Domestic Anticommunism

Cold War

(1945–91)

The Cold War refers to the worldwide conflict following the end of World War II that pitted the West, a U.S.-led bloc of largely democratic and capitalist countries, against the East, a U.S.S.R.-led bloc of largely communist nations with centrally planned economies. The Cold War initially focused on Europe in the 1940s and 1950s, then shifted to Asia and beyond in the 1960s. Until the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, the superpowers engaged directly in the conflict, creating several serious crises. After 1962, they eschewed direct confrontation, competing instead through Third World proxies. An ever-present threat of intentional or accidental nuclear war hung over the world from the 1950s onward, paradoxically stabilizing the struggle of the Cold War. Furthermore, both the war's long life and ideological underpinnings deeply affected American domestic politics and society from McCarthyism to Watergate.

Origins

The Cold War's origin is still the subject of contentious debate, with some revisionist historians placing it as early as the 1919 Allied intervention in the Russian civil war. While this school identifies the Cold War's principal cause as Soviet insecurity, more traditional scholars focus on Moscow's aggressive post–World War II foreign policy. Soviet suppression of Polish democratic elections in 1946 and Stalin's speech in February of that year forecasting worldwide struggle against the West were soon followed by Winston Churchill's speech in March decrying the “Iron Curtain” descending across Europe. Action followed words as both sides pressed for advantage in a series of crises.

During the war, Soviet action presaged its postwar stance: Soviet troops, which had entered Iran with British forces in 1941 to forestall Axis influence, refused to withdraw in accordance with the agreed timetable. Using military leverage, the Soviets pressured Tehran for territorial and economic concessions until Western powers coaxed the Soviets to reduce their forces. Simultaneously, a communist insurgency pressured the Greek monarchist government and its British sponsor. Following a February 1947 warning from economically strained London that it could no longer defend Athens, Pres. Harry S. Truman declared that the United States would, “support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.” This “Truman Doctrine” became part of a larger framework for addressing the Soviet threat.

A junior American State Department official provided that first widely accepted outline of a coherent American policy. George Kennan's 1947 article in Foreign Affairs, “Sources of Soviet Conduct,” crystallized American policy in the early Cold War. Kennan held that, just as a shark must move forward or die, Moscow was compelled to expand to justify domestic totalitarian repression. If the West prevented the U.S.S.R. from expanding to other industrialized areas by supporting stable and prosperous democratic regimes, then communism would eventually collapse. “Containment” became a multifaceted strategy, combining economic, ideological, military, and cultural elements. The key economic component was the European Recovery Program, or “Marshall Plan,” which provided more than $13 billion for economic recovery in Western Europe and successfully curtailed Soviet influence by reducing financial hardship—an important source of political support for communism. Other economic components included the Inter-American Development Bank, the Alliance for Progress, and, within the United States, the National Defense Education Act of 1958.

The containment policy also spurred a range of cultural programs and enterprises, including the Fulbright Exchange Program for U.S. and foreign academics in 1946, Radio Free Europe in 1949, and the United States Information Agency in 1953. The Truman administration, partly in response to Soviet criticism of American race relations, began the integration of the armed services and launched other support for the civil rights movement. The Peace Corps was established in 1961 as a nonmilitary and humanitarian way to exert American influence in many parts of world, and, in the 1950s, the State Department lent support to the student exchange program of the American Field Service, a private organization. The federal government's mobilization in the face of the Cold War even extended to music, with its facilitation of foreign concert tours by prominent American jazz musicians, including Louis “Satchmo” Armstrong.

Domestic Anticommunism

Fear of Soviet subversion was not limited to Europe. The Cold War reintroduced a potent ingredient to the witches' brew of the American domestic political scene. Fear of communism had precipitated a post–World War I “Red scare”—a threat more imagined than real. However, real communist activity expanded in the United States during the 1930s, as the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA) became active in labor politics. Groups and individuals connected informally to the CPUSA, often through short-lived “popular fronts,” became politically influential legal outlets for American communism.

At the same time, Soviet agents were busy recruiting sympathetic non-CPUSA members, so-called fellow travelers, in industry and government to help their cause. New Deal agencies, the Treasury Department, and most notably the State Department (with the recruitment of spies including Alger Hiss) became the focus of Soviet attention.

The tools to prosecute the perceived communist enemy also predated the Cold War. The House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), also known as the Dies Committee, was established in 1938 to investigate communist penetration of labor and popular fronts; it continued to function well into the Cold War. HUAC was also used as a political weapon against the New Deal. In addition, although not specifically targeted at communists, the Smith Act of 1940, which forbade the advocacy of the forcible overthrow of the government or belonging to a group that did, became the legal basis for pursuing communists in the postwar era. Nonetheless, the wartime alliance with the U.S.S.R. provided ample opportunity for continued communist infiltration of the Defense Department and defense industries; several agents were found within the atomic bomb program.

The series of postwar crises marking the start of the Cold War coincided with the erosion of support for the New Deal and of Democratic Party power. The Republicans swept to power in both houses in 1946 by attacking the New Deal and began associating its policies and programs with communism. Largely to defuse the political potency of the Republican anticommunist weapon, Truman launched a vigorous anticommunist program of his own. Executive Order 9835 mandated loyalty checks of more than two million employees and set up loyalty boards throughout the government to vet workers. In the end, however, they dismissed only 102. The Justice Department brought charges of violating the Smith Act against the CPUSA's National Board, its highest body. The subsequent circuslike trial resulted in a guilty verdict, which, combined with the Congress of Industrial Organization's ouster of most communist elements from the ranks of its labor unions, broke the CPUSA's waning influence and drove it underground. Fellow travelers also came under pressure, most notably in HUAC's 1947 investigation and trial of the “Hollywood Ten,” which focused on communist writers in the entertainment industry. The result was the firing and blacklisting of writers, actors, and others in a widening array of businesses, while the same pressure was exerted on a number of schools and colleges.

Soviet power (as opposed to domestic communist activity) also came under intense scrutiny. Alger Hiss, a former senior bureaucrat in the State Department, testified before the HUAC in March 1948 that he was not a communist and did not know the man, Whittaker Chambers, who had named him as such. In fact, as intercepted Soviet communications later bore out, Hiss had been a Soviet agent since 1935, actively passing information to Moscow, and Chambers had been his courier. Hiss was convicted of perjury after Chambers produced microfilm (hidden in a pumpkin) implicating him. The conviction damaged Truman and the State Department, while launching the career of HUAC member Richard Nixon.

The trail from a 1950 British spy case against atomic scientist and Soviet agent Klaus Fuchs eventually led to two Americans, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Even more than Hiss, the Rosenbergs became a cause célèbre, with partisans decrying them as traitors or as innocent victims of a witch-hunt. The Rosenbergs were both convicted of espionage, condemned to death, and executed in 1953, two years after their trial.

By 1950, these efforts by all three branches of the government broke the back of Depression-era and wartime Soviet espionage in the United States and exposed the infiltration of labor by the CPUSA.

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