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Editor’s Note: The following is an excerpt from the author’s book Lies My Liberal Teacher Told Me: Debunking the False Narratives Defining America’s School Curricula. It is posted here with permission.
One central left-wing myth, underlying many other beliefs, is that the United States is a “McCarthyite” society prone to “Red Scares.” The belief props up the narrative the political left uses to pooh-pooh any concerns about socialism these days, but itself is founded on a misleading understanding of history.
According to the now standard media and academic storyline, the Red Scare was simply a case of rube politicians abusively harassing innocent teachers and actors, whom they falsely accused of being Communist agents or assets, throughout much of the 1950s and 1960s—and such insane behavior could begin again at any time.
The problem is that we now know for a fact that it wasn’t just baseless paranoia.
In the mid-1990s the U.S. government declassified the Venona cables, intercepted Soviet missives detailing post–World War Two Soviet espionage activities within the United States, which means we now know that most of the more prominent persons accused of spying for the Russkis during the Cold War were in fact spying for the Russkis during the Cold War.
Not that you’re likely to see these revelations reflected in left-wing syllabi. One textbook, America, Past and Present, opens a discussion of the McCarthy and anti-Communist era by presenting the Red Scare as paranoia, saying that the “fear of Communism abroad” was also turned against home front citizens not by “Democrats” but by “politicians willing to exploit the public’s deep-seated anxiety.”
The textbook frowns on the American public’s response to worldwide communism: “The Truman Administration, portraying the men in the Kremlin as inspired revolutionaries bent on world conquest, frightened the American people [who] viewed the Soviet Union as the successor to Nazi Germany”; “the Justice Department further heightened fears of subversion [by charging] eleven officials of the Communist party with advocating the violent overthrow of the government”….The real story, the book hints, is the emotional reaction to these events, not the events themselves.
No wonder, then, that Senator McCarthy, the textbook claims, “failed to unearth a single confirmed Communist in government,” despite keeping the entire Truman presidential administration “in turmoil.”
Hollywood certainly supports the preferred academic and journalistic version of the historical narrative. Films lionize Tinseltown dwellers accused of being Communist spies or sympathizers during the Cold War. Most prominently, Trumbo—which drew several Academy Award nominations—focused on a screenwriter whose former membership in the Communist Party drew criticism from pro-American celebrities like Hedda Hopper and John Wayne and led to his becoming un-hirable under his own name during the Hollywood blacklist era of the 1950s and early 1960.
Dalton Trumbo is the unabashed hero of the piece, which presents his financial difficulties in wrenching detail: he closes it by speaking about how the Blacklist “victimized” everyone in what seems on the surface to be a conciliatory speech.
There’s just one problem with all of this tear-jerking about “civil rights violations:” Dalton Trumbo was a Communist, and so—with the probable exception of most of those on Tail Gunner Joe’s first bad-judgment “list of names”—were most of those accused of espionage or other pro-Soviet activity during this period.
Hollywood is repeating the same mistake as the activist lessons, textbooks, and articles that dismiss the Red Scare as a moral panic. But how did everyone get it so wrong?
In part, it’s because the U.S. government concealed the truth. In the 2007 book Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight Against America’s Enemies, renowned conservative historian M. Stanton Evans argues that much of the strong and immediate backlash to McCarthy’s allegations occurred because the government wasn’t about to admit how real McCarthy’s worries were about infiltration. U.S. officials from both parties “weren’t eager to have [the reality of ] Communist penetration on their watch, and their failure to do much about it,” broken down in front of the general public.
The Venona Cables revealed the truth. Very often, Evans argues, “these McCarthy cases were right there in the Soviet cables.” In other words, data recently obtained from no-longer- Soviet Russia demonstrates that specific individuals long thought to be martyrs of a kind were in fact “Communists, Soviet agents, or assets of the KGB—just as McCarthy had suggested.”
Why is this a problem? Isn’t it still persecution of Americans for their private thoughts? Something we don’t fully appreciate today is that being a Communist at that time didn’t just mean holding a mildly unfashionable opinion.
As film critic Godfrey Cheshire notes in a review of Trumbo, the film is deceitful when “it invites us to the [sic] see the Communist Party USA as just another political party rather than as the domestic instrument of a hostile and ultra-murderous foreign tyranny.”
In truth, as historian Ron Capshaw writes, the film’s “Trumbo-the- free- speech- avatar” is highly inconsistent with “Trumbo the actual person.”
[Trumbo’s] daughter Nikola has said that being a communist in that period had ‘nothing to do with Russia’ but was instead about the ‘rights of workers.’ If so, Trumbo spent a great deal of ‘wasted’ time defending Joseph Stalin. It is easy to confirm his zigs and zags in accord with the policy changes out of Moscow throughout much of his adult life…
To help the non-interventionist cause, Trumbo even defended the Third Reich. In response to Hitler’s crackdown on France, the famous civil libertarian disputed reports of Nazi brutality coming out of France, declaring that ‘To the vanquished all conquerors are inhuman.’
While horrifying, this is at some level not surprising. Russians and other Eastern Europeans have a long tradition of maskirovka—skillful camouflage designed to confuse and manipulate an opponent—and subtle infiltration of systems has long been a strategy for Communists of all backgrounds.
So why won’t American teachers and textbooks and journalists admit it? Maybe because admitting that Communist infiltration of the United States, abetted by geopolitical foes like Russia and Red China, was never a made-up bogeyman would mean realizing that such a threat could still be a real threat to American national interests.
Picture by Queensland State Archives on Flickr & Icon added by Jared Gould
For a rewarding deep dive into the history of communist infiltration in America and its implications for future political dissembling, see the many excellent (and highly readable!) works by John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr. See as well the vicious mudslinging and invective hurled at them by their vile nemesis, the queen of communist apologists, Ellen Shrecker (may she reap her just desserts for all eternity in the afterlife).
Ah, yes. The days of my youth. So what do I remember?
1. Hearing about McCarthy even though I was only a kid. So it certainly was Big News.
2. Hearing about people’s lives ruined by accusations of Communist party membership.
3. Practicing duck and cover drills in case the Russians hurled bombs at us.
4. In young adulthood:
– meeting ex communists.They tended to be communists to improve society, not stealthily overturn the government.
– noting that communists were supporters of and actively behind Berkeley’s Free Speech Movement. (Out of curiosity, rather than ideology, I participated in the Sproul Hall sit in.)
– Communists were also actively behind the Viet Nam War protests. After one peace march in San Francisco (and noting FBI on street corners taking photos), the protesters gathered at a stadium, where young men were hawking free copies of “The Sayings of Chairman Mao.”
“Get-cha Red Book!” they chanted. I still have my copy of the tiny tome but never got beyond the first page. Boring.
_ When I applied for a job at UC Berkeley, I had to raise my right hand and take a loyalty oath. (Which I thought was pretty silly.)
BTW: One takeaway for this octogenarian is that, just like communists in the 50’s, yes, Iran is surely a supporter of the pro-Palestinian protests BUT, as in the 50’s, these backers (Communists, Iran) were NOT the main reason for the protests. Squelching of speech was awful. (These days, the Left seems to do more of it. lol), and the Vietnam War sacrificed a lot of young American men to support a corrupt South Vietnamese dictatorship, so the peace marches were genuine just as the pro-Palestinian protests are. Israel’s aim to eliminate all Muslim and Christian Palestinians from the land “between the river and the sea” because Torah says that Yaweh gave it to Jews is most definitely genocide. The ghastly horror of what was happening to Jews in Europe the year I was born does not give Zionists a get-out-of-jail-free card now.
Obviously a no-nothing comment: “Israel’s aim to eliminate all Muslim and Christian Palestinians from the land “between the river and the sea” because Torah says that Yaweh gave it to Jews is most definitely genocide.” Israel’s demographics attest to pluralism that includes Muslims, Druze, Bedouin, Christian, B’ahai, and Jews. The government and culture is largely secular with a religious component. Gaza is the obverse. Please use reality glasses before opining about where the genocide problem lies.
I think WE need to concede that McCarthy was drunk. Even by the heavy-drinking standards of the 1950s, he was a hopeless alcoholic and it would kill him about 18 months later.
Intoxicated people do not use the best of judgment, I have no problem making the point that Senator Margaret Chase Smith (the “Lady from Maine”) made about his ungentlemanly tactics being unacceptable.
That said, Soviet spying was such that Stalin knew about the successful Trinity Test of the A-Bomb before Truman did. It was a real problem.
And what’s not been released — Bill Clinton classified — is the report on Soviet infiltration of American academia in the ’70s & ’80s. I suspect that would be rather damning, and while the Russians don’t have the resources they once did, the Chinese and Iranians *do* — and Bibi N bluntly stated today that the Iranians are behind Team Hamas.
History is repeating itself — we need to discredit a legitimate Red Scare in order to discredit equally valid scares today. As I write this, “protesters” are clashing with police in the streets of DC, and the sun there will set in three hours — at 8:30. Things well could get “interesting” and while a lot of this is self-financed (students with trust funds, professors with six-figure salaries), it’s starting to become clear that someone is financing the organizers. Bibi N bluntly stated that Israeli intelligence knows that it’s the Iranians, and I don’t think he would say that if he couldn’t prove it.
Over 200 people were arrested in the Capitol Hill Complex last night — will they be prosecuted (persecuted) the way that the January 6th trespassers were? Why not?
And that alone is why we can’t be told that Joe McCarthy was actually a well-intended drunk exercising poor judgement and not a mid-century incarnation of the antiChrist.