Daniel J. Flynn

During the period known today as “the McCarthy era,” it was possible for a group of fanatics to terrorize those that held dissenting opinions regarding the nature of communism. One elected official, whose non-conformist views on communism bucked the establishment, saw his phone tapped, his tax returns illegally made public, and his incoming correspondence intercepted by a “mail cover.” Drew Pearson, one of America’s most widely read columnists, placed a paid spy in his office and a large daily newspaper in Las Vegas predicted and welcomed his assassination. His colleagues in the Senate even attempted to suspend democracy and invalidate his election for the sole reason that the voters of his state had made a choice with which they disagreed.

These extremists who attempted to stamp out dissent, were themselves, in fact, the very same communists, fellow travelers, and unwitting accomplices of totalitarianism who claimed to be the victims of "McCarthyism." The Senator they so viciously attacked, of course, was Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin.

In a sense, the liberals have been right all along. The "McCarthy era" was a time when it was dangerous to shun conformity. Yet the views that were being stamped out were those that correctly saw Communism as a murderous ideology which had infiltrated high levels of the United States government. One can still hear the sneers and snickers over McCarthy’s condemnations of "twenty years of treason" or warnings of "a conspiracy on a scale so immense." Yet, in light of declassified documents from both major participants in the Cold War, McCarthy’s general charges seem to be anything but overstated.

In Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America, Yeshiva University Professor Ellen Schrecker admits, "Despite the wide spread contention that McCarthy and his colleagues picked on innocent liberals, most of the men and women who lost their jobs or were otherwise victimized were not apolitical folks who had somehow gotten on the wrong mailing lists or signed the wrong petitions. Rather…they had once been in or near the American Communist party. Whether or not they should have been victimized, they certainly were not misidentified."

So it has come to this. Activist intellectuals, like Professor Schrecker, are no longer comfortable defending domestic-subversives as martyrs who had been wrongfully accused. Now they admit that most of those they claimed were victims of a "witch-hunt," were real and not imaginary witches. Today, with an avalanche of new information vindicating the charges of internal subversion, many academics have been forced to find new ways to denigrate the anti-Communist crusade. "Were these activities so awful?" Schrecker asks. "Was the espionage, which unquestionably occurred, such a serious threat to the nation’s security that it required the development of a politically repressive internal security system?" Communists, Schrecker contends, were not betraying their country. They just "did not subscribe to traditional forms of patriotism."

Schrecker’s mental gymnastics in defending the CPUSA (Communist Party of the United States of America) in almost every instance is perhaps nowhere more evident than in her treatment of the party’s stance on the Smith Act, a law that made advocating the overthrow of the U.S. government a federal crime.

"Though the CP’s leaders realized that the law might someday be used against their own party, their wartime loyalty to FDR and hostility to Trotskyism kept them from speaking out," explains Schrecker regarding the initial silence from the Party.

Yet the Communists did speak out—in favor of the Smith Act.

At first, the Communists enthusiastically supported the Smith Act because it was used as a tool for attacking their enemies, Trotskyists and German Bundists. Years after intellectual Phillip Jaffe’s association with Communism ended, he pointed out that in 1941 the CPUSA "prepared for the Department of Justice an important collection of documents to help prove the guilt of the Socialist Workers Party. There were 14 documents in all, including a separate 24-page typescript report prepared by the CP for the prosecution, titled ‘The Fifth Column Role of the Trotskyites in the United States.’" It was only later, when the law was used against the CPUSA, that party members made their unprincipled stand against the Smith Act.

Equally bizarre is Schrecker’s treatment of Elizabeth Bentley, the Soviet spy-master turned informant. Schrecker’s Bentley is a "melodramatic, unstable, and alcoholic woman" who told a "convoluted story" and penned a "fictionalized memoir." Yet all of the new information relevant to Bentley’s "convoluted story,"—e.g. Soviet spy traffic decoded by the National Security Administration’s (NSA) Venona project, documents released from the archives of the Soviet Union, and declassified FBI files—confirms the truth of her allegations.

Yale University’s Annals of Communism series includes three documents detailing the Red ties of seven U.S. government officials, which matches "precisely with the story Bentley told in Out of Bondage," her supposedly "fictionalized memoir." "Despite her dismissal as a ‘New England spinster,’" Yale’s Secret World of American Communism notes, "Elizabeth Bentley knew what she was talking about."

Further confirmation comes from the American government’s top-secret Venona project. The Venona decripts were," explains the NSA’s initial Venona monograph, "to show the accuracy of…Bentley’s disclosures." Among the government officials accused of spying by Bentley and later identified as espionage agents by Venona include Nathan Gregory Silvermaster, Alger Hiss, and Harry Dexter White.

Like Schrecker, Albert Fried’s apparent adoration of Marxism prevents him from objectively analyzing almost anything involving the Soviet Union or American Communism. In McCarthyism: The Great American Red Scare, the retired SUNY-Purchase professor opines, "the Soviet Union alone among the major powers stood up to advancing Fascism" and praises the USSR’s "lonely resistance to Fascist expansion, Hitler’s in particular." Only in passing does he note Stalin’s two-year alliance with Hitler. Absent entirely is an explanation of why the American Communist Party reversed many of its long-held positions—such as its about face on aid to nations fighting Hitler—in the wake of 1939’s Nazi-Soviet accord. Nor does he examine the spectacle of "anti-fascist" groups ceasing their criticisms of Hitler and changing their names—such as the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League’s permutation into the Hollywood Committee for Democratic Action—after Moscow had established itself as a de facto ally of the Germans.

Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, Fried still posits, "Whatever one thought of [the CPUSA’s] authoritarian style and modus operandi and their attachment to the Soviet Union, they had never behaved illegally until the government decided they did in 1948."

From the laundering of Soviet money by Armand Hammer, to the atomic espionage of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, American Communists were engaged in nearly every criminal activity one can think up.

Schrecker proclaims, "Communism offered more than tokenism to its black members." It certainly did. For Lovett Fort-Whiteman, a leading African-American Communist, it offered a grisly death in the Gulag. Denounced by his fellow American Communists as a "Trotskyist," Fort-Whiteman’s visit to the Soviet Union was interrupted when he was snatched by the NKVD and sent to Siberia, where his teeth were kicked in and he was starved to death. American Communists would play an even greater role in the liquidation of those they suspected of ideological deviation during the Spanish Civil War, the Russo-Finnish War, and at various other times.

Indeed, aiding and abetting murder was only one of the many crimes in which American Communists took part. Over the course of seven decades, the CPUSA violated U.S. campaign finance laws by receiving subsidies from the Soviet Union. With documentation from the files of the Soviet Union, Yale University’s Annals of Communism series illustrates that during the 1920s, the CPUSA received between one third and one half of its budget from the USSR. From 1958 to 1980, $28 million was delivered by two double agents alone. The subsidies reached the $3 million dollar per annum mark by the late 1980s after CPUSA head Gus Hall bragged to Anatoli Dobrynin, "The fact is we were influential and even the deciding factor in the defeat of some extreme Reaganite candidates." The CPUSA was shut off in 1989 when Gus Hall finally stopped parroting the Moscow line and criticized the Soviet Union—for glasnost and other reforms designed to create a more free society!

Both books—ostensibly about "McCarthyism"—curiously steer clear of the precise charges leveled by Wisconsin’s junior senator. In Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America, only one chapter out of ten focuses on McCarthy and his accusations; in McCarthyism: The Great American Red Scare just one of eleven chapters addresses the specific allegations put forward by the farm-boy turned senator. When either of the books do pause to examine McCarthy’s allegations of Communist infiltration of the U.S. government, they stoop to utilizing the same tactics that they allege were employed by McCarthy.

Nowhere is the smear of McCarthy so incredulous as when it concerns his February 9, 1950 address in Wheeling, West Virginia, where McCarthy asserted that the State Department knowingly kept Communists on the payroll.

"He did not have the names," claims Fried, "or rather, the names he released, few in any case, were of little consequence. They were liberals, and in one or two instances they might have espoused the popular front line, but Communists they definitely were not (even assuming, falsely, that Communists were automatically traitors)."

McCarthy did have the names and he released them to the Senate shortly after making the speech that would thrust him into the national spotlight.

Schrecker and Fried state as if it were established fact, for instance, that McCarthy used the number "205" in reference to his now infamous list that he revealed in Wheeling. Yet only one person with any connection to the Wheeling speech backed up Wheeling Intelligencer reporter Frank Desmond’s assertion that McCarthy used the "205" figure in relation to Communists being harbored by the State Department. An editorial in the Intelligencer on the same day that the "205" figure was reported, for instance, confirmed that McCarthy had "shocked his audience when he charged there are over fifty persons of known Communistic affiliation still sheltered in the U.S. Department of State." Many local citizens who attended the address also corroborated Senator McCarthy’s version of events. Reporter Desmond finally admitted that he had based his report of the speech not on his eyewitness account of the event, but by lazily relying on the notes that the senator used for his largely extemporaneous address.

Perhaps Schrecker and Fried believe this lone journalist’s report over the account given by a senator, the Intelligencer’s editorial page editor, and several other witnesses interrogated by Democratic congressional investigators. This is their prerogative. This Queen of Hearts condemnation of McCarthy without the presentation of the full facts of the incident, however, does a disservice to their readers, who are presumably intelligent enough to make up their minds for themselves.

One man included in the names McCarthy released to the Senate was Owen Lattimore. "McCarthy and his friends had tortured no one more than Lattimore," claims Fried, "whom McCarthy had accused of being the State Department traitor he had in mind when he was throwing his numbers around. Nothing came of that charge except Lattimore’s public humiliation." Schrecker goes further and states that the Johns Hopkins University professor "had never worked for the State Department…. Nor had Lattimore been a Communist," labeling him, "just a liberal."

Lattimore, who held a series of government positions throughout the ‘40s, most definitely did work in the State Department. In a letter found in the files of the pro-Communist Institute of Pacific Relations, he writes, "I am in Washington about 4 days a week, and when there can be reached at Lauchlin Currie’s office, room 228, State Department Building." Currie, it should be noted, is named as a Soviet agent in the Venona intercepts.

Was Lattimore, as McCarthy contended, not fit to serve in sensitive positions in the U.S. government?

At the outset of World War II, the FBI compiled a 5,000-page dossier on Lattimore and recommended that he be put under "Custodial Detention in case of national emergency." He was known to be an agent of the Soviet Union by many former Russian and American Communists. He edited a magazine, Pacific Affairs, staffed and funded by Communists. In his journal he proclaimed, "the Soviet Union stands for democracy," and about Moscow’s Show Trials, he stated, "That sounds to me like democracy." In a meeting with Soviet officials in Moscow, Lattimore even solicited articles from the Communist government, stating, "if the Soviet group would show in their articles a general line—a struggle for peace—the other articles would naturally gravitate to that line." He added that "he was willing to have P.A. reflect such a line." Quite clearly, Owen Lattimore was not "just a liberal."

More than forty years have passed since Senator McCarthy lay in state in the U.S. Capitol. Time has confirmed the enormity of the crimes of Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, and their dozens of impersonators throughout the world. Here in America, time has vindicated the anti-Communist cause by revealing the unquestionable guilt of scores of Americans that had previously thought to be "smeared" by "McCarthyism."

Ellen Schrecker vindictively professes in the introduction to Many Are the Crimes, "the political account books remain open. It is time to settle them."

Schrecker and other academics sympathetic to the American Communist Party should be careful of what they wish for – this may just come true.