.

Then, in the summer of 1950, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, both American Communists, were arrested and charged with passing atomic secrets to the Russians. To many Americans, the wilder allegations of the anti-Communists now seemed to have substance. From California to the New York Island, the cry went up,
Nous sommes trahis!

In this atmosphere, increasingly little distinction was made between espionage and subversion on the one hand, and legitimate political activity and agitation on the other. Historian of the McCarthy phenomenon David M. Oshinsky relates how “Indiana forced professional wrestlers to sign a loyalty oath. Ohio declared Communists ineligible for unemployment benefits. Pennsylvania barred them from all state programs with one exception: blind Communists would be cared for . . . Tennessee ordered the death penalty for those seeking to overthrow the State government.” The government of the State of Tennessee, that is.
³⁹
Another illustration of the folk appeal of this new Red Scare
^g
was an incident in the small town of Mosinee, Wisconsin, where in 1950 veterans from the American Legion disguised as Russian soldiers took over the town, arrested the mayor, imprisoned the clergy, nationalized businesses, and allowed only potato soup to be served in the cafés, before allowing everyone to be liberated from communism at dusk .
⁴⁰

One of those elected in the 1946 midterm congressional elections was the young Californian Republican Richard Nixon. It was Nixon who, as a member of the HUAC, had first pursued the Chambers-Hiss case and Nixon for whom the outcome of the Hiss perjury trial was a personal triumph. The Soviets, argued Nixon, might be the ultimate enemy, but Soviet success was a homegrown disaster. It had happened “because President Truman treated Communist infiltration like any ordinary political scandal. He is responsible for this failure to act against the Communist conspiracy, and has rendered the greatest possible disservice to the people of this nation.”
⁴¹
The enemy without was not nearly as potent, he was implying, as the enemy within.

Enter McCarthy

In 1950, Senator Joe McCarthy of Wisconsin was no more or less anti-Communist than most of his fellow Republicans. He had a streak of that midwestern populism, but there was nothing to suggest that he was a monocausal crusader. A speech made by McCarthy in 1949 was, by the standard of the time, quotidian. “One of the major aims of the Communist Party,” McCarthy told his audience, “is to locate members in important positions in newspapers—especially in college towns, so that young people will be getting daily doses of the Communist party-line propaganda under the mistaken impression that they are absorbing ‘liberal’ and ‘progressive’ ideas.”
⁴²
And, of course, subtracting the suggested underhandedness of this desire to spread the word, this was substantially true and mostly obvious. It’s what all party activists do.

But in January 1950, McCarthy (according to most accounts) enjoyed a lunch with two friendly academics and a lawyer, and told them he was looking for an issue around which to base his campaign for reelection. One mentioned communism in government, to which McCarthy is said to have replied, “The government is full of Communists. The thing to do is to hammer them.”
⁴³
A few weeks later, McCarthy addressed a meeting of the Republican Women’s Club at the McClure Hotel in Wheeling and was reported as telling his audience, “While I cannot take the time to name all the men in the State Department who have been named as members of a spy ring, I have here in my hand a list of 205 . . . that were known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping the policy of the State Department.”
⁴⁴

This was a sensational charge, its impact due to its specificity and the fact that it was being leveled by a senator. The list itself was never published, but David Oshinsky has calculated that the figure was reached by taking the number of those employees whose loyalty screening back in 1946 had thrown up some damaging information, and then subtracting the number (seventy-nine) who had subsequently been discharged. McCarthy, comments Oshinsky, couldn’t have known “whether those individuals were Communist, fascists, alcoholics, sex deviants or common liars. As a gambling man he was simply raising on a poor hand, searching for an ace or two before his bluff was called.”
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