Keith Olbermann and the uses and misuses of McCarthyism

8 comments

November 10, 5:58 AM

by Mark Newgent, Baltimore History Examiner

 

 

Ignorance is indeed bliss.

Watching Olbermann’s frothing inanity begs two questions:

1. Is Olbermann on crack?
2. Does Olbermann know anything at all about McCarthyism?

I’ll leave the first question alone, and address the second.

McCarthyism has been and will always be a provocative topic in American life. It has been the subject of countless historical works as well as treatments in popular books, television and films.

For a long time the historical (and popular) consensus held that Joe McCarthy was venomous demagogue who stoked unfounded fears of the “Red Menace,” and hurled scurrilous accusations and guilt-by-association charges of Soviet espionage at innocent liberals for partisan purposes.

The opening of Soviet archives containing CPUSA documents and NSA's declassification the Venona decrypts, forced historians and political observers to reassess our understanding of the American Communist movement, Soviet espionage, anti-communism, and consequently McCarthyism. The goal of this essay is to look back at what McCarthyism was and was not, and how those on the left and the right distort it.

The reassessment has produced great historical works such as John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr's Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America, In Denial: Historians, Communism, and Espionage, Allen Weinstein's The Haunted Wood: Soviet Espionage in America--The Stalin Era, and locally Vernon Pederson's The Maryland Communist Party:1919-1957.

Edward R. Murrow

Some unbelievably bad histories--from both the right and the left—have come down the pike as well. Ann Coulter's Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terror, being the most notable, and Ellen Shrecker's Cold War Triumphalism: Exposing the Misuse of History after the Fall of Communism, among the notables.

Coulter's argument takes her rehabilitation of McCarthy far past what the historical evidence provides. Not withstanding the areas where McCarthy has been vindicated, No one seriously believes Coulter’s defense of McCarthy’s contention that Harry Truman, George Marshall, and Dean Acheson were part of "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, which it is finally exposed, its principals shall be forever deserving of the maledictions of all honest men..."

Ironically Ellen Shrecker, arguing from the left, says that Truman and the Cold War liberals were more dangerous than McCarthy; so what does that say about Coulter's terrible argument.

Don't get me wrong, Shrecker is just as bad as Coulter. Shrecker is the foremost anti anti-communist scholar in academia. Shrecker is so in the tank for the CPUSA that she has found the most novel ways to twist truth and apologize for Stalin and the American communists who spied for him. A prime example her intellectual acrobatics is when she tries to explain the Rosenbergs’ treason, "they did so for political, not pecuniary reasons… As communists these people did not subscribe to traditional forms of patriotism; they were internationalists whose political allegiances transcended national boundaries. They thought they were ‘building… a better worlds for the masses,’ not betraying their country.”

They weren’t spies or traitors who gave Stalin the atomic bomb, they were non-traditional patriots—cosmopolitan citizens of the world if you will.

M. Stanton Evans 2007 book on McCarthy, Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight Against America's Enemies, also stirred the pot. While the book elicited all predictable caterwauling from the shrieking harpies of the left, it surprisingly sparked an intra-conservative argument in the pages of National Review.

Sports Center circa 1954

Whatever the side arguments, we now know that Soviet penetration of the U.S. Government by American communists was real and substantial, and that on the whole McCarthy was right, but got a lot of the details wrong. This new consensus has shifted the focus of the history from the battles of the 1950s to the 1930s when Soviet communism had its greatest sway over American intellectuals, activists, and politicians. Obviously, the Great Depression had an enormous effect on those who turned to communism, or became fellow travelers. Some had a short dalliance with communism but broke with the Soviet Union. This included many of the initial New Deal brain trust folks like Rexford Tugwell, and Stuart Chase; intellectuals like Edmund Wilson, Bertrand Russell Sydney Hook, Frank Meyer, Irving Kristol; and writers like Whittaker Chambers, Lionel Trilling, Lillian Hellman, Dashiell Hammett, and Dalton Trumbo.

After 1936, the truth about the horrors of Stalinism (The Great Terror and the purges) was there for all to see. Despite what they knew, some of these folks willfully sided with Stalin and portrayed the Soviet Union as the wave of the future. Lincoln Steffens returned the United States from a junket in the Soviet Union and said, “I have seen the future and it works,” Stuart Chase’s conclusion in his book, which gave the New Deal its moniker was, “why should Russians have all the fun remaking a world?” Lillian Hellman and her lover Hammett, along with Dalton Trumbo led the Stalinist charge in Hollywood. Make no mistake, the Hollywood Ten, were not innocent liberal martyrs. They were, in fact, ardent Stalinists, and even practiced that Stalinism against their own. Just ask Albert Maltz. Maltz was a communist screenwriter who dared praise the writing qualities of a Trotskyite author, in the communist journal New Masses. His Hollywood comrades subjected him to a most cruel self-incrimination/confession session. For Maltz it was Darkness at Noon in Beverly Hills. In order to save himself from expulsion from the party, he published a humiliating retraction in New Masses.

Some intellectuals went beyond bleating for the communist wave of the future and actively assisted the Soviet intelligence services. Alger Hiss was an agent of the GRU (Soviet military intelligence); Whitaker Chambers served the American communist underground as a courier for the documents Hiss stole from Washington. The Silvermaster Group, the Ware Group and the Perlo Group were all composed of New Deal intellectuals/officials who provided classified U.S. government information to the Soviets; Shrecker’s so-called non-traditional patriots.

Some intellectuals, once they realized the horrors of Stalinism and the totalitarian nightmare of the Soviet Union, broke with communism and became leaders in the anti-Stalinist left like Bertrand Russell, Sydney Hook and Lionel Trilling. Others, like Whittaker Chambers, Frank Meyer and Irving Kristol found themselves nurturing the nascent American conservative movement.

The disaffection with communism/Stalinism/Soviet Union came at different times for all of these folks, both left and right. For some like Chambers, it came when he realized the horrors of Stalin’s purges, for others it was the Soviet alliance with Hitler. Many more left after Khrushchev’s denouncement of Stalin at the 20th Party Congress. It should be noted that Khrushchev denounced Stalin in part to consolidate his own power and to hide his own culpability as one of Stalin’s chief henchmen of the Great Terror.

So what does this have to do with McCarthyism? Well given the hysteria of the era and some contemporary writers (Coulter), it is important to draw serious distinctions between those who were at one time, drawn to communism and saw the light versus those who knew the truth and kept the faith, and those who engaged in acts of treason in fulfilling that faith.

Anti-communism was a noble cause. I say that with one caveat; Joseph McCarthy, despite the fact that in a vaguely general sense, he was correct, did nothing to help the anti-communist cause, and in fact did much to hurt it. No less an anti-communist hero than Whittaker Chambers denounced McCarthy for doing so.
 

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