Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History (20 page)

On February 20, McCarthy took his charges to the floor of the Senate. In eight hours of innuendo, semi-connected suggestions, exaggerations, guilt by association, implied accusations, and invective, McCarthy elaborated on his essential charge that the American government and the administration of President Truman were riddled with Communists and Communist sympathizers conspiring against American interests. So wild were McCarthy’s claims that the Democrats decided to undermine the man from Wisconsin by establishing an investigation to look at his accusations. Properly and publicly tested, they believed, these assertions would be revealed as false, thus casting doubt on other such allegations.

The Republicans agreed that such a body should be established, and McCarthy set up an investigation team with the objective of finding absolutely anything that would give substance to his contentions. Onside were a couple of ex-Communists, a handful of muckraking journalists such as Westbrook Pegler, and a number of right-wing ideologues. The HUAC helped out with access to their files, and the FBI may well also have given assistance. The posse was given the job of hunting down any signs that government employees had sympathies with the Reds, connections with the Reds, or relationships with anyone who did. It didn’t matter how tenuous such links might be.

One of the earliest of McCarthy’s targets was an academic and sinologist, Owen Lattimore, director of the School of International Relations at Johns Hopkins University. Lattimore had never actually been an employee of the government but had acted as an adviser, and in that capacity had long argued against U.S. support for the nationalist Chinese. During the war, he had insisted, correctly, that the Communists were more effective in the battle against the Japanese. But in the atmosphere of 1950 and the argument over who had “lost” China, Lattimore’s past toleration of Mao looked like a fondness for communism. It didn’t help that in 1938 Lattimore had been one of the credulous Westerners duped by the Moscow trials.

There were some problems for McCarthy, however. The most obvious was that Lattimore had himself been attacked in the Communist Party newspaper, the
Daily Worker
. Ah well, said McCarthy’s team, wasn’t it obvious that some party members and sympathizers would be protected from exposure by being criticized by party publications, or by being given special dispensation to deviate from the party line? “A new technique had been unveiled,” comments David Oshinsky, “guilt by disassociation.”
^h
“Owen Lattimore had not been proved a Communist,”
Time
commented on the case, “but he had not proved that he was not one.” And how could he? Any more than he could prove that the
Daily Worker
wasn’t criticizing him as part of a secret Communist strategy?

The comment illustrates how the ground had shifted. At the outset of the Red Scare, Communists might have been people with whom one absolutely disagreed but whose actions were broadly legal and acceptable. Then Communists per se came to be seen as disloyal and their activities semicriminal. Then people who might have been Communists were added to that category, or people whose arguments were sometimes the same as the Communists. Assumption was piled on assumption, until you could have someone as nonrevolutionary as Lattimore, whose calvary could be justified because “he had not proved he was not” a Communist. One feature of widely believed conspiracy theories may be that even those who do not accept them often cease to examine them properly; something that would otherwise be quickly seen as absurd is instead treated as if it were one genuine possibility among several.

John T. Flynn, now almost at the end of his ideological journey, was one of Joe McCarthy’s most enthusiastic supporters. For him, the enemy was that group of fellow-traveling social democrats who had sold the New Deal, procured war, and were now revealed as having been in cahoots with the Reds. Owen Lattimore provided Flynn with a satisfying villain. In 1953, Flynn even wrote a book,
The Lattimore Story
, to expose “a conspiracy involving over four dozen writers, journalists, educators and high-ranking government officials—almost all Americans—to force the American State Department to betray China and Korea into the hands of the Communists.” Lattimore himself was never successfully prosecuted, but departed America to teach at Leeds University in a United Kingdom that seemed unworried by Flynn’s and McCarthy’s accusations.

Before Lattimore left, McCarthy delivered an address to the Senate that stands as the perfect encapsulation of the Red Scare proposition and its psychology:

How can we account for our present situation unless we believe that men high in this government are concerting to deliver us to disaster? This must be the product of a great conspiracy, a conspiracy on a scale so immense as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man. A conspiracy of infamy so black that, when it is finally exposed, its principals shall be forever deserving of the maledictions of all honest men.
⁴⁶

McCarthy’s rhetorical question could have been answered by an analysis of twentieth-century history and any number of plausible hypotheses. But rather than attempt such a discussion, McCarthy begins his answer, “This must be . . .” The situation couldn’t be the culmination of the effects of huge political, economic, and other forces, of mistakes and accidents; it “must be” the result of a deliberate and infernal calculation on the part of people whose avowed position—that they were trying to achieve the opposite result—was all a blindsiding lie.

The occasional Alger Hiss would not suffice. In his speech, McCarthy insinuated the involvement in the conspiracy of men like the secretary of defense, author of the Marshall Plan and wartime chief of staff General George C. Marshall, who had made a “baffling pattern of decisions” that always ended up serving the “world policy of the Kremlin.” The aim of the conspirators, said the senator, was to make certain that America would “finally fall victim to Soviet intrigue from within and Russian military might from without.”

This formulation recommended itself to Flynn, who was to endorse McCarthy’s opposition “to admitting Americans who are enemies of our American system of government—Communists or Socialists—into the government of the United States.” Unfortunately for Flynn, the Red Scare burned itself out over the next few years, with McCarthy himself being largely marginalized by the end of 1954. By then the Republicans were in the White House and less likely to give tacit support to McCarthy’s rampage through American institutions. Flynn himself moved on to other targets. In a 1955 publication, Flynn took on the youthful United Nations, which in his view had nothing to do with preserving world peace. In a voice unmellowed by age, he thundered, “We must rid this nation of the United Nations, which provides the Communist conspiracy with a headquarters here on our own shores, and which actually makes it impossible for the United States to form its own decisions about its conduct and policies in Europe and Asia.”
⁴⁷
In his assault on the United Nations, Flynn anticipated the main thrust of American right-wing conspiracy thinking for the next forty years, certainly up to Oklahoma City and Timothy McVeigh. “They”—the forces of world domination and government—were seeking to hobble the independent United States and force it into submission, either to the advantage of communism or for the benefit of Zionism.

Why Flynnism?

The appeal of McCarthy, according to David Oshinsky, was that he provided “a simple explanation for America’s ‘decline’ in the world. He spoke of a massive internal conspiracy directed by Communists and abetted by government officials who came to include the Republican President of the United States. He provided names, documents and statistics—in short the
appearance
of diligent research.”
⁴⁸
But there is a puzzle here, the existence of which is highlighted by Oshinsky’s use of quotes around “decline.” By any objective standard, America had risen, not declined. America was richer, victorious in war, and—in contrast to the pulverized continents of Europe and Asia—undamaged. The specter of communism might be repulsive, but it was a long way away and less obviously threatening than Nazi Germany and the Axis powers had been at their height. Yet for several years in postwar America, conspiracism was almost a majority pastime. And the targets of suspicion were far more exalted than the usual minorities or secret organizations of past demonologies. As the historian Richard Hofstadter put it:

For the vaguely delineated villains of the anti-Masons, for the obscure and disguised Jesuit agents, the little-known papal delegates of the anti-Catholics, for the shadowy international bankers of the monetary conspiracies, we may now substitute eminent public figures like Presidents Roosevelt, Truman and Eisenhower, Secretaries of State like Marshall, Acheson and Dulles, justices of the Supreme Court like Frankfurter and Warren, and the whole battery of lesser but still famous and vivid conspirators headed by Alger Hiss.
⁴⁹

In one sense, however, those under suspicion conformed to the enemy of American populist folklore. They were East Coasters or Hollywooders; they were educated; they were city dwellers; they liked art and fancy music; they were separate from—and unsympathetic to—the daily travails of the American little man. And the American little man might be wealthier than before, but he was also facing greater change than ever before. One feature of Hollywood movies of the period is ambivalence about the transformation of small-town life. In Frank Capra’s 1946 iconic
It’s a Wonderful Life,
the hero battles against a monopolistic banker and his attempts to destroy small enterprise and thus the true values of the community. James Stewart is the champion of organic society, and as the sociologist Raymond Williams wrote, “the only sure fact about the organic society is that it has always gone.”
⁵⁰
To which the critic Lawrence Levine added another sure fact: “that almost invariably the organic society has barely just gone, leaving many nostalgic survivors in its wake.”
⁵¹

During the 1940s, small-town Americans had had direct experience of the strong state. They or their families had served in the armed forces, had been mobilized by the government and sent abroad. Young men, in particular, had met—often for the first time—other Americans from all the states of the Union. Mental and physical borders had been breached. Nothing would be the same. It is hardly too fanciful to suggest that the Communist menace was in some ways an externalization of internal fears about alterations to the passing world.

The originators and spreaders of the conspiracy theories of the 1950s were in the main the defeated of the 1930s and 1940s. Hofstadter’s paranoid American of the postwar period was someone who “believes himself to be living in a world in which he is spied upon, plotted against, betrayed and very likely destined for total ruin. He feels that his liberties have been arbitrarily and outrageously invaded. He is opposed to almost everything that has happened in American politics in the past twenty years (1943-1963). He hates the very thought of Franklin D. Roosevelt.”
⁵²
The description perfectly fits men like John T. Flynn, who had battled against the “conspiracy” to take America into war, found themselves worsted by Roosevelt and history, and wondered how on earth it had happened. Their answer was to ascribe to Roosevelt the powers of a dark messiah. McCarthyism was in one sense a fightback by these politically defeated men, and their posthumous revenge on the dead president.

Passing the Baton: The Legacy of Harry Elmer Barnes

Within a decade of McCarthy’s ascendancy, the strength of right-wing conspiracism had ebbed, partially because, with Eisenhower’s victory in 1952, the more Establishment part of the insurgency had been co-opted (Richard M. Nixon, after all, was vice president) and partially because the Cold War had eased. Organizations such as the John Birch Society attempted to keep alive the flame of collective paranoia, but were limited to addressing a declining fringe of aging eccentrics. The new conspiracism was to be found elsewhere.

Toward the end of his life, Harry Elmer Barnes surveyed the terrain around him and understood that the right-wing isolationist impulse had faded. But he was not without optimism. In 1967, he wrote:

About the only rays of light and hope on the horizon for the moment are by-products of the Vietnam War. For the first time in all American history, except for the Mexican War land-grab, the liberals are not the shock troops of the warmongers, and many are preponderantly “doves,” notably the younger liberals or the “new left.” This has encouraged many of them who, as a group, have been less subject to the World War II brainwashing, to look back over their shoulder at liberal bellicosity in the past and examine its validity more rationally.
⁵³

It was the young, liberal doves, wrote Barnes, who were now questioning the “impeccable soundness of interventionist propaganda and the historical blackout relative to the two world wars of this century.” This skeptical and inquiring attitude, he thought, might grow. In fact, though he may not have realized it, the event that prompted a new liberal revisionism had already taken place. On November 22, 1963, a president had been shot.

4. DEAD DEITIES

I shouted out,
“Who killed the Kennedys? ”
When after all,
It was you and me.