Not Without Honor: The History of American Anticommunism

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Feb 26, 1996 | by Harvey Klehr

American democracy has defeated two totalitarian rivals in the last 50 years. The victory over fascism, achieved during World War II at the cost of thousands of lives, was an occasion of national rejoicing. The victory over communism, achieved after a Cold War that occasionally turned hot, has been relatively ignored.

In fact, Americans seem faintly embarrassed by the collapse of communism. At the time of its demise, communism no longer seemed quite as threatening or dangerous as it once had. To many Americans, anticommunism suggested fanaticism. When Ronald Reagan denounced the Soviet Union as an "evil empire" in 1983, he was condemned roundly by the media. As late as 1987, a conference on anticommunism at Harvard University brought together academics and activists united by the belief enunciated by Joel Kovel, the Alger Hiss Professor of Social Studies at New York's Bard College, that anticommunism was an irrational disease.

Why did anticommunism get such a bad name? How could enemies of a doctrine so inimical to the American character become marginalized in American intellectual life? These are among the questions that Richard Gid Powers sets out to answer in his fascinating new study Not Without Honor: The History of American Anticommunism (Free Press, 554 pp). Powers traces the threads of the doctrine back through the 20th century and restores the reputations and wisdom of some much-reviled figures in American historiography.

Anticommunism came in many guises. Liberals, socialists, Catholics, Jews and conservatives all had their own reasons to despise a doctrine that attacked religion, denigrated individualism, mocked democracy and promised to destroy traditional society and its values. Powers provides vivid reminders of the varying motives that united such disparate figures as Abraham Cahan, an immigrant socialist Jew; George Schuyler, a black journalist; J. Edgar Hoover, a conservative government bureaucrat; Father Edmund Walsh, an intellectual Jesuit from Georgetown University; and Sidney Hook, who played a key role in exposing the Moscow trials and defying totalitarianism. While all were anticommunists, they were attracted to the doctrine for different reasons and in response to different constituencies. Hence, they rarely could agree on specific policies to combat communism or on what attitudes to adopt toward politicians who raised the issue.

According to Powers, anticommunism was held in low esteem in part because of the activities of what he calls the countersubversive anticommunists, people who specialized in lurid exposes such as Red Web or Reds in America. Even when they included accurate information, sometimes gleaned from party files, writers these intricate conspiracy theories often misunderstood the evidence they had and attributed startling power to their enemies. Their frequent inability to separate fact from fiction and their willingness to identify communism with liberalism or radicalism or Judaism had a long-lasting and pernicious effect. The wild charges made by Elizabeth Dilling and Martin Dies in the thirties and forties convinced many liberals that anticommunism was synonymous with hostility to the New Deal.

The high tide of countersubversive anticommunism was McCarthyism. Powers notes that Sen. Joe McCarthy's meteoric career, filled with demagogic charges and a wild melange of truth and fantasy, did more than any other factor to identify anticommunism with irresponsibility and extremism in the public mind. Frightened by his successes, "many liberals came to reject not just McCarthyism, but all conservative, popular forms of anticommunism as a threat to freedom," Powers writes.

The death of Joseph Stalin and the end of the Korean War contributed to splintering of the anticommunist movement, never highly unified to begin with. To some, communism seemed less of a threat and more of an anachronism. When in the sixties the media focused on remarks attributed to Robert Welch, founder of the John Birch Society, that President Dwight Eisenhower was a conscious instrument of the communist conspiracy, the public identification of anticommunism with kooks seemed complete.

The Vietnam War confirmed such suspicions among the liberal elite. Originally justified in traditional Cold War terms, the Vietnam episode increasingly came to be regarded as an inevitable consequence of a mindless and obsessive anticommunism, the product of a doctrine no longer relevant to the more complex, postcolonial world. By the sixties, the worst epithet in American life was "McCarthyite," which had been expanded in meaning from someone making false accusations of communism to anyone calling a communist a communist. Books and movies reevaluating the forties and fifties demonized anticommunists and proclaimed communists and their allies moral exemplars and heroic idealists persecuted by a racist, xenophobic and reactionary society.

Powers concludes his journey through the history of American anticommunism by analyzing its dramatic resurgence in the seventies and eighties. Intellectually revitalized by the efforts of Norman Podhoretz and Commentary magazine, it reached its height with the election of President Reagan in 1980.