Anticommunism's Two Faces: The Irresponsible Won Out

After the Second World War, there was belated acknowledgment in the United States of the role of "premature antifascists," those who had opposed fascism before it became acceptable to do so. Now that the Cold War is over and even Russian politicians and writers denounce communism, it is time, Richard Gid Powers proposes in Not Without Honor, to acknowledge those Americans whose unfashionable early opposition to communism has won them honor abroad even if, as he claims in the last sentence of his interesting book, "in their own country they are still without honor."

Anticommunism in America, Powers, a professor at the City University of New York, makes clear, was hardly a monolithic movement. Anticommunist sentiment drew from the left as well as the right, from trade union halls as well as corporate boardrooms, from the soapbox as well as the pulpit; its adherents included the labor leader Walter Reuther as well as Francis Cardinal Spellman, the socialist Norman Thomas as well as Senator Joseph McCarthy. But within this diversity Powers discerns two main tendencies. One consisted of those whom he calls, rather awkwardly, "countersubversive anticommunists," persons "obsessed with uncovering plots that were, for the most part, figments of their own imagination." The other consisted of "responsible Americans with an anticommunism rooted in a realistic and principled view of the world."

The conflict between these two forms of anticommunism provides the drama in Powers' narrative. The ironic point made in the first three-quarters of the book is that the disbelief generated by irresponsible anticommunism overwhelmed the reasoned arguments of responsible anticommunism and succeeded in discrediting the anticommunist cause. But in the last quarter Powers curiously shifts ground and seems to regard the demise of irresponsible anticommunism as a blow to the republic.

THE ANTICOMMUNIST DIVIDE

Powers begins in the 1920s, when, following the excesses of Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer and the Red Scare of 1919-20, the countersubversives, proclaiming that a revolutionary left organized by Moscow was on the verge of overthrowing the government, reduced anticommunism to a "travesty." In the 1930s publisher William Randolph Hearst's campaign to label the New Deal communist, and the addled demagoguery of Representative Martin Dies and the House Un-American Activities Committee, "hurt anticommunism more than it hurt communism." This was the time when the Great Depression seemed to verify Marxist prophecies about the collapse of capitalism and when the Soviet Union appeared to some as the only reliable foe of Hitler. On one side stood Hearst and Dies and on the other, high-minded idealists sympathetic to communism; as Arthur Koestler well said, it was a contest between those who were right for the wrong reasons and those who were wrong for the right reasons.

But responsible anticommunism found sustenance in the Moscow trials and the 1939 Nazi-Soviet pact, and it came into its own in the early years of the Cold War. By the end of the 1940s, Powers writes, Cold War liberalism "had laid the foundation for a worldwide military, political, and cultural bulwark against communism." Then came the Alger Hiss case, and "wild-eyed red web conspiracy theorists" soon were "recklessly tearing away at those achievements, until the movement was vulnerable to be captured by the first demagogues able to cloak paranoid red web conspiracy theories in the mantle of major party respectability."

The Hiss case, while a disaster for the Truman administration and those who had minimized the threat of domestic communism, was also a disaster for the anticommunist cause. "It shifted the balance of power in the movement from the responsible liberal anticommunists ... to some of the most bizarre and irresponsible figures in American politics." With the rise of McCarthy, the two forms of anticommunism came into bitter collision.

For the countersubversives, communism was an internal threat, burrowing into Hollywood, the universities, the churches, the press, even the army; McCarthy was a hero in his determination to root out spies and traitors, and McCarthyism was the salvation of the republic. As for liberal anticommunists who condemned McCarthy and his methods, they were almost as bad as the communists themselves.

For responsible anticommunists, how-ever, communism was a threat to America, not a threat in America. Domestic communism was a problem only insofar as it complicated the task of building support for the containment of Soviet expansion overseas. The way to handle American communists was discussion and debate, not loyalty oaths, blacklists, and persecution.

For a time, McCarthy worked his will. But eventually the Senate and the country had had enough. McCarthy had turned himself into the symbol of anticommunism, and "when McCarthy went down, so to a great extent did anticommunism." The backlash against McCarthyism, Powers mysteriously argues, "silenced anticommunism." President Eisenhower thereafter discouraged Americans from "expressing their anticommunism, for fear of reawakening McCarthyism.... With the President himself muting the urgency of the moral crusade against communism ... American foreign policy was at risk of losing its way" in a world in which communism's assault on freedom was still a fundamental fact of life. "When liberals dismissed McCarthyism ... they were dangerously close to denying the public the right to debate the great issues of the day, a debate that would inevitably lead to errors (like McCarthyism) as well as to insight."

MISPLACED REGRET