The Reasons for the Red Scare
Fox, John
a remark that we can only call a lie since Hellman admits in this very memoir that her friend Dashiell Hammett argued that "nothing less than a revolution could wipe out the corruption" in this...
...She goes on to demand bitterly why to this day none of the anti-Communist intellectuals and writers "has stepped forward to admit a mistake...
...In the face of such revelations, American innocence about internal security rapidly fell away, and the government lumbered into action with the first comprehensive and systematic effort to screen federal employees for subversive connections...
...In light of the continuing scandals about spies and underground agents in government during the next four years especially, Truman's Executive Order for the Loyalty Board (Garry Wills' "original sin" of McCarthyism) may be seen as the effort of a free society to deal with real but largely undelineated threats to its security...
...But let us be generous and say that Hellman is merely inconsistent, has a bad memory, or really believes that Communists "meant no harm...
...during these years the GPU had a so-called "mobile brigade" in the U.S...
...Our Irish temperaments threw up walls across which it was virtually impossible to communicate...
...We sat under the big trees on the lawn that fall and talked about William Butler Yeats, but got nowhere beyond that...
...He criticized the "small political group" that owed its allegiance and duty "not to America but to an outside government...
...All my friends were writing poems or plays or novels, jim Merrill brought out his first book of poems, The Black Swan in Athens, Greece, and I published the Ten Poets Anthology, with early work by Jim Merrill, Fred Buechner, Richard Wilbur, and others...
...Only in December did Justice give in, telling the FBI in its inquiries to "let the chips fall where they may...
...In particular, the case of organized labor may throw considerable light on the seriousness with which Communism was (and still is) taken by people who do not hate the New Deal, or love Richard Nixon...
...Subsequent investigations turned up one of the biggest hauls of secret information in history: some 1,700 documents, from every government department except the FBI...
...Andrew Roth [a devoted young communist who had been appointed--over opposition--to Naval Intelligence] has been' furnishing confidential and secret documents to a man named Jaffe...who has had intimate relationship with the Russian Consul in New York...
...though originating in a dozen places in government service, they all bore the stamp of the Department of State, showing the documents had been received there...
...American officials were shaken by the deep penetration that Gouzenko's reports revealed to have taken place in all sections of Canadian government...
...I wrote poetry for Furioso and Chimera and other equally obscure journals which, at the time, seemed the most important publications in the world...
...Such cells gave Moscow virtually open access to U.S...
...The case was prosecuted prematurely, amid great internal government feuding...
...The FBI traced the leak to the Justice Department, and partially uncovered a ring that included contacts in the departments of Justice, State, Interior, the United Nations, and the Soviet consulate in New York...
...An anti-Stalinist Norman Cousins stood before the Spring 1949 "Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace" at the Waldorf-Astoria, and was booed and hissed for alleging the real consequences of ideas espoused by the delegates to this last Cold War conclave of bitter-end Soviet apologists...
...When liberals put a string of incidents like the Amerasia affair together with the purges of the '30s or the Czechoslovak coup of '48, they recoiled with anger from that dwindling group which still cooperated with and abetted Communist machinations...
...Miss Hellman's crisis of belief in intellectuals may well be justified, but for radically different reasons...
...Revisionists also might pause to ponder what agent Philby, the man who knew more East-West secrets than any other, reveals when he remembers the fifties in his autobiography My Silent War (1968): " I t was an eta of McCarthy in full evil blast...
...By carefully concealing their identity Communists found their way into hundreds of key positions...
...As soon as Stalin broke with Hitler, Communist unions swerved to a strikeless "win-the-war" position...
...It was coming to executive attention, before the enactment of the loyalty program, that the late thirties and the war years had been golden days for Soviet intelligence in America...
...A search of Judith Coplon's office in the Foreign Agents Registration Section at Justice disclosed several hundred FBI counter-espionage reports in her desk and file drawers, and in March 1949 she was arrested in New York passing documents to a third secretary of the Soviet Embassy...
...The Party was also happy to perform "essential services" for the Soviets, such as falsifying passports and birth certificates, arranging the transfer of funds, establishing mail drops, and setting up "business covers" for Russian agents in America...
...a remark that we can only call a lie since Hellman admits in this very memoir that her friend Dashiell Hammett argued that "nothing less than a revolution could wipe out the corruption" in this country...
...A neglected figure of twentieth-century history, Joseph Stalin, declared in 1935: " I t takes a thousand men to build a bridge, but only one to blow it up...
...The importance of such revelations was not lost on the Kremlin nor on many Communist sympathizers at the time...
...The significance of above- and below-ground Communist work was not lost on the majority of Americans...
...As Krivitsky explained: With the thousands of recruits enlisted under the banner of democracy, the Communist Party OGPU espionage ring in the U.S...
...These men had passed large amounts of sensitive information, recommended one another for important posts, and taken part in untold aspects of national and international policy formation and implementation...
...The CPUSA in fact conducted purges of its own ranks in 1948 to "purify" itself for the fight against the anti-Stalinists...
...At the extremity of the purge trials in Russia, in fear of his life and in doubt about the course of the Bolshevik Revolution, Krivitsky fled his post as chief of Soviet Army Intelligence for Western Europe...
...How much of the network was never exposed, it is impossible to tell...
...the Soviets had by this time stopped using the CPUSA for underground work or recruiting...
...The CIO held its own hearings into Party infiltration, and a dozen member unions were expelled from its ranks, as when in 1949 the 500,000-strong United Electrical Workers was condemned as "the Communist Party masquerading as a labor union...
...The era is depicted as a reign of reactionary terror, buttressed by America's imperialist needs, and in keeping with the nation's wanton omnipotence abroad...
...For its knowledge of both Soviet domestic terror and connected worldwide efforts, the West was very often dependent on direct observers like Orwell and on ex-Communists and agents...
...ism," while a Smith College professor with convincing evidence of Hiss' guilt is"disinvited" from campuses once his views are found OUt...
...They served as couriers for material from the underground, and in the maritime unions, assisted in shipping kidnapped purge victims to Russia, and also helped Soviet agents (e.g., Gerhardt Eisler) flee the country...
...But several of us had attended Black Mountain College in North Carolina, that curious little experimental college formed by refugees from the Bauhaus School of Design in Germany and other refugees from a tennis college in Florida...
...My adviser was Mary McCarthy, the novelist, but we didn't get on very well...
...I recommend my own method, Mr...
...Why did American labor fight a bitter and wide-ranging battle to rid itself of Communist influence ? Most of the current discussion of the period focuses on the question of civil liberties...
...Hellman obviously had no trouble putting her selfserving version of the past on paper--no trouble in fathoming the motives of all those who disagreed with her, who acted differently...
...It was a danger embodied in the most brilliant traitor of them all, Kim Philby, who wrote after his sensational 1963 defection of "the liberal smokescreen behind which I concealed my real opinions...
...The possible motives in this fight are endless, and as with the entire period, more complex and less easily followed than many would now have us believe...
...Many on the Left who had devoutly hoped in the Soviet Union dial"step forward to admit a mistake," which caused them to undergo a number of un-Hellmanlike "shocks...
...There was nothing menacing then about the life of New York City, nothing hostile, nothing threatening, nothing that evidenced decay or breakdown...
...It should be stressed, however, that in every case the taking of such documents constituted de facto espionage, and that the Soviet Union in nearly every case brazenly tried to retrieve the secret material...
...He edited and contributed to the Ten Poets Anthology...
...I had a family interest in this as my uncle, Joshua Logan, was a director and producer of major stage hits...
...The doors of the house were open to countless friends and friends of friendsqgirls from Bennington who were studying modern dance, would-be novelists and painters, aspiring actors and composers...
...We partied all that summer...
...But Hellman visits her easiest scorn on liberal writers and intellectuals of the time who joined the dark forces of anti-Communist reaction...
...Thus, too, Garry Wills, in his extraordinary introduction to Scoundrel Time, tells us that Harry Truman committed the "original sin" of MeCarthyism by ordering the loyalty program of 1947...
...CP members in the UnitedElectrical Workers Union, for instance, transmitted the latest aircraft designs to Moscow, during the years of its alliance with Hitler...
...submarines in the Pacific...
...At Bard, our group cultivated its sensibilities...
...The particular and added crisis which beset liberalism, and which by recent evidence appears unresolved, was how to rescue itself from the moral confusion and cynical abuse it had suffered at the hand of the Soviet Communists...
...historical achievement, Wills announces: "If power corrupts, we came closer to absolute power, over the world and over our own people's outlook, than any nation had ever come...
...Echoes of contemporaneous White House sentiment can be heard in what Prime Minister Mackenzie King later told his Commons: "From what I have heard and know about Premier Stalin, I am confident that the Russian leader would not countenance or condone such action in one of his embassies...
...Some examples: U.S...
...Communist members performed all sorts of Party tasks, aiding in massive industrial espionage in munitions and aircraft (one member testified to having stolen nearly a hundred military diesel engine blueprints of landing craft from General Motors and passed them on to the apparat...
...The Truman Doctrine of aid for Greece and Turkey did not appear "aggressive" to those in the West, ex-Communists and former fellow-travelers among them, who could agree with Czech Communist leader OldrichJohn who in 1949 described the Sovietengineered coup in Czechoslovakia: February 1948 was not a decision concerning only our country, but the whole world...
...That the Communists still had agents where they needed them --in spite of the loyalty programs--was also shown with the breaking of the Coplon case...
...I believe I was the only member of the group who had grown Anthony Harrigan, now executive vice president of the United States industrial Council, was a poet in the 1940s...
...the use of amateurs in espionage was thought unprofessional and dangerous should there ever be a major defection or security crackdown...
...The theatre had an important place in our lives...
...What we cannot grant her is her claim to be an unpolitical person, for the memoir is riddled with political remarks--the most simplistic being her claim that liberal anti-Communists were responsible for the Vietnam War...
...The world seemed to be made up almost exclusively of people who read Rimbaud or analyzed the lyrics of Hart Crane...
...The Justice Department had sent the FBI after Chambers, not Hiss, in an attempt to indict the accuser for perjury...
...The Adlers encouraged Marion Brando's stage career...
...Most of them came to their positions on some evidentiary basis...
...The Alternative: An American Spectator January 1977 13 The McCarthyism of the Left now gaining momentum steels itself against such testimony...
...The Party's first responsibility, which was to support and advance the interests of the USSR, in the end made it clash violently with the goals of the vast majority of trade unionists...
...grew much larger and penetrated previously untouched territory...
...One night, I recall, we took the El to the Battery, crossed on the ferry to Staten Island, and then traveled across the island to swim in the surf at two o'clock in the morning...
...These shocks concern, among other things, the nature of a political idea in a revolutionary century...
...It was also the era of Hiss, Coplon, Fuchs, Gold, Greenglass, and the brave Rosenbergs--not to mention those who are still nameless...
...Even after the breaking of the Hiss case, double agent Donald Maclean was first secretary at the British Embassy in Washington, acting as conduit for whatever Moscow needed to know about European defense planning under Eisenhower, NATO's German policy, global atomic strategy, and much else of diplomatic and military importance...
...the Department of Justice has evidence to the effect that Lt...
...But their terror was all too real...
...The issue here is not the indisputable over-reaction, or more aptly~ mis-reaction, of much postwar anti-Communist activity...
...Closer examination of her own epic material in Scoundrel Time, however, discloses her sizable private trauma to be based on some curious public facts: a reported subpoena to appear before the McCarthy Committee which turned out to be false...
...Among other pieces of information, the FBI found that an Amerasia assistant editor, who was listed in the New York Social Register, had visited Moscow in the 1930s to establish a working relationship with the Far East division of the Communist InterJohn Fox is a senior at Princeton majoring in English...
...The atomic network, directed primarily at the United States, was exposed as run from Ottawa, with the two top leaders of the Canadian Communist Party as paid agents...
...others became cold-blooded agents who passed on Western secrets--but in embracing the Soviet regime, they all had been, in the reluctant words of Leslie Fiedler, "wrong, drastically wrong, about the most important political fact of our time...
...Ideas have consequences, words have meaning, the anti-Communist liberals argued and fought...
...Many of those who had been close to the CP, for whatever reason, fell silent or became the Party's fiercest enemies...
...Coplon went on to say that she had "breezed through it rapidly," and remembered that it dealt with figures involved in the Hiss case (then in progress...
...The suspected (and subsequently documented) activities of well-positioned New Deal officials like Noel Field, Lee Pressman, Harry Dexte...
...The mood, the mind-set, the dreams and experiences of a generational group constitute something as real as the impact of a work of art...
...She refers dimly to her die-hard partisanship of the "sins of Stalinism," but still concludes: "Whatever our mistakes, I do not believe we did the country any harm...
...I recall Ellen's grandmother, who also was invariably kind to me, said once to Stella: "He is a nice young man, but he doesn't give Ellen any jewels...
...atomic testing, had joined the staff of the Soviet embassy in Washington as military attache...
...The appellate court which later reversed Coplon's espionage conviction did not alter the facts of her crime ("Her guilt is plain," wrote Learned Hand in overturning her conviction...
...And one freezing winter night our group drove from Bard to Schenectady in an oId Chevy with a poor heater to watcti l~iarlrn try out in the play 14 The Alternative: An .American Spectator January 1977...
...U.S...
...The death struggle between pro- and antiCommunists in the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) from 1946-50 parallels that in fields from movie-making to the military at the time...
...Krivitsky was terrified when put on notice that the notorious GPU assassin Hans Bruesse had arrived in the United States...
...White, Lauchlin Currie, Laurence Duggan, Nathan Silvermaster, and Alger Hiss did little to bolster the belief that the United States alone among world governments should have been spared serious breaches of national security...
...They can swallow totalitarianism because they have no experience of anything except liberalism...
...Of the anti-Communist liberals she says: "I think they did...
...The hammer blows of the extreme Left are now striking with a political vengeance and historical recklessness displayed by that segment of the Right which gravely blurred political distinctions and abused its temporary hold on power 25 years ago...
...Lillian Hetlman scoffs at the "comic secrecy" of ex-Soviet agents and dismisses their fears of violence...
...The "satellization" of Eastern Europe, by means from internal subversion to direct military attack, and Soviet designs on Berlin and other areas, profoundly disturbed those who saw the CPUSA follow every violent swing in Kremlin policy...
...Krivitsky had just returned from telling the incredulous British intelligence and diplomatic services about grave Soviet penetration of their ranks when he was found shot in his Washington hotel room in February 1941...
...Our group was interested in Proust and Pound, not Marx or Rooseveltian politics...
...Phillip Murray, one of the anti-Communist leaders of the CIO, was himself the victim of a Communist purge in 1941...
...The issue is the nature of Miss Hellman's moral authority, on which she presumes to indict all those who have opposed the Soviet Union at home and abroad...
...A notable one of these was General Walter Krivitsky...
...national...
...The government in fact took great care not to upset the Soviets, and so delayed release of the astounding material until after the autumn conference of foreign ministers in Moscow and a UN session in London...
...Official fears were hardly quieted when it was found that Colonel Peter Motinov, a key figure in the Canadian network who among other activities had flown to Moscow with samples of the uranium used in U.S...
...For historical reality we must look elsewhere...
...plans for the postwar control: of Japan...
...bombing targets in Japan...
...Portions of his testimony have been disputed, but subsequent events have borne out his statements about the American Communist Party...
...The legal development of the Amerasia affair is to this day shrouded in mystery...
...Amidst an uproar, Lillian Hellman followed, and the gathering, as Garry Wills reports it, "dissolved into laughter" at her chiding of the speaker: "I didn't know until now that one talked about one's host at his dinner table...
...Of course it is uncharitable to say such things, but in doing so one is only paying Hellman back in kind, for she is a veritable virtuoso of uncharity...
...What knowledge and experience did the NAACP possess in 1950, when it authorized its board of directors to revoke the charter of any chapter found to be Communist-controlled...
...I don't recall any political types...
...In responding to such possibilities, the American government was not nearly so monolithic in its anti-Communism as revisionist historians imagine...
...It was precisely in order to clear Communists and their allies from liberal ranks that organizations like Americans for Democratic Action were born...
...At issue were fundamental beliefs about human perfectibility, freedom, and justice, and how those beliefs translate into political reality...
...Lillian Hellman can still draw an amnesiac laugh, as Woody Allen's schlep-heroic performance can jerk a tear, from the exuberant new revisionist guard which finds nothing in the record to justify a national concern with Communism...
...Whittaker Chambers, she says, "sold us a bill of goods on that romantic theme...
...12 The Alternative: An American Spectator January 1977 Communist penetration bore political fruit...
...The Americans believed, correctly, that a parallel and larger apparat must then exist in Washington...
...According to Irving Howe, Hellman collaborated closely with the Party over the years, signing numerous statements and supporting well-known, Communist-front organizations...
...William Phillips, the editor of Partisan Review, has written: I and other writers who had broken with Communism were kept from writing for various journals and prevented from getting not-so-lucrative university jobs because of the pressure and machinations of the Communists...
...At the height of their power, Communists dominated fifteen of the forty international CIO unions, though they had a numerical strength of less than a tenth of one percent...
...Their commitments to Communism had often differed in degree and in sincerity--some were wishful idealists attracted by the vision of a new man...
...But by the time it was uncovered, the threecountry network had performed its first and most essential task, by obtaining formulas, designs, and descriptions of instruments and vital explosives and propellants, as well as samples of U-233 and U-235...
...recommendation, are all areas of government policy possibly affected in the forties, when the rising public servants recruited in the thirties were coming to maturity in government...
...What were the motives of policy advisers such as John Stewart Service and influential organizations such as the Institute of Pacific Relations ? What links were there between the Amerasia staff and the Soviet underground...
...And she condemns them for still not owning up to .their complicity in bringing on Vietnam and the Nixon Presidency...
...Indeed it was the unfolding of a cynical and expansionary Soviet foreign policy which had perhaps the greatest effect on American response to international and domestic Communism...
...Jaffe and a co-worker received only minor fines, and were charged not with espionage but with being" in illegal possession of Government documents...
...concessions to Stalin at Yalta, and the appointment of large numbers of Communists to UN posts on U.S...
...One hopes that this disingenuous and mean-spirited memoir does not become the version of the era for many, since the "legend" who wrote this book has only given us a legend...
...And, finally, we cannot even say that she was particularly courageous in her dealings with the Committee, for she too ended up in taking the Fifth Amendment although there was only the slightest chance that the Committee would have sent her to prison for contempt of Congress...
...How much valuable intelligence might have been provided to the Chinese Communists at a key juncture in Mao's struggle...
...In the summer of 1945, at the peak of Soviet intelligence success abroad, "vast projects were ripening and hundreds of new agents were being recruited...
...But in this climate, one Hollywood name on a blacklist overwhelms a slavelabor-camp death on the newly-blessed scales of justice...
...the organization of Japanese naval forces...
...the disposition of Chinese Nationalist troops...
...That first summer someone (I believe it was the composer Mark Brunswick) loaned one of our group his splendid old house on Washington Square...
...According to the affidavit of the FBI agent who apprehended her, Coplon was carrying 34 sheets "containing extracts from reports of the FBI relating to Internal Security matters and to suspected espionage agents in the United States...
...When Black Mountain underwent one of its periodic fragmentations, a number of the students transferred to Bard College on the Hudson River above Poughkeepsie...
...OSS agents had observed people carrying envelopes and briefcases in and out of the magazine's offices at all hours, and in the office was found one suitcase containing over 400 documents...
...The playwright who refers to mass concentration camps and suppression of intellectuals as "infringements of personal liberty," and nods quickly in the direction of t h e " sins" of Stalin--tens of millions of deaths and persecutions so much less real to her than her Balmain "testifying dress"--from her we learn " o f the shock that came from an unexamined belief...
...In December 1948 the FBI learned that the contents of many of its espionage investigations had been going directly to Moscow, which it, turn was informing its security agents in the U.S...
...But by taking advantage of a porous New Deal bureaucracy and by identifying the Communist Party with liberal democracy via Popular Front rhetoric, Soviet intelligence was able to make significant inroads into American government...
...Then, for a time, I went with Ellen Adler, daughter of SteUa Adler, the very able "Method" actress who had been deeply involved with the Group Theatre in the 1930s...
...John Fox The Reasons for the Red Scare Why, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, were so many liberals and conservatives afraid of domestic Communists ? In February 1945, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) accidentally discovered that its most confidential documents were , being leaked to a small magazine of Far Eastern affairs, Amerasia...
...What was the nature of important advice on the Far East being received by the State Department...
...was the discovery of a sophisticated atomic spy ring which by itself justified the years of Soviet underground effort...
...But if, as Miss Hellman and the film-makers believe, it is the time for remembering and questioning, then why not examine the reasons anti-Communism was so often a liberal as well as a conservative phenomenon...
...Liberal anti-Communists (as well as vast numbers of conservative ones--witness the measure of Alger Hiss" early conservative support after the August 1948 Chambers charges) were not congenital red-hunters...
...No, we cannot grant Hellman unpolitical status, nor can we grant her radical status, unless we define radical as being a Stalinist...
...In his section of the Special Senate Committee report on the case in 1952, Henry Cabot Lodge detailed some of the documents as containing (for 1945) the latest and most sensitive U.S...
...In the words of the Canadian Royal Commission reporting on the Gouzenko affair: "It is clear that the information sought was considered of the greatest importance by the Russian espionage leaders, and that alone might be a fair test on the question of value...
...Also ultimately uncovered was the infiltration of American nuclear research centers by Harry Gold, David Greenglass, the Rosenbergs, and others...
...The NAACP, CIO, and ADA knew that purges worked both ways, and there could only be one victor...
...The problem was also that many American liberals and socialists had espoused the Soviet ideal, and as they gradually recognized the reality of Stalin' s enormities, they had to come to psychological terms with what they perceived as their own complicity...
...It is now Diana Trilling who meets opposition from publishing houses merely for trying to respond to Lillian Hellman's attacks on her (based largely on references to the Hiss case which are simply wrong...
...In fact, until the middle of World War II, Soviet intelligence could rely almost exclusively on American Party members and friends to staff its underground agencies in the United States...
...We had studied Plato and Machiavelli and Erasmus in a tiny institution without structure or rules, except that of working one day a week on the college garbage truck...
...At least three major espionage rings--Ware, Silvermaster, and Perlo--were known to have penetrated the government, and in the mid-forties it was widely bruited about Washington that the Soviet Union had recruited an impressive group of rising young New Deal figures for work that ranged from political and military espionage to the influencing of policy...
...which executed countless enemies as well as known agents of Stalin...
...In the Amerasia offices was found extensive photocopying equipment, and editor Philip Jaffe's desk was covered with dozens of originals and freshly made copies of the secret material...
...Thus, the anti-Communist reaction of American liberals after World War II was in part the bittersweet harvest of their radical commitments in the thirties...
...Lenin had been particularly anxious to win over the American trade unions, and Communist success in the CIO was a model of Leninist discipline and infiltration...
...On the contrary, life was exceptionally rewarding...
...the recognition that every idea, no matter how liberal, relates to power...
...After the Hiss conviction, when even Time magazine was proclaiming the "end of the Red scare," Soviet spy Anthony Burgess was working in the British Embassy in Washington...
...As an early leader of left-wing reaction to CP maneuvers, Reinhold Niebuhr, put it: "I do not believe in the slogan, 'My country, right or wrong'--particularly when it isn't even my country...
...Then in September, as the Soviets were preparing a major new intelligence cell of about twenty persons in Canada, an obscure cipher clerk defected from the Russian embassy in Ottawa...
...Those not moved by spy scandals or the continuing purges of dissidents in Russia (mirrored in CPs worldwide), may have been affected by the 1939 Nazi-Soviet Pact, and the precipitate swings between violent Communist opposition andcomradely support of Roosevelt five times in ten years...
...McInerney later testified that the stolen information had been "only a little above the level of teacup gossip in the Far East," but he also said: I think now that Jaffe may have been an espionage agent, which information we did not have at the time...
...It never crossed our minds that the city would become a jungle...
...up in the South...
...It was known to the FBI in 1945, for example, that The Alternative: An American Spectator January 1977 9 information on the Far East, especially China, was a prime objective of the Communist underground...
...Miss Hellman asserts along with Wills that Nixonian and McCarthyite '~witch-hunters," who were the real threats to America at this period, developed the Red scare to exploit native fears of socialism and destroy the New Deal...
...The movie, with its caricatured red-hunters and unprincipled partners of the blacklist, gives no hint that the story line may run deeper than Woody's vindication in standing up to these tramplers of individual rights...
...No appreciation of this complexity, however, is to be found in the revisionist histories which are coming to dominate our shelves and our screens...
...My God," exclaimed Secretary of State Dean Acheson when he learned of Maclean's 1951 defection...
...The character of the network changed after the mid-forties...
...Thus it is that Woody Allen, serio-comic hero of The Front, can enjoy his triumphal moment at the end of a film about the Hollywood blacklist by cussing out an inquisitional committee of Congress...
...Communist activity, said the CIG executive board when it drove out four more unions in 1950, "is based upon one fundamental objective--the support of the Soviet Union...the goals of American labor, as stated by the Party, are always found to be those of the Soviet Union...
...Last summer, he worked for Allen Weinstein, helping him prepare his upcoming book on the Hiss-Chambers case...
...And Navy Secretary James Forrestal made this entry in his diary for May 28, 1945...
...Soviet authorities were not entirely happy about this practice, which broke normal Party discipline by grouping recruits in cells where they knew one another...
...For instance, the Department of Justice, HUAC, and the FBI fought intensely over investigation of the Hiss case from the August 1948 charges by Whittaker Chambers until the midDecember "pumpkin papers" revelations...
...The Truman loyalty program, for instance, apl~ears as a deus ex macbina in the revisionist telling of the period, as if the loyalty orders created, rather than tried to deal with, the real tragedy...
...security and national interests...
...Which is why it becomes necessary to repeat that history from which intellectuals have most to learn...
...It would rather scorn the call for a responsible relation between political idea and political power, and instead hold to account those who make it...
...The hammer blows will continue to strike, pounding down untold nuance and useful study, as long as any faction enjoys a special dispensation from moral adulthood and political responsibility...
...This is Surely a critical question, but unless we are to believe that thousands of presumably sensate liberals and conservatives in widely separated fields were just tilting at windmills of Nixonian and McCarthyite devising, we need to examine the legitimacy behind postwar fears of a Communist threat to U.S...
...High-placed aides had undetermined effects on policy...
...And the plight of the Lillian Hellmans was ensured, because "after World War II we had a bloated and ideologized FBI, the congressional committees, an internal security program, and the will to make our Truth prevail...
...Our New York was both comfortable and consciousness-raising, overwhelming in its exposure to new ideas and safe for our adventures...
...As was being discovered, neither loyalty programs nor the danger of perjury convictions would sway "professional" agents from their course...
...What particularly disturbed the U.S...
...The Communists gained key control of the union movement in industries of vital economic and strategic importance (shipping, transportation, fuel, metal trades...
...and Western policy plans and secrets during a period of crucial political and technological change (in a single day, for example, the Soviet embassy in Ottawa microfilmed 700 pages of secret data received from one agent...
...in intellectuals...
...She was also carrying a memorandum reading in part: "I have not been able (and don't think I will) to get the top secret FBI report which I described to Michael on Soviet & Communist Intelligence Activities in the US...
...Information Service, the United The Alternative: An American Spectator January 1977 11 Nations, and many other bodies...
...officials, had made their way into the administrative staff of the White House, the State Department, Treasury, Army, Navy, Justice, War Production Board, six Congressional committees, the Office of Strategic Services, the International Monetary Fund, the Government Printing Office, U.S...
...they" are all guilty of dishonorable or cowardly behavior whereas she has always--she hastens to assure us--acted with decency...
...Each generation envisions and experiences a city in a unique way...
...When it struck home that individual, committed Stalinists had set about to blow up, by their several means, the imperfect but very real bridges the democratic thousands had built, the United States was forced to face an ancient problem--how free men deal with the enemies of freedom...
...The case reveals the circumscription at this time, not of civil liberties, but of official power: the arrests had been made without a search warrant...
...Cousins, which is to wait until you get home to do it...
...The crude and approximate instruments of investigating committees and agents, sometimes recklessly, sometimes responsibly used, may be viewed in the context of the necessary acquisition of basic information on this threat...
...With a growing number of defectors, Krivitsky began to lay out the story of an interlocking Communist network, based on his close work with the underground apparatus...
...We are a people," she says, "who do not want to keep much of the past in our heads...
...At the time, I could barely afford the train fare to my uncle's home on Long Island...
...The 1945 prosecution, by Assistant Attorney General James McInerney, demonstrated a certain lack of government eagerness to find Reds under beds...
...The Morgenthau Plan for the "pastoralization" of Germany after the war, Alger Hiss' attempt to reorganize the State Department so as to give himself vastly more power, catastrophic U.S...
...Our group consisted of native New Yorkers (several worlds: Central Park West, the theatre world, and Park Avenue) and others who came from towns and cities in the Middle West and West...
...As detailed by former organizers, such unions took orders from the CPUSA and ultimately from Moscow...
...Anthony Harrigan New York in the Forties: Fragments and Images IVe were intent upon the city's splendor, especially those of us who were writers...
...It was suspected that Krivitsky was about to reveal Harold "Kim" Philby's real role as double agent in the British Secret Service (twenty-two years before Philby defected and told the world h,_'mself), and he was to testify before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) two days after his death...
...For many people whose intentions were benign enough, the problem of recognition was one described by George Orwell (a socialist anti-Communist--a logical impossibility for the revisionists) when he wrote in 1940 about that segment of the British Left which still supported Communism: To people of that kind such things as purges, secret police, summary executions, imprisonment without trial, etc., etc., are too remote to be terrifying...
...The reprehensible anti-Communist purges of the State Department, Wills informs us, coincided with America's welcome discovery of a "Total enemy" abroad, which nourished a ravenous military-industrial complex...
...It looked as if nothing," historian David Dallin has written in Soviet Espionage, "could stop the rapid and successful expansion of the apparat...
...Russian agents and collaborators, with the aid of the CPUSA and U.S...
...It became possible for Moscow to influence the conduct of officials who would not knowingly approach the Comintern or OGPU with a ten-footpole...
...The Amerasia affair and other scandals in the late 1940s and early 1950s set many intelligent Americans to thinking about the domestic problem of Communism...
...The FBI had surveilled several visits by Jaffe to Earl Browder, chief of the American Communist Party (CPUSA), and at least one each to CP headquarters and the Soviet consulate during a brief span in spring 1945, which information McInerney did have at the time...
...Lest there be some doubt as to the U.S...
...This problem was not simply that American government (and many areas of American society) seemed to be infiltrated by sympathizers of a foreign regime whose totalitarian horrors were everyday becoming more evident...
...And the memoir, moreover, refers to her many political activities, one of them being her serving as a sponsor for the Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace in 1949, a conference that was dominated by Communists and fellow travellers...
...The age of a city and the ages of its youthful celebrants and observers produces an inter-action in spirit, a composition in lifestyles...
...Why, for instance, did left-wing organizations like the American Civil Liberties Union and humanitarian groups like the American Jewish Committee drive the Communists from their ranks...
...In the afternoons, we went swimming on Long Island...
...The political symbols have shifted to such a degree that Alger Hiss can stump the college circuit declaring himself" the first victim of McCarthy...
...the location of U.S...
...As emerged from later Congressional investigations, intelligence gathering, and the testimony of many ex-Communists, the Party was willing and able to provide recruits for all sorts of tasks ordered by the Soviets...
...Upset at the proven loyalties of Communist leaders in critical unions, and at the terrorist methods used to ma.ke the labor movement a handmaiden of the Soviet Union, a growing group fought back...
...And professionals often got what the Soviets wanted...
...The Gouzenko break was fatal to the atomic espionage group, because it gave investigators a key piece in the international puzzle that led to the exposure of selfconfessed atom spy Klaus Fuchs and much of the British network...
...I recall how it was for our group during one brief interval--1946 and 1947--when New York provided an extraordinary opportunity for discover...
...In regard to the Coplon documents, as to others mentioned above, we may now argue that a "confidential" stamp does not always a national security risk make...
...It gradually became clear, from the testimony of defectors, that this unit had the active assistance of the American Communist Party in organizational detail and with contacts, as for instance in helping place the ice pick in Leon Trotsky's skull...
...In addition to recruits for work abroad as Soviet agents, the Party in great number supplied photographers 10 The Alternative: An American Spectator January 1977 to copy stolen documents, short-wave radio experts, sources of information in vital American industries and government agencies, and couriers for the espionage network...
...a passport which was not denied her, but in fact extended...
...The struggle for control revolved around issues of foreign policy: the anti-Communists, who were subject to purges, vilification, and all manner of physical and economic reprisals from the pro-Soviet faction, might have difficulty today accepting the charge that their fears were chimerical...
...the organization of the Chinese Air Force...
...He knows everything...
...Russian nuclear technology gained an estimated three-tofour years as a result, making the difference, many analysts have suggested, between a Stalin (sans bomb) who backed down in the Berlin air-lift crisis in 1948, and a Stalin confident enough in 1950 to back a North Korean invasion of the South...
...thus the documents were seized illegally, and the government could not prove that the FBI wiretaps of Coplon's conversations had not "led to any part of the evidence on which she was convicted...
...Among the salient points that revisionists have failed to address is why there were so few antiCommunists in America until 1947-48...
...Moreover, after the decimation of the late forties, the Soviets replenished the underground with more skillful, less spectacular agents like Rudolf Abel, who operated out of New York until exposed in 1956...
...an allegedly tyrannical HUAC which did not cite her for contempt as it could legally have done, but let her go after some inconclusive questioning...
...mastery and breakdown of Japanese codes...
...By 1950 the ultimate shock of the period had been dealt the American people by the Hiss case and the mass of material flowing from it: a conclusive demonstration that a sizable Soviet spy apparat did indeed operate in vitally sensitive areas of the government...
...Stella and her husband, Harold Clurman, were very kind to me, though we were a million miles apart in outlook...
...And during the Party's "isolationist" period, there were Communist-led strikes in plants doing defense work, such as North American, Vultee Aircraft, and Allis Chalmers...
...The wellspring of Miss Hellman's moral authority is in her defiance of investigating committees and anti-Communist authority in general...
...The end of innocence came for much of the Left when it was dramatically shown how, in Diana Trilling's line about the Fuchs (and Hiss) case, "the idealistic idea of a single individual placed in the right circumstances t~n be as strong as an atom bomb...
...The formulations of the New Left do not allow that the recognition of a Communist problem, domestically and internationally, came gradually to increasing numbers of thinking individuals, through successive shocks to their historical innocence...
...I don't know what they made of a would-be poet with a Southern upbringing and values...
...a report entitled "Changes to Order of Battle of Chinese Army...
...What is more, the broader implications of the case are still unresolved...
...To judge from Lillian Hellman's Scoundrel Time, the Woody Allen film The Front, Hollywood on Trial (and there will be many more), the Congressional investigating committees, Communist trials, and loyalty boards amounted to no more than hysterical persecution carried out for the basest personal and political gain...
...They sought to combat the confusion and corruption on the Left that came in the wake of Communist penetration...
...In responding to committees and to Communists, the problem, as Nathan Glazer recently stated it in Commentary, ...was the extent to which a real threat to freedom in the world could be divorced from those who at home had defended or were defending or working to advance--for whatever reason--the interests of the tyranny that was the source of this threat...
...Igor Gouzenko was careful to take with him reports detailing the activities of one Soviet spy ring, yet Canada still came close to sending him back to his employers...
...Each season possesses a special flavor derived from the mix of people and ideas...
...Government agencies were not only uncoordinated, they also battled with each other over means and ends...
...At a decisive key position in Europe we achieved a critical shift of the forces of the world...
...messages from Roosevelt to Chiang Kai-shek...
...information on the Far East...
...From his Moscow refuge, Philby smiled at Western naifs puzzled that he "could have maintained such a consistently liberal-intellectual framework unless I had really believed in it...
...Time, place, and people--in any world--have an organic unity...
...IVe wrote richly symbolic poems about the skyscrapers and the cars moving through the city's streets at twilight...
...As Krivitsky unraveled his story, it became clear that the CPUSA "was more closely connected than any other CP with [the GPU, the predecessor of the KGB] and Intelligence Service...
...Its townhouses, parties, parks, and streets were part playground, part stage set, part laboratory for life, part poet's image...
Vol. 10 • January 1977 • No. 4
