Author: mccumber@humnet.ucla.edu

31. Impacts of McCarthyism

So the early Cold War was really important, a watershed in American history. A further indication of this is our tendency to trivialize it by calling it the “McCarthy Era.”  I did this, with misgivings, in my Time in the Ditch. It was a seemingly innocent semantic move, but only seemingly; semantics is never innocent. In fact, it epitomizes larger strategies of occlusion:

  • It suggests that the domestic pressures of the Cold War were directed only against Communists.
  • It isolates the anti-Communist hysteria of the fifties from what came after and went before, making the whole thing seem like a temporary aberration.
  • It localizes that aberration to the work of one man and the city in which he lived, Washington D. C.

None of these is accurate. Richard Hofstadter and Walter P. Metzger concluded in 1955 that in almost two thirds of the academic freedom cases that came to the American Association of University Professors during the early Cold War, the motivations had nothing to do, except rhetorically, with Communism. They were entirely personal  (Hofstadter & Metzger 1955: 18). Hofstadter later put it as follows:

The real function of the Great Inquisition of the 1950’s was not anything so simply rational as to turn up spies or prevent espionage (for which the police agencies are presumably adequate), or even to expose actual Communists, but to discharge resentments and frustrations, to punish, to satisfy enmities whose roots lay elsewhere than in the Communist issue itself…In this crusade Communism was not the target but the weapon…(Hofstadter 1963: 41-42).

Such resentments were not confined to Washington DC, even if it is a hothouse for them. Suppose that Professor X, who teaches somewhere in this great land, has a nice corner office on the third floor. His colleague Professor Y, who is junior by some years but more productive, is working out of a semi-converted boiler room in the basement. In the McCarthy Era, Y would know that all he had to do was credibly link X with Communism or (in the words of the UCLA Daily Bruin) with “anything that might faintly resemble” it, and X would be gone. The credibility did not even have to be to fellow academics. As we see in Scared, people far outside academia could be incited to campaigns to keep even eminent philosophy professors from being hired, and those campaigns could be successful–ask Bertrand Russell.

But Hofstadter and Metzger still did not get the whole story. The “resentment and frustration” that characterized so much of the McCarthy Era were not merely personal, but were often directed against entire groups. The McCarthyites  tended to be highly racist, anti-Semitic, homophobic, and sexist (references to the literature are in Scare). Though Catholicism was widely connected with McCarthy himself, Catholics were not fully accepted in American society until their bishops ditched the Church’s collectivist social teaching and reduced morality to abortion, birth control, and divorce.

This wasn’t a “McCarthy Era.” It was more like a “terroristic exercise in American fascism.” And it wasn’t temporary: this story, I fear, has not ended.

32. An Imperial Transformation

The importance of what is commonly called the “McCarthy Era” is dawning quickly on historians and others.  For example, a nationally known feminist (not an historian) with whom I had dinner a while ago told me that she had begun teaching courses on that period because she had noticed that so many other things she was teaching about either began there or were transformed then.

Exactly.

I dislike the name “McCarthy Era,” for a number of reasons listed in the Introduction to The Philosophy Scare (which I’ll just call “Scare” from now on). One main one is that it obscures its connections to what happened to the entire world—not just the US—in the late 1940’s and the 1950’s. For that was when the United States stopped being a country and became a global empire.

This required major changes in the home society. Look at ancient Rome. By 49 BCE, the Roman Republic was structurally outdated. It lacked, for one thing, a central administration for many public services. Things like  police protection were largely in private hands—and as the city’s prominence grew and wealth flooded in to just a few families, gangs of bodyguards became private armies. Inevitably these started fighting one another, tearing the city apart. The need was for a single, centralized authority to supply services and stop the bloodshed—and that transformed not only Rome, but the whole Mediterranean basin.

As the Cold War began, the United States was governed mainly by local elites (C. Wright Mills explored a lot of this in The Power Elite). These elites were usually family based, but in the large companies which dominated certain states (Delaware, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania) membership  often came from job performance over decades (at a moment of great military prestige, this was called “rising through the ranks”). Such a decentralized oligarchy was not quick or supple enough to counter the nuclear-age Communist threat. As Nicholas Lemann shows in The Big Test,  it was replaced by meritocracy: elite college degrees, themselves largely allocated on the basis of performance on a single measure of “scholastic aptitude,” replaced not only family connections but personal accomplishments as the gateway to higher position.

The result was a nation governed by people whose signal achievement came when they were 17. We live with this monolithic system today: tell  any American that somebody got 440, 540 640, or 740 on their college boards and she can tell you a great deal about how they live. This system placed great burdens on universities, elite and other, and they had to be quickly transformed into bastions of intellectual purity. We’ re living today with the consequences of that, too.