THE IMPACT OF MCCARTHYISM
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In the late 1950s a group of graduate students at the University of Chicago wanted to have
a coffee-vending machine installed outside the Physics Department for the convenience of
people who worked there late at night. They started to circulate a petition to the
Buildings and Grounds Department, but their colleagues refused to sign. They did not want
to be associated with the allegedly radical students whose names were already on the
document.
This incident -- and it is not unique -- exemplifies the kind of timidity that came to be
seen, even at the time, as the most damaging consequence of the anticommunist furor. Since
political activities could get you in trouble, prudent folk avoided them. Instead, to the
despair of intellectuals, middle class Americans embraced social conformity. A silent
generation of students populated the nation's campuses, while their professors shrank from
teaching anything that might be construed as controversial. Meaningful political dissent
had all but withered away.
Was McCarthyism at fault? We know that the congressional hearings, loyalty programs, and
blacklists deeply affected the lives of the men and women caught up in them. But beyond
that, it is hard to tell. The statistics are imprecise. 10,000 people may have lost their
jobs. Is that few or many? It may well be useful to reflect on an earlier historians'
debate about the application of sanctions -- in this case the apparently low number of
whippings administered under slavery -- to realize that it may not be necessary to whip
many slaves to keep the rest of the plantation in line.
Quantification aside, it may be helpful to look at the specific sectors of American
society that McCarthyism affected. Such an appraisal, tentative though it must be, may
offer some insight into the extent of the damage and into the ways in which the anti
communist crusade influenced American society, politics, and culture. We should keep in
mind, however, that it is possible that the main impact may well be in what did not happen
rather than in what did -- the social reforms that were never implemented, the diplomatic
initiatives that were never taken, the workers who were never organized into unions, the
books that were never written and the movies that were never made.
The most obvious casualty was the American left. The institutional toll is clear. The
Communist party dwindled into insignificance and all the organizations associated with it
disappeared. The destruction of the front groups and the left-led unions may w ell have
had a more serious impact on American politics than the decline of the CP. With their
demise, the nation lost the institutional network that had created a public space where
serious alternatives to the status quo could be presented. Moreover, with the
disappearance of a vigorous movement on their left, moderate reform groups were more
exposed to right-wing attacks and thus were less effective.
In the realm of social policy, for example, McCarthyism may have aborted much needed
reforms. As the nation's politics swung to the right after World War II, the federal
government abandoned the unfinished agenda of the New Deal. Measures, like national health
insurance, a social reform embraced by the rest of the industrialized world simply fell by
the wayside. The left-liberal political coalition that might have supported health reforms
and similar projects was torn apart by the anticommunist crusade. Moderates feared being
identified with anything that seemed too radical and people to the left of them were
either unheard or under attack. McCarthyism further contributed to the attenuation of the
reform impulse by diverting the attention of the labor movement, the strongest institution
within the left-liberal coalition, from external organizing to internal politicking.
The impact of the McCarthy era was equally apparent in the realm of international affairs.
Opposition to the Cold War had been so thoroughly identified with communism that it was no
longer possible to challenge the basic assumptions of American foreign policy without
incurring suspicions of disloyalty. As a result, from the defeat of Henry Wallace in the
fall of 1948 until the early 1960s, effective public criticism of America's role in the
world was essentially non-existent. The insecurities bred by McCarthyism afflicted the
State Department for years, especially with regard to East Asia. Thus, for example, the
campaign against the loss of China left such long-lasting scars that American
policy-makers feared to acknowledge the official existence of the People's Republic of
China until Richard Nixon, who was uniquely impervious to charges of being soft on reds,
did so as President in 1971. And it was in part to avoid a replay of the loss-of-China
scenario that Nixon's Democratic predecessors Kennedy and Johnson dragged the United
States so deeply into the quagmire of the Vietnam War.
The nation's cultural and intellectual life also suffered. While there were other reasons
why TV offered a bland menu of quiz shows and Westerns during late 1950s, McCarthy-era
anxieties clearly played a role. Similarly, the blacklist contributed to the reluctance of
the film industry to grapple with controversial social or political issues. In the
intellectual world, Cold War liberals also avoided controversy. They celebrated the
"the end of ideology," claiming that the United States' uniquely pragmatic
approach to politics made the problems that had once concerned left-wing ideologists
irrelevant. Consensus historians pushed that formulation into the past and described a
nation that had never experienced serious internal conflict. It took the civil rights
movement and Vietnam War to bring reality back in.
Ironically, just as these social commentators were lauding the resilience of American
democracy, the anticommunist crusade was undermining it. The political repression of the
McCarthy period fostered the growth of the national security state and facilitated its
expansion into the rest of civil society. In the name of protecting the nation from
communist infiltration, federal agents attacked individual rights and extended state power
into movie studios, universities, labor unions, and many other ostensibly y independent
institutions. The near universal deference to the federal government's formulation of the
communist threat abetted the process and suppressed opposition to what was going on.
Moreover, even after the anticommunist campaign began to abate, the e antidemocratic
practices associated with it continued. We can trace the legacy of McCarthyism in the
FBI's secret COINTELPRO program of harassing political dissenters, the Watergate-related
felonies of the Nixon White House, and Iran-Contra. The pervasiveness of such wrongdoing
reveals how seriously the nation's defenses against official illegalities had eroded in
the face of claims that national security took precedence over ordinary law. During the
McCarthy years, the collaboration of private institutions and public agencies in
suppressing the alleged threat of domestic communism ate away at the political freedom of
all Americans. It may not yet have been completely restored.
© 1995, Ellen Schrecker, used by permission of the author. All other rights reserved.