Spider Web

The Birth of American Anticommunism

Nick Fischer

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780252081514, 9780252040023
• eBook ISBN: 9780252098222
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The McCarthy-era witch hunts marked the culmination of an anticommunist crusade launched after the First World War. With Bolshevism triumphant in Russia and public discontent shaking the United States, conservatives at every level of government and business created a network dedicated to sweeping away the "spider web" of radicalism they saw threatening the nation. In this groundbreaking study, Nick Fischer shines a light on right-wing activities during the interwar period. Conservatives, eager to dispel communism's appeal to the working class, railed against a supposed Soviet-directed conspiracy composed of socialists, trade unions, peace and civil liberties groups, feminists, liberals, aliens, and Jews. Their rhetoric and power made for devastating weapons in their systematic war for control of the country against progressive causes. But, as Fischer shows, the term spider web far more accurately described the anticommunist movement than it did the makeup and operations of international communism. Fischer details how anticommunist myths and propaganda influenced mainstream politics in America, and how its ongoing efforts paved the way for the McCarthyite Fifties--and augured the conservative backlash that would one day transform American politics.

CHAPTER 1

The Origins of American Anticommunism, ca. 1860–1917

Though the people support the Government, the Government should not support the people.

—Grover Cleveland

Anticommunism was a response to the failure of US political institutions and traditions to resolve the fundamental challenges of the latter nineteenth century. Anticommunism emerged from an edifice of economic and social inequality and stratification and from the ways in which different social, economic, and political interests sought either to explain and preserve or, alternatively, to reform the structure of American society.

At the most basic level, anticommunism helped justify long-standing practices of labor exploitation and the suppression of labor organization. But the doctrine was innovative in that it justified this exploitation and suppression by blaming foreign ideas and people for American economic and social tensions. These tensions began to emerge immediately after the Civil War, which had been fought not just to abolish Afro-American slavery but also to extinguish the threat the spread of slavery posed to the prospects of free white people throughout the Union. Apart from its moral wrongs, a slave society would destroy a growing nation's capacity to guarantee its citizens an independent living. Yet Union victory neither resolved the increasing incompatibility of republican ideology and America's political economy nor dislodged or revised the Jacksonian reform tradition that sought to deliver “equal freedom” rather than equality to citizens, and offered little remedy to the period's defining trends.¹

In the decades following the Civil War, increasing numbers of Americans struggled to meet their basic needs. They did not make a living wage or work in a safe environment, and they had no safety net to sustain them when they became sick or disabled. The principle of forcing people to labor in intolerable conditions or for intolerable terms survived slavery to become a basic feature of working life. For millions of industrial and agricultural laborers, sharecroppers, and tenant farmers, life was defined by cruel patterns. They worked in dangerous jobs for subsistence wages, in constant fear of poverty and loss of livelihood. Booms and busts shook the economy periodically, and “average” workers bore the brunt of prolonged recession. Their every attempt to organize into cooperative or industrial associations was met with heavy opposition, penalties, and condescension.

Simultaneously, the economic dominance of corporations and the institutionalization of political corruption as the price of economic development increased with each passing decade. Many employers and magnates refused to negotiate with labor unions, and the state generally rose to the defense of property. As corruption closed off one reform after another, the historical practices of “criminaliz[ing] political differences” and stigmatizing “dissenters as social pariahs” became ever more important devices for marginalizing “those going under in the new America.”² A rising tide of protest and civil, industrial, and political violence was blamed on the unprecedented numbers of aliens arriving on America's shores, allegedly bringing with them polluting notions of class warfare. This cycle of widespread and prolonged distress gave rise to competing responses. While some citizens acknowledged that the nation's political system and economy required reform, a corresponding conviction that distress did not warrant and should on no account receive any systemic redress emerged. And this conviction resulted in a distinctive and in some respects exceptional American form of anticommunism.

With astonishing speed, anticommunism became an effective and influential political doctrine and strategy. It was woven, sometimes uncritically but often with great craft and persistence, into America's “countersubversive” tradition of politics, in which fear of disorder, conspiracy, and tribal bonds give rise to violent and exclusionary rhetoric and action. As a form of countersubversive politics, anticommunism was prosecuted by a blend of corporate, government, and social entities comprising public-private or state-society partnerships of great power that were in many respects particular to the United States.

Capital and Corruption

The economic and social tensions that defined Gilded Age America were rooted in the fundamental direction in which the American economy had developed since the early nineteenth century. This direction was defined above all by the transition from an agrarian to an industrial economy dominated by corporations.

Although the United States initially relied on a partnership between capital and the state to finance and coordinate economic development, private corporations emerged as the principal engine of the American economy by the close of Andrew Jackson's presidency. After the Civil War, they also became the great political power. The rising power and concentration of capital resulted from numerous factors. Technology was an important spur, as was US integration into the global economy. Industrialization in agriculture revolutionized not only farming but also the demographic patterns of national life. As farming mechanized, it became a mass-production business where yields grew exponentially and unit prices fell dramatically. Farming businesses rationalized and sold huge volumes of stock, becoming major exporters. American agribusiness realized economies of scale that only Russia could rival. Independent farmers in both the United States and Europe were driven off the land, triggering mass migrations from the American heartland and from Europe to US industrial centers, placing unprecedented stress on the labor market, civil infrastructure, and social cohesion. From 1860 to 1890, the metropolitan population ballooned while rural centers declined.³

The postwar economy was dominated by industrialists and finance magnates. In the thirty-five years that separated the Civil War and the twentieth century, the wealth amassed by the great capitalists or “robber barons” gave them “such incommensurate power” that in the judgment of H. W. Brands, “the imperatives of capitalism mattered more to the daily existence of most Americans than the principles of democracy.” Whereas more than half the nation's wealth had been held by the richest 29 percent of the population before the Civil War, just 1 percent owned the same amount a generation later.⁴

The barons amassed such enormous wealth as a consequence of the structural opportunities provided by the absence of a strong and centralized government (whose priorities might have differed from those of business) and a comparable absence of powerful social classes (particularly a hereditary landed aristocracy) whose interests might also have clashed with capital. American capital benefited, too, from the availability of vast tracts of fertile and accessible land that had been seized from its traditional owners. And the great capitalists also gained from government assistance in the form of land grants, tax concessions, and forcible resolution of its labor-management problems. American capitalists thus profited from many freedoms denied to industrialists and merchants in Europe and elsewhere in the New World: in global terms, these barons were uniquely fortunate and powerful.

Although American capital benefited from unparalleled freedom, the political economy of nineteenth-century America was characterized more by state capitalism than by free enterprise. In this system, governments doled out huge concessions to corporations and underwrote the costs of their expansion. Between 1850 and 1870, railroads received roughly two hundred million acres of land, “a gratuity equivalent to the size of France” and several times the acreage handed out for small-scale farming under the Homestead Act of 1862. Government attitudes toward the disbursement of public monies were epitomized by President Grover Cleveland, who in 1892 agreed to lower interest rate charges on a twenty-six-million-dollar government loan to the Union and Pacific Railroad but vetoed a ten-thousand-dollar appropriation for Texas farmers in need of drought relief. Citizens, the president said, had to understand that “though the people support the Government the Government should not support the people.”⁵

Governments regarded subsidization of business as a necessary price for developing their jurisdictions. In the rush to develop competing regions, corporations could play towns, cities, and states as well as both the major political parties against each other, giving themselves over entirely to the service of capital. Legislators accepted bribes paid by railroad and finance tycoons, which fell “like snowflakes and dissolved like dew.” And two-thirds of the holders of cabinet posts during the Gilded Age had rail clients, sat on railroad management boards, lobbied for railroads, or had relatives in the railroad business.⁶

Having embedded the major political parties within their corporate structure, plutocrats refused to brook any interference in their business, whether from government, consumers, or an increasingly desperate and growing labor movement. Whatever political measures governments instituted to arrest the death of free labor, the barons straightforwardly subverted. Thus, around 1900, the United States had been wholly transformed “from a nation of freely competing, individually owned enterprises into a nation dominated by a small number of giant corporations.”⁷

Labor in the Gilded Age

The power the robber barons wielded over their workforces was multifaceted, structural, and opportunistic. The same geopolitical, technological, and market forces that drove the growth and concentration of capital entrapped many Americans in wage slavery and poverty. The industrialization of agriculture, the formation of a US national labor market (one of the Civil War's most important consequences), and the mass migration of European peasants created a glut in the labor market to the detriment of independent farmers and artisans as well as unskilled laborers. And while immigration and emancipation made labor cheap, technological advances devalued manual skills and knowledge. New migrants, both native (typically from the Deep South) and foreign-born, struggled to find decent and consistently remunerated work. They discovered that contrary to American mythology, they were locked into the working classes. Society was now stratified; upward mobility was exceedingly rare.⁸

Although the economic changes sweeping America need not necessarily have so harmed the prospects and condition of so many manual workers, customary and prejudicial practices and attitudes toward labor relations were determinedly and successfully pursued by capital and by its allies and servants after the Civil War. Important legacies of southern slavery and antebellum industrial relations practices in the North remained influential. During the war, while union ranks were depleted, industrialists formed employers’ organizations, maintained blacklists of unionists, and pressured government for antilabor laws. Several states passed legislation outlawing not only strikes but also unions as “conspiracies to restrain trade.” State and federal troops crushed strikes under martial law. The federal government also provided northern industrialists with scab labor, including freed slaves, while permitting employers to import and indenture European laborers, keeping native-born workers out of employment.⁹

Throughout the postwar period, fetters on free labor and labor organization became more prevalent and confining. Freed slaves were quickly entrapped by Black Codes that threatened the homeless with imprisonment if they refused to toil for planters. When the codes were outlawed, African Americans (and most white farmers) in the South had little option but to become tenant farmers and sharecroppers, a state “not far removed from slavery.”¹⁰

In the North, the prevalence and severity of wage slavery also deepened. At the end of the war, workers had no minimum wage laws, but their living expenses had grown by about 70 percent. They owed their homes to the companies for whom they drudged. They were forced to pay inflated prices for life's necessities at company stores. They could appeal to no law to compensate them or their families for injuries or death suffered in the workplace. And the principal available jobs were perilous; working conditions for miners and steel mill, railroad, and textile workers were unhealthy, injurious, and too often deadly.

While working conditions produced great suffering, that suffering was magnified by the disproportionate burdens laborers bore during the prolonged, severe economic downturns that plagued Gilded Age America. The profound disruption to traditional economy and society meant that workers had little choice but to seek employment wherever it might be available. The itinerant nature of the workforce helped preclude the formation of labor unions and the establishment by unions of broad, local connections. Thus, as writer Jack London observed, capital could always call on “a large surplus army of laborers” that could easily be mobilized against anyone who refused to work under the terms offered.¹¹

The Birth of Anticommunism

Such huge and growing disparities in wealth, health, and opportunity did not go unchallenged. Desperation and anger repeatedly led to major industrial conflicts that spread across vast regions and industries. Trade unions as well as farmer and farmer-labor alliances sought to redress economic inequities, with varying degrees of success. But the plight of the working classes also fueled fears of their latent, malevolent power as well as a powerful sense of resentment among some prosperous citizens, who concluded that their economic inferiors posed a revolutionary threat with which the state was ill-equipped to cope. With this resentment came with a trenchant denial that inequality was rooted in the fundamental conditions and relations of society; acknowledging the structural bases of poverty and inequality risked reinforcing an unwelcome “sense of the contingency and fragility of the American dream.”¹²

This combination of fear, resentment, and denial culminated in the birth and support of a doctrine that styled labor organization, industrial action, and unemployment relief as illegitimate and even subversive threats to American civilization. This doctrine provided vital and effective political cover for a campaign of repression that was unleashed not only to suppress the working classes’ industrial organizations and aspirations but also to altogether discredit the politics of class.

Although the characterization of labor organization as an expression of “communism” began before the Civil War, the rapid rise and fall between March and May 1871 of the Paris Commune (or city council), a socialist government that was ejected by the French regular army, first raised the serious prospect, in at least some Americans’ minds, of a local workers’ revolution. The reign of the Paris Commune had barely ended before a professor at the Union Theological Seminary in New York shuddered, “Today there is not in our language…a more hateful word than communism.”¹³ This “hateful word” came quickly to encompass an apparent breakdown of social order signified by the formation of labor unions; the widespread presence of indigent, unemployed men; and the congregation of recently arrived and ethnically exotic migrants in urban districts and industries. All these groups were rapidly and indelibly associated with foul terminology and rhetorically and physically attacked for their supposed inability and unwillingness to assimilate into decent society.

Communal Loyalty and Conspiracies

The hostile response of various elements of American society to economic disadvantage and social disorder had complex origins. It did not simply express anxiety about contemporary conditions and prospects. It also reflected the influence of venerable political narratives and practices that encouraged the demonization of marginalized groups.

The fear of disorder as a “distinctive American political tradition” first developed in the white majority's relations with people of color. This tradition defined itself against alien threats and sanctioned violent and exclusionary responses to them. Native Americans were the original emblems of this threat, and their conquest legitimized the violent subjugation of other alien groups. Aside from being represented as (noble or ignoble) savages, Native Americans also symbolized tribalism, which was thought to pose a menace to “private property and the family.” Their subjugation was thus predicated on the need to undermine “communal loyalties as sources of political resistance.” After the Civil War, “the group ties of workers and immigrants were [similarly] assaulted in the name of individual freedom.”¹⁴

American political tradition was also intolerant of faction within the polity. The Founders’ political theory did not accommodate “institutionalized opposition to popularly based government.” This attitude later fed into middle-class distaste for labor unions, but it first fueled a tendency to equate institutionalized opposition to government policy with sedition. Here, intolerance of section melded with a rich tradition of fear of anti-American conspiracy. Since the Federalists alleged that agents of the French Revolution were conspiring with Freemasons and the Bavarian Illuminati to destroy their independence, Americans had detected national threats from Catholics, Masons, the Mormon church, the “monster-hydra” of the Second Bank of the United States, abolitionists, the “Slave Power” conspiracy, and “demon rum.” These fears had biblical utopian and apocalyptic roots, but they also reflected a “dark side of American individualism” as well as the fluidity of antebellum society, where individuals had ample opportunity to represent themselves as something or someone they perhaps were not. Thus “pervasive role-playing generated suspicions of hidden motives” and of secret, nefarious centers of power.¹⁵

A principal response to the threat of subversion was to “domesticate American freedom.” Revolutionary reformers such as Benjamin Rush hoped to transform citizens into “republican machines” who would “perform their parts properly, in the great machine of the government,” exercising their freedom with self-control. For the middle classes, the most important institution reinforcing self-control was the nuclear family, supplemented by schools. Together, they helped to enforce an “ideology of domesticity [that] limited political dissent in scarcely measurable ways.” When successful, this self-censorship “did not simply intimidate political opposition already formed but inhibited the formation of new opposition,” resulting in the “suppression of politics at the pre-political level, through the transformation of potentially political discontent into problems of personal life.” In this fashion, “reform practice turned conflicts of interest into problems of personal and social adjustment” and encouraged “the criminalization of political differences, the collapse of politics into disease, the spread of surveillance, and the stigmatization of dissenters as social pariahs.”¹⁶

Yet the structu...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. The Origins of American Anticommunism, ca. 1860–1917
• Chapter 2. The First World War and the Origins of the Red Scare
• Chapter 3. Here Come the Bolsheviks! The Russian Revolution and the Red Scare
• Chapter 4. The Spider Web Chart
• Chapter 5. Mapping a Political Network: The Anticommunist Spider Web
• Chapter 6. John Bond Trevor, Radicals, Eugenics, and Immigration
• Chapter 7. Jacob Spolansky: The Rise of the Career Anticommunist Spook
• Chapter 8. The Better America Federation and Big Business's War on Labor
• Chapter 9. Political Repression and Culture War
• Chapter 10. Anticommunism and Political Terror
• Chapter 11. The Mythology of Anticommunism
• Chapter 12. Antidemocracy and Authoritarianism
• Conclusion. Legacies of the Spider Web
• Afterword
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author