WASHINGTON REPORT: Heritage of Fear

...Librarians were naturally vulnerable to an anti-Communism that was inescapable anti-literacy as well...

...It is also true that in fact the country had quite a few other things to be legitimately fearful about, as it shortly discovered in the news from Europe and Asia...

...The anti-Communism that gave us the purges and Korea has continued to dominate American policy and American thought about policy...

...If there is indeed something that can be reasonably called "Koreagate," it, too, is the creature of American anti-Communism...

...His example was followed by a whole troupe of political mountebanks taking office on the promise to keep Josef Stalin out of the public schools...

...Teachers at all levels were similarly vulnerable—the title "college professor" was a dirty word in many minds—as were scientists, union leaders and advocates of just about any socially ameliorative measure including, perhaps especially, the extension of Constitutional rights to black people...

...Finally, of course, the hysteria played itself out...

...Putting aside the national fear of the Depression and, presently, of the "wave of the future" in German and Japanese militarism, FDR led a newly confident country to victories over everything in sight...

...Inevitably, too, the movement produced a burlesque of itself in Joe McCarthy, although it was never without its burlesque figures, including J. Parnell Thomas, who ended up in the Danbury exercise yard alongside one of his victims, Ring Lardner, Jr., on the familiar felony of anti-Communists, a certain carelessness in the cash box, a "co-mingling," as one of them called it, of funds public and funds private...

...And all of this, we simply ignore...

...In the full flush of victory, in a new, much more widely shared prosperity than previously experienced, America became fearful again and out of that fear betrayed its own ideals, the Constitution, its own soul...

...In his book, Caute examines cases that seem to go right across the board of American occupations...

...Taking Soviet propaganda at its own word, they, and many of their countrymen, believed that all Communists were Soviet-directed, that the obvious aim of ihe movement was conquest of the world...

...Truman and Acheson did not, of course, go into their anti-Communist seizure without cause, both foreign and domestic...

...Here he recounts a story of the right, in the words of his subtitle, "the anti-Communist purge under Truman and Eisenhower...

...But of course, it hasn't played itself out at all and this is the most depressing thing about David Caute's horrifying recital...

...The "Great Fear" manifested itself in purges under Truman and Eisenhower, but die antiCommunism behind the purges and the fear has by no means been cured by the national understanding that the purges were much more effectively anti-American than they were anti-Communist...

...In the atmosphere of the time, it was entirely likely that we would shortly become a totally "secure" country in very much the style that Russia is...

...At the end of World War II, the Soviets did indeed hang onto the East European countries they had conquered from the Nazis, abolishing three formerly independent states altogether, seizing great hunks of land from others and putting all those nations—plus, later, Czechoslovakia—under Quisling Communist rule backed by the Red Army...

...In the entertainment world, the ravages were by no means limited to the Hollywood "Ten...

...We think, too, that the purge was pretty much confined to State Department bureaucrats and to movie people, an improbable combination probably brought together simply by shared vulnerability...

...We have had an FBI burglarizing' American homes, a CIA reading Americans' mail, have suffered a disastrous war and are now, this minute, bankrupting ourselves on arms expenditures, all in the name of anti-Communism and somehow it never occurs to anyone that maybe it's time we seriously re-examined the premises of this doctrine that has proved so costly in money, wasted lives, the erosion of our own principles, the corruption of our government...

...An occasional publisher was willing to stand up for the First Amendment, but no broadcast executive has ever been accused of moral courage: such a trait in such a job would probably be grounds for dismissal...

...FRANK GETLEIN 14 April 1978: 230...

...We know about the script writers and directors of Hollywood...

...Caute, a British scholar and writer, is an authority on the Left in Europe over the last two centuries...

...Garbage men and street sweepers were hauled before boards to defend their political views...

...It's time...

...Beyond the 1950s, of course, anti-Communism gave us the catastrophe of Vietnam, the tragic farce of Watergate...

...Once launched in government, the security review program moved rapidly into private business...

...The purge also turned to newspapers and television with complete success in broadcasting, all too much in print...

...No one, either an individual or a nation, can live gasping indefinitely...

...The blandness of the 1950s, so widely denounced in the 1960s, is an obvious response to the lesson of what happened to non-bland people in the purge...

...Like any intelligent politician, Truman tried to defuse a politically dangerous issue by occupying at least some of the territory of the opposition...

...In fact, it became a private business and a highly profitable one for a number of the sleaziest opportunists ever to make money out of national confusion here or elsewhere...

...Dozens of other creative people were driven from their jobs...

...In the hazy or selective memory most of us are burdened with, we think vaguely that the anti-Communist purge was caused by Senator Joe McCarthy and put to an end by Eisehower after McCarthy attacked Ike's hero and mentor, George Marshall...

...That fear and that betrayal are the subject of an exhaustive, depressing and essential new book by David Caute, The Great Fear (Simon and Schuster, $14.95...

...Roosevelt died, the war ended and it was only then that the wisdom of his words and the direness of his prophecy became manifest...

...I would not suggest a cause and effect relationship, but it seems to me unavoidable that one, let us say, encouraging condition for I the rise of abstract expressionism as a major American art form in the 1950s was the professional memory of the persecution of artists who painted or wrote works that by whatever strain of meaning could be called "Communist" by some kook or crook in the anti-Communist industry...

...In spite of the example not only of China but more flamboyantly of Tito's Yugoslavia, Truman and Acheson could not accept the possibility of independent Communist countries...

...Likewise because both McCarthy and the infinitely more damaging antiCommunist charlatan, Richard Nixon, attacked Truman and his Secretary of State—"Dean Acheson's cowardly college of Communist containment," was Nixon's keen analysis—we tend to misdate the purge and leave Truman and Acheson out of it when in fact it was they Commonweal: 229 who initiated it in the government, as they initiated anti-Communist wars in Korea and anti-Communist chicanery and shenanigans in the CIA...

...Then there was the "loss" of China to Mao's armies, misperceived as agents of the Kremlin...

...Probably even more compelling in Truman's thought was the alarming fact that anti-Communism was a hot issue in domestic politics...

...Federal bureaucrats were far from the only or even the most savagely affected...

...Nixon won first a House seat then a Senate seat by lyingly labeling his opponents as pro-Communist...

...He was talking about the Depression and it is true that paralysis through fear might well have kept the economy depressed indefinitely...