Symposium: Treason?
By Jamie Glazov
FrontPageMagazine.com | July 25, 2003
Joe McCarthy was an individual who severely damaged the cause of anti-Communism. Why would a conservative try to legitimize him? And what purpose is served by accusing all political opponents of “treason”? Doesn’t such a broad-brushed charge profoundly trivialize the word “treason” itself and make it more difficult to discuss actual cases of treason in a serious way?.....
Harvey Klehr, a professor of political science at Emory University. He was one of the first Western researchers allowed access to the archives of the Comintern, and is a co-author, with John Earl Haynes, of "The Secret World of American Communism" and "The Soviet World of American Communism"; and John Earl Haynes is Twentieth-Century Political Historian, Library of Congress. He is a co-author, with Harvey Klehr, of "The Secret World of American Communism" and "The Soviet World of American Communism.".....
Interlocutor: Ladies and gentlemen, in her new book Treason, Ann Coulter comes to the defense of Joseph McCarthy. Why would a conservative want to do this, seeing that McCarthy did more to discredit anti-communism than anyone else in the past half century?
Klehr: Mr. Brennan claims never to have heard of any people falsely or maliciously attacked by McCarthy. How about James Wechsler, editor of the New York Post? Wechsler had long been public about his Communist background in the student movement of the 1930s and had for years been a vigorous and forthright anti-communist liberal. Senator McCarthy went after him largely because Wechsler had criticized McCarthy and suggested that Communist denunciations of Wechsler were actually part of a Communist effort to make him appear to be an anti-communist.
Even when he was attacking Communist sympathizers or fellow-travellers, McCarthy was often reckless and wrong. Did it do the anti-communist cause any good to accuse Owen Lattimore, a despicable man to be sure, of being the top Soviet spy in the United States? Whatever Lattimore's sins, that was not one of them. The more errors McCarthy made the easier he made the job of the pro-Communist left: to call anyone accused of communism a victim of a McCarthyite slander.
Haynes: Let's get the dates straight. Joseph McCarthy did not emerge as an anticommunist spokesman until 1950. By that time the back of the domestic Communist movement already had been broken and anticommunism dominated both major parties. President Truman in 1948 set up a massive loyalty program to remove Communists from federal employment. Truman's Justice Department convicted the leadership of the CPUSA under the Smith Act, convicted Alger Hiss, and in 1950 arrested and later convicted the Rosenbergs, David Greenglass, Harry Gold, and Morton Sobell for espionage.
Most importantly, Truman, Cold War Democrats and anticommunist liberals in 1948 smashed the bold attempt of the Communists and Popular Front liberals to carve out a major role in mainstream politics through Henry Wallace's presidential campaign and the Progressive Party. The expulsion of Communist-led unions from the CIO completed the destruction of the institutional base of Communist influence in 1949. Abroad, Truman enunciated the Truman Doctrine of aid to nations facing Soviet aggression, committed America to war in Korea to stop Communist aggression, and launched the Marshall Plan that restored European prosperity and contained the internal Communist threat there......
Klehr: Brennan's understanding of the academy is as misguided as his understanding of Joe McCarthy. I can assure him that I'm under no pressure to preserve my tenure by denouncing McCarthy. I can say anything I want about him and no one is going to suggest I shouldn't be teaching. What he doesn't seem to understand is that you can denounce Lattimore as a contemptible person and Soviet apologist- as Ron Radosh and I did in our book on Amerasia- and understand that there is no conclusive evidence he was a spy. In his biography of Joe McCarthy, Arthur Herman claimed that Venona demonstrated that Lattimore was a spy and hence McCarthy was right. But Lattimore is not mentioned in Venona. I'm glad that Mr. Brennan and Ann Coulter admire the work John Haynes and I have done on Soviet espionage-but I wish they would read it more carefully.
Haynes: Polemicists and partisans have a different role than that of historians. Political debate is adversarial, and nuance and balance are usually not winning qualities in partisan exchanges. Exaggeration and one-sided presentations of evidence are normal. And, given that such arguments are usually adversarial, this is not necessarily improper in as much as the adversary is normally using the same tactic, and the audience is perfectly capable of making up its mind while mixing and matching arguments and evidence of the adversaries.
Historians, however, should not be polemicists and are bound by what available evidence can sustain, not by what may be true, or even by what we likely suspect is true, but by what we can establish with documentation. Ms. Coulter writes, "Denouncing McCarthy is the establishment's loyalty oath. A professor who puts in a kind word for McCarthy would end his career ... Even Haynes and Klehr, the authors of Venona, utter the ritualistic malediction before cheerfully returning to identifying another hundred liberals who were Soviet spies."
Speaking kindly of McCarthy does horrify the academic establishment. But Klehr and I burned our bridges with the reigning establishment years ago. Whatever maledictions we direct at McCarthy are our actual judgments. Further, we identify hundreds Communists, not liberals, who were Soviet spies. There were some Popular Front liberals whose pro-Sovietism was so ardent that they assisted Soviet espionage against the U.S.; Lauchlin Currie and Harry White come to mind. But Popular Front liberals even in the 1930s-40s were a minority wing of the New Deal coalition. Communists and liberals were and are not the same and it is historically inaccurate to conflate the two.
Haynes: One second, sorry to interrupt here, but time's arrow flies in only one direction and when writing about history, it is essential to get the dates right. Joseph McCarthy's entry on the national stage in regard to domestic communism came in 1950. The House Committee on Un-American Activities began its highly publicized hearings, hearings that led the imprisonment of ten Hollywood writers (all who really were secret Communists by the way) for refusing to testify and also refusing to invoke their fifth amendment rights. What McCarthy did in 1950 and later could in no way have influenced or caused what happened in 1947, 1948 and 1949 in regard to Hollywood and the House committee.
It is also important to realize that there was not a single anticommunism. The various anticommunisms (left, right, and center, religiously-based, trade union-based, or patriotically-based) did not follow a common agenda aside from their shared opposition to communism or even approve of each other. Liberal anti-Communists, usually Democrats, and conservative anti-Communists, usually Republican, often loathed each other. Nor did Roman Catholic anti-Communists inspired by the Papal declarations of Renum Novarum and Quadragesimo Anno have much in common with Ayn Randian anticommunism......
Klehr: Wechsler a "hero of the dominant Marxist left?" The Communists and their allies hated Wechsler and his fellow Americans for Democratic Action liberals like Walter Reuther, Hubert Humphrey and Arthur Schlesinger Jr. precisely because they had fought the Communists long before Joe McCarthy knew the difference between Earl Browder and Louis Budenz. It was liberal anti-communists- including Ronald Reagan- who organized ADA after WWII who helped cleanse the CIO of communist influence, fought against Henry Wallace in the Democratic party and supported a strong anti-Communist foreign policy. You don't have to agree with every aspect of their ideology to recognize the invaluable contribution they made to anti-communism- long before McCarthy arrived on the scene to distort their views and malign them.
Haynes: From 1945 through 1947 the Truman administration treated domestic communism and espionage as not serious and Republican complaints as partisan nuisances. Truman regarded the FBI's Hoover as an alarmist and did not take his reports seriously. But by late 1947 Truman came, belatedly, to comprehend the Soviet menace and the domestic threat of Wallace and Popular front liberals to Truman's Cold War policies and the evidence sank in from the Bentley and Gouzenko defections and the Venona project.
The Truman administration shifted and adopted a series of anticommunist measures. It continued to deny Republican charges that there was or had been a subversion problem while simultaneously removing the problem and preventing its reoccurrence. While intellectually illogical, it was effective damage control as demonstrated by Truman's election in 1948, defeating the Republicans and smashing beyond recovery the pro-Communist left under Wallace.
McCarthy did not only point out the belatedness and shortcomings of the Truman administration's anti-subversion measures, he accused the administration of participation in the Communist conspiracy and that its highest officials were traitors. The charge was false and was of a nature that exceeds that which a healthy democratic polity can sustain. Exaggerated, malign, and angry partisan rhetoric is common and tolerable in American politics. But accusations of treason set the stage for a systemic crisis that undermines the polity itself.......
Interlocutor: Ok, ladies and gentlemen, Coulter obviously went over the top regarding her defense of McCarthy. But let us look at it from another angle: she is surely more right about the McCarthy era and the Communists than the NY Times. Right?
In making that point, let me ask this question: should the era of the Fifties be called the era of "McCarthyism" and "The Red Scare" or "The Red Threat"? McCarthy’s tactics might have been reprehensible, and he might have been a demagogue, but unfortunately the era took the label of something associated with him personally. Shouldn’t we now recognize that calling that period “McCarthyism” is actually quite inaccurate and misleading in terms of the real danger that America faced at the time from one of the most evil regimes in history?
Haynes: In one of the history profession's leading journals, Professor Ellen Schrecker, a prominent member of the historical establishment, commented, "McCarthyism is a loaded word" and "is invariably pejorative." One would expect scholars to use words that are pejorative and loaded with care. But in the moral squalor of today's academia where Communists are heroes and those who opposed communism are despised, Schrecker proclaimed that just those qualities made it a "useful" epithet that "should become part of our regular historical discourse," and called on historians to use "McCarthyism" as the term of choice for "the movement to eliminate communism from American life during the late 1940s and 1950s."
And so it has been in book after book. The term is not merely inaccurate, it is a act of propaganda in the academic left's campaign to rewrite history to teach that the wrong side won the Cold War. The term "Red Scare" isn't much better because a "scare" often means a panic over a nonexistent or minor threat. "Red Threat," however, seems a bit lurid. Better would simply be the "anti-Communist era," encompassing both the initial Cold War mobilization against the external Soviet challenge and the recognition and neutralization of the domestic Communist threat.
Klehr: McCarthy was right about one major point- there had been a significant problem of Communist subversion in American government and it had to be dealt with. He was wrong on many of the particulars. Likewise
Ann Coulter is right to emphasize that the anti-anti-communist mindset that dominates the New York Times and other major media but is wrong on many of the details. It doesn't advance our understanding to label their obtuseness "treason."
Jamie, you are right to suggest that calling this the age of McCarthyism is to allow the left to define the debate. While I deplore McCarthy and his tactics, I agree with those who note that his influence had been exaggerated all out of proportion. There was no reign of terror in the United States during the 1950s. Several thousand people lost their jobs- some unjustly or unfairly- and a few hundred went to prison for brief periods of time- including some who probably should not have been prosecuted. Two- Julius and Ethel Rosenberg- were executed for conspiracy to commit espionage, although Ethel should not have been subjected to that punishment. Compared to the violations of civil liberties during previous American wars- and remember that we were fighting both a Cold War with Russia and a hot war in Korea when McCarthy rose to prominence- this hardly justifies the fevered and breathless suggestions that Americans were living in a state of sweat-drenched fear and that it took real courage to challenge the ogre from Wisconsin....
Haynes: Senator Joseph McCarthy painted the entire New Deal as little-more than a disguised Communist plot and depicted Dean Acheson, secretary of state under President Truman, and George C. Marshall, Army chief of staff under President Roosevelt and secretary of state and secretary of defense under Truman, as participants in "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."
In the light of history both Acheson and Marshall in their role as leading policy makers in diplomacy and national security made mistakes and exercised poor judgment as well as achieving striking successes. Whatever one's judgment on the balance between their successes and failures, however, it is utter balderdash, indeed a vile and reprehensible smear to implicate them, as
McCarthy did, in a Communist conspiracy and betrayal of the nation. It will also not do to insist that if one carefully parses with a defense lawyers eye the words McCarthy used and resolving grammatical ambiguities in a certain way, then he did not exactly say they were traitors. Such lawyerly hairsplitting is an evasion. No on at the time had any difficulty understanding that McCarthy was accusing both Acheson and Marshall, and the Truman administration in general, of conscious and knowing assistance to Communist subversion and Soviet aggression.
Haynes: I think it is important to add that, by the time, 1950, that Joseph McCarthy became a national figure in the debate about domestic communism the American public, the government, and both major political parties were already well awakened to both the domestic and foreign Communist threat. McCarthy appeared years after Truman's order setting up a loyalty program to remove Communists and security risks from government service, after the announcement of the "Truman Doctrine" that implemented America's Cold War containment strategy against Soviet aggression, after the Marshall Plan to save Western Europe from economic collapse and Communist takeover, after the CIO expelled Communists from its power base in some trade unions, and after the Popular Front liberal allies of the Communists had withdrawn from the Democratic Party and embarked on their disastrous Progressive Party venture.
The new young liberal stars of the Democratic Party were men such as Hubert Humphrey who had risen to the leadership of the Democratic party in Minnesota (Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party to use its exact title) by defeating the Popular Front liberals and their secret Communist allies who had seized control of the Minnesota party in 1946. And among Republicans, Richard Nixon's work on the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1948 on the Hiss-Chambers case contributed greatly to arousing public opinion in regard to the seriousness of Soviet espionage. Nixon's activities both proceeded that of McCarthy and were far more responsible.....
Interlocutor: Ladies and gentlemen, Ann Coulter has obviously erred in implying that all Liberals are traitors and guilty of treason. Unfortunately, such a wild and erroneous charge makes it difficult to even speak about treason in a serious way.
Having said that, Ms. Coulter is certainly right in pointing out that many Liberals have, in general, engaged in historical amnesia to hide the crimes of their political comrades.
We know today that many Left-Liberals were dead wrong during the Cold War. It has been proven beyond reasonable doubt – as if we ever needed more than common sense to figure it out -- that the Soviet regime was a pernicious and diabolical entity that sought the destruction of freedom everywhere and that the U.S. was legitimate in its fear of communism at home and abroad.
So my question: when will a multitude of Leftists and Liberals finally step forward and, in consideration of the 100 million lives that were liquidated on the altar of socialist ideals in the 20th century, pronounce: mea culpa?
Haynes: Liberals in general have nothing to apologize for in regard to domestic communism, but one faction of liberalism, its "progressive" Popular Front wing, does. Its defense of the Moscow Trials and the Nazi-Soviet Pact, rejection of President’s Truman Cold War policies against Soviet aggression, and support for the covertly Communist-dominated Progressive Party of Henry Wallace were shameful episodes. And fifty year of claiming innocence for Alger Hiss and Julius Rosenberg was not merely misguided but a campaign of intellectual dishonesty coupled with an effort to smear anyone who spoke the truth about Soviet espionage, a campaign of lies and personal destruction as vile as anything Joseph McCarthy ever undertook and which lasted far longer than McCarthy’s brief appearance on the national stage.
McCarthy was not the Great Satan of left historical myth but he was a minor devil. His use of anticommunism as a partisan weapon against not just the guilty Popular Front liberals but anti-Communist liberals and Cold War Democrats as well was highly divisive and ultimately destructive of anti-Communist goals. For little short-term partisan gain McCarthy’s tactics allowed Communists and their allies to hide their guilt behind the innocence of others.
So overall, Liberals as a group need not enter a mea culpa in regard to the Cold War. Some should, but many do not. Harry Truman led America into the Cold War and the Truman Doctrine with its commitment to American containment of Soviet aggression remained the basic U.S. strategy until the USSR collapsed in 1991. John Kennedy was an ardent although not always skilful Cold Warrior, and his administration forced the Soviets into a humiliating retreat from their plans to install nuclear missiles in Cuba. Although the policies he pursued in Vietnam led to America's major Cold War defeat, Lyndon Johnson's commitment to containing Soviet expansion cannot be doubted. And to take two more recent examples, foolish indeed would be questioning the anti-Communist commitment of Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Carter's National Security Adviser, or that of the recently deceased liberal Democratic Senator from New York, Daniel Patrick Moynihan. No mea culpas due there.
It is one wing of liberalism, the Popular Front liberals of the 1930-1950 era (most prominently represented by Henry Wallace in his 1948 presidential campaign) and their heirs who emerged after the Vietnam War and from the New Left who got the Cold War wrong. Expecting mea culpa may be unrealistic. But what is reasonable to ask and expect, is that academicians stop rewriting history to show that Harry Truman was wrong and Henry Wallace was right about the Cold War and that Alger Hiss, Julius Rosenberg, Lauchlin Currie, and so on were innocent or, the fall back position, that the evidence is still ambiguous and their guilt is not established.
Klehr: Some liberals were dead wrong during the Cold war and some are dead wrong today in their evaluation of that Cold War. Others got it mostly right. Coulter is right that far too many liberals today are unwilling or unable to confront the crimes of communism in the same forthright way they confront the crimes of fascism. The University of Massachusetts Press is about to publish the memoirs of an American communist who deserted from the US Army in the 1950s and made a new life in East Germany. While mildly critical of some aspects of East German society, it is an apology for that nasty little regime and the idealism of its founders.
Can anyone imagine a comparable book about the idealism of Nazi Germany by an American deserter? While Holocaust deniers are shunned by anyone with a shred of decency (some on the American left persist in lionizing Noam Chomsky despite his defense of French holocaust deniers), there are plenty of American academics and liberals who persist in explaining that despite making some mistakes, Stalin did a lot of good or the number of victims of communism has been exaggerated or that communists really meant well. But there were and are plenty of other liberals who saw quite clearly the nature of communism and courageously fought against it. Coulter's mistake is tarring all liberals with the sins of some of them......
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