McCarthyism: Another Precedent for Witch-Hunting

Another Precedent for Witch-Hunting

Excerpts from the site of Jérôme Fernoux

For those of you with time, read the full analysis on J. Fernoux’s site.

In the condensed version we offer below, certain passages have been set in italics and highlighted. The parenthetical comments relating to the question that concerns us on this site have been added by the webmaster (ed.) of the CICNS site. A quick reading of this summary can therefore be done by browsing only the italicised paragraphs and the notes.

Annotated bibliography on McCarthyism

INTRODUCTION

(…) McCarthyism stands today among the many commonplaces and ideological shortcuts that allow the average citizen to grasp instantly that a matter is grave and that an inquisition is at work. The developments our study will examine show how and why this period — during which reciting Nabokov verses earned one a summons before one of the committees investigating “un-American” activities — generated a deep trauma that largely explains the prominence we have just mentioned.

A purely descriptive analysis would prove tedious here, given the large number of domains affected by McCarthyism. The political sphere comes first, since this phenomenon arose in the context of the Cold War. Sociology also plays a decisive role in its gestation and development. History finally gives us a very precise idea of the way in which this manifestation of hatred toward a given group ought to be understood. The variety of causes is matched by the variety of consequences. The political sphere first, for as we shall see, this phenomenon is underpinned by a strongly marked political ideology. The psychological domain next, through the methods employed and the effects that the investigations had on the men who were forced to undergo them. And lastly, in philosophical and legal terms — regarding first the implications for civil liberties, and then the legislative and judicial elements that marked those years. The temptation to give our study the sole form of an inventory has therefore been set aside, as too rigid and, above all, as offering no perspective.

The word McCarthyism is the nominalisation of the name of an American senator, Joseph McCarthy, who burst onto the political stage by accusing the State Department of harbouring Communists, while the entire country was being conditioned to see in any progressive conception of society an obvious threat to the survival of the American dream. The famous Washington Post cartoonist Herbert Block was the first to use this substantive in a drawing published a month after McCarthy’s first speech in Wheeling. McCarthyism is the purge of the Administration, and then of American society as a whole, “infested,” in his view, with subversive Communist agents, seeking the overthrow of the government by force. This conception, which we can already classify as extremism — here, of the right — found several legal applications that we shall examine at length in this study. Yet this definition remains too restrictive. To Fulton Lewis Jr., a national radio host of the time who saw in it Americanism, Richard H. Rovere, in his very thorough biography of the senator, replies that “he [McCarthy] was an essentially destructive force, a partisan of revolution without revolutionary vision, a rebel without a cause.” Despite the efforts at conceptualisation in these two analyses, they give an image that still seems too reductive. As presented thus far, McCarthyism appears as a circumstantial movement, leading Marie-France Toinet, author of “La chasse aux sorcières, le Maccarthysme,” to describe it as the “quintessence of a collective hysteria personified by a brilliantly manipulative demagogue.” McCarthyism is here reduced to its sole instigator, who — though decisive in its existence — conceals an immense portion of the field opened by the question.

McCarthyism is far more than all of that. It appears to us as an impersonal movement, a recurring behaviour that has taken, and could again take, different names throughout History. Our purpose is not to measure McCarthyism against Nazism, the Terror of 1793, or the Holy Inquisition, but to show that the mechanisms to which it obeyed are the same ones that have brought tragedy here and there when left unchecked or even encouraged. McCarthyism did not go as far as Nazism. Nevertheless, the question we must pose here and now, and keep in mind throughout this study, is whether nationalism or a momentary fear of the Other — whose ideological mainspring rests immutably on the exclusion and condemnation of difference — does not always carry within it the seed of the plague that ravaged the last century. This is why McCarthyism must be put in perspective. Although our study focuses on the measures taken by the American government to destroy what it considered a threat to its security, it will be necessary to go beyond this circumstantial aspect of events in order to better grasp their deep and recurring mechanisms (…)

1 ANALYTICAL CHRONOLOGY OF MCCARTHYISM

The Ancestors of McCarthyism

(…) In 1798, it was the French who were pilloried. The Revolution did not sit well with the American authorities, who voted a set of laws known as the Alien and Sedition Acts, enabling the President of the United States notably to order the imprisonment or deportation of any foreigner “dangerous to the peace and safety of the United States, or who may reasonably be suspected of being involved in secret machinations against the government of the United States, or of treason against it.” We shall see that the terms and the reasoning in force at the end of the 18th century would still find an echo in 1950. If such a fear of the outside could be understood during a period when the United States had to assert or had just asserted itself against colonial powers, the same reflex seems less explicable in 1950, when it had acceded to the status of a great power.

We see here that the foreigner or the unknown has traditionally frightened Americans. It triggers a wave of rejection that translates into a desire to exterminate what is perceived as the expression of Evil. Communists would experience this from the 1920s onward. Successive waves of attraction and repulsion would then follow, shaped by domestic and above all foreign political events, without any willingness to integrate Marxist doctrine ever being contemplated by the political class. Eleanor Roosevelt, whose husband was President from 1932 to 1945 and was sometimes suspected of Communist sympathies for his progressive management of economic and social affairs, wrote concerning university professors dismissed for their Marxist opinions: “One cannot subscribe to the Communist Party and at the same time be a good American citizen, still less a professor.” There is no acceptance — even from the left side of the political spectrum — of Communist ideas. They would always be perceived as a threat to society and to the very existence of the United States, thereby legitimising often brutal repression.

The 1920s, or Pre-McCarthyism

The year 1917 saw the revolution triumph in Russia, and with it the Marxist-Leninist doctrine. This doctrine advocates the dictatorship of the proletariat, which would abolish the notion of social classes, ultimately bringing about the disappearance of the state as an instrument for preserving inequalities — once it had been rendered purposeless. A political and social disagreement thus arose between the two countries, accentuated by the withdrawal of Russian troops who had until then been allied with the United States in the world conflict.

The end of hostilities would, however, quickly give way to upheavals in American society. Several strikes in the steel and metalworking sectors, combined with problems related to Prohibition and the suffragette campaign for women’s right to vote, plunged America into a social crisis that it would believe it could resolve by stigmatising a tiny fraction of its population: the Communists. For the moment, it was Mitchell Palmer, the Attorney General, who sounded the charge: “The tongues of revolutionary heat lick the altars of the churches, leap into the belfries of the school bells, crawl into the sacred corners of American homes, replacing the sermons of the marriage vows with the libertine laws, leaping into the foundations of society.” The metaphor has little poetic value, but was sufficiently striking. And so when during the summer of 1919 a succession of anarchist bombings struck the United States, culminating on 2 June with eight cities targeted including the capital Washington and Palmer’s own home, there was no longer any doubt that the anarchists were in fact Communists. The election of the Socialist representative from Wisconsin was annulled by Congress, and Palmer, believing he saw in this a tacit approval of his crusade by the representatives of the nation, assembled commandos who would strike the bastions of the American left and far-left: the unions and the premises of the Communist Party. The high point of these “Palmer raids” was reached in December 1919 with the deportation, with complete impunity, of 249 Communist sympathisers to the Soviet Union.

These forerunners of McCarthyism reveal an interesting process, highlighting two reflexes. On the one hand, the lack of capacity in American society to question its social model. If the latter falters, the cause necessarily comes from an exogenous element incompatible with the standards of the “American way of life.” On the other hand, a tendency to systematically link an internal threat to an external fear, with the latter interpreted as the inspirer and support of the former. The aim, therefore, is to legitimise a repression that is objectively lacking in justification. We shall find, in part, the same type of conflation at work with McCarthyism.

Normalisations and Ruptures of the Inter-War Period

The Yalta conference of February 1945 again plunged America into Red phobia — a position all the more lasting for the fact that the conservative right had taken control of Congress. The year 1947 marked the beginning of a radicalisation of the American authorities. President Harry Truman proposed an aid plan for Greece, which was fighting Communist rebels, and seized the occasion of a speech on the subject to paint a picture of the world. There would be two kinds of countries: those founded on the will of the people, and those based on the will of a minority maintained through terror and oppression. Communism was equated with Fascism. This Manichaeism takes us back to Palmer’s prose and its religious references. Here, Good and Evil are clearly identified, in a formidable simplification of international relations (see the current situation with terrorism — ed.).

The Wheeling Detonator

(…) The American people paid little attention to Communists. They had always been opposed to Marxist-Leninist ideology without, however, going so far as to wish for the extermination of Communists. Yet the hunt for Communists would take on an unprecedented scale from 1950 onward, increasingly resembling the Inquisition from which it borrowed certain procedures (…) We had already mentioned in our introduction that McCarthyism did not go as far as Nazism. Joseph McCarthy was not Torquemada either. Let us, however, keep in mind John E. O’Connor’s analysis in his article Analysing Ed. R. Murrow’s Report on J. McCarthy, in which he notes that “fear of Communism led people to listen to McCarthy. Fear of being targeted by him, or placed on a blacklist, intimidated public opinion, which dared not stand up to him. Fear did more than silence the opposition; it led it to accept the abrogation of constitutional rights recognised for every individual without the slightest protest.”

(…) The American political class never accepted viewing Marxist theses as philosophically valid. Harry Truman went so far as to say in his 1948 inaugural address that Communism is a false philosophy. The new masters of Congress wanted to go further than mere rejection — they wanted eradication. Henceforth, if the Democrats were to regain power, they would have to hunt on Republican ground, whose hobby-horse was anti-Communism. There was therefore, from the end of the 1940s and even more so when the Republicans took Congress, a political consensus on the question of Communists: they had to disappear.

McCarthy sensed that he had found a theme touching the entire political spectrum, and therefore the opportunity to become extremely popular. On 9 February 1950, he delivered a speech in Wheeling in which he accused the State Department of knowingly employing 205 members of the Communist Party who were working to overthrow the government under Soviet auspices. Here appears the dialectic that would be at work throughout this entire period, and within all the investigative committees that would be created: loyalty to the Communist Party systematically meant disloyalty to the United States. A month after the Wheeling speech, McCarthy repeated himself before the Senate and laid out in detail 81 cases of treason (1). This speech is not the founding act, strictly speaking, of the desire to hunt down Communists on American soil. It is not the most violent. Others are far more so, and his book Fight for America (“Fight” is “Kampf” in German…) serves as a veritable bible. It is, however, a formidable detonator that brought fear of Communists to the heart of middle America. A cartoon published in the United Electrical News on 14 February 1950, showing a furniture salesman presenting a bedroom model with a bed without legs “specially designed for people who fear having Reds under their bed,” perfectly captures that feeling.

From 1950 to 1954, McCarthy held the torch of anti-Communism. President Truman until 1952, and Eisenhower from that point onward, supported him more or less openly. Congress created investigative committees on Communist penetration into American society and its Administration (a parallel can be drawn today between anti-cult activist associations and the support they receive, more or less discreetly, from the authorities — ed.). The federal states imitated this inquisitorial fervour, and violations of civil rights multiplied. The term “witch-hunt,” with reference to the Salem affair, appeared.

(…) European countries, as Franck L. Schoell notes in his Histoire des États-Unis, believed at that moment that the United States was about to slide into Fascism. We shall see, through a study of the functioning of the organs that applied McCarthy’s sermons, that the witch-hunt was open to all branches of power: judicial, executive, and legislative. McCarthyism far exceeded Joseph McCarthy, using him merely as a nominal figurehead.

2 THE INQUISITORIAL APPARATUS AND ITS OPERATING PRINCIPLES

The Legislative and Regulatory Arsenal

Many texts served the development of McCarthyism. Legislative texts first (see the laws currently passed “against cults” or “against the wearing of the Islamic veil” — ed.), which set out the broad orientations without neglecting the details.

Surveillance of Foreigners

In 1940, the Alien Registration Act — also known as the Smith Act, after its sponsor — required foreigners wishing to set foot on American soil to register and answer the question still printed on the forms distributed on aircraft before landing in the United States: “Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party or of any organisation affiliated with it?” It should be noted that this law applied to nationals as much as to foreigners. It constitutes the first manifest breach of the freedom of speech and thought contained in the First Amendment to the 1776 American Constitution, prohibiting Congress from making any law restricting the freedom of speech.

The second text concerning the surveillance of foreigners is the Internal Security Act — also known as the McCarran Act — passed in 1950 and reinforcing the Smith Act’s provisions on immigration, notably through far more drastic controls on visa grants. This law also strengthened sanctions for espionage by providing that any individual “suspected” of having communicated, transmitted, or delivered information “endangering national security” would be prosecuted for treason and espionage. Suspicion had replaced proof (…) The notion of national security was never clearly defined by American legislators, leaving wide scope for judicial interpretation (this recalls today’s desire not to define the word “cult,” leaving the same interpretive power to today’s judges — ed.). The same applies to the term “suspected,” which gives prevalence to personal conviction over formal proof.

In 1952, Congress passed the Immigration and Nationality Act, authorising police authorities to place under judicial supervision foreigners engaged in “subversive” activities. The notion of “subversive activity” being undefined and left to the authorities responsible for oversight, the procedure ran entirely counter to the established rules of legal proceedings known as “due process of law.”

Finally, in 1953, a circular from Secretary of State Dulles — who would under President Lyndon Johnson become director of the Central Intelligence Agency — banned “Communist” works from American cultural centres abroad. Here again we find the violation of freedom of expression and thought guaranteed by the Constitution.

Surveillance of the Administration

(…) Presidential Decree No. 9835, issued in March 1947, required all federal employees to submit to a loyalty evaluation procedure. This procedure notably involved signing a loyalty oath in which the individual acknowledged not being affiliated with the Communist Party. In the event of an unfavourable decision leading to dismissal, the employee could appeal before a loyalty review board that gave its opinion to the government. Any civil servant could be called into question if they belonged to an organisation “designated by the Attorney General as totalitarian, fascist, Communist, or subversive, or as having adopted a policy of advocating or approving acts of force or violence to deny persons their constitutional rights, or seeking to alter the form of government of the United States by unconstitutional means.” It suffered, like the texts we have already discussed, from the legal vagueness of the concepts it sought to criminalise. The notion of loyalty was not defined, leaving room for the personal interpretations of the agents tasked with testing it in civil servants. This text was amended in 1951 in a more restrictive direction, providing that henceforth doubt — rather than “evidence, reasonably evaluated” — would be sufficient to dismiss a civil servant by calling their loyalty into question.

Surveillance of Trade Unions

The Taft-Hartley Act, passed in 1947 by the very conservative Congress elected in 1946, required every union leader to swear an oath that they were not a member of the Communist Party and did not support an organisation that advocates or teaches the overthrow of the government by unconstitutional means. A union whose leader did not take the oath was no longer deemed representative and therefore lost the right to participate in collective bargaining. The law was openly anti-Communist and in direct contradiction with the First Amendment. It would have disastrous consequences for union representation in the United States, since employers would draw up their own blacklists — lists on which all actual or suspected Communist sympathisers were inscribed — and practice hiring discrimination that was perfectly illegal.

This overview of the legislative and regulatory arsenal must not neglect those provisions that had repercussions on private individuals, regardless of their profession or nationality.

Surveillance of Private Individuals

Mitchell Palmer — whose poetic talents we have already had occasion to appreciate — had created in 1920 the so-called Attorney General’s list, which catalogued six types of organisations whose activities were deemed subversive and therefore to be banned. Any person belonging to one of these organisations committed a crime. This list was re-established in 1947. Its main effect was to disintegrate the American associative fabric, since the Attorney General could, for any reason of expediency, ban an association he deemed to meet the criteria set out in Presidential Decree No. 9835 already cited (see today, in France, the parliamentary list of 1995 — ed.).

It was the Smith Act that would prove the most effective weapon for Communist hunters (…) Locke taught us that the people possess the right of resistance to oppression in the event that the trust placed in government is broken. The Smith Act denied this right to Americans, who would have to bow under the boot of a dictator without opposing him — on pain of being prosecuted for crimes. The government could take the form of absolute tyranny, and it would be illegal to oppose it. When we shall have seen that the Smith Act would serve as the legal basis for the conviction of Communist leaders from the mid-1940s and especially after 1950, there is no longer any doubt that America came close to Fascism during those dark years. Moreover, it is necessary to understand that McCarthyism came to be grafted onto these provisions. The proposal to view it as an impersonal movement, as we formulated in the introduction, is here reinforced. McCarthyism gave its name to mechanisms that preceded it, that had an autonomous existence, and whose mark has ravaged the History of Humanity. Thus, if it did not go as far as Nazism or the Inquisition, as we noted earlier, it was no doubt through lack of time, not of means.

The McCarran Act of 1950 reinforced this view, as it authorised the creation of concentration camps capable of housing agents of subversion in the event of an emergency declared by the President (…) The McCarran Act must further be noted for having created the “Subversive Activities Control Board,” tasked with determining which associations fell within the Communist or pro-Communist category. These associations were then required to register with the Attorney General, who barred their members from becoming civil servants under Decree No. 9835 and referred their leaders to the courts under the Smith Act. Non-declaration being punishable by heavy fines or imprisonment, these associations had no choice but to dissolve themselves.

In 1954, the Communist Control Act stripped the Communist Party of its rights and privileges as an organisation, without, however, declaring it illegal — pushing American legislation to a degree of refinement in the art of hypocrisy it had previously reached only in the matter of racial segregation.

Individuals whose activities the FBI deemed suspicious were denied passports; their private correspondence was opened from 1948 onward by postal services; any words spoken in favour of the USSR were interpreted from 1950 onward as proof of disloyalty and a desire to overthrow the United States government by force. Communists thus found themselves at the centre of a legislative crossfire designed to expose and eradicate them — without Congress ever assuming the responsibility of declaring the Communist Party illegal.

This fierce will to exterminate the “Communist vermin” of which McCarthy spoke (to be compared today with the very similar language of Roger Ikor regarding religions and all spiritual approaches — ed.) was assisted by the investigative committees created by Congress, ostensibly to help representatives in their legislative work by giving them a better understanding of Communist penetration into American society. A laudable attitude from a legislator concerned with grasping a problem in all its richness and complexity before determining the best remedies. Besides the fact that the remedies — as we have just seen — did not really reflect this displayed serenity, the committees quickly went beyond the requirements of legislative work in favour of the more entertaining practice of the Inquisition.

Legislative committees assaulting individual rights — Several committees would play an important role in McCarthyism’s march toward purification. Each chamber of Congress would have its own investigative committee. We have retained two of these committees to illustrate the phenomenon by which a progressive relaxation of parliamentary oversight corresponded to an increasingly marked violation of the constitutional rights of the individual.

The House Un-American Activities Committee

The most famous of the committees to flourish during the witch-hunt was the House Un-American Activities Committee, or HUAC, placed under the authority of the House of Representatives (…) Beyond the impressive number of investigations and hearings it directed between 1945 and 1958 (approximately 350 investigations and 3,000 witness hearings), it was before its members that all of Hollywood would parade to attest or deny the reality of Communist penetration in American film studios. The most striking episode of these hearings would remain the conviction of the Hollywood Ten, who, for having refused to answer the question “Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?”, were indicted for contempt of Congress and sentenced to prison terms by a common-law tribunal. The studios and actors’ unions — Ronald Reagan at the forefront — announced they would no longer employ Communist sympathisers. Chaplin and Brecht fled the United States after having been grossly attacked in the press in Chaplin’s case, and interrogated by HUAC in the German poet’s case. The film industry was of course weakened by these investigations, which came into direct conflict with an art form for which freedom of expression is the lifeblood. It should be noted, however, that most of those excluded from Hollywood were able to continue their work under assumed names or abroad. The same option was, however, rarely available to those less well-known individuals who were summoned before an investigative committee simply for having a book on rural life in Russia in their library, or because their name had come up during a hearing.

The Canwell Committee

Alongside HUAC, we find numerous identical structures created by the federal states, themselves eager to storm their own Bastille. In the state of Washington, there was the Canwell Committee — whose notoriety did not cross the Atlantic but which enjoyed undeniable prestige thanks in particular to the forceful character of its chairman, Albert J. Canwell. The committee distinguished itself by its contempt for the legal aims and procedures that had presided over its creation, and its chairman by his irascibility. The resolution passed on 26 February 1947 by the Washington State House of Representatives establishing a committee on “un-American” activities is equally illuminating. It gave the committee the mandate to hold public hearings, gather any document and hear any witness capable of assisting in the legislative work of the House, to seize the competent courts when it deemed this necessary for the pursuit of its investigations, and finally “to do all things necessary for it to exercise its powers and achieve the aims set by this resolution.” In metaphorical language this is called a blank cheque, and in legal language, full powers.

University Disciplinary Commissions

Universities — mostly private in the United States — represented a very sensitive sector for McCarthyism, which saw there an opportunity for a Communist professor to indoctrinate a youth still uncertain of its political choices (here again a parallel with the current fear that “cults” might corrupt the young, and the instructions distributed to the French national education system to guard against such a risk — ed.). To guard against this eventuality, students would be registered in a dossier compiled by their own university’s information-gathering bureau, which could at any moment and upon simple request from a legislative committee transmit the files thus assembled. The case of professors gave rise to intense debate in the American academic community, between those who favoured banning professors sympathetic to Marxist-Leninist theses from teaching, and those who saw in this ban an intolerable violation of academic freedom.

For the president of the University of Washington, Raymond Allen, a Communist was not a free man, and therefore a Communist professor could not teach (this certainty brings to mind the assertion of today’s ADFI, who claim that members of cults are unknowingly unfree!). Here we return to the problem of academic freedom. For Mr Allen, in an article he published in the Educational Forum in May 1949: “The classroom has been called the chapel of democracy. As priests of the temple of education, the members of the teaching body have a sacred duty to expel from their ranks the false prophet of Communism.” (Another striking similarity to current discourses against the wearing of the Islamic veil in French schools and the “secular temple” that constitutes the national education system, which cannot be tainted by religious impurities.)

Violations of Individual Rights

(…) Practice — and sometimes the texts themselves, as we have seen with the Canwell Committee — showed that the committees applied judicial procedures while granting none of the corresponding protections to their victims. The individual was thus called into question and treated as an accused person while being deprived of the rights that “due process of law” would guarantee in proceedings before a court of law (see the situation in French courts, heavily influenced by the collective hysteria over “cults.” Without French justice today reaching the excesses of McCarthyism, one may question the gradual drift we are witnessing, which could in time inexorably lead to a similar dictatorship — ed.).

Melvin Rader had to testify before the Canwell Committee about his Communist Party membership. His university career was destroyed, and he described — in a book teeming with detail on the practices of the witch-hunt, False Witness, published in 1969 — the procedure in force before the committee: “During the hearing, there were none of the protections assured by the Constitution before a court of law. The liberties of the First and Fifth Amendments were violated by a quasi-inquisitorial practice. There was no judge, no jury, no right to cross-examine hostile witnesses, no possibility of submitting evidence or testimony in support of one’s own defence. Although the assistance of counsel was allowed, counsel was either silenced or drastically limited in what they could say. Rather than being presumed innocent until proof of guilt had been established, one bore the burden of proving one’s own innocence. (The same happens today in France — see the l’Essentiel affair — ed.)” We could cite a considerable number of testimonies in the same vein. This one seems to us the most complete, as it covers the full range of the system’s aberrations. It also suggests the idea that the committees wanted above all to corroborate their prejudices rather than to discover the truth.

(…) The committee then interrogated these persons one by one with that perennial question: “Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?” Two options were then open to the witness, now become accused. Either they answered affirmatively and named a few names to gain a degree of credibility in the committee’s eyes and prove that they had severed, or would sever, their ties with the Party. Or they refused to answer, or named no one, and were summoned for a second hearing to give them time to reconsider their position. If they held firm, they were then referred to a common-law court for contempt of Congress and had as their last resort only the United States Supreme Court. These practices of denunciation and self-accusation — here, Communist Party membership — recall the technique used by the Chinese Communists upon taking power in 1949, demanding that their prisoners confess to crimes they had not always committed. The words of Mr Jackson, who sat on HUAC, as reported by Victor Navasky in his book Naming Names published in 1980, point perfectly in the direction of such a parallel: “I placed no value on the testimony of an individual who was not willing to come before the committee for the purpose of cooperating and who retained respect for the activities of the Communist Party.” This equating of Communist practices with those of individuals who devoted all their energies to fighting Marxist-Leninist ideas would be delicious were it not to bring us back to the realisation that the procedures initiated before McCarthy and multiplied by the force of his ideas contained the seeds of a tragedy that was still smoking in 1950.

The last observation about violations of individual rights by the legislative committees concerns two broader and less technical notions: political freedom of conscience and freedom of expression. These are guarantees found in any democratic constitutional framework. States that trample on either of these two freedoms immediately fall into the category of totalitarian regimes denying the autonomy of the individual. American leaders frequently pointed to this flaw in the Soviet system to better assert the superiority of their liberal model respectful of intellectual integrity. There is no doubt in our minds that the Soviet management of individual freedoms was a political heresy. But what must be condemned in others must also be condemned in oneself. Tocqueville had noted: “In America, the majority draws a formidable circle around thought.” There is therefore no permanent conception of freedoms, and from this it is possible to conclude that America is a Fascist, or at least totalitarian, country — in potential.

As we have seen, refusal to cooperate with the legislative committees meant indictment for contempt of Congress. Committee members were protected by parliamentary immunity and could therefore not be the object of any complaint from witnesses. Informants, for their part, enjoyed judicial immunity, even though the committees were not judicial bodies. It is interesting to see how, faced with the repeated violations of rights committed by the committees, those who rebelled against the rules of the hunt — both before their inquisitors and before their judges — responded.

Means of Defence and the Supreme Court’s Responses

Refusal to testify by persons summoned before the committees was based on two successive arguments, the second seeking to make good the Supreme Court’s refusal to accept petitions based on the first.

The First Amendment to the Constitution

In an article published on 27 July 1948 in the Seattle Post Newspaper, the director of the Seattle Repertory Theater set out the reasons leading her to refuse to testify before the Canwell Committee. The hearings were for her a violation of the First Amendment to the American Constitution, under which “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble…” She was aiming at the questions bearing on witnesses’ political opinions. By extension, this was an attack on the Smith Act of 1940, which banned Communists from belonging to any party or association or from meeting together. The Hollywood Ten also invoked the protection of the First Amendment — without success, as they would be convicted by common-law courts.

How can it be that such violations of constitutional rights were not censured by the courts or, as a last resort, by the Supreme Court? Two reasons explain this manifest disregard for individual rights. The first relates to the notion of national security and the power of judicial interpretation by judges in the United States (a situation of current relevance throughout the world in the wake of the 11 September 2001 attacks and the laws that have been passed since, reducing civil liberties everywhere — ed.).

(…) The ruling of 27 March 1950. The justices were asked to rule on the legality of the Smith Act in relation to the First Amendment. The Court began by establishing that the Communist Party met the legal qualification targeted and condemned by the Smith Act. It then established that “the structure and purpose of the Smith Act must be interpreted as the legislature’s intent to punish the intention to overthrow the government” and not merely the acts in furtherance of that aim. Regarding the First Amendment, the Court held that these were not unlimited rights but on the contrary “subordinate to other values and considerations” — which it did not define, contenting itself with invoking precedent. It then decided that even if the Smith Act was imprecise in its terms, the existence of a “clear and present danger” was sufficient to suspend the guarantees of the First Amendment. The overthrow of the government being in the Court’s view the thing most to be avoided by the United States, “it behoves the authorities to act at the first signs of a threat.” In the case at hand, the Court held that the Communist Party leaders were inciting action “as soon as possible” and thus represented a clear and present danger. The protection of the First Amendment was therefore not granted to them. The Supreme Court completely sealed its framework by deciding that the question of determining the degree of danger posed by the contested activities was within the sovereign assessment of the justices.

The protection of the First Amendment no longer being guaranteed, a new orientation was taken by reluctant witnesses: the protection offered by the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution.

Recourse to the Fifth Amendment

This provides that “no person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury… nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law…”

McCarthy would declare that “a witness’s refusal to answer a question about their political views on the grounds that it violates the Fifth Amendment is the most positive proof one can obtain of their Communist Party membership.” Lastly, it should not be forgotten that a summons before a committee was automatically interpreted as proof of Communist membership or beliefs. Since summons were often served at the workplace, the protection of the Fifth Amendment rapidly proved futile in the face of the opprobrium thus cast upon the person summoned.

The inquisitorial procedures that McCarthyism employed were supported by the solidarity of the organs of state in this matter. The executive with the President, the legislative with Congress, and the judicial with the Supreme Court’s blessing all show that the entire state apparatus had an appetite for Communists (…) if the Smith Act of 1940 classified Communist Party membership among criminal behaviours, there is a fundamental difference between the death-row convict and the Communist: the former has committed a crime in the psychological, intentional, and material senses, whereas the latter is merely defending political ideas deemed subversive. To convict someone for ideas one considers contrary to freedom of expression or conscience, while depriving them of the right to exercise those freedoms, may be legally conceivable but does not hold philosophically. It is a return to Saint-Just’s doubly contestable phrase: “No freedom for the enemies of freedom.” On the one hand this presupposition served to justify the often indiscriminate massacres of the Terror. On the other hand it unfortunately encapsulates the paradox of democracy, which permits that which may destroy it.

Anti-Communism slowly penetrated every sector of American society, whereas at the beginning of our study we noted with M.-F. Toinet that in the mid-1940s it had been primarily a political preoccupation. McCarthyism plays an essential role in this evolution, but we have shown that it must be transcended in order to allow a better understanding of the mechanisms that went beyond it. The analysis of its decline will reprise this double dimension. Communist hunting was legally outlawed in 1957 following the Supreme Court’s reversal of its jurisprudence, but the hunt continued. Only the colour of the quarry had changed.

3 THE END OF THE SEASON

The Desire to Be Rid of the Hunter

McCarthyism owes much to the notion of exteriority. Foreign policy and international relations, the fear of outside influence — all of these external factors acted directly on its existence and found a place of choice in its essence. This same dialectic would, unfortunately but logically, apply to its decline. Two elements — the international situation and the press — would initiate its fall, even though ammunition and quarry were still plentiful.

The Changing International Situation

The Role of the Press

(The decline of McCarthyism) John E. O’Connor’s excellent article, already cited, demonstrates marvellously the impact of the image on the American population through a rigorously methodical analysis of a report on Joseph McCarthy broadcast on 9 March 1954 — a few weeks before the beginning of the Army-McCarthy hearings, which would likewise prove disastrous for the senator, as they were broadcast live by American television. Those hearings would indeed show a population that had until then read only terse, near-aphoristic sentences, a man vulgar in his gestures and words, spewing a bilious hatred without any real argument and quick to resort to the most shameless lies (this brings to mind the grossness and ignorance of much of today’s anti-cult activist commentary — ed.).

(In the United States) It took until 2 July 1964 for a civil rights law to finally make disappear those shameful signs reading “whites only” that prevented a dark-skinned man from drinking from the same public fountain as a white man. Black people were not fully-fledged citizens — or rather, equal citizens. Communists did not enjoy that honour either, any more than Americans of Japanese origin had in 1940. Such contempt for human beings is a tumour in a great democracy. Albert Camus reminds us: “Every form of contempt, if it intervenes in politics, prepares or establishes Fascism.”

(…) McCarthyism — by whatever name — is a potential of American society that seems to need a demon to chase in order to feel more secure (this is a feature of every society, and today’s France and America are comparable on this point to 1950s America — ed.).

5 CONCLUSION

This reflection leads us (…) to reflect on the criterion of McCarthyism. We have compared this phenomenon to the Inquisition. Can this disease of Europe be reborn? And if so, for what reasons? Here again, reflection is needed on the tendencies toward rejection that one can observe here and there. It is moreover interesting to note that European institutions — in which we see an effective safeguard against violations of individual rights — are rejected in France, chiefly by the proponents of an ideology that advocates national preference, the modern expression of segregation.

Is McCarthyism not an American disease, but one that lives in embryo within every society? This conclusion is a possibility (…)

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(1) McCarthy delivered a speech at Wheeling on 9 February 1950. No copy of it survives. A month later he developed the same arguments before the Senate. Note the extravagant religious references and numerous intellectual shortcuts.

Joseph McCarthy: Communists in the State Department (excerpt)

Ladies and Gentlemen:

…Today we are engaged in a final, all-out battle between communistic atheism and Christianity. The modern champions of communism have selected this as the time. And, ladies and gentlemen, the chips are down, they are truly down.

Lest there be any doubt that the time has been chosen, let us go directly to the leader of communism today — Joseph Stalin. Here is what he said — not back in 1928, not before the war, not during the war — but two years after the last war was ended: “To think that the Communist revolution can be carried out peacefully, within the framework of a Christian democracy means one has either gone out of one’s mind and lost all normal understanding, or has grossly and openly repudiated the Communist revolution.”

And this is what was said by Lenin in 1919, which was also quoted with approval by Stalin in 1947: “We are living,” said Lenin, “not merely in a state but in a system of states, and the existence of the Soviet Republic side by side with Christian states for a long time is unthinkable. One or the other must triumph in the end. And before that end supervenes, a series of frightful collisions between the Soviet Republic and the bourgeois states will be inevitable.”

Ladies and gentlemen, can there be anyone here tonight who is so blind as to say that the war is not on? Can there be anyone who fails to realize that the Communist world has said, “The time is now” — that this is the time for the show-down between the democratic Christian world and the Communist atheistic world? Unless we face this fact, we shall pay the price that must be paid by those who wait too long.

Six years ago, at the time of the first conference to map out peace — Dumbarton Oaks — there was within the Soviet orbit 180 million people. Lined up on the antitotalitarian side there were in the world at that time roughly 1,625,000,000 people. Today, only six years later, there are 800 million people under the absolute domination of Soviet Russia — an increase of over 400 percent. On our side, the figure has shrunk to around 500 million. In other words, in less than six years the odds have changed from 9 to 1 in favor to 8 to 5 against us. This indicates the swiftness of the tempo of Communist victories and American defeats in the cold war. As one of our outstanding historical figures once said, “When a great democracy is destroyed, it will not be because of enemies from without but rather because of enemies from within.” The truth of this statement is becoming terrifyingly clear as we see this country each day losing on every front.

Now I know it is very easy for anyone to condemn a particular bureau or department in general terms. Therefore, I would like to cite one rather unusual case — the case of a man who has done much to shape our foreign policy.

When Chiang Kai-shek was fighting our war, the State Department had in China a young man named John S. Service. His task, obviously, was not to work for the communization of China. Strangely, however, he sent official reports back to the State Department urging that we torpedo our ally Chiang Kai-shek and stating, in effect, that communism was the best hope of China.

Later, this man — John Service — was picked up by the Federal Bureau of Investigation for turning over to the communists secret State Department information. Strangely, however, he was never prosecuted. However, Joseph Grew, the undersecretary of state, who insisted on his prosecution, was forced to resign. Two days after, Grew’s successor, Dean Acheson, took over; as undersecretary of state, this man — John Service — who had been picked up by the FBI and who had previously urged that communism was the best hope of China, was not only reinstated in the State Department but promoted; and finally, under Acheson, placed in charge of all placements and promotions.

This, ladies and gentlemen, gives you somewhat of a picture of the type of individuals who have been helping to shape our foreign policy. In my opinion the State Department, which is one of the most important government departments, is thoroughly infested with Communists.

I have in my hand fifty-seven cases of individuals who would appear to be either card-carrying members or certainly loyal to the Communist Party, but who nevertheless are still helping to shape our foreign policy.

Source: Record, 81 Cong., 2 Sess., pp. 1952–57

ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY

Generally speaking, there is a great deal of documentation on McCarthyism. The difficulty is that 95 per cent of this documentation is accessible only under two conditions: first, speaking the language of Faulkner, and second, having a computer and a good internet connection.

The only French-language source that is not impossible to find outside libraries is Marie-France Toinet’s book:

La chasse aux sorcières — EDITIONS COMPLEXE

This book provides a comprehensive approach to McCarthyism. The reader thus comes to understand its recent origins, its functioning, and its consequences. If the reader is interested in famous “hunting scenes” such as the Alger Hiss affair, the conviction of the Rosenbergs, and the hearings of Walt Disney or Ronald Reagan, the book avoids none of the genre’s stock themes. This reading nonetheless constitutes a complete picture of the phenomenon and proves very useful for clarifying more in-depth documents that it is essential to consult in order to put the subject in perspective.

Two major books, of which we were able to consult only very substantial excerpts, are very interesting for approaching McCarthyism in all its complexity:

Senator Joe McCarthy — Richard H. Rovere

Naming Names — Victor Navasky, published in 1980