I visited the folks this weekend, and while there, I came across McCarthy: Reexaming the life of America’s Most Hated Senator, by Arthur Herman, a professor at George Mason University.
“This should be interesting,” I thought, “I haven’t read anything re-evaluating the Red Scare in light of the opening of the KGB files.” So I dive in.
About 100 pages later I dive out again. The author had destroyed all his credibility before we even got to the meat of McCarthy’s career. I got my first warning in the Introduction, when Herman presented statistics on the human toll of the Red Scare. He wrote that 10,000 people lost their jobs, 108 were convicted of subversive activities, about a dozen were convicted of espionage, and two (the Rosenbergs) were executed. Fine, nice statement of facts.
But then, Herman goes on to contrast these statistics with the purges in Soviet Russia, where 3.5 million people were purged, thousands imprisoned, executed, etc., etc. Herman’s implication was that, in comparison, the Red Scare in the U.S. wasn’t that bad.
Huh? What does one got to do with the other? At the very least, aren’t we in the United States supposed to hold ourselves to a higher standard than a totalitarian regime?
Despite this, I plunged ahead. I got to Herman’s section on the background of the Red Scare. There, he presented the following argument: Liberals who joined the Communist party or a front organization in the 30’s had committed a “fatal error in judgment,” and therefore deserved to lose their jobs 10-20 years later. At this point I lost it.
There is some basis for this argument - if the prior conduct had been illegal. But it wasn’t. Further, I didn’t see Herman taking the position that fellow conservatives who used to be segregationists should be barred from their jobs now.
So whaddya think? Did I judge Herman too quickly, or was I right in determining that he had destroyed his credibility?
At least Julius was - the evidence is still out on Ethel. My understanding of the Soviet archives is that Julius was the agent, and there are indications that Ethel aided him. Wittingly or unwittingly is up in the air.
And this is what annoyed me about Herman’s book. There is new evidence, and therefore there is a valid basis for a re-examination of that time period, and McCarthy’s involvement. Why he couldn’t do it without setting up strawmen is beyond me.
“Deserved to lose their jobs” is a less-than-rigorous statement.
The short answer as I see it is “No - you did not abandon the book too soon; the author did hurt his credibility.”
In more detail: if you’re talking about something like the Hollywood blacklist, I think there’s a case, albeit threadbare, to be made for “deserving” to lose jobs over past associations, even if they were not illegal. Any position in which public perception plays an almost solitary role is filled with such risks. As an analogy, I might say that Rock Hudson would have “deserved” to lose his job opportunities if he had come out, since he knew that Hollywood, and the nation in general, was unforgiving of homosexual lifestyles. Obviously, we now have a different attitude - but the fact of the matter is that the studios were in business, and were entitled to make judgements based on their best business perceptions. Any person making a living in that industry must know - always - that some facet of their life may cause them to fall out of favor with the public, or with their bosses because of a fear of public reaction.
None of this admittedly weak reasoning can be applied to the State Department or other government employees. Unlike those who eke out a living from a fickle ticket-buying public, they were entitled to expect their government to follow basic rules of due process. This includes not imposing ex post facto employment conditions such as prohibiting Communist party membership. These people were vilified for joining, or even visiting meetings of, an organization that was not illegal. Hell, it represented a political movement that was our ostensible ally during World War II. They had no notice that this was a prohibited activity, and no reason to believe their careers might be in jeopardy.
That’s not to say that then-current members of the Communist Party could not have been legitimately fired. The government has - and had - every right to prohibit employees who sought its violent overthrow, which the Communist party certainly did. And I’d be very interested in seeing a dispassionate analysis of just how real, if at all, that threat was, in light of newly-available KGB records. My guess is that it was a paper tiger, and nothign more; I’m certainly willing to be proved wrong on that view.