- Joined
- Apr 27, 2007
- Messages
- 69,284
- Reaction score
- 144
Transcripts reveal ugly details of McCarthy's Red Scare browbeating
Vladimir Toumanoff discovered the stark reality of McCarthyism in a stuffy room in the basement of the Senate Office Building. Half a century later, he can still feel his sense of outrage at being grilled by congressional investigators convinced he was a communist mole inside the U.S. government and unwilling to let facts get in the way of their conspiracy theories.
"You sit there, and they interrogate you, cynically twisting and distorting bits and pieces of your testimony," said Toumanoff, 80. "And you ask yourself: `My God, how can this be happening in the United States?'"
In fact, such scenes happened repeatedly during the notorious Red Scare of the 1950s, when ordinary Americans were victims of political witch-hunts that cost thousands their jobs. Its ugliness was revealed anew by the recent release of transcripts of closed-door sessions of a Senate subcommittee headed by Sen. Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin-the grand inquisitor of the anticommunist crusade.
For 50 years, those transcripts have been sealed to protect the privacy of individuals, says Donald Ritchie, the associate Senate historian who supervised their publication. Now, they reveal how adroitly McCarthy used secret hearings to craft a portrait of himself as defending America from godless communism by dramatically unmasking its enemies.
Behind closed doors, witnesses were threatened and browbeaten, then given the script they were expected to recite before television cameras in the committee's public hearings.
"They held up a piece of paper for me to see which said, `Toumanoff's public testimony will be as follows,' Toumanoff said. "It felt like the Senate had landed on me like a ton of bricks."
Central to the committee's pre-scripted version of Toumanoff's life was the fact that he had been born in 1923 in the Russian Embassy in Istanbul, Turkey. To McCarthy's one-track mind that could only mean that Toumanoff's parents were communists, since because Lenin's Bolsheviks were then in power in Russia. McCarthy's eyebrows were similarly raised by the fact that Toumanoff had taken a small pay cut when he went to work as a recruitment officer for the U.S. Foreign Service. Toumanoff's assigned script called for him to admit it was part of a plot to use his position to help other communists infiltrate the government. It was a theme-nests of hidden communists in government offices-to which McCarthy clung with paranoiac fervor.
On the day of his public appearance, Feb. 6, 1953, Toumanoff read his own statement of the facts of his life. In the civil war that followed the Russian Revolution of 1917, his parents fought on the side of the White Russians, Lenin's bitter opponents. When the Communists won, the Toumanoffs had to flee for their lives, initially to Turkey, where the Russian Embassy was still in the hands of czarist loyalists. Given refuge there, Toumanoff's mother had delivered him in the embassy's infirmary.
The elder Toumanoffs remained active in the anticommunist cause after landing in the United States, lobbying the government, unsuccessfully as it turned out, not to extend diplomatic recognition to Lenin's regime. Like his parents, Vladimir Toumanoff was no friend to communism.
After his statement, a frustrated McCarthy sparred with Toumanoff, trying to get him back on the committee's script. When that failed, McCarthy abruptly gaveled the meeting to a close.
It wasn't the first time that McCarthy was unfazed by being unable to deliver the goods as advertised. His anticommunist career had begun on just such a mixed note.
Three years before Toumanoff's ordeal, Joseph McCarthy was a little-known senator from Wisconsin, desperately in need of a campaign issue. His legislative record was undistinguished, and he was under attack for accepting campaign contributions in return for doing home-state businessmen political favors.
Then he was asked to address the annual Lincoln Day Dinner of the Ohio County (West Virginia) Republican Women's Club. Ordinarily, an obscure senator speaking before an equally obscure group wouldn't have made news.
But McCarthy got up in front of that audience on Feb. 9, 1950, and ominously waved a piece of paper.
"I have here in my hand," he said, "a list of 205 (people) that were known to the secretary of state as being members of the Communist Party and who, nevertheless, are still working and shaping the policy of the State Department."
What exactly was on the paper remains a mystery to this day. Afterwards, McCarthy revised the number of supposed traitors, first to 57 then to 81. Reporters covering the event wrote up his speech for the local paper, and the story was picked up by the wire services. Overnight, McCarthy was famous, celebrated and satirized as chief spokesman for the theory that American society was riddled with Soviet agents.
Shortly, Herblock, the liberal editorial cartoonist of The Washington Post, used the label "McCarthyism" in a drawing. It caught on, and so the redbaiting years came to be known as the McCarthy Era.
In fact, Sen. McCarthy was a latecomer to the anticommunist crusade.
Three years earlier, President Truman Harry Truman had issued Executive Order 9835 setting up Loyalty Boards that launched a purge of government workers with suspect political views. In 1948, the top leaders of the Communist Party were indicted and subsequently convicted under the Smith Act, a federal law that criminalized "teaching and advocating the violent overthrow of the government." The House Un-American Activities Committee, another congressional investigating committee, had investigated alleged communist infiltration of the movie industry, and the so-called Hollywood Ten, prominent screenwriters and directors' who refused to testify, were cited for contempt and sent to prison.
For those on the left, the repressive measures represented a sharp turnabout in their fortunes. Only a few years before, they had been an accepted part of the American political scene. During the Great Depression of the 1930s, the Communist Party found ready recruits among the legion of the unemployed. Communists were instrumental in organizing factory workers in the newly formed unions of the Congress of Industrial Organizations. They took a leading role in the civil-rights movement, decades before other whites dared.
A generation of notable American writers-including James T. Farrell, John Dos Passos and Arthur Miller-were associated with either the party or its literary affiliate, the John Reed Clubs. Named for Reed, an American radical who had chronicled the Russian Revolution in his "Ten Days That Shook the World," the clubs were a way to recruit young intellectuals into party circles.
In his testimony before the McCarthy committee, Jerre Mangione, who wrote "Reunion in Sicily," recalled the appeal of the John Reed Clubs to budding authors.
"I went there as a young writer," he said, "sort of attracted by the glamour of hearing other writers talk."
During World War II, the Soviet Union was our ally in the struggle against the Nazis, which similarly legitimized the American Communist Party. But when that war ended and the Cold War began, the political climate changed, virtually on the proverbial dime.
In 1947, Benjamin Davis was a duly elected communist member of the New York City Council. The next year, he was indicted under the Smith Act. When McCarthy began his anticommunist crusade, Frank Zeidler, a socialist, was mayor of Milwaukee.
When Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed in 1953 for passing atomic secrets to the Russians, it seemed to confirm the theory that American leftists were Stalin's agents. McCarthy's contribution to the hysteria was to push that theory to the extreme. He used it as an easy explanation for the emergence of a Communist regime in post-war China.
"This must be the product of a great conspiracy," McCarthy said, "a conspiracy on a scale so immense as to dwarf any previous venture in the history of man."
He even accused Gen. George C. Marshall, U.S. chief of staff in World War II, of belonging to the cabal that had sold out America. Yet for all his highly publicized hearings, McCarthy never was able to identify so much as one government official as "a card-carrying member" of the Communist Party, as he liked to put it.
Yet the climate of fear his hearings engendered long outlived McCarthy, who died in 1957, notes Ritchie, the Senate historian. It was still a dark presence on campus when he went to the City College of New York in the 1960s.
"Our freshman year, a professor gave us a bit of advice," Ritchie said.
"`Never sign a petition.'"
Evidently, the professor or friends of his had been burned during the repressive years, Ritchie explained. The memory of the experience long afterwards led Ritchie to campaign for the publication of the McCarthy transcripts.
Toumanoff recalled that, in the aftermath of his encounter with McCarthy, his superiors at the State Department asked him to lie low. He went on an unpaid leave for about six months, economically surviving because of the loyal support of his and his wife's families.
Then he was restored to active duty and served many more years with the department before becoming a professor at Harvard.
"My story has a happy ending," Toumanoff said. "Others weren't so lucky."
Indeed, it is estimated that 10,000 Americans lost their jobs during the Red Scare-some because, years before, they signed a petition for some half-forgotten liberal cause. For decades, blacklisted Hollywood writers couldn't take screen credits for their work. At the height of the McCarthy Era, Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas was among those denied a passport.
McCarthy himself fell from grace just as rapidly as he had risen. In 1954, he accused the U.S. Army of harboring subversives. The generals hired Joseph Welch, a shrew shrewd Boston lawyer, to represent them at widely watched televised hearings that led to McCarthy's being censured by his fellow senators.
McCarthy noted that a young lawyer on Welch's staff briefly had belonged to a left-wing organization. That gave Welch (who afterwards reprised his folksy courtroom manner in the 1959 movie "Anatomy of a Murder") the opportunity to demonstrate McCarthy's bullying tactics.
"Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness," Welch said, "I would like to think I am a gentle man, but, your forgiveness will have to come from others."
With his aids trying to restrain him, McCarthy attempted to proceed with his character assassination. It was a typical performance, in which McCarthy would try to twist a small fact into a major crime.
"Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?" Welch said, in effect reading McCarthy's political obituary. "Have you left no sense of decency?"
