how did republicans use anti communism to help them regain power from the democrats?
how did republicans use anti communism to help them regain power from the democrats?
"The Politics of Scholarship: Liberals, Anti-Communism, and McCarthyism"
Athan Theoharis
During the 1950’s American liberals, influenced both by their identification with the New Deal presidency and their acceptance of the anti-Communist politics of the cold war years, sought to explain McCarthyism in terms of a mass-based, essentially non- partisan and nonconservative threat to American institutions. According to such scholars as Daniel Bell, Seymour Martin Lipset, Richard Hofstadter, and the other contributors to The New American Right, McCarthyism was an irrational popular response to the rise of the modern secular state. Like Populism, McCarthyism was not only a dangerous popular movement, they argued; it was also rooted in resentments produced by status anxiety. This analysis of the McCarthy phenomenon reinforced the belief of these scholars in the irrationality of mass-based protest and encouraged them to place their confidence in interest-group politics, in public and private bureaucracies, and in the educated elite that governed both. In these institutions, they hoped to find a bulwark against the dangers of popular passion.
Articulating these concerns, Hofstadter lamented the lack in the "populistic culture" of the United States of a "responsible elite with political and moral autonomy." Similarly, Lipset attributed McCarthyism to "the lack of an integrated cultural and political control structure–of a distinct aristocratic elite to play an integrative and leadership function." Peter Viereck, another contributor to The New American Right, charged that "The McCarthyites threaten liberty precisely because they are so egalitarian, ruling foreign policy by mass telegrams to the Executive Branch and by radio speeches and Gallup Poll." Finally, Talcott Parsons argued that a political elite composed "of ‘politicians’ whose specialty consist in the management of public opinion, and of ‘administrators’ in both civil and military services, must be greatly strengthened. It is here," he concluded, "that the practical consequences of McCarthyism run most directly counter to the realistic needs of the time."
This interpretation has been subjected to a brilliantly persuasive critique by Michael Paul Rogin who argues, in The Intellectuals and McCarthy: The Radical Specter, that there was no continuity between Populism and McCarthyism and that, even more important, McCarthyism was not a mass movement of the "radical" right, but rather the product of routine conservative politics. McCarthyism did not split apart existing coalitions or create a new mass base; it was created by the actions and inactions of conservative and liberal elites–precisely those groups to whom the liberal pluralists would turn to in their quest for an orderly society.
This analysis, however insightful its critique of the deficiencies of pluralistic theory, fails to discuss certain basic assumptions of these liberal scholars, especially their identification of presidential leadership with the national interest and their uncritical acceptance of the containment/loyalty-security policies of the Truman Administration. This essay intends to extend Rogin’s analysis and specifically to suggest that McCarthyism can best be understood as the product of the anti-Communist politics of the early cold-war years.
I
For American liberals, the experiences of the 1950’s shaped their conception of the American past and contributed to the popularity of consensus historiography. Writing during these years, liberal scholars came to celebrate the American past and to extol the beneficence of American political and economic institutions. Historians and other social scientists were especially supportive of activist presidential leadership. Strongly influenced by their identification with the New Deal presidency of Franklin Roosevelt and convinced by the experiences of World War II and the early cold war that public opinion was a potentially dangerous impediment to the conduct of American diplomacy, many liberal scholars sought to reinterpret democratic principles to justify the need for dynamic, even manipulative, executive leadership. To them, the President was the "central instrument of democracy," the national teacher, the American public’s "one authentic trumpet." Because the President alone represented all the people, and because he alone had command of the expertise necessary to make policy, he was therefore "the common reference point for social effort." Reformers were admonished to seek change through a vigorous executive rather than through Congress or through mass public pressure. Foreign policy, these scholars continued, was almost exclusively the preserve of the President. One noted authority, indeed, approvingly quoted Harry Truman’s bluntly revealing remark to the Jewish War Veterans: "I make American foreign policy."
This exalted view of the presidency was given wide currency during the 1950’s by Clinton Rossiter in The American Presidency. Written, as Rossiter himself noted, out of a "feeling of veneration, if not exactly reverence, for the authority and dignity of the presidency," The American Presidency extolled the strong-minded executive who bent Congress and the public to his will and who left as his legacy a strengthened executive office. The greatness of presidents, according to this calculus, lay in their success in leading a passive, if not recalcitrant, public into accepting new responsibilities.
Not only did Rossiter and other liberal scholars commend activist presidents; they particularly supported the substantive policy decisions of Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman. For Rossiter, Roosevelt’s greatness lay in the leadership he provided during depression and war, and Truman’s in his responses to the international crisis of the cold war. "Not one of [Truman's] grave steps in foreign and military affairs has yet been proven wrong, stupid, or contrary to the best judgment and interests of the American people," Rossiter contended. When Truman left office in January 1953, "we stood before the world a free, liberty-loving people with no more wounds and neuroses than we probably deserved."
Rossiter’s judgments, delivered in 1956, reflected the dominant concerns of the "new liberalism" that emerged during the cold-war years. Unlike their predecessors in the thirties, the new liberals did not consider themselves a part of the left but rather what Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., has called the "vital center". As such, they rejected the crusading rhetoric of the thirties with its blunt appeals to class interests and its demands for redistributive social change. Moreover, the new liberals had discovered in the "mixed" economy of the postwar years an alternative both to unregulated capitalism and to socialism. This economy–for them, an interest-group "democracy" presided over by "progressive" businessmen, trade unionists, and pragmatic politicians–had the dual advantage of ensuring prosperity and of providing the means to avoid class conflict. Reform, the new liberals thus argued, could be achieved without conflict through economic growth.
Again unlike the liberals of the thirties, the new liberals were also militantly anti-Communist. An excerpt from the organizational statement of principle and purpose of the Americans for Democratic Action (ADA), the chief vehicle for the new liberalism, captures this concern: "Because the interests of the United States are the interests of free men everywhere, America must furnish political and economic support to democratic and freedom-loving peoples the world over." This language–indistinguishable from the later-announced Truman Doctrine’s emphases on freedom and globalism–served to set the ADA apart from the postwar American left. Inevitably, then, with the intensification of the cold war, the ADA emerged as one of the principal and frequently uncritical defenders of the foreign and internal security policies of the Truman Administration.
During the late 1940’s specifically, the ADA endorsed the Truman Administration’s crusading anti-Communism, its loyalty program, and attacked Henry Wallace and other cold-war critics as naive and sentimental dupes of the Communists. Their criticisms even of the blatantly partisan and reactionary House Committee on Un-American Activities centered on that Committee’s methods not objectives–in the words of Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., the committee’s "promiscuous and unprincipled attack on radicalism." Writing in 1949, Schlesinger further extolled the need for a federal loyalty program, objecting only to certain procedural aspects of the recently established presidential program. Even then, Schlesinger muted his criticisms–one might have concluded that Schlesinger’s objections were not to specific provisions of Truman’s loyalty program (which they were) but to possible future abuses. And, when Schlesinger detailed examples of the precipitous and unfair dismissal of certain federal employees under the program, he lamely maintained that the executive branch only acted thusly because it had been "stampeded" by pressure from "witch-hunters in the Eightieth Congress."
Similarly, in the years after 1947 and as the result of internal decisions, the ADA came to subordinate liberal principles con- cerning the right to dissent and respect for individual liberties to the attainment of an effective anti-communist program. Dissent, for many ADAers, became a burdensome luxury to be exercised with cautious restraint, if at all. Thus, one ADAer, when recommending a strategy intended to undercut liberal support for Henry W
