Theories of McCarthyism A Survey

...The difference between Taft's fussy integrity and McCarthy's improvised hysterics is said to be the measure of the distance we have travelled toward "fascism...

...Since he leads a foreign policy rather than a class coalition, defeat in war might play the role for him that economic depression played for Hitler...

...What is novel about the present situation is that, except for Korea, the conflict has been political and economic rather than military...

...Yet whatever McCarthy's political fate may be, resistance to the garrison state ideology and the defense of civil liberties will continue to be necessary...

...It hardly needs to be said that the editors of The Nation and some European neutralists turn out a good deal of undiscriminating cant about "reigns of terror" in the United States, and certainly the remaining homegrown Stalinists are giving their own twist to anti-McCarthyism...

...They see McCarthy as the candidate of the men of new wealth who have sprung up in the years of war and post-war prosperity...

...But in the absence of severe internal crisis he cannot be classified as a full-fledged fascist, for an economic depression or a catastrophe promoting comparable disintegration is the classic circumstance favoring a fascist movement...

...Like the Nazis and Stalinists, McCarthy's stock-in-trade is a conspiracy theory of politics...

...Their attacks must constantly be interlarded with denunciations of the "anti-anti-Communists" and Europeans who exaggerate McCarthy's power or, like Alan Westin in the July Commentary, with warnings that the Communists are exploiting the McCarthy issue...

...The book is essentially a "campaign document" meant to persuade that public which approves McCarthy's "objectives" while deprecating his "methods," of the insincerity and opportunism of his anti-Communism...

...It started in fact when the Cold War began in earnest in 1946-47...

...Most forebodings about McCarthy's prospects as an American Hitler have, consequently, stemmed from speculations on what his movement might become in the event of a depression...

...If the weight he is believed to carry with the electorate has encouraged rich men to finance him, there is nevertheless a sense in which they need him as much as he needs them...

...David Schine and William Buckley, second-generation heirs to fortunes made in the hotel business and the oil industry, are other conspicuous examples...

...Their lavish support of McCarthy represents an effort to attain national political power by ousting both the liberal Democrats and the Republican "sophisticated conservatives...

...This means that to discover the core of McCarthy's support, one must look for groups sharing a common outlook on foreign policy rather than on domestic economic questions...

...It is the shadow of the Cold War rather than the class war which has recently loomed largest in our politics...

...Recognizing this, many interpreters have minimized the significance of McCarthy himself and seen him merely as the symbol of a drift towards militarized bureaucratic government in which civil liberties are given short shrift...

...In their current support of McCarthy the German and Irish blocs have found a new set of ad hoc allies: other ethnic groups, especially the Poles, whose homelands have been occupied by the Soviet Union, fanatically anti-Communist religious groups, the new millionaires anxious to make a splash in national politics, and a substantial number of Americans, particularly among the less educated, who are baffled by the frustrations of the Cold War and the failures of American foreign policy...

...McCarthy's support among politicians comes largely from the ranks of these old Taftmen, but his mass following crosses party lines and he has been careful not to jeopardize its loyalty by making speeches on "the menace of creeping socialism...

...In the 1930's and early 1940's these ethnic isolationists found sufficient numbers of ad hoc allies to become a powerful bloc capable of delaying active American resistance to the Axis powers...

...What occurs here is the bureaucratization through enactment into law of the "ideological fictions" of McCarthyism, just as the racist fantasies of the Nazis were converted into impersonal juridical standards by Himmler...

...When leading national figures must debate McCarthy's wild charges as if they were a pressing national issue, they indeed become a pressing national issue...

...The former a Jew and the latter a Catholic, both are outside the circle of established Protestant old families...

...Samuel Lubell sketched the outlines of the McCarthyite coalition in The Future of American Politics and, following his lead, Nathan Glazer has advanced in an able article in Commentary what might be called, in contrast to the "class theories" discussed above, an "ethnic theory" of McCarthyism...

...Both possibilities appear doubtful...

...Insofar as the Communists are an active conspiratorial group rather than a broad social category like the German Jews or people "of bourgeois origin" in Russia, they are at present numerically insignificant and the job of crushing them is too easily and too soon completed for them adequately to serve as totalitarian victim...

...but who can deny that he has contributed to them by aggravating pre-existing repressive impulses, by encouraging his political enemies to try and beat him at his own game, by the fears that his mere presence on the national scene arouses...

...To answer this question full measure must be taken of McCarthy's ingenuity in single-mindedly concentrating on an issue which arises out of the troubled conditions of world politics but which he has adroitly transformed into a now bogus domestic issue: Communist infiltration of American society...

...The absence of an economic crisis, McCarthy's concentration on a single issue and his consequent failure to develop a broad political program and the unorganized character of his support, have frequently been noted as features clearly differentiating his following from the disciplined and ideologically self-conscious fascist movements which developed in Europe and America during the depression years...

...Too many intellectuals are addicted to apocalyptic modes of thinking: unless they can represent their enemy as a colossal force of evil threatening all liberal values, they become complacent and make little effort to combat more limited dangers...

...aires...

...The most recent book-length study, McCarthy and the Communists by James Rorty and Moshe Dector, sticks fairly closely to the man and his public record...

...They are similarities of "form" rather than of historical content...

...By now, one would expect to find many authoritative interpretations of the political tendency he personifies...

...Furthermore, the Monthly Review editors fail to note that McCarthy became a national figure before he attracted the support of new million...

...He concludes that the chances of McCarthy capturing the Presidency are slight...

...It is the merit of Glazer's approach to show how the old ethnic isolationists have persisted in spite of their silence in the war and early post-war years and have now reappeared as the largest elements in McCarthy's mass following...

...One holds one's breath, for he has stormed back into the headlines to win new triumphs before...

...Their Autumn 1954 • DISSENT • 387 article appeared last January and they made much of McCarthy's silence during the recession and his failure to exploit the farm discontent rising in his home state...

...It is the power of organization, both openly flaunted and working in the darkness, that lends reality to the "ideological fictions" of the movement...

...Rorty and Dector might argue that they are deeply disturbed by McCarthy's inroads on civil liberties, but that their intended audience is less likely to be moved by the protests of civil libertarians than by demonstrations of McCarthy's ineffectiveness as a Communist-hunter...

...It is certainly doubtful that they would continue to back him if he became a gold brick reformer in the Huey Long pattern...

...Here, however, McCarthy's most authentically totalitarian traits reveal themselves: he constantly broadens his proscribed minority to include not only Communist Party members but anyone opposing him who ever had any commerce with the Party, real or imaginable...

...The Smith Act was passed in 1940, a year before Pearl Harbor, and during the war the mass deportation of Japanese-Americans from the West Coast was one of the most flagrant violations of civil liberty in American history...

...Buckley's book attacking the Yale faculty and his almost obsessive hatred of the "respectable" Ivy League intelligentsia are symptomatic...

...388 • DISSENT • Aufumn 1954 HI What large and stable elements in the American body politic has McCarthy successfully mobilized...

...A more sophisticated version of the "split in the ruling class" theory has been advanced by the editors of the Stalinoid journal Monthly Review...

...It is necessary to emphasize once more that these similarities between the McCarthyites and the Nazis do not suffice to make the former a coherent fascist movement...

...11 Few serious analysts have pictured McCarthy as the leader of a fascist movement...

...Its similarity to past Communist networks has been remarked on by many observers...

...McCarthy's appaAutumn 1954 • DISSENT • 391 ratus functions secretly through an army of informers and openly, not by para-military formations marching in the streets, but by batteries of publicity...

...The Smith Act convictions for words rather than deeds, the unprecedented death penalty for the Rosenbergs, the flimsy excuses for indicting Lattimore, the absurd indignities to which civil servants are subjected, the Attorney General's use of the FBI files for partisan purposes, the Oppenheimer case, the possibly unconstitutional outlawing of the Communist Party, and last, but far from least, the many squalid state and local measures against "subversives"—these events make a pattern...

...European nations have long become accustomed to living in the shadow of war, but cold wars are a new experience to Americans...

...Midwestern industrial capital as represented by the leaders of General Motors and Chrysler conspicuously supported Eisenhower in 1952, and Taft himself shortly before his death criticized the Big Business composition of Eisenhower's Cabinet and publicly reminded the President that there were many "middle class" Republican voters...

...It is neither surprising nor novel that the conflict with Russia should have produced similar occurrences...

...But that McCarthyism, whatever its origins or ultimate significance, has created a national climate in which departures from the most elementary decencies of a democratic society are imperceptibly becoming the norm is something that these Cold War crusaders cannot bring themselves to admit without all sorts of public relations demurrers...

...But whether he stays or goes it is important to define the social and political roots of "McCarthyism" to see how closely the "ism" is linked to the man...

...Plebeian, uncultured, often even uneducated and aggressive, resembling somewhat the robber barons of the last century, the Texas oil millionaires and their smaller-scale counterparts resent the political and social dominance of the wealthy old families of the Eastern seaboard...

...They wanted a Republican President and Congress to give them rights to tidelands oil, and even the faintest suggestion of possible revision of the tax depletion allowances which have permitted them to keep their millions will loosen their bankrolls...

...He has even placed "Communist thinkers" and all New Dealers stained by the "twenty years of treason" on the list...

...This applies equally to those liberals —often retaining illusions about Stalinism—who magnify McCarthy's power by picturing him as an American Hitler, and to the "hard" antiCommunists, concerned only with the admittedly greater world-wide menace of Soviet expansionism, who think that they have taken an adequate "stand" on McCarthy by showing that he is not a fascist, that he actually helps the Communists, and that his power is precarious...

...Here we enter a highly speculative realm, but it now seems probably accurate to conclude as one observer has that "McCarthy is the luxury of a full-employment economy...

...Yet Glazer observes that even at the height of their power the old isolationists were unable to elect a President or even to dictate the selection of a major party candidate...

...The First World War witnessed the summary imprisonment of anti-war socialists and pacifists, and the persecution of GermanAmericans...

...If McCarthy votes for reactionary measures in Congress to please them, there are scores of other legislators who are more useful "waterboys for the vested interests" quietly rigging legislation in the lobbies and committees of Congress...

...Others, more impressed by analogies with recent European history, picture McCarthy as the leader of a formidable reactionary, even fascist, movement, enrolling new millionaires, segments of the Army and the Catholic Church, and an embittered small-town bourgeoisie in what will, it is predicted, remain a powerful faction in American politics for some time to come...

...The very terms in which McCarthy is castigated imply certain "theories" about him...

...Today one group of liberals responds to McCarthyism in escapist fashion by so exaggerating the urgency of combating it that all the more perplexing problems of modern politics are made to seem unimportant by comparison...

...totalitarian and semi-totalitarian movements almost invariably imitate the organizational features of their enemies...

...Yet his departure will not remove the pressures on civil liberties...

...If he should be repudiated by the professional politicians and his power at the polls revealed to be grossly exaggerated, the trend away from civil liberties will be to some degree arrested and the air will certainly be cleared...

...Apart from the questionable expediency and the even more doubtful morality of such a propagandistic approach, what disturbs one about too many of these intellectuals is the way in which their chosen public roles as spokesmen for the American intellectual community have completely usurped what should be their primary roles as critics of society and defenders of freedom...

...Some liberals and socialists with pacifist leanings, the Communists in the years of the Stalin-Hitler pact, Italian-Americans who sympathized with Mussolini, and businessmen who admired the European dictators' "solution" of the "labor problem" all joined in support of America First...

...Even if McCarthy is soon discredited, his conception of the "Red menace" has been, so to speak, objectified and is able to outlive his personal political power...

...As Hannah Arendt has pointed out in The Origins of Totalitarianism, organization is the sine qua non of totalitarian movements...

...Their verdict is that he is just another unscrupulous politician feeding on the tensions of the period, but destined to be repudiated and to descend into the limbo of "lunatic fringe" politics...

...The oilmen's support of McCarthy, as the Monthly Review editors seem to recognize, is less a matter of economic self-interest than a grandiose gesture expressing their uninhibited craving for additional power and prestige, as well as arriviste resentment of the mellowed wealth of the Eastern "aristocracy...

...There is something profoundly disquieting about these terms of opposition to McCarthy, particularly when one remembers that the research for the book was supported by the American Committee for Cultural Freedom...

...But beyond this, they have no labor problem in an industry which employs little manpower and there is obviously no formidable party of the Left nor the prospect of one to challenge the sources of their wealth...

...Yet such are the passions McCarthy arouses that most discussions of him amount to little more than manifestoes of denunciation or documented exposes...

...War," Randolph Bourne once remarked, "is the health of the state...

...Weissberg, Beck and Godin, and other refugees from the Russian purge of the 1930's have reported that the first question asked by the GPU examiners and one which they relentlessly pursued throughout all questionings was "Who recruited you...

...Could he re-adapt the Communist issue to appeal to a nation suffering from mass unemployment or could he successfully identify himself with a new program while retaining his present supporters...

...His voting record in Congress has become increasingly conservative, but there are many other Republican politicians who are more closely identified with the crabbed bourgeois conservatism that Taft epitomized...

...Some of them occurred before McCarthy's ascendancy, most of them afterwards, in none of them was he directly involved...

...Undeniably McCarthy has inherited some of Taft's support, but if he has failed to put forward a social program that might attract radicalized masses in a depression he has equally failed to make himself, as Taft did, the spokesman of opposition to the welfare state...

...Rorty and Dector are evidently among those intellectuals so ready to serve as unofficial voices of America that they can barely bring themselves to condemn McCarthyism in the large...

...To build an effective dam one does not have to believe in the imminence of a deluge...

...McCarthy's agents in the executive branch of the government, his "plants" among newspapermen, and his partisans in patriotic societies give the impression of constituting a diffuse conspiracy, if not a tightly controlled and centralized one...

...Civil liberties in America have suffered most during wars and immediately before or after them...

...For McCarthy's activities have greatly accelerated the brutalization of our politics...

...Since the Cold War will continue even if McCarthy suffers a political eclipse, he has served as a scapegoat for some "liberals" who by concentrat 390 • DISSENT • Autumn 1954 ing their fire on him have been able to avoid confronting the crimes committed or condoned by their friends...

...Noting the thinly-concealed pro-Nazi position that McCarthy took in the 1948 Senate hearings on the Malmedy massacres, Glazer sees him as the heir of the old isolationist leaders whose most steadfast followers were of German and Irish descent...

...This view, which answers to the necessity felt by a certain kind of Marxist to find conflicts of economic interest behind all political struggles, has never had very much to recommend it...

...A third view sees McCarthy as a mere incident in the slow drift toward the garrison state which started before his rise and will not be checked appreciably by his fall...

...He has, however, since emerged, if somewhat belatedly, as an active proponent of higher fixed price supports than the present ones...

...His arguments are compelling, but the question of whether McCarthy could ever be elected President is altogether too narrow a compass in which to evaluate his role and prospects...

...At a time when foreign policy questions have once again become Autumn 1954 • DISSENT • 389 primary, they have regained much of their pre-war power through their ability to swing votes across party lines...

...392 • DISSENT • Autumn 1954...

...The Texas oilmen have a definite but quite limited stake in national politics...

...Another group, aptly labeled "the petrified anti-Stalinists" by Philip Rahv, appears to feel that until blood is actually spilled in the streets McCarthy is no cause for concern...

...There was a time when a single case of injustice would evoke from the intellectual community a cry of protest that was free of ulterior ideological compulsions...

...The fact that McCarthy's support comes from groups at both the top and bottom of the class hierarchy does give his following a certain similarity to that of the Nazis...

...The revelations of Communist infiltration in the Roosevelt and Truman administrations gave these groups a chance to charge the leaders of the war with treason and thus retrospectively to justify their opposition to American participation...

...And when the government employs his flexible criteria of "loyalty" to evaluate its personnel, reality is conferred on McCarthy's claims, just as the Nazi stormtroopers were able to equate "race" with personal destiny by beating up Jews in the street...

...Before considering the "ism" as something partially independent of the man, it is necessary to note another possible "road to power" which McCarthy as the leader of a fascist movement could conceivably follow...

...The Monthly Review editors attribute McCarthy's failure to develop a demagogic social program which might win him support in the depression they anticipate, to a fear of alienating his reactionary backers...

...One of his most novel characteristics is his ability to make use of the mass media: he is the first American politician to win a wide and fanatical following solely by calculated exploitation of the machinery of publicity...

...Their main complaints are that "he has never proved the seriousness and substantiality of his anti-Communism" and that "both [his] tactics and strategy can only be destructive of the ends sought by authentic anti-Communists...

...The familiar "Marxist" notion that the long-standing Taft-Dewey split in the Republican Party reflects a division within "the ruling class" between 386 • DISSENT • Autumn 1954 Eastern financial capital and Midwestern industrial capital has been refurbished to explain the Eisenhower-McCarthy split, with McCarthy cast in the role of Taft's heir...

...But they amount to an unmistakable injection of the totalitarian mentality into American political life...

...however his power, like HitIer's in relation to the Ruhr industrialists, rests essentially on mass support so that he is far from being solely the instrument of the businessmen currently sponsoring him...

...Since the Cold War is unlikely to disappear overnight, McCarthy has been able to exceed the life-span of earlier nativist demagogues who achieved brief national prominence by playing on transitory economic dissatisfactions...

...McCarthy too displays less interest in the witnesses appearing before his committee than in finding out who recommended them for government employment, who hired them, and who gave them security clearance, thereby expanding his proscribed minority to include ever-swelling numbers of potential victims...

...McCarthy's anti-intellectualism and anti-militarism, his stress on his plebeian origins and his sneers at gentility are even reminiscent of some strains of Populist oratory, although it is impossible to accept Leslie Fiedler's characterization of him in Encounter as simply a latter-day Midwestern Populist...

...Moreover, Glazer does not touch on the larger question of McCarthyism as a mood infecting even the Senator's opponents...

...And the seeming endlessness of the Cold War has created the mood of distemper and blocked aggression which has given McCarthy his opportunity...

...IV The essence of McCarthyism may be an assault on traditional liberties, but their erosion clearly started before McCarthy hit the headlines...

...Glazer qualifies his optimism with recognition of this possibility...

...Clearly McCarthy has mobilized new wealth of this sort behind him...

...And in both periods Republican politicians have actively tried to weld these heterogeneous groupings into a firm alliance against the Democrats...

...The number of serious political analyses of the man, his mass support and the national mood he expresses, remains surprisingly small...

...The loss of India to the Communists, the complete collapse of NATO, another war like the Korean—might not defeats of this magnitude thoroughly discredit present American policy and further polarize public opinion to such an extent that the McCarthyites could develop into a genuine fascist movement with a chance of gaining power...

...Those who view him primarily in the perspective of the American political tradition assimilate his career to that of other specimens of demagogus Americanus...

...There are, however, a number of "class theories" of McCarthyism which have characterized it as at least an incipient fascist movement...

...In the end they reveal more about the limits of their own concern over McCarthyism than about the phenomenon itself...

...If McCarthy has simply galvanized the tendency to restrict civil liberties that emerges in all periods of actual or imminent war, he has nevertheless been successful enough to leave his own imprint upon it...

...The authors' documentation is thorough and they make a few useful distinctions between the McCarthyites and organized totalitarian movements, but their book is chiefly of interest as an expression of the embarrassment and irritation with which those intellectuals who have, as it Autumn 1954 • DISSENT • 385 were, enlisted for the duration of the Cold War confront McCarthy...

...Yet, while less damaging to the cause of civil liberties, the opposite extreme of emphasizing McCarthyism without McCarthy also involves some distortion of reality...