The Cold War at Home

The Red Scare in Pennsylvania, 1945-1960

Philip Jenkins

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780807847817, 9780807824986
• eBook ISBN: 9781469619651
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

One of the most significant industrial states in the country, with a powerful radical tradition, Pennsylvania was, by the early 1950s, the scene of some of the fiercest anti-Communist activism in the United States. Philip Jenkins examines the political and social impact of the Cold War across the state, tracing the Red Scare's reverberations in party politics, the labor movement, ethnic organizations, schools and universities, and religious organizations.

Among Jenkins's most provocative findings is the revelation that, although their absolute numbers were not large, Communists were very well positioned in crucial Pennsylvania regions and constituencies, particularly in labor unions, the educational system, and major ethnic organizations. Instead of focusing on Pennsylvania's right-wing politicians (the sort represented nationally by Senator Joseph McCarthy), Jenkins emphasizes the anti-Communist activities of liberal politicians, labor leaders, and ethnic community figures who were terrified of Communist encroachments on their respective power bases. He also stresses the deep roots of the state's militant anti-Communism, which can be traced back at least into the 1930s.

1
Introduction

During the decade after the Second World War, one of the leading figures of Pennsylvania’s Republican politics was James H. Duff, who successively served as governor and U.S. senator. Duff was distinctly progressive by the standards of contemporary Republicanism, presiding over an enlightened reformist administration in the state and taking a politically unpopular position against Senator Joseph McCarthy long before most members of his party would dare take such a step. Duff seems like a classic moderate or even liberal, which makes it surprising that on the issue of Communism he was more extreme than most of the visible Red-hunters in public life. In 1950 he declared that members of the Communist Party were ipso facto traitors deserving the penalties of treason, which meant hanging. Furthermore, he believed, “if people put themselves in a position where their activities are doubtful, we are going to treat them if they are doubtful the way they are if they are wrong, because the time has come in America where we can’t continue to make mistakes with the people who are trying to destroy our Way of Life.”¹ Such were the views of a moderate Republican in a politically moderate state.

Duffs position on Communism raises important questions about what exactly constituted extremism in these years. Specifically, it is a useful comment on what has come to be known as McCarthyism, a word that is often used in a far broader sense than it deserves. The term has come to be synonymous with the official movement to seek out and remove Communists from American life, a theme that became a national phenomenon in 1947 and remained in vogue at least through the mid-1950s. Accurately reflecting popular usage, Ellen Schrecker writes of “McCarthyism, the anti-Communist political repression of the late 1940s and 1950s,” while Albert Fried’s book on McCarthyism is subtitled The Great American Red Scare.² Governor Duff’s views suggest a problem with this approach: while he yielded to nobody in his anti-Communist zeal, he was categorically not a McCarthyite in the sense in which that word was used in his day. For Duff, as for many of his contemporaries who would have described themselves as liberals, McCarthyism was an unacceptable form of extremism. It was an irresponsible and dangerous tactic characterized by vague and unsubstantiated accusations for political ends, the exploitation of hysterical public fears, the reckless persecution of innocent or relatively harmless dissidents, and the practice of using loose connections between suspected individuals in order to construct “a conspiracy so immense.” Critics used the term essentially synonymously with witch-hunting or demagoguery, and, as such, it deserved utter repudiation. Worse, it distracted public attention from the urgent need to discover authentic Communists, who should at the least be removed from any office of trust. McCarthyism did not, in these years, refer to the use of quite intrusive or inquisitorial means to discover and root out genuine Communists or subversives, potential spies and saboteurs, a process that had sustained the support of a broad bipartisan consensus for several years before Senator McCarthy himself became a figure of national consequence. McCarthyism did not emerge until after many of the most important inquiries and purges had already occurred.

Criticizing the McCarthyite label would be pedantic if the widespread identification of the anti-Communist movement with Senator McCarthy had not done so much to shape popular historical understanding of these years. The word diverts attention from the other protagonists of this era, to the extent that the senator is popularly associated with the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), which long predated him, and he attracts blame for acts that in fact occurred under the Democratic administration of Harry Truman. In folk memory, the voice of Joseph McCarthy may be indelibly associated with the notorious question of “Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of the Communist Party?”but the phrase was a cliché before he ever used it. Conversely, the fall of McCarthy in 1954 is often taken as marking the end of the movement of hysterical anti-Communism that he symbolized, when in fact the basic system of anti-Communist investigations, loyalty oaths, and deportations continued for years afterward. David Caute’s history, The Great Fear, avoids the McCarthy label in its subtitle; he prefers to write of The Anti-Communist Purge under Truman and Eisenhower.³ McCarthyism was extreme, while the Red Scare arose from the political mainstream.

Politically, the historical emphasis on McCarthyism places responsibility for the postwar Red Scare on those conservatives, mainly Republicans, who used the movement as a flank attack on New Deal policies, which could be tainted by association with “twenty years of treason.” As Albert Fried has written, “McCarthyism may also be defined as the Cold War’s revenge on liberal Democrats.”⁴ While the anti-Communist purges did cause a traumatic split within the New Deal coalition, it would be equally fair to see liberals as the motivators rather than the victims in seeking to drive Communists and other progressives out of the Democratic camp and the labor unions. McCarthyism may have been a desperate ploy of the Republican Right, but the anti-Communist movement itself was thoroughly bipartisan. In a sense, identifying the whole movement as McCarthyism allowed the campaign to be depoliticized, to be seen not as a social or political movement in which both parties had been involved, but as the criminal ambition of one dubious character and the band of irresponsible adventurers around him: everything could be blamed on “a one man party called McCarthyism.”⁵ Once the senator was discredited, his political eclipse served to bury the worst extremes of the previous decade, which henceforward were conventionally associated with him.

Finally, to speak of McCarthyism places undue emphasis on the role of the federal government, of congressional investigation, and of the element of “high” politics, as McCarthy’s prime issue was not so much Communism as Communism within the U.S. government. Whatever we call it, inquisition or purge, the practical effects of the anti-Communist movement were felt across the nation, and the vast majority of the victims were relatively humble individuals, factory workers and clerks, teachers and minor civil servants, rather than officeholders or celebrities, but once again, popular memory has focused on the great national causes célèbres. Scholarship on the domestic front of the Cold War has paid enormous attention to cases like those of Alger Hiss, the Rosenbergs, and the Hollywood Ten, together with the abundantly publicized attack upon show business personalities, but far less is available on the “ordinary” aspect of the persecutions.

This approach is well reflected in popular culture treatments of the Cold War era, which became numerous in the decade after the Watergate scandal. With the lifting of old restrictions and the collapse of blacklisting, the “McCarthy years” became a flourishing genre in film and literature, and the emphasis was firmly upon the major national events. Inevitably, given the interests of writers and producers in the visual media, conditions in the entertainment industry were prominently depicted in fictionalized films like The Way We Were (1973), Fear on Trial (1975), The Front and Bound for Glory (both 1976), Guilty by Suspicion (1991), and the documentary Hollywood on Trial (1979), while the McCarthy hearings formed the subject of Tail Gunner Joe (1977) and Citizen Cohn (1992).⁶ The Rosenberg case in particular has attracted later authors and was treated in E. L. Doctorow’s The Book of Daniel (1971; filmed as Daniel, 1983), and Robert Coover’s The Public Burning (1977). In contrast, the plight of relatively ordinary citizens caught up in McCarthyite suspicions has been the subject of only a few minor and forgettable features.⁷

To understand the impact of national events on everyday life, historians often use case studies that examine the experience of a particular city or state, and the number of books dealing with the local impact of the Red Scare years has been steadily growing since the mid-1980s. Recent examples include T. Michael Holmes’ The Specter of Communism in Hawaii and M. J. Heale’s account of several diverse states in McCarthy’s Americans.⁸ Much still remains to be done on these models, particularly in some of the major states or regions where Communism was said to be particularly rampant and where the resulting purges were peculiarly intense. In this context, Pennsylvania offers a valuable example. One of the most significant industrial states, with a powerful radical tradition, by the early 1950s it was the scene of some of the fiercest anti-Red activism to be found anywhere in the country. David Caute’s The Great Fear includes a chapter entitled “Hell in Pittsburgh,” describing the testimony of one long-term infiltrator into the Communist Party, Matt Cvetic, and how his allegations initiated a period of purges and trials. Pittsburgh became “that Mecca of the inquisition.”⁹ Philadelphia was equally subjected to major loyalty purges in 1952-53, and these events had ramifications in many smaller communities.

Pennsylvania’s experience with anti-Communism raises many important questions for understanding events nationwide. One immediate point is the irrelevance of McCarthy himself, if not of McCarthyism: events would probably not have happened too differently if the senator had never come to public attention. Though his example influenced the hearings in both Philadelphia and Pittsburgh in 1953, these occurred very much at the tail end of five years or more of investigation and suppression of Communist activities in the state. Pennsylvania’s Red hunt proceeded according to a regional dynamic that can be traced back to 1946, and arguably to 1939. We will often find that the “little Red Scare” between 1939 and 1941 set the stage for later conflicts. If there was a single detonator for the 1940s Red Scare, perhaps it was not the case of the “atom spies,” nor the conviction of Alger Hiss, nor Senator McCarthy’s celebrated speech in Wheeling, West Virginia: it may rather have been the Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939, which set off a two-year period of judicial and political repression of Communists that foreshadowed the events of a decade later, often targeting the same individuals and groups. From this perspective, the era of good feelings that the Communist Party enjoyed through the Second World War looks like a truce in a long-term struggle under way from the late 1930s through the early 1960s.

The case of Pennsylvania also raises the question of why anti-Communist politics and rhetoric should have been so extremely vigorous, why in fact there should have been hell in Pittsburgh, or in Philadelphia, or any one of a dozen other cities. Pennsylvania politics did not generally lend itself to extremism. Though the state was politically Republican through most of the twentieth century, it had a distinctly moderate tradition in areas like civil rights and racial issues and was in the midst of a historic shift to the Democrats. In 1951, at the height of anti-Red sentiment, the city of Philadelphia broke a century of tradition by voting in a new administration that was not merely Democratic but definitely liberal in persuasion. On Communism, though, the political consensus remained implacable. The state was the home of some of the fiercest Red-hunters in the country and the scene of some of the most sweeping public exposes and denunciations.

We repeatedly find that liberalism in one area did not transfer to attitudes toward the far Left. The state’s best-known anti-Communist was probably Judge Michael Angelo Musmanno, whose pro-labor credentials were wonderful: he had personally defended Sacco and Vanzetti, he campaigned to abolish the employers’ private Coal and Iron Police, and in the mid-1960s he attracted the ire of the far Right when he supported civil rights marchers in Mississippi. His anti-Communist rhetoric was utterly intemperate, however, and he viewed Communist Party members as traitors deserving lengthy prison sentences at the least. One of the state’s great liberals was Father Charles Owen Rice, a labor activist who was a devoted supporter of civil rights and passionately opposed the Vietnam War, yet who waged his own personal decade-long war against Red influences in the labor unions. An odd member of this “liberal” group was Francis “Tad” Walter, who chaired HUAC from 1954 to 1963 and was a dedicated enemy of all things Communist, yet whose own voting record on social and labor issues was the despair of his conservative admirers.

Musmanno, Rice, and Walter were all New Deal supporters, and this list underlines the extent to which the anti-Red movement was a product of the Democratic Party rather than a Republican riposte to the Roosevelt inheritance. Activism in the late 1940s was launched by powerful Democratic factions and was usually directed against groups and individuals who claimed a foothold within the same party. In 1950, for example, progressives within the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE) described the deadly rightist challenge to their existence as coming from an unholy alliance between the Democratic Party, the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). That Communism could expect to provoke a violent response from business groups, veterans, and the Catholic Church was scarcely surprising; what was new after 1945 was the anti-Communist activism of the Democratic Party and of major unions like the steelworkers.

This internecine quality reflected the fundamental fact that the state’s Democratic Party was fighting for its existence. Democratic power in this region was very new, and the potent coalition of the mid-i940s was a still-young artifact of the New Deal years. The 1946 elections showed that this coalition was on the verge of fragmenting, with the most acute tension evident in the labor movement and the ethnic components, so that unless Communists and fellow travelers were purged thoroughly, and publicly, Democrats faced obliteration. Democratic anti-Communism was a matter of self-preservation. Similar factors explain why anti-Communism found such fervent support in the state’s labor unions, as the CIO was likewise fighting to preserve the gains of the previous decade. For both the Democratic Party and the CIO, the 1948 campaign of Henry Wallace on the Progressive ticket was the last straw; the Left was in danger of splitting the New Deal coalition for its own sectarian purposes, even if this meant returning conservative Republicans to national power.

Anti-Communist zeal must be understood in terms of the religious and ethnic makeup of the state’s population. Pennsylvania had a sizable Catholic minority that had gained enormous social and political influence as a result of the New Deal, though ideologically Catholics found themselves ill at ease with the leftists that formed part of the Roosevelt coalition. After 1946 the deteriorating international situation provided justification for the purge of leftist forces. Furthermore, in a state with a strong heritage from the nations of southern and eastern Europe, religion was closely related to ethnicity. In the decade after 1945, the Communist threat became much more immediate in the European countries with which many Pennsylvanians had ethnic ties. Prior to 1939, Communist rule was an established fact for Russians and Ukrainians, but during the next decade, this fate also befell the Baltic republics, as well as citizens of several other eastern European nations. Most of the newly “captive nations” were either predominantly Catholic or, like Yugoslavia, included substantial Catholic minorities. Between 1946 and 1950 it was a serious possibility that several other nations would be “lost to Communism,” and the Communist coup in Czechoslovakia in early 1948 showed the vulnerability of advanced industrial states like France and Italy. Many (though not all) Catholic Poles, Slovaks, Croats, and Italians thus had powerful and multifaceted reasons for opposing Communism, or any ideas that seemed vaguely pink.

Throughout the Red Scare years, militantly anti-Communist politicians reflected the deeply held views of a large section of the public, including the working and middle classes. The extent of these feelings is suggested by the extreme difficulty of holding public meetings for Henry Wallace’s Progressives during his 1948 campaign, or by the frequent incidents in which individual Communists were subjected to random attack or vilification (FBI undercover informants often told of such incidents after they had surfaced). Communists found it difficult to organize rallies or even closed-door meetings after 1948, the year that the traditional May Day celebrations largely died, and this did not result from official suppression by police or government. When a mob attacked a major Communist meeting in Pittsburgh’s North Side in 1949, victims had a hard time escaping because cab drivers would not assist them. Some street-level anti-Communists may have been Catholics or eastern Europeans, but all evidence suggests that such attitudes traversed the religious and ethnic spectrum, affecting Jews and Protestants as well as Catholics, and extended to members of all classes. Of course, there was still much room for disagreement about specific policies to combat Communism, and firebrands like Musmanno often adopted stances much more extreme than other leaders, but there was little conflict about the overall goals. The Red Scare arose from a genuinely comprehensive social movement.

Though it is no adequate excuse for the hysteria of these years, the popular consensus can best be understood against a background of imminent war. Emergency measures could be justified because the nation might at any time face a military conflict of unprecedented savagery, and it became an urgent necessity to seek out and suppress potential spies and saboteurs. A clear and present danger to national security might arguably justify the suspension of some civil liberties. If there was a subversive threat, then all logic suggested that a primary target would be the defense-related industries of Pennsylvania, its steelworks and coal mines, electrical plants and shipyards. Concerns about a global war were not unfounded: such an outbreak was a real possibility at several points between, say, 1947 and 1962, and had it occurred, both superpowers would have exploited whatever assets they had behind enemy lines to cause maximum disruption. Both sides would likely have used front organizations to undermine the other side’s will to fight. As it would be suicidal to speak openly on behalf of a military enemy during wartime, antiwar propaganda would have to be carried on in the guise of other ideologies, such as humanita...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• The Cold War at Home
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Tables
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations Used in the Text
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Haunting Pennsylvania the Communist Tradition
• 3 The New Americanism, 1944-1950
• 4 Red Scare Rampant, 1950-1953
• 5 Saving Labor
• 6 Teaching Americanism the Purge of the Teaching Profession
• 7 The Struggle for the Ethnic Communities
• 8 Constructing the Beast the Churches and Anti-Communism
• 9 Coming tn from the Cold War, 1956-1968
• 10 Consequences
• Notes
• Index