WHERE SEEING IS NOT BELIEVING:

Devils in America: a review of Reds: McCarthyism in Twentieth-Century America by Ted Morgan (Harvey Klehr, 2/12/04, New Republic)

[G]ermane to Morgan's argument is his demonstration that the American government's repression of radicalism was often a response to a real threat of subversion. The first "Red Scare" was prompted by left-wing violence. A group of Italian anarchists, led by Luigi Galleani, launched a terrorist campaign in 1914. In 1919 more than thirty bombs targeted opponents of radicalism including Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, John Rockefeller, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, and a variety of United States Senators. The newly organized communist parties created underground wings and issued blood-curdling threats about overthrowing the government. Outraged citizens demanded the deportation of radicals "in ships of stone with sails of lead, with the wrath of God for a breeze and with hell for their first port." State and congressional committees launched investigations, and Palmer and a young Justice Department employee named J. Edgar Hoover inaugurated a round-up of radicals in 1919-1920 that swept up no less than ten thousand people, with 3,500 held as deportable aliens. Morgan notes that, as in the McCarthy era, there was a genuine threat -- thirty-five people had been killed and two hundred people had been injured by terrorist bombs, and the nascent communist movement had thirty-four thousand nominal members committed to overthrowing the government; but Palmer's blunderbuss response certainly violated civil liberties, failed to target many of the most important perpetrators, and discredited his cause.

While the chastened FBI under Hoover curtailed its surveillance of radicals in the 1920s, the Communist International, headquartered in Moscow, embarked on a long-term plan to subvert America, setting up clandestine networks that transmitted money to finance the CPUSA, and using such agencies as Amtorg and the Russian Red Cross to facilitate espionage and the illegal transfer of American technology. Following American recognition of the Soviet Union in 1933, the Soviets quickly violated several of the conditions to which they had agreed and began extensive use of the CPUSA as an instrument of espionage. In the late 1930s the Ware Group, for which Whittaker Chambers served as a courier, transmitted material from numerous government departments to Moscow with scarcely a concern for the FBI. Liberals such as Lawrence Duggan, a high-ranking State Department employee, and Deputy Secretary of the Treasury Harry Dexter White, romantic pro-communists such as Noel Field, covert Soviet admirers such as Alger Hiss, and crooks such as Congressman Samuel Dickstein (the prime mover behind the formation of a special committee to investigate "un-American activities") all blithely aided Soviet intelligence.

At the end of the 1930s, during which American communists became cheerleaders for the New Deal, the Popular Front eased these spies' consciences by making it appear that American and Soviet interests were congruent. Similarly, the hundreds of Americans who spied for the Soviet Union during World War II could rationalize their behavior by pretending that they were only helping a deserving ally. While the Dies Committee, like many congressional investigations of communism (including McCarthy's) did uncover some significant data, its penchant for wackiness and extremism, giving publicity to cranks and alarmists, led the Roosevelt administration to ignore the significance of some of its findings: that lots of government employees, including several later unmasked as spies, were active in Communist-controlled organizations.

The Roosevelt administration had first authorized domestic surveillance of radicals in 1936, but such efforts were largely ineffective and sporadic until after World War II. Morgan calls Soviet espionage during the war "without historical precedent. Never did one country steal so many political, diplomatic, scientific and military secrets from another." Although the most spectacular feat of Soviet intelligence was to pilfer the scientific secrets of the atomic bomb, hundreds of Americans working for Soviet intelligence also turned over important details on virtually every American secret, ranging from proximity fuses and radar to diplomatic cables and war production figures. A killer such as Roland Abbiat, who had murdered the Soviet defector Ignace Reiss in Switzerland in 1937, based himself in New York under the cover of a Pravda correspondent by the name of Vladimir Pravdin and befriended American journalists such as Walter Lippmann and I.F. Stone while supervising a stable of spies. Communist subversion, Morgan concludes, was a real threat to American security.

While it is a useful and well-written summary of what has been learned about Soviet espionage in the last decade, Reds adds little new to what has already been revealed. Morgan has unearthed additional details from FBI reports in the Truman Library about J. Robert Oppenheimer's communist contacts in the years before he moved to Los Alamos to direct the Manhattan Project. His conclusion that Oppenheimer kept his distance from communists once he became privy to secret information, but ran into trouble because he lied to security agents to cover up his past activities, is congruent with Gregg Herken's argument in Brotherhood of the Bomb. Morgan occasionally stumbles into minor factual errors, and he has an annoying habit of calling Elizabeth Bentley "Liz," despite the fact that no one referred to her in that manner. More seriously, his footnoting apparatus makes it impossible to be sure about his sources. Citations are only loosely related to specific paragraphs in the text and direct the reader not to specific documents but to such sources as "Hoover memo, Truman Library."

One of the virtues of Morgan's book is his reminder that McCarthy was a latecomer to the anti-communist cause. He was able to exploit the issue because Harry Truman, far more suspicious of Stalin's intentions than Roosevelt, was also ambivalent about dealing with communist subversion, an issue that threatened to embarrass Democrats and liberals who had once welcomed communists as allies. [...]

Had Morgan ended his book with McCarthy's downfall, it would have been a useful corrective to the hysterical accounts of a McCarthyite reign of terror and the equally blustering defenses of a thug and a liar. Instead, Morgan suddenly redefines McCarthyism at the end of Reds as "the use of false information in the irrational pursuit of a fictitious enemy," as if he had not just written a few hundred pages about communist spies and subversion. He then draws a direct line between McCarthy and Richard Nixon's plumbers, Ronald Reagan, and George W. Bush, and the war in Iraq, even though the premise of his entire book is that McCarthyism was a response to the very real and specific issue of communism and the particular dangers that it presented. Morgan asserts, with dubious analogies, that in the aftermath of September 11, a "McCarthyite strain in American political life reemerged with a vengeance -- the politics of fear, the politics of insult and the politics of deceit."

To be an honest historian requires that you acknowledge witchcraft existed. To be a liberal historian requires you to deny that anyone practiced it.

Posted by Orrin Judd at February 12, 2004 11:26 AM