The Enemy Within Read online

  With this, a stage was set for the emergence of the single most notorious anti-communist warrior of the entire century: Joseph R. McCarthy, a hitherto obscure Republican senator from Wisconsin. McCarthy’s opening salvo was a speech delivered in February 1950, in Wheeling, West Virginia, in the course of which he brandished a list supposedly identifying 205 “card-carrying” Communists then at work in the State Department. The number would vary over time—205 one day, 57 the next—but the very idea of a list, with its implied specificity, was electrifying. Moreover, events soon conspired to lift McCarthy’s profile enormously. Actual spies, it seemed, had penetrated to the heart of nuclear development programs both at home and abroad: hence the arrest, in quick succession, of Klaus Fuchs in Britain and Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in the United States. McCarthy had begun by targeting government officials of modest rank but would subsequently raise his aim to the level of Secretary of Defense George C. Marshall. Summing up the entire lot, he decried “a conspiracy so immense and an infamy so black as to dwarf any previous venture in the history of man.”

  But McCarthy was just the centerpiece—in some respects more symbolic than substantive—of a steadily building, polity-wide “crusade.” Elected officials across-the-board, including many Democrats, were following a similar track. In 1950 the Senate passed an Internal Security Act, extending political surveillance from the operations of government to private organizations and individuals. Membership in the Communist Party would henceforth be a crime; and potential “security risk,” rather than simple “loyalty,” became the disqualifying marker for federal employment. The Senate Internal Security Subcommittee began a new round of investigations, paralleling and occasionally exceeding the efforts of HUAC. Meanwhile, too, the Justice Department stepped up the pace of prosecutions under the Smith Act; eventually, dozens of actual or supposed Communists would be jailed. The FBI under Hoover played an especially important role here, compiling secret dossiers on thousands of American citizens (plus some noncitizens) and selectively releasing the contents to those agencies and officials most fully sympathetic to the anti-communist agenda. And Hoover played an increasingly influential part as public spokesman. “Communists,” he declared in a widely noted 1950 address, “are today at work within the very gates of America. . . . They have . . . one diabolic ambition: to weaken and to eventually destroy American democracy by stealth and cunning.”

  Thus did “McCarthyism” enter the mainstream of political life. And soon it would be augmented by powerful elements within the press, the business community (for example, a number of enormously wealthy Texas oilmen), the churches (especially evangelical Protestants and conservative Catholics), veterans groups, patriotic associations, and even some trade unions. Many of these sought to make a direct contribution to the anti-communist cause by weeding out “subversives” within their own ranks. Still, government itself remained the leading arm of attack. When Republicans triumphed in the 1952 national elections—taking control once again of both congressional Houses and making Dwight Eisenhower president—McCarthy gained a committee chairmanship to use as a forum for further investigation. The campaign had included much anti-communist rhetoric, with Democrats widely denounced for overseeing “twenty years of treason” and McCarthy cast in a central role; a respected political commentator could therefore conclude that “the voting majority indicated approval of . . . McCarthyism.” In the weeks and months to follow, the newly vindicated senator and his like-minded colleagues would pluck the fruits of their victory.

  Loyalty review boards increased their efforts against security risks in the federal workforce. Over 1,000 such had been discovered and dismissed during the last years of the Truman administration, and another 1,500 would depart in the Eisenhower era. Most were low- or middle-echelon operatives: secretaries, clerks, engineers, supervisors, and the like. But at least a few were distinguished civil servants and diplomats, including several in the State Department held responsible for “losing China” to Maoism. (Of course, the suffering and loss, to families as well as to the individuals directly involved, was huge in all cases—no matter the differences in position.)

  Even as this process continued, attention was shifting more and more toward “subversives” in various fields outside the government. There was a growing sense of peril to ordinary citizens from the covert designs of Red-leaning schoolteachers, journalists, social workers and other seeming “do-gooders,” and even some in the churches. Hundreds of teachers would lose their jobs in states like New York and California, and many of those who remained were compelled to sign loyalty oaths. Universities were similarly affected; leading professors resigned in protest or were summarily fired. The Hollywood blacklist expanded to include dozens more actors, producers, and directors—and was extended to the television industry as well. In all this, HUAC, its Senate counterparts, and other investigatory bodies both expressed and intensified deep-seated public anxieties about Communist “indoctrination.”

  The wave of fear about domestic subversion crested, and began to recede, in 1954. And McCarthy himself was first to fall. His popular support, as measured by opinion surveys, reached its highest level that January, but he would soon make a fatal strategic error. He had already begun, in the previous year, a politically hazardous probe of “disloyal tendencies” among the staff at a military base in New Jersey; in short order this would embroil him with high-ranking officers and then with the secretary of the army, Robert T. Stevens. The subsequent Army-McCarthy hearings degenerated into farce, with McCarthy at the witness table, mixing baldly gratuitous smears of his adversaries with endless procedural interventions. Television covered the entire proceeding, and millions watched as it stretched through one embarrassing week after another. By the end, McCarthy’s reputation was shattered. The Eisenhower White House, previously diffident toward nearly all his activities, at last offered direct criticism. A colleague (and fellow Republican) introduced in the Senate a formal motion of censure, which was passed in December by a solid, bipartisan majority; henceforth he was largely ignored by both press and public. With his health undermined by alcoholism, McCarthy would die a scant three years later.

  For almost the last time we ask: was it a witch-hunt? Indeed, it was labeled that way far more often, and to more telling effect, than any of the preceding “scares.” The reason is obvious. Arthur Miller’s remarkable play The Crucible—holding up the Salem trials as a kind of dark mirror to McCarthyism—was written and performed virtually at its height. Herein lies the chief source of our fondness for the metaphor ever since. But, again: with what basis in the actual events? Let us count the ways, most of them by now entirely familiar. “A conspiracy so immense” (in McCarthy’s own words). To be achieved by “stealth and cunning” (Hoover’s words). Prompted by “diabolic ambition” (Hoover again). Of alien origin (the Soviet Union). With a highly authoritarian structure (the Communist Party). Liable to infect the unwitting (“dupes” in government and elsewhere). And thus requiring a vigorous purge (blacklisting, deportation, imprisonment). Meanwhile, in those who supported the “hunt”: revulsion, outrage, deep anxiety, a will to revenge. And the whole framed in starkly moral, and bipolar, terms: Good versus Evil, the God-inspired versus the Godless. However, there is no particular sign of a gendered element. And the impetus—the sponsorship—seems more overtly political than in our other cases: Republicans seizing a fine opportunity to belabor Democrats.

  McCarthy’s personal and political disgrace cast a long shadow over the anti-communist project. And there were broader changes afoot. With a Republican president in office, anti-communism as a partisan tool seemed largely irrelevant. Moreover, the end of the Korean War, the death of the Soviet dictator Stalin, the opening of deep schisms within the Communist bloc, the growing strength of the Western alliance: these factors, separately and together, served to blur the sense of inhabiting a bifurcated world with apocalypse looming. The Cold War was becoming a manageable, livable situation; the siege mentality it had initially foster
ed began to weaken. Both public opinion and government itself turned away from extreme preoccupation with “security” issues. The Supreme Court, in particular, rendered a series of crucial decisions redefining and restricting the investigative powers of congressional committees, the FBI, and other federal agencies. The very word “McCarthyism” became, for many, a kind of epithet.

  Beginning in the late 1950s, a “liberal consensus” would set a new and different tone, and last through the next two decades. In 1980 the pendulum swung back, with the emergence of a “conservative consensus.” In neither case did attacks on the weak domestic Communist Party play a major role. Thus was the “Red” bogeyman, which had so bedeviled American public life for almost a century, finally laid to rest.

  We have five cases—or “episodes”—before us. And they do yield a broadly consistent picture.

  All began with the aspect of “scare.” This is to say that all were fueled by extraordinarily strong, widely shared emotion—fear, most especially, but also anger, distress, contempt. And so, too, were the witch-hunts once fueled.

  All produced a vivid idea—an image—of their adversaries that was wildly exaggerated, not to say fantastic. Its chief components were conspiracy, secrecy and deception, vast dimensions, deeply subversive purpose, alien origin, unseen contamination (and contagion), authoritarianism, moral polarities, and potentially apocalyptic menace. (The proportions would vary somewhat from one case to another.) And these were also key components of witch-hunting.

  Most, if not all, traced a process that included the following stages: identification (of the enemy), magnification (of his inherent qualities and powers), intense and “spiraling” investigation (where one accusation leads directly to others), and measures, finally, of social exclusion. Here, too, lay evident and important parallels to witch-hunting.

  Some, though not all, proceeded under one or another form of elite sponsorship: for example, an economic elite (corporate enterprise), or a political one (partisan leadership). In traditional witch-hunting, the sponsorship typically came from a religious elite—in short, the Church hierarchy.

  In each case, the underlying social and psychological vectors included what clinicians call “projection” or “externalization” (attributing to others unwanted parts of oneself), plus a closely related urge toward purity, unity, and inner coherence. No less was true of witch-hunting.

  And yet the likeness is not complete. Some differences of degree, and of procedure, must be acknowledged. None of our five modern episodes included outright torture, a notorious feature of many traditional witch-hunts. And in only one (Haymarket) were death sentences imposed and carried out. Moreover: in no case does a strongly gendered element appear. Men were the principal targets (though not exclusively so). This was, presumably, a function of men’s dominant public position since the events themselves belonged to the public domain. Witch-hunting, in strong contrast, was deeply—and lethally—misogynous.

  There remains, finally, the difficult issue of “reality”—an “actual” basis, or stimulus, to set the whole chain in motion. There were Communists in America during the McCarthy era, at least a few of whom—we now know—were Soviet spies. There were “Reds” of various kinds at the time of the Palmer raids, some of whom did seek to advance revolutionary goals. There were strident labor activists to spark the Haymarket affair. There were Freemasons galore in the 1820s and ’30s, ensconced in their lodges and devoted to their fraternal “rites.” There was even a Society of Illuminati in the late 18th century, though perhaps without any significant American membership. In every case, then, the feelings of “scare”—and the image they conjured up—had some relation, however remote, to real people and actual events.

  Might one also have found “actual” witches in pre-modern times? Certainly contemporaries thought so. Witchcraft was an assumed part of their cosmological world; its mostly unseen, but strongly felt, presence was to them beyond doubt. Here, then, the boundary between the actual and the imagined grows blurred. The safest conclusion about these various events—witch-hunts in both the literal and the metaphorical sense—is that all included extraordinary forms and levels of exaggeration, misperception, and (at some points) outright fantasy. Put differently: the distance between any actual stimulus, on the one side, and the prevalent imagery (and concurrent emotion), on the other, was huge. In the end, it is this distance—these extreme distortions—that best define witch-hunting.

  There is a final commonality here: an intense and pervasive preoccupation with questions of loyalty. In the pre-modern era, this meant loyalty to organized Christianity, with witches cast as a deeply undermining force. In late 18th- and 19th-century America, with both “Illuminism” and the Masons, it meant loyalty to “republican freedom.” In the 20th century, with the postwar Red Scares, it meant loyalty to the values of democracy and individualism. In each case, the figure of the accused directly inverted a core allegiance.

  In sum, the elements of likeness, all the crosscutting commonalities, do seem to outweigh the differences; the metaphor includes much that justifies it. A version of witch-hunting has indeed survived into the modern era. In fact, it has reached into our own lifetimes, appearing here and there in the very recent past. A striking example comes from the 1980s and early ’90s; in many ways it brings this entire history full circle—back even to the workings of Satan and his (supposed) earthly followers.

  The Child Sex-Abuse Crisis (1983-circa 1995)

  It became, in the blunt words of two prize-winning investigative reporters, “a witch-hunt unparalleled in modern times.” Its focal period was 1983-88, though its closing phase stretched on for considerably longer. Its geographic dimensions were nationwide, though individual cases fell disproportionately on the West and East coasts. And its similarity to pre-modern witch-hunting was openly recognized—indeed emphasized—virtually from the start, though mostly by its critics and victims.

  In retrospect, one could almost see it coming. The decades of the 1960s and ’70s had been famously unsettling with their turbulent “movement” politics and a broad array of challenges to received convention. There was a war fought in the face of massive public opposition, and “lost” (for the first time ever, it was said, in American history). There was a broad-gauge revamping of gender roles, with women entering the workforce in unprecedented numbers. There was a step-by-step relaxation of traditional constraints on personal behavior, including dress, deportment, and common speech. There was a “sexual revolution,” in tandem with a new contraceptive technology (“the pill”), and a reversal of legal barriers to abortion. There was a whole galaxy of “liberation” struggles around previously disadvantaged minorities.

  Parts of this ferment were pointed straight toward the inner workings of family life. In the early 1960s, the deeply troubling problem of child battering was first “discovered” and publicly acknowledged, setting in motion a train of policy initiatives that would culminate a dozen years later with important congressional legislation (the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act of 1974, also known as the Mondale Act after its chief sponsor, the then-senator Walter Mondale). Another so-called discovery, related but different, was father-daughter incest; this, too, sparked high levels of public alarm. The apparent growth of religious “cults” seemed to present special enticements—and dangers—to young people, prompting parents to form advocacy groups dedicated to the goal of “deprogramming.” Concern for “missing children,” their numbers estimated as high as 50,000 per year, led to widely publicized campaigns of retrieval. Anxiety descended even to the commonplace level of Halloween crime: apples and candy supposedly laced with razor blades or poisons in order to injure innocent young trick-or-treaters. Finally, the growth (however modest) of Wicca and related “occult” practice generated dark fears of Satanism. (A 1973 survey showed that half of Americans believed in Satan as a literal, personified presence; a decade later, fully 70 percent were found to credit the existence of sexually abusive, Satanic cults.) A spate of
books published around 1980 presented, by way of “recovered memory,” victim accounts of ritual assault in childhood at the hands of organized Devil worshipers.

  The underlying realities here spanned a broad range. Child battering and incest were real enough; perpetrators could be identified in large numbers. Most “missing children” however, turned out to be runaways or the unfortunate victims of custody disputes. Halloween crime was, for the most part, an urban legend. And “recovered memory” remains highly controversial to the present day. Still, all these trends—no matter the reality—helped build a mood of fearfulness around the current state, and future prospects, of the family. Meanwhile, too, the divorce rate continued to rise, reaching a much-noted peak of half of all marriages begun in the 1970s. In sum: community turmoil; family disintegration; children in peril. And fear, guilt, outrage, in fateful convergence: a recipe for crisis if ever there was one.

  It began in California, with the apparent exposure of a “sex ring” in Bakersfield (at the lower end of the Great Central Valley) and then of an abusive day-care center in Manhattan Beach (near Los Angeles). The resultant investigations laid down a double template for a nationwide “crusade” to follow.