McCarthyism – Political Payback

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Last week I published a long article exploring the history of Sen. Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin, whose anti-Communist crusade dominated our politics of the early 1950s. His activities gave rise to “McCarthyism” as a term of abuse and despite the passage of three generations, that expression still seems so widely used today that it has its own 14,000 word Wikipedia article.

In February 1950 McCarthy received huge media attention when he began giving public speeches denouncing the alleged dangers our country faced from the subversive activities of Communists and Soviet agents. Based upon my mainstream history textbooks and the media coverage I’d absorbed, I’d always regarded those claims as wildly exaggerated, so I’d been greatly surprised to gradually discover that the domestic threat of Soviet Communist agents had once been at least as severe as McCarthy alleged.

However, although I became convinced that the menace of Communist infiltration had been very real, I still regarded the senator’s own behavior as erratic, with McCarthy prone to making wild accusations. As I wrote a dozen years ago:

In mid-March, the Wall Street Journal carried a long discussion of the origins of the Bretton Woods system, the international financial framework that governed the Western world for decades after World War II. A photo showed the two individuals who negotiated that agreement. Britain was represented by John Maynard Keynes, a towering economic figure of that era. America’s representative was Harry Dexter White, assistant secretary of the Treasury and long a central architect of American economic policy, given that his nominal superior, Secretary Henry Morgenthau Jr., was a gentleman farmer with no background in finance. White was also a Communist agent.

Such a situation was hardly unique in American government during the 1930s and 1940s. For example, when a dying Franklin Roosevelt negotiated the outlines of postwar Europe with Joseph Stalin at the 1945 Yalta summit, one of his important advisors was Alger Hiss, a State Department official whose primary loyalty was to the Soviet side. Over the last 20 years, John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr, and other scholars have conclusively established that many dozens or even hundreds of Soviet agents once honeycombed the key policy staffs and nuclear research facilities of our federal government, constituting a total presence perhaps approaching the scale suggested by Sen. Joseph McCarthy, whose often unsubstantiated charges tended to damage the credibility of his position.

Some years later I’d read Blacklisted by History, a ringing 2007 defense of McCarthy and his activities by M. Stanton Evans, and last month I did the same with most of the other major books in the pro-McCarthy camp. These included Arthur Herman’s widely praised 1999 biography Joseph McCarthy, Ann Coulter’s 2003 bestseller Treason, the famous 1954 work McCarthy and His Enemies by William F. Buckley Jr. and L. Brent Bozell, and Buckley’s much later 1999 novel The Redhunter, a lightly fictionalized account of the Wisconsin senator’s career. To provide some balance, I also reread Richard Rovere’s short but highly influential 1959 work Senator Joe McCarthy, providing an account quite hostile to the senator.

With the exception of the Rovere book, all these other works had been written by McCarthy’s strongest defenders, but based upon the factual information they provided, my verdict of a dozen years ago was fully confirmed. McCarthy was right that America had faced a great threat from Soviet Communist subversion, but he was frequently wrong about almost everything else.

McCarthy often made wild, unsubstantiated accusations, and he was just as dishonest and careless with facts as his mainstream media critics had always claimed. So although he was hugely successful for several years, he ultimately did enormous damage to his own cause. Moreover, he was very much of a latecomer to the Communism issue and quite possibly merely an opportunist. So he became a public figure who permanently tainted the important work already done by his far more scrupulous and competent political allies.

The widely televised Army-McCarthy Hearings of 1954 destroyed his credibility, and a few months later he was censured by an overwhelming vote of his fellow senators. After his political eclipse, he gradually drank himself to death over the next couple of years.

By the late 1950s, the self-destructive nature of McCarthy’s efforts were so widely recognized that they had become a theme of popular fiction. For example, Richard Condon published his Cold War thriller The Manchurian Candidate in 1959 and it was soon made into a famous movie of the same title. This work portrayed the extremely nefarious plots of Communist agents to seize control of our country, but ironically enough, the McCarthy-like political character was eventually revealed to be a Communist dupe, manipulated by our foreign enemies into destroying our society and its freedoms while capturing our government for the Communist conspirators who secretly controlled him.

Towards the beginning of my long article I described how the 1990s declassification of the Venona Decrypts fully confirmed the enormous influence that agents of Soviet Communism had gained over our federal government during the 1930s and 1940s. By the late 1940s, the discovery of so many very high-ranking Soviet operatives such as Alger Hiss and Harry Dexter White easily explained the huge attention that McCarthy attracted when he launched his anti-Communist crusade with a public speech in February 1950, and the arrest of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg later that same year for nuclear weapons espionage seemed to further boost the credibility of his claims. So although McCarthy’s accusations were often bombastic and unsubstantiated, they resonated deeply with a fearful public grown suspicious that our elected officials were concealing the true extent of ongoing Communist subversion.

The documented existence of all those important Soviet agents was obviously the proximal factor behind the widespread popular support that McCarthy’s political crusade quickly attracted. But I think that there were also much deeper political roots to McCarthyism, roots that have almost always been ignored in our histories of that era, whether these were written by the senator’s many mainstream critics or by his small handful of committed defenders. This strange silence seems due to the controversial nature of that prior history, but an important clue to that hidden backstory may be found in an influential book from that era.

In 1955 Daniel Bell published The New American Right, a collection of essays by leading mainstream American academics, and in 1963 he reissued that same work in much expanded form as The Radical Right. McCarthyism was a major part of the analysis and the last two essays by sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset totaled more than 140 pages with both of these focused upon that subject. Lipset demonstrated that the political campaign of the Wisconsin senator shared many of its ideological roots and much of its social base with the earlier 1930s movement of Father Charles Coughlin, a hugely popular anti-Communist radio priest from neighboring Michigan.

Launched in the late 1920s, Coughlin’s syndicated weekly radio show eventually became political and grew tremendously popular. At his 1930s peak Coughlin had amassed an enormous national audience estimated at 30 million regular listeners, amounting to roughly one-quarter of the entire American population, probably making him the world’s most influential broadcaster. By 1934 the priest was receiving over 10,000 letters of support each day, considerably more than President Franklin Roosevelt or anyone else.

Coughlin began as a strong early supporter of FDR and his New Deal reforms, coining the popular phrases “Roosevelt or Ruin” and “The New Deal is Christ’s Deal.” But he gradually became disillusioned with FDR and his policies, viewing them as insufficiently bold and far too beholden to Wall Street financial interests. So Coughlin instead began encouraging the political ambitions of Sen. Huey Long of Louisiana, a populist figure who planned to challenge Roosevelt for reelection in 1936, running on a radical platform of “Share the Wealth.”

The twin stories of Coughlin and Long and their complex relationship are told in Voices of Protest, an award-winning 1982 book by the distinguished historian Alan Brinkley, who suggested that such a complementary Long-Coughlin political partnership might have given Roosevelt a very difficult race in 1936. But those plans suddenly collapsed in September 1935 when Long was assassinated by a crazed lone gunman, who himself was immediately shot dead. That fortuitous event allowed FDR to win a huge reelection landslide the following year against a weak Republican opponent whose traditional conservative policies offered little popular appeal.

Over the years that followed, Coughlin grew increasingly critical of Jews and Jewish influence, given their hugely disproportionate role as Wall Street bankers, whose activities he regarded as so damaging to the interests of the ordinary American workers whom he championed. In March 1936 he began publishing a weekly political newspaper called Social Justice and it eventually reached a peak circulation of about a million subscribers in the late 1930s, making it one of the most widely read publications in America, having more than ten times the combined circulation of the Nation and the New Republic, the leading liberal weeklies. The complete archives of Social Justice are conveniently available on this website.

Coughlin had always been hostile to Communism, and after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in July 1936, he began strongly supporting the anti-Communist Nationalist forces, who were also backed by Hitler and Mussolini. Meanwhile, Jewish groups overwhelmingly supported the opposing Loyalist side, heavily backed both by foreign Communists and by Stalin’s Soviet Union. This further increased Coughlin’s suspicion of Jews.

During this same period, Jewish groups and most of the American mainstream media began harshly condemning Nazi Germany for the persecution of its tiny 1% Jewish minority, and these public attacks reached a crescendo after dozens of Jews were killed in the November 1938 Kristallnacht riots, probably orchestrated by some Nazi leaders.

But Coughlin claimed that Jewish bankers had played a crucial role in the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution that brought Soviet Communism to power, while the very heavily Jewish regime thereby established had been responsible for the deaths of many millions of Christians, easily explaining the Nazi hostility toward Jews and their influence. Coughlin was naturally outraged that our media focused so much of its attention upon the dozens of Jewish deaths at the hands of German Nazis rather than the millions of Christian deaths at the hands of Bolshevik Jews.

These sorts of matters have largely been excluded from our more recent mainstream historical narratives, but they widely circulated at the time. Although I neglected to mention Coughlin I discussed some of these controversial issues in one of my earliest American Pravda articles, published in 2018:

In 1938 Coughlin established a new anti-Communist political organization called the Christian Front, and according to Wikipedia it soon attracted several thousand members, mostly Irish-American men in New York City and other East Coast urban centers. Around that same time, Coughlin was regularly vilified as a fascist sympathizer and the Roosevelt Administration began making efforts to remove him from the airwaves. These efforts intensified after World War II broke out in September 1939 and Coughlin become a leading opponent of American intervention in that military conflict.

In January 1940, the FBI raided the Brooklyn headquarters of the Christian Front and arrested 17 men on charges of plotting to overthrow the U.S. government. But although one defendant committed suicide, the trials of all the others ended in acquittals or hung juries, thus humiliating the federal prosecutors.

But pressure continued and by September 1940 Coughlin was forced to end his radio broadcasts. Then in April 1942 the Espionage Act of 1917 was invoked to ban his Social Justice newspaper from the mails, effectively eliminating nearly all his national media influence. Thus, government action had been used to silence the voice of America’s leading broadcaster and also ban the distribution of one of our largest national newspapers, actions vastly more serious than anything done during the anti-Communist domestic campaigns of the Korean War era a decade later.

This extreme crackdown on Coughlin continued as FDR’s Attorney General Francis Biddle soon convened a federal grand jury to indict him and his publication on charges of sedition. Biddle then worked out a deal with Coughlin’s ecclesiastical superior Archbishop Edward Mooney, promising that the U.S. Justice Department would drop its prosecution of the priest if he closed Social Justice and permanently ceased all his political activities. With Mooney threatening to suspend his ministry, Coughlin agreed to those severe terms. Although he remained the pastor of his local church and lived until 1979, his political and media activities had come to a permanent end.

With Coughlin no longer having a media platform to publicly defend himself, his bitter enemies were able to construct an entirely one-sided narrative of his history and beliefs, and in the aftermath of the American victory in World War II, this official verdict on Coughlin’s political career became an extremely hostile one. Decades later, my history textbooks dismissed him in just a sentence or two as a popular antisemitic demagogue with strong fascist tendencies, someone who regularly promoted various implausible conspiratorial theories regarding Jews and Communism.

This huge stigma ensured that when a new generation of rising Republican leaders such as McCarthy and Richard Nixon entered Congress in the first postwar elections of 1946, they apparently never considered identifying themselves with a defeated and demonized figure such as Coughlin, who was already fast becoming a fading memory in elite DC circles. Also, many of these new elected officials had made their names and reputations in World War II, thus rendering Coughlin’s fierce opposition to that conflict especially toxic.

And this harsh dismissal of Coughlin grew even stronger over the generations that followed, after all direct memory of his once enormous national influence had been forgotten. All that remained was the very negative image inserted into our history books of a failed, antisemitic political demagogue who had supported our Axis enemies.

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