In a previous post I described how left-leaning historians, who resent the backlash against Soviet influence that roiled the nation in the 1940’s and 1950’s, have portrayed Senator Joseph McCarthy as the “villain” who created and drove the whole anti-Communist movement. McCarthy, the textbooks tell us, accused innocent Americans of being Soviet agents. McCarthy, they tell us, destroyed people’s lives and careers with malicious lies. McCarthy, they tell us, invented the whole idea of Communist subversion in the US government.

The truth is very different. Abundant evidence shows that the Soviet Union had an extensive network of agents in the American government in the 40’s and 50’s. And many American politicians crusaded against Communist subversion during this period; McCarthy was not the only one. In fact McCarthy was actually pretty late in joining the movement. Leftist have made McCarthy the face of the anti-Communist movement not because he started it, but because he is easier to demonize than any of the other leaders. And history professors and textbook writers are not above playing fast and loose with the facts when it comes to the man they have chosen as the face of anti-Communism.

Revising History

Many of the statements about Joseph McCarthy in college textbooks are flat-out false. The three history professors ¹ who wrote the book America’s Promise, for example, tell us that McCarthy’s political downfall began “when McCarthy accused the army of harboring communists,” and that “He made the accusation after army officials revealed that McCarthy had sought special privileges for his former aide, Private G. David Schine.” The implication is clear: McCarty investigated security leaks in the Army not because the leaks actually existed, but because he had a vendetta against the Army.

The statement is false, unless you can interpret the word “after” to mean “before.”

M. Stanton Evans lays out the chronology of the “Army-McCarthy” conflict in great detail in his abundantly footnoted book Blacklisted by History. The truth is, by the time the Army accused McCarthy’s associates of trying to get special privileges for Schine, McCarthy’s committee had been investigating evidence of Communist agents in the Army for some seven months.

The story starts in 1947, many years before David Schine started working with McCarthy. In that year the Army draft board classified Schine “4F” (physically unfit for military service) because of a bad back. Roughly four years later, in 1951, the FBI wrote up a report about thirty-four suspected Communist spies at the Army Signal Corps’ research facility at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey. Two years after that, in the spring of 1953, an Army intelligence officer gave Joseph McCarthy a copy of the memo. By this time Schine was working for McCarthy’s Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations as an unpaid volunteer.

McCarthy’s committee held hearings about the security problems at Fort Monmouth in August, September, October, November, and December of 1953.² David Schine was an unpaid assistant to McCarthy’s group during this whole period.

Many of the Fort Monmouth workers McCarthy interrogated at these hearings had to resort to invoking the Fifth Amendment to avoid incrimination. Joseph Levitsky, to cite just one example, was asked whether he had attended Communist Party meetings with atom bomb spy Julius Rosenberg; Levitsky took the Fifth. McCarthy then asked Levitsky “Were you a member of the Communist conspiracy while you were handling classified material for the government?” and Levitsky took the Fifth. When McCarthy assistant Roy Cohn asked Levitsky “Did you ask persons who were employed at Fort Monmouth, in the Signal Corps, to commit espionage?” Levitsky again took the Fifth..³

As McCarthy turned up more and more evidence of security problems in the Army Signal Corps, relations between his group and the Army brass became strained.

During this period the Army suddenly changed David Schine’s draft classification from “4F” to “1A” and drafted him. He reported for duty in November of 1953, at the age of 26.⁴ Roy Cohn and others accused the Army of drafting Schine to intimidate McCarthy’s committee, but of course there is no way to know for sure whether the sudden change in Schine’s status was anything more than a coincidence.

During November and December of 1953, and January of 1954, Cohn asked the Army several times to grant Schine leave so that he could work on projects related to the ongoing investigations. The Army did in fact grant Schine leave for this purpose on several occasions. On March 10 of 1954, some seven months after McCarthy’s subcommittee held the first of its hearings on security problems at Fort Monmouth, the Army for the first time⁵ accused McCarthy’s people of seeking special privileges for David Schine.

McCarthy’s group did persuade the Army to grant Schine more leave than soldiers normally get, and Army brass did eventually complain that the days off amounted to “special privileges.” But the decision to investigate security problems at Fort Monmouth clearly was made before, not “after,” the Army complained about Schine. The textbook authors have apparently resorted to bending time to make McCarthy’s investigation of Fort Monmouth look like a witch hunt.

“No Basis in Fact”

The Textbook Give Me Liberty goes even further with its attacks on Senator McCarthy. The author, Professor Eric Foner, has reason to resent the Anti-Communist movement of the forties and fifties. Two years before he was born, his father, Professor Jack Foner, was fired by the City College of New York when he was accused by a committee of the State legislature of being a Communist, and refused to testify before the committee.

The younger Professor Foner didn’t fall too far from the tree. The sympathetic portrayals of the Communist Party USA in his textbook give some indication of where his sympathies lie. The book tells students that during the 1930’s the Communist Party USA “helped to imbue New Deal liberalism with a militant spirit and a more pluralistic understanding of Americanism.” He goes on to say that it was “not so much the party’s ideology as its vitality – its involvement in a mind-boggling array of activities including demonstrations for the unemployed, struggles for industrial unionism, and a renewed movement for black civil rights – that for a time made it the center of gravity for a broad democratic upsurge.”

Needless to say, Eric Foner is not a fan of Joseph McCarthy. He too goes beyond bias and becomes downright dishonest. McCarthy, he tells us, “never identified a single person guilty of genuine disloyalty,” he simply “made sweeping accusations with no basis in fact.”

The truth is very different.

Space does not permit anything like a comprehensive list of Soviet Agents McCarthy investigated and exposed. A few examples will have to do. For the reader’s convenience, I have chosen examples that can easily be confirmed via Wikipedia.

Leonard Mins was a defense worker with access to sensitive information when McCarthy called him in for a hearing. McCarthy and Roy Cohn asked Mins a series of direct questions including: “At the time you had access to this material were you a member of the Communist Party?” “Did you transmit the information…to Soviet military intelligence?” “Were you at that time on the payroll of the Soviet military intelligence?” Mins took the Fifth in response to each of these questions.⁶ The Venona documents confirm that he was a Soviet agent for many years.

V. Frank Coe was a Treasury Department employee questioned by McCarthy’s committee. He took the Fifth in response to the question “At the time you wrote that memorandum, were you engaged in espionage activities in behalf (sic) of the Soviet government?” The Venona decrypts confirm that he was. His code name was “Peak.”⁷

Harold Glasser, like Coe, was a Treasury Department employee investigated by McCarthy’s committee. (He was also a friend of Alger Hiss.) He took the Fifth in response to “At the time you attended those meetings, where you engaged in espionage?” as well as to “At the time you attended those meetings, were you a member of the Communist Party?” The Venona documents show that his Soviet code name was “Ruble.”⁸

In 1950 McCarthy accused a journalist named David Karr of being a Communist agent. Karr had written harsh criticisms of McCarthy and other anti-Communist crusaders of the time. McCarthy adduced Civil Service Committee records showing that Karr had been a member of the Communist Party USA, and had written for the party newspaper The Daily Worker. We now know that David Karr shows up in one of the Venona decrypts under his own name, without benefit of a code name, as a Soviet source.⁹ He also turns up in KGB files (which were made available to Western researchers for a short time in the early 90’s) as a “competent KGB source.”¹⁰

Given the abundance of evidence to the contrary, it is hard to find an innocent explanation for Dr. Foner’s claim that McCarthy “made sweeping accusations with no basis in fact.” It seems more likely that the professor is intentionally misrepresenting history. History students who are required to study Dr. Foner’s book would do well to remember how tendentious the author is.

McCarthy’s True Legacy

The Soviet Union was precisely what President Reagan said it was: an evil empire. The Soviet government murdered millions of its own citizens and fomented revolutions and terrorism around the world in an effort to enlarge its sphere of influence. The Soviets’ stated goal was to bring the entire world under Communist domination. To this end, the KGB and its predecessors employed a virtual army of traitors within American trade unions, media, academia, and, especially, within the US government itself.

The people who worked to expose Communist traitors, and expel them from positions of power in our government, deserve better treatment than they get in most history books. Today Soviet Communism lies moldering on the “ash heap of history,” thanks in part to the contributions of people like McCarthy. A few left-leaning scholars may pine for the Soviet Union, but most of us are glad it’s gone.

A fair rendering of history would credit Joseph McCarthy with being one of the men who helped defeat Communism, thus making the world a safer and better place. Unfortunately for the Senator, the people who write most of the commonly used history textbooks have no interest in presenting a fair rendering.

¹Rorabaugh, Critchlow, and Baker
²M. Stanton Evans, Blacklisted by History, p. 506
³ibid., p. 508
⁴ibid., p. 544
⁵ibid., p. 546
⁶ibid., p. 46
⁷ibid., p. 43
⁸ibid., p. 43
⁹ibid., pp. 44, 45
¹⁰Romerstein and Breindel, The Venona Secrets, pp. 138, 139

Most history textbooks use the word “McCarthyism” to describe the backlash against Soviet espionage and influence that took place in America from the mid 1940’s to the late 1950’s, despite the fact that Senator Joseph McCarthy played no role in “McCarthyism” until 1950, and his role in it was always limited to Senate hearings.

Joseph McCarthy was never part of the House Un-American Activities Committee. He never had anything to do with blacklisting Communists in Hollywood. He had nothing to do with the 1947 Loyalty Program that cost hundreds of government employees their jobs. He didn’t put Alger Hiss or the Rosenbergs on trial.

The almost universal use of the word “McCarthyism” among college professors and other liberals reflects the desire of people on the political left to discredit the whole anti-Communist movement of that era, through the use of a convenient villain. Senator McCarthy was his own worst enemy at times, and some of his personal failings have made him the right person to use to put a an ugly face on a movement leftists resent.

Eric Foner’s freshman history textbook Give Me Liberty, for example, tells the reader that by the time McCarthy died in 1957 “the word ‘McCarthyism’ had entered the political vocabulary, a shorthand for character assassination, guilt by association, and abuse of power in the name of anticommunism.”¹

What Professor Foner doesn’t say is that anti-Communism was an idea whose time had come by the mid 1940’s.

Foxes in the Henhouse

The period leading up to the “McCarthy Era” was an unusual time in American history. It was a time when the President of the United States could keep the nation’s wartime nuclear weapons program concealed from his own Vice President, but not from Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin. It was a time when one Communist traitor would represent the United States at the first meeting of the United Nations, and another would represent America at the founding conferences of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. It was, in short, a time when Soviet agents had infiltrated the United States government at every level.

Prior to about 1945 few people outside of the FBI would express much concern about Communist subversives and spies in the government. A Texas Democrat, Congressman Martin Dies Jr., chaired a committee that investigated Communist influences in the government; but even when the Dies committee would identify someone as a security risk the warning was often ignored.

Things began to change around 1945, when Soviet spymaster Elizabeth Bentley turned against the Russians and began cooperating with the FBI. By corroborating much of the testimony ex-Communist Whittaker Chambers had already given, she renewed congressional interest in Chambers, whom government leaders had been reluctant to believe at first. The testimonies of these two erstwhile Soviet agents shocked and angered the public. The extent of Soviet penetration of the US government that Bentley and Hiss described was horrifying, coming as it did at a time when Joseph Stalin’s crimes against his own citizens were also coming to light.

Anti-Communism: A Popular Movement

The hunt for enemy agents was widespread during this era, and it had many leaders. City and state police departments investigated local bureaucrats, union leaders like Samuel Gompers conducted purges, Republicans and Democrats held hearings at various levels of government.

Even Hollywood figures like John Wayne and Walt Disney crusaded against pro-Soviet subversion in those days, but left-leaning historians and textbook writers have settled on the word “McCarthyism” to describe the movement, presumably because it would be hard to give the word “Disney-ism” a sufficiently menacing sound.

Anti-Anti-Communism

Communism has always been considered chic in academia, and it remains so today, even though the Soviet Union itself lies moldering on the ash heap of history. It is still fashionable in some circles to talk in romantic terms about the theory of Marxism, while overlooking the abuses that happened in countries where the theory was put into actual practice. And many people who hold this point of view bitterly resent the backlash against Communism that so damaged its prospects in this country in the mid 20^th Century.

For this reason, leftist scholars have labored to put the ugliest possible face on the whole anti-Communist movement. And several things about Joe McCarthy make him stand out as the best poster child for a movement historians want to besmirch. McCarthy had a drinking problem. He had a temper. His disgust at Soviet infiltration of the government sometimes led him to lash out at other political leaders whose “don’t rock the boat” attitudes gave a layer of protection to well-connected persons.

The senator has been painted as an insincere opportunist, whose rage at Communist subversion was all just an act, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. Time and again, after asking some government official a question like “Have you ever turned government secrets over to anyone known to you to be an espionage agent?”² McCarthy would listen to another invocation of the Fifth Amendment, and react with anger that was ugly, but quite genuine.

McCarthy, unlike most congressmen, made little attempt to build alliances with other politicians to enlarge his power base and protect his back. He focused on his own agenda, and never learned the quid pro quo nature of DC politics. He lost the support of some of his fellow Republicans when Republican Dwight Eisenhower succeeded Democrat Harry Truman in the White House, and McCarthy kept up his hunt for administration spies without any regard for partisanship.

Not Ready for Prime Time

Even worse; McCarthy and his assistant, Roy Cohn, were slow to adapt to the rules that the new medium of television was writing for politics. The senator’s public image took a beating in March of 1954 when an Army Signal Corps code clerk named Annie Lee Moss was called before McCarthy’s committee to answer charges that she had gotten her security clearance by falsely denying membership in the Communist party. The hearing was televised.

Mrs. Moss was actually very bright; in addition to the challenging job she did for the army she held a real estate license in the District of Columbia. But on TV she came across as a kind but dim-witted little old lady who didn’t understand why she was being picked on. She even claimed that she had never heard of Karl Marx. And as Roy Cohn questioned her more and more aggressively she looked more and more the victim.

Subsequent evidence would prove beyond all doubt that she was deliberately lying when she denied her membership in the Communist party. But, as the Wikipedia page on Annie Lee Moss tells us, “Historians with a mainstream view of McCarthy have placed little importance on the issue of Moss’s guilt.”

The same could be said of the other Communist agents McCarthy exposed. Their guilt does not matter to “historians with a mainstream view.” McCarty’s abrasiveness and unpopularity make everything else a moot point.

Today history professors and other leftists will pull out McCarthy’s name like a gun from a holster, whenever anyone on the right complains about Communist infiltration in the United States. The mere use of the word is supposed to silence the heretic and end the debate. The finger points accusingly, the brows contract, and the charge is made: “That’s McCarthyism!”
¹Eric Foner, Give Me Liberty (2006 edition) p. 801
²M. Stanton Evans, Blacklisted by History, p. 509

The CPUSA was an agency under direct Soviet control, formed and operated to help the Soviet Union weaken and conquer the United States. But leftist college professors typically forget to mention that part of the story while teaching America’s next generation about the Smith Act trials of the party’s leaders.

Sympathy for the Devil

The freshman history textbook America’s Promise tells the story this way: “The Communist party also came under attack; a dozen of the top party leaders in America went to prison for their political beliefs.”  In his A People’s History of the United States Professor Howard Zinn complains that during the 40’s and 50’s in America “The whole culture was permeated with anti-Communism.” In his textbook Give Me Liberty, Eric Foner of Columbia University laments that “The campaign against subversion redrew the boundaries of acceptable Democratic liberalism to exclude both communists (sic) and those willing to cooperate with them.”

There were good reasons for Democrats and liberals to start excluding Communists from their circle, despite what Professor Foner might say about it. A brief history of the Communist party will show why.

All Roads Lead to Moscow

From 1919 to 1943 the Soviet government organized and ran overseas Communists parties under the Communist International, or “Comintern,” which held regular meetings in Moscow. Comintern was formed to fight “by all available means, including armed force, for the overthrow of the international bourgeoisie and for the creation of an international Soviet republic.” Comintern was officially “dissolved” in 1943, but continued to function as it had before in all but name.

The struggles for power that roiled the Soviet Union in the 1920’s and 30’s often had traumatic effects on the subordinate Communist parties in other nations, including the one in the United States. In 1924 Vladimir Lenin died, and Joseph Stalin began his bloody campaign for absolute power. In 1929 Stalin fired CPUSA leader Jay Lovestone and replaced him with William Foster. Nikolai Bukharin, the Comintern leader who had supported Lovestone, was kicked out of the Politburo in 1929, and executed in Moscow in 1938.

In 1932 William Foster retired as General Secretary of the party and the Soviets picked Earl Browder to replace him. There is room for debate about the extent of Communist spying conducted in the US before 1932, but it is indisputable that the party under Earl Browder recruited and managed a small army of traitors who worked in all departments of the Roosevelt administration, much to the detriment of American security. It is indisputable because Browder had the misfortune to have two of his high level agents turn against Communism and tell their stories to the FBI.

The Truth Comes Out

In 1943 CPUSA official Jacob Golos died of a heart attack. Golos had worked under Browder as the liaison for a network of spies run by Julius Rosenberg, funneling nuclear weapons secrets from the Manhattan project to the NKVD, the Soviet intelligence service that would eventually be re-organized as the KGB. He was also the Soviet liaison with the Nathan Silvermaster spy group, which operated primarily in the US Treasury Department and US Army Air Corps.  He had connections to the Perlo spy network, which reported directly to party Chairman Browder. It is widely believed that Golos was involved with the murder, on American soil, of Soviet defector Juliet Poyntz; and the murder in Mexico of Leon Trotsky.

Upon Golos’ death, Browder assigned all his contacts to Elizabeth Bentley, who had been Golos’ lover. In 1945 Bentley broke with the Communist party and started telling the FBI about her career as a spy, name by name and detail by detail. She identified over a hundred Communist agents, including dozens of US government employees.

Elizabeth Bentley was not the first of Browder’s protégés to leave the Communist party. Whittaker Chambers had left the party in 1938, taking the precaution of keeping copies of some of the sensitive government documents his network of spies had been stealing for him. In the 1940’s he began telling the FBI what he knew. When Elizabeth Bentley came along she unwittingly confirmed much of what the FBI had already learned from Chambers.

When Elizabeth Bentley and Whittaker Chambers were telling their tales, the FBI was already in possession of fairly extensive evidence of Soviet activities gathered through the US Army’s Venona Project, in which Soviet radio messages were intercepted and decrypted. The FBI never used the Venona documents as evidence in court, as this would have revealed to the Russians that the program existed. But when the Venona decrypts were de-classified in 1995 they provided researchers with never-before seen proof of the guilt of many Communist traitors from the mid-Twentieth Century.

Wikipedia’s article on CPUSA, and the linked article about Elizabeth Bentley, will confirm most of the statements presented in this blog. An excellent book on the subject, chock full of facts and figures that left-leaning history professors would find embarrassing, is Romerstein and Breindel’s The Venona Secrets.
  
One thing is certain. During the Cold War years, the Communist Party in the United States was not just a political party. It was the center of operations, within our own shores, of a hostile foreign power.

The part of this story that you won’t learn in college is that there actually were many Soviet spies in the government before and during the “McCarthy Era,” and that “McCarthyism” forced many of these enemy agents out of the government.

One element of this era that liberal academics love to misrepresent is the Loyalty Program established by a 1947 executive order signed by President  Truman. The three history professors who co-wrote the freshman textbook America’s Promise tell us that “In March 1947, under increasing pressure, Truman ordered the FBI to investigate all federal employees…So began the great witch hunt.”

Eric Foner’s widely used history book Give me Liberty similarly portrays Truman’s loyalty program as unjust and cruel, then goes on to say “The loyalty program failed to uncover any cases of espionage. But the federal government dismissed several hundred persons from their jobs, and thousands resigned rather than submit to investigation.”

In Howard Zinn’s aptly named A People’s History of the United States Zinn uses similar language about the loyalty program, and then quotes from yet another book that makes the same statement: “Not a single case of espionage was uncovered, though about 500 persons were dismissed in dubious cases of ‘questionable loyalty’…Despite the failure to find subversion, the broad scope of the official Red hunt gave popular credence to the notion that the government was riddled with spies.”

Foner and Zinn make much of the fact that Truman’s loyalty program did not “uncover” any Soviet spies. But neither of them tells us how he is defining the word “uncover.” Both authors admit that hundreds of federal employees were dismissed as a result of the program, but apparently assume that the government fired all those people without first identifying any of them as security risks.

If “failed to uncover any cases of espionage” means that Truman’s loyalty program did not result in the arrest, trial, and conviction of any Soviet spies; then the statement is specious to the point of being shameful. The complete text of Truman’s 1947 executive order is a matter of public record, and there is nothing in it that makes provision for arresting or trying spies. The FBI did arrest many Soviet agents during this period, but none of the spies were arrested as a direct result of Truman’s executive order. The 1947 loyalty program was designed not to catch spies, but to keep them out of the government. Saying that the loyalty program did not result in jail time for any Soviet spies is like saying the vault in your local bank has not captured any bank robbers.

As for what Zinn calls “the notion that the government was riddled with spies,” the government certainly was riddled with spies in those days. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, to cite two well-known examples, were hanged for running a spy ring that operated inside the Manhattan Project and gave Joseph Stalin the ability to develop an atom bomb. Alger Hiss, an American who was the first Secretary General of the United Nations, was convicted of perjury after lying about his involvement with a Soviet spy ring. So was William Remington. Cedric Belfrage, Frank Coe, Leonard Mins, and Harold Glasser had to invoke their Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination when asked questions like “Were you engaged in espionage activities in behalf of the Soviet Union?” and “Were you at that time on the payroll of the Soviet military intelligence?”

The list above is far from comprehensive. Space does not allow anything like a complete listing of US government employees who have been positively identified as Soviet agents. The handful of spies mentioned above were all members of the Communist Party USA, were all involved in illegal activities, and are all are easy to look up in a few seconds on Wikipedia.

The US Army’s “Venona” decrypts of Soviet radio traffic, along with KGB files briefly made available to Western researchers after the fall of the Soviet Union, have now confirmed the guilt of many suspected Soviet agents who managed to avoid arrest during their careers. Two excellent books on the subject of Soviet espionage areThe Venona Secretsby Herbert Romerstein and Eric Breindel, and Blacklisted by History by M. Stanton Evans. These books make for scary reading, as they detail the extent to which America’s government and other institutions were penetrated by agents of a hostile foreign power.

Calling President Truman’s loyalty program a “witch hunt” is a clever turn of phrase; it implies that there were never any actual witches out there, and that the hunt was a fraud. The truth of the matter is very different. The witches were real, and the hard work of exposing and expelling them may well have saved the United States from losing the Cold War.

Al Fuller