Red Scare

Last updated

A Red Scare is a form of moral panic provoked by fear of the rise, supposed or real, of leftist ideologies in a society, especially communism and socialism. Historically, "red scares" have led to mass political persecution, scapegoating, and the ousting of those in government positions who have had connections with left-wing to far-left ideology. The name is derived from the red flag, a common symbol of communism and socialism.

Contents

The term is most often used to refer to two periods in the history of the United States which are referred to by this name. The First Red Scare, which occurred immediately after World War I, revolved around a perceived threat from the American labor movement, anarchist revolution, and political radicalism that followed revolutionary socialist movements in Germany and Russia during the 19th–early 20th century.

The Second Red Scare, which occurred immediately after World War II, was preoccupied with the perception that national or foreign communists were infiltrating or subverting American society and the federal government.

First Red Scare (1917–1920)

A political cartoon from 1919 depicting the October Revolution's impact on the Paris peace talks 1919 Political Cartoon (14759129762) (cropped).jpg
A political cartoon from 1919 depicting the October Revolution's impact on the Paris peace talks

The first Red Scare in the United States accompanied the Russian Revolution of 1917 (specifically, the October Revolution) and subsequent communist revolutions in Europe and beyond. Citizens of the United States in the years of World War I (1914–1918) were intensely patriotic; anarchist and left-wing social agitation aggravated national, social, and political tensions.[ citation needed ] Political scientist and former member of the Communist Party USA Murray B. Levin wrote that the Red Scare was "a nationwide anti-radical hysteria provoked by a mounting fear and anxiety that a Bolshevik revolution in America was imminent—a revolution that would change Church, home, marriage, civility, and the American way of Life". [1] News media exacerbated such fears, channeling them into anti-foreign sentiment due to the lively debate among recent immigrants from Europe regarding various forms of anarchism as possible solutions to widespread poverty. The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), also known as the Wobblies, backed several labor strikes in 1916 and 1917. These strikes covered a wide range of industries including steel working, shipbuilding, coal mining, copper mining, and others necessary for wartime activities.

After World War I ended (November 1918), the number of strikes increased to record levels in 1919, with more than 3,600 separate strikes by a wide range of workers, e.g. steel workers, railroad shop workers, and the Boston police department. [2] The press portrayed these worker strikes as "radical threats to American society" inspired by "left-wing, foreign agents provocateurs". The IWW and those sympathetic to workers claimed that the press "misrepresented legitimate labor strikes" as "crimes against society", "conspiracies against the government", and "plots to establish communism". [3] Opponents of labor viewed strikes as an extension of the radical, anarchist foundations of the IWW, which contends that all workers should be united as a social class and that capitalism and the wage system should be abolished. [4]

In June 1917, as a response to World War I, Congress passed the Espionage Act to prevent any information relating to national defense from being used to harm the United States or to aid her enemies. The Wilson administration used this act to make anything "urging treason" a "nonmailable matter". Due to the Espionage Act and the then Postmaster General Albert S. Burleson, 74 separate newspapers were not being mailed. [5]

A "European Anarchist" attempts to destroy the Statue of Liberty in this 1919 political cartoon. Come unto me, ye opprest.jpg
A "European Anarchist" attempts to destroy the Statue of Liberty in this 1919 political cartoon.
A bomb blast badly damaged the residence of Attorney General Mitchell Palmer in the spring of 1919. Palmer Bombing.jpg
A bomb blast badly damaged the residence of Attorney General Mitchell Palmer in the spring of 1919.

In April 1919, authorities discovered a plot for mailing 36 bombs to prominent members of the U.S. political and economic establishment: J. P. Morgan Jr., John D. Rockefeller, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, U.S. Attorney General Alexander Mitchell Palmer, and immigration officials. On June 2, 1919, in eight cities, eight bombs exploded simultaneously. One target was the Washington, D.C., house of U.S. Attorney General Palmer, where the explosion killed the bomber, who (evidence indicated) was an Italian-American radical from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Afterwards, Palmer ordered the U.S. Justice Department to launch the Palmer Raids (1919–21). [6] He deported 249 Russian immigrants on the "Soviet Ark", formed the General Intelligence Unit – a precursor to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) – within the Department of Justice, and used federal agents to jail more than 5,000 citizens and to search homes without respecting their constitutional rights. [7]

In 1918, before the bombings, President Woodrow Wilson had pressured Congress to legislate the anti-anarchist Sedition Act of 1918 to protect wartime morale by deporting putatively undesirable political people. Law professor David D. Cole reports that President Wilson's "federal government consistently targeted alien radicals, deporting them... for their speech or associations, making little effort to distinguish terrorists from ideological dissidents". [6] President Wilson used the Sedition Act of 1918 to limit the exercise of free speech by criminalizing language deemed disloyal to the United States government. [8]

Initially, the press praised the raids; The Washington Post stated: "There is no time to waste on hairsplitting over [the] infringement of liberty", and The New York Times wrote that the injuries inflicted upon the arrested were "souvenirs of the new attitude of aggressiveness which had been assumed by the Federal agents against Reds and suspected-Reds". [9] In the event, twelve publicly prominent lawyers characterized the Palmer Raids as unconstitutional. The critics included future Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, who published A Report on the Illegal Practices of The United States Department of Justice, documenting systematic violations of the Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, and Eighth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution via Palmer-authorized "illegal acts" and "wanton violence". Defensively, Palmer then warned that a government-deposing left-wing revolution would begin on 1 May 1920—May Day, the International Workers' Day. When it failed to happen, he was ridiculed and lost much credibility. Strengthening the legal criticism of Palmer was that fewer than 600 deportations were substantiated with evidence, out of the thousands of resident aliens arrested and deported. In July 1920, Palmer's once-promising Democratic Party bid for the U.S. presidency failed. [10] Wall Street was bombed on September 16, 1920, near Federal Hall National Memorial and the JP Morgan Bank. Although both anarchists and communists were suspected as being responsible for the bombing, ultimately no individuals were indicted for the bombing, in which 38 died and 141 were injured. [11]

In 1919–20, several states enacted "criminal syndicalism" laws outlawing advocacy of violence in effecting and securing social change. The restrictions included limitations on free speech. [12] Passage of these laws, in turn, provoked aggressive police investigation of the accused persons, their jailing, and deportation for being suspected of being either communist or left-wing. Regardless of ideological gradation, the Red Scare did not distinguish between communism, anarchism, socialism, or social democracy. [13] This aggressive crackdown on certain ideologies resulted in many Supreme Court cases over free speech. In the 1919 case of Schenk v. United States , the Supreme Court, introducing the clear-and-present-danger test, effectively deemed the Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition Act of 1918 constitutional. [14]

Second Red Scare (1947–1957)

Senator Joseph McCarthy, namesake of McCarthyism Joseph McCarthy.jpg
Senator Joseph McCarthy, namesake of McCarthyism

The second Red Scare occurred after World War II (1939–1945), and is known as "McCarthyism" after its best-known advocate, Senator Joseph McCarthy. McCarthyism coincided with an increased and widespread fear of communist espionage that was consequent of the increasing tension in the Cold War through the Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe, the Berlin Blockade (1948–49), the end of the Chinese Civil War, the confessions of spying for the Soviet Union that were made by several high-ranking U.S. government officials, and the outbreak of the Korean War.

Internal causes of the anti-communist fear

The events of the late 1940s, the early 1950s—the trial of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg (1953), the trial of Alger Hiss, the Iron Curtain (1945–1991) around Eastern Europe, and the Soviet Union's first nuclear weapon test in 1949 (RDS-1)—surprised the American public, influencing popular opinion about U.S. national security, which, in turn, was connected to the fear that the Soviet Union would drop nuclear bombs on the United States, and fear of the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA).

In Canada, the 1946 Kellock–Taschereau Commission investigated espionage after top-secret documents concerning RDX, radar and other weapons were handed over to the Soviets by a domestic spy-ring. [15]

At the House Un-American Activities Committee, former CPUSA members and NKVD spies, Elizabeth Bentley and Whittaker Chambers, testified that Soviet spies and communist sympathizers had penetrated the U.S. government before, during and after World War II. Other U.S. citizen spies confessed to their acts of espionage in situations where the statute of limitations on prosecuting them had run out. In 1949, anti-communist fear, and fear of American traitors, was aggravated by the Chinese Communists winning the Chinese Civil War against the Western-sponsored Kuomintang, their founding of the Communist China, and later China intervenes (October–December 1950) in the Korean War (1950–53) against U.S. ally South Korea.

A few of the events during the Red Scare were also due to a power struggle between director of FBI J. Edgar Hoover and the Central Intelligence Agency. Hoover had instigated and aided some of the investigations of members of the CIA with "leftist" history, like Cord Meyer. [16] This conflict could also be traced back to the conflict between Hoover and William J. Donovan, going back to the first Red Scare, but especially during World War II. Donovan ran the OSS (CIA's predecessor). They had differing opinions on the nature of the alliance with the Soviet Union, conflicts over jurisdiction, conflicts of personality, the OSS hiring of communists and criminals as agents, etc. [17]

Historian Richard Powers distinguishes two main forms of anti-communism during the period, liberal anti-communism and countersubversive anti-communism. The countersubversives, he argues, derived from a pre-WWII isolationist tradition on the right. Liberal anti-communists believed that political debate was enough to show Communists as disloyal and irrelevant, while countersubversive anticommunists believed that Communists had to be exposed and punished. [18] At times, countersubversive anticommunists accused liberals of being "equally destructive" as Communists due to an alleged lack of religious values or supposed "red web" infiltration into the New Deal. [18]

Much evidence for Soviet espionage existed, according to Democratic Senator and historian Daniel Moynihan, with the Venona project consisting of "overwhelming proof of the activities of Soviet spy networks in America, complete with names, dates, places, and deeds." However, Moynihan argued that because sources like the Venona project were kept secret for so long, "ignorant armies clashed by night". With McCarthy advocating an extremist view, the discussion of communist subversion was made into a civil rights issue instead of a counterintelligence one. [19] This historiographical perspective is shared by historians John Earl Haynes [20] and Robert Louis Benson. [21] While President Truman formulated the Truman Doctrine against Soviet expansion, it is possible he was not fully informed of the Venona intercepts, leaving him unaware of the domestic extent of espionage, according to Moynihan and Benson. [22]

History

Early years

By the 1930s, communism had become an attractive economic ideology, particularly among labor leaders and intellectuals. By 1939, the CPUSA had about 50,000 members. [23] In 1940, soon after World War II began in Europe, the U.S. Congress legislated the Alien Registration Act (aka the Smith Act , 18 USC § 2385) making it a crime to "knowingly or willfully advocate, abet, advise or teach the duty, necessity, desirability or propriety of overthrowing the Government of the United States or of any State by force or violence, or for anyone to organize any association which teaches, advises or encourages such an overthrow, or for anyone to become a member of or to affiliate with any such association"—and required Federal registration of all foreign nationals. Although principally deployed against communists, the Smith Act was also used against right-wing political threats such as the German-American Bund, and the perceived racial disloyalty of the Japanese-American population (cf. hyphenated-Americans).

World War II

The Washington Commonwealth Federation newspaper after the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact (original scan) People Demand Peace.jpeg
The Washington Commonwealth Federation newspaper after the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact (original scan)

After the Soviet Union signed the non-aggression Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact with Nazi Germany on August 23, 1939, negative attitudes towards communists in the United States were on the rise. While the American communist party at first attacked Germany for its September 1, 1939 invasion of western Poland, on September 11 it received a blunt directive from Moscow denouncing the Polish government. [24] On September 17, the Soviet Union invaded eastern Poland and occupied the Polish territory assigned to it by the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, followed by co-ordination with German forces in Poland. [25] [26] The CPUSA turned the focus of its public activities from anti-fascism to advocating peace, not only opposing military preparations, but also condemning those opposed to Hitler. The party did not at first attack President Roosevelt, reasoning that this could devastate American Communism, blaming instead Roosevelt's advisors. [27]

On November 30, when Soviet Union attacked Finland and after forced mutual assistance pacts from Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, the Communist Party considered Russian security sufficient justification to support the actions. [28] Secret short wave radio broadcasts in October from Comintern leader Georgi Dimitrov ordered CPUSA leader Earl Browder to change the party's support for Roosevelt. [28] On October 23, the party began attacking Roosevelt. [29] The party was active in the isolationist America First Committee. [30] The CPUSA also dropped its boycott of Nazi goods, spread the slogans "The Yanks Are Not Coming" and "Hands Off", set up a "perpetual peace vigil" across the street from the White House and announced that Roosevelt was the head of the "war party of the American bourgeoisie". [29] By April 1940, the party Daily Worker's line seemed not so much antiwar as simply pro-German. [31] A pamphlet stated the Jews had just as much to fear from Britain and France as they did Germany. [31] In August 1940, after NKVD agent Ramón Mercader killed Trotsky with an ice axe, Browder perpetuated Moscow's fiction that the killer, who had been dating one of Trotsky's secretaries, was a disillusioned follower. [32]

In allegiance to the Soviet Union, the party changed this policy again after Hitler broke the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact by attacking the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941. The CPUSA opposed labor strikes in the weapons industry and supporting the U.S. war effort against the Axis Powers. With the slogan "Communism is Twentieth-Century Americanism", the chairman, Earl Browder, advertised the CPUSA's integration to the political mainstream. [33] In contrast, the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party opposed U.S. participation in the war and supported labor strikes, even in the war-effort industry. For this reason, James P. Cannon and other SWP leaders were convicted per the Smith Act.

Increasing tension

In March 1947, President Harry S. Truman signed Executive Order 9835, creating the "Federal Employees Loyalty Program" establishing political-loyalty review boards who determined the "Americanism" of Federal Government employees, and requiring that all federal employees to take an oath of loyalty to the United States government. It then recommended termination of those who had confessed to spying for the Soviet Union, as well as some suspected of being "Un-American". This led to more than 2,700 dismissals and 12,000 resignations from the years 1947 to 1956. [34] It also was the template for several state legislatures' loyalty acts, such as California's Levering Act. The House Committee on Un-American Activities was created during the Truman administration as a response to allegations by Republicans of disloyalty in Truman's administration. [34] The House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) and the committees of Senator Joseph McCarthy (R., Wisc.) conducted character investigations of "American communists" (actual and alleged), and their roles in (real and imaginary) espionage, propaganda, and subversion favoring the Soviet Union—in the process revealing the extraordinary breadth of the Soviet spy network in infiltrating the federal government. The process also launched the successful political careers of Richard Nixon and Robert F. Kennedy, [35] as well as that of Joseph McCarthy. The HUAC held a large interest in investigating those in the entertainment industry in Hollywood. They interrogated actors, writers, and producers. The people who cooperated in the investigations got to continue working as they had been, but people who refused to cooperate were blacklisted. Critics of the HUAC claim their tactics were an abuse of government power and resulted in a witch hunt that disregarded citizens’ rights and ruined their careers and reputations. Critics claim the internal witch hunt was a use for personal gain to spread influence for government officials by intensifying the fear of Communists infiltrating the country. Supporters, however, believe the actions of the HUAC were justified given the level of threat Communism posed to democracy in the United States.

Senator McCarthy stirred up further fear in the United States of communists infiltrating the country by saying that communist spies were omnipresent, and he was America's only salvation, using this fear to increase his own influence. In 1950 Joseph McCarthy addressed the senate, citing 81 separate cases, and made accusations against suspected communists. Although he provided little or no evidence, this prompted the Senate to call for a full investigation. [36]

Senator McCarran introduced the McCarran Internal Security Act of 1950 that was passed by the U.S. Congress and which modified a great deal of law to restrict civil liberties in the name of security. President Truman declared the act a "mockery of the Bill of Rights" and a "long step toward totalitarianism" because it represented a government restriction on the freedom of opinion. He vetoed the act but his veto was overridden by Congress. [37] Much of the bill eventually was repealed.

The formal establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949 and the beginning of the Korean War in 1950 meant that Asian Americans, especially those of Chinese or Korean descent, came under increasing suspicion by both American civilians and government officials of being Communist sympathizers. Simultaneously, some American politicians saw the prospect of American-educated Chinese students bringing their knowledge back to "Red China" as an unacceptable threat to American national security, and laws such as the China Aid Act of 1950 and the Refugee Relief Act of 1953 gave significant assistance to Chinese students who wished to settle in the United States. Despite being naturalized, however, Chinese immigrants continued to face suspicion of their allegiance. The general effect, according to University of Wisconsin-Madison scholar Qing Liu, was to simultaneously demand that Chinese (and other Asian) students politically support the American government yet avoid engaging directly in politics. [38]

The Second Red Scare profoundly altered the temper of American society. Its later characterizations may be seen as contributory to works of feared communist espionage, such as the film My Son John (1952), about parents' suspicions their son is a spy. Abundant accounts in narrative forms contained themes of the infiltration, subversion, invasion, and destruction of American society by un–American thought. Even a baseball team, the Cincinnati Reds, temporarily renamed themselves the "Cincinnati Redlegs" to avoid the money-losing and career-ruining connotations inherent in being ball-playing "Reds" (communists).

In 1954, Congress passed the Communist Control Act of 1954 which prevented members of the communist party in America from holding office in labor unions and other labor organizations.

Wind down

Examining the political controversies of the 1940s and 1950s, historian John Earl Haynes, who studied the Venona decryptions extensively, argued that Joseph McCarthy's attempts to "make anti-communism a partisan weapon" actually "threatened [the post-War] anti-Communist consensus", thereby ultimately harming anti-communist efforts more than helping them. [20] Meanwhile, the "shockingly high level" of infiltration by Soviet agents during WWII had largely dissipated by 1950. [20] Liberal anti-communists like Edward Shils and Daniel Moynihan had contempt for McCarthyism, and Moynihan argued that McCarthy's overreaction distracted from the "real (but limited) extent of Soviet espionage in America." [19] In 1950, President Harry Truman called Joseph McCarthy "the greatest asset the Kremlin has." [39]

In 1954, after accusing the army, including war heroes, Senator Joseph McCarthy lost credibility in the eyes of the American public and the Army-McCarthy Hearings were held in the summer of 1954. He was formally censured by his colleagues in Congress and the hearings led by McCarthy came to a close. [36] After the Senate formally censured McCarthy, [40] his political standing and power were significantly diminished, and much of the tension surrounding the idea of a possible communist takeover died down.

From 1955 through 1959, the Supreme Court made several decisions which restricted the ways in which the government could enforce its anti-communist policies, some of which included limiting the federal loyalty program to only those who had access to sensitive information, allowing defendants to face their accusers, reducing the strength of congressional investigation committees, and weakening the Smith Act. [34]

In the 1957 case Yates v. United States and the 1961 case Scales v. United States , the Supreme Court limited Congress's ability to circumvent the First Amendment, and in 1967 during the Supreme Court case United States v. Robel , the Supreme Court ruled that a ban on communists in the defense industry was unconstitutional. [41]

In 1995, the American government declassified details of the Venona Project following the Moynihan Commission, which when combined with the opening of the USSR Comintern archives, provided substantial validation of intelligence gathering, outright spying, and policy influencing, by Americans on behalf of the Soviet Union, from 1940 through 1980. [42] [43] Over 300 American communists, whether they knew it or not, including government officials and technicians that helped in developing the atom bomb, were found to have engaged in espionage. [34] This allegedly included some pro-Soviet capitalists, such as economist Harry Dexter White, [44] [45] and communist businessman David Karr. [46]

New Red Scare

According to The New York Times , China's growing military and economic power has resulted in a "New Red Scare" in the United States. Both Democrats and Republicans have expressed anti-China sentiment. [47] According to The Economist , the New Red Scare has caused the American and Chinese governments to "increasingly view Chinese students with suspicion" on American college campuses. [48]

The fourth iteration of the Committee on the Present Danger, a United States foreign policy interest group, was established on March 25, 2019, branding itself Committee on the Present Danger: China (CPDC). [47] The CPDC has been criticized as promoting a revival of Red Scare politics in the United States, and for its ties to conspiracy theorist Frank Gaffney and conservative activist Steve Bannon. [47] [49] David Skidmore, writing for The Diplomat , saw it as another instance of "adolescent hysteria" in American diplomacy, as another of the "fevered crusades [which] have produced some of the costliest mistakes in American foreign policy". [49]

Between 2000 and 2023, there were 224 reported instances of Chinese espionage directed at the United States. [50]

Outside the United States

The American Red Scares, combined with the general atmosphere of the Cold War, had a marked influence on other Anglophone countries. Anticommunist paranoia and violence was significantly advanced in Australia, [51] Canada, [52] and the United Kingdom. [53] In other parts of the world, such as Indonesia, fear and loathing of communism has escalated to the level of political violence.

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">McCarthyism</span> Phenomenon of US political rhetoric after WWII

McCarthyism, also known as the Second Red Scare, was the political repression and persecution of left-wing individuals and a campaign spreading fear of communist and Soviet influence on American institutions and of Soviet espionage in the United States during the late 1940s through the 1950s. After the mid-1950s, U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy, who had spearheaded the campaign, gradually lost his public popularity and credibility after several of his accusations were found to be false. The U.S. Supreme Court under Chief Justice Earl Warren made a series of rulings on civil and political rights that overturned several key laws and legislative directives, and helped bring an end to the Second Red Scare. Historians have suggested since the 1980s that as McCarthy's involvement was less central than that of others, a different and more accurate term should be used instead that more accurately conveys the breadth of the phenomenon, and that the term McCarthyism is, in the modern day, outdated. Ellen Schrecker has suggested that Hooverism, after FBI Head J. Edgar Hoover, is more appropriate.

The Venona project was a United States counterintelligence program initiated during World War II by the United States Army's Signal Intelligence Service and later absorbed by the National Security Agency (NSA), that ran from February 1, 1943, until October 1, 1980. It was intended to decrypt messages transmitted by the intelligence agencies of the Soviet Union. Initiated when the Soviet Union was an ally of the US, the program continued during the Cold War, when the Soviet Union was considered an enemy.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Communist Party USA</span> American political party

The Communist Party USA, officially the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA), is a communist party in the United States which was established in 1919 after a split in the Socialist Party of America following the Russian Revolution.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Eugene Dennis</span> American politician

Francis Xavier Waldron, best known by the pseudonym Eugene Dennis and Tim Ryan, was an American communist politician and union organizer, best remembered as the long-time leader of the Communist Party USA and as named party in Dennis v. United States, a famous McCarthy Era Supreme Court case.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Earl Browder</span> American communist politician (1891–1973)

Earl Russell Browder was an American politician, spy for the Soviet Union, communist activist and leader of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA). Browder was the General Secretary of the CPUSA during the 1930s and first half of the 1940s. During World War I, Browder served time in federal prison as a conscientious objector to conscription and the war. Upon his release, Browder became an active member of the American Communist movement, soon working as an organizer on behalf of the Communist International and its Red International of Labor Unions in China and the Pacific region.

Jacob Golos was a Ukrainian-born Bolshevik revolutionary who became an intelligence operative in the United States on behalf of the USSR. A founding member of the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA), circa 1930 Golos became involved in the covert work of Soviet intelligence agencies. He participated in procuring American passports by means of fraudulent documentation, and the recruitment and coordination of activities of a broad network of agents.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Elizabeth Bentley</span> Cold War Soviet spy

Elizabeth Terrill Bentley was an American NKVD spymaster, who was recruited from within the Communist Party USA (CPUSA). She served the Soviet Union as the primary handler of multiple highly placed moles within both the United States Federal Government and the Office of Strategic Services from 1938 to 1945. She defected by contacting the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and debriefing about her espionage activities.

Lt. Col. Duncan Chaplin Lee (1913–1988) was a confidential senior assistant to Maj. Gen. William Donovan, founder and director of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), World War II-era predecessor of the CIA, between 1942 and 1946. Lee has posthumously been identified by the Venona project as the NKVD mole inside the OSS with the code name "Koch", making Lee the most senior alleged spy the Soviet Union is ever known to have recruited inside the U.S. intelligence community.

As early as the 1920s, the Soviet Union, through its GRU, OGPU, NKVD, and KGB intelligence agencies, used Russian and foreign-born nationals, as well as Communists of American origin, to perform espionage activities in the United States, forming various spy rings. Particularly during the 1940s, some of these espionage networks had contact with various U.S. government agencies. These Soviet espionage networks illegally transmitted confidential information to Moscow, such as information on the development of the atomic bomb. Soviet spies also participated in propaganda and disinformation operations, known as active measures, and attempted to sabotage diplomatic relationships between the U.S. and its allies.

Harry Magdoff was accused by a number of authors as having been complicit in Soviet espionage activity during his time in US government. He was accused of passing information to Soviet intelligence networks in the United States, primarily through what the FBI called the "Perlo Group." Magdoff was never indicted, but after the end of the Cold War, a number of scholars have inspected declassified documents from U.S. and Soviet archives. They cite these documents to support the claim that Magdoff was involved in espionage. Other authors have taken issue with some of the broader interpretations of such materials which implicate many Americans in espionage for the Soviet Union, and the allegation that Harry Magdoff was an information source for the Soviets is disputed by several academics and historians asserting that Magdoff probably had no malicious intentions and committed no crimes.

John Earl Haynes is an American historian who worked as a specialist in 20th-century political history in the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress. He is known for his books on the subject of the American Communist and anti-Communist movements, and on Soviet espionage in America.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Louis F. Budenz</span> American activist and writer (1891–1972)

Louis Francis Budenz was an American activist and writer. He began as a labor activist and became a member of the Communist Party USA. In 1945, Budenz renounced Communism and became a vocal anti-Communist, appearing as an expert witness at governmental hearings and writing about his experiences.

Ellen Wolf Schrecker is an American professor emerita of American history at Yeshiva University. She has received the Frederick Ewen Academic Freedom Fellowship at the Tamiment Library at NYU. She is known primarily for her work in the history of McCarthyism. Historian Ronald Radosh has described her as "the dean of the anti-anti-Communist historians."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Browderism</span> American variant of Marxism–Leninism

Browderism refers to the variant of Marxism–Leninism developed in the 1940s by American communist politician Earl Browder, who led the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) from 1930 to 1945. Characterized by deviations from orthodox Marxist–Leninist policies and principles, it sought to revise Marxism to align the party with mainstream American politics and present events; this involved incorporating Americanism and its nationalist values into the party's message, shifting away from the revolutionary socialism previously touted by the CPUSA. Moreover, Browderism rejected class conflict entirely, instead advocating for class collaboration with the bourgeosie under a popular front.

Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight Against America's Enemies is a 2007 book by author M. Stanton Evans, who argues that Joseph McCarthy was proper in making accusations of disloyalty, subversion, or treason within the US State Department and the US Army, showing proper regard for evidence.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Smith Act trials of Communist Party leaders</span> U.S. federal prosecutions, 1949–1958

The Smith Act trials of Communist Party leaders in New York City from 1949 to 1958 were the result of US federal government prosecutions in the postwar period and during the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the United States. Leaders of the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA) were accused of violating the Smith Act, a statute that prohibited advocating violent overthrow of the government. The defendants argued that they advocated a peaceful transition to socialism, and that the First Amendment's guarantee of freedom of speech and of association protected their membership in a political party. Appeals from these trials reached the US Supreme Court, which ruled on issues in Dennis v. United States (1951) and Yates v. United States (1957).

The Communist Party USA (CPUSA) is an American political party with a communist platform that was founded in 1919 in Chicago, Illinois. Its history is deeply rooted in the history of the American labor movement as it played critical roles in the earliest struggles to organize American workers into unions, in leadership of labor strikes, as well as prominent involvement in later civil rights and anti-war movements. Many party members were forced to work covertly due to the high level of political repression in the United States against Communists. CPUSA faced many challenges in gaining a foothold in the United States as they endured two eras of the Red Scare and never experienced significant electoral success. Despite struggling to become a major electoral player, CPUSA was the most prominent leftist party in the United States. CPUSA developed close ties with the Soviet Union, which led to them being financially linked.

Anti anti-communism is opposition to anti-communism as applied in the Cold War. The term was first coined by Clifford Geertz, an American anthropologist at the Institute for Advanced Study, who defined it as being applied in "the cold war days" by "those who ... regarded the [Red] Menace as the primary fact of contemporary political life" to "[t]hose of us who strenuously opposed [that] obsession, as we saw it ... with the insinuation – wildly incorrect in the vast majority of cases – that, by the law of the double negative, we had some secret affection for the Soviet Union." Stated more simply by Kristen Ghodsee and Scott Sehon, "the anthropologist Clifford Geertz wrote that you could be 'anti anti-communism' without being in favour of communism."

References

  1. ↑ Levin, Murray B. (1971). Political Hysteria in America: The Democratic Capacity for Repression. Basic Books. p. 29. ISBN   0-465-05898-1. OCLC   257349.
  2. ↑ "Labour Movements, Trade Unions and Strikes (USA) | International Encyclopedia of the First World War". encyclopedia.1914-1918-online.net. Archived from the original on 2022-11-06. Retrieved 2022-12-06. The strike surge of 1919 featured unprecedented levels of industrial conflict. Acting as the capstone to the long strike wave of 1915–1922, it involved nearly one out of every four workers — over 4,160,000 in total, 20 percent of the labor force — walking out in more than 3,630 work stoppages, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
  3. ↑ Political Hysteria in America: The Democratic Capacity for Repression (1971), p. 31
  4. ↑ "Industrial Workers of the World: Constitution Preamble". www.iww.org. 2021. Retrieved 28 October 2022.
  5. ↑ May 2019), Deborah Fisher in. "Espionage Act of 1917". www.mtsu.edu. Retrieved 2019-10-31.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)
  6. 1 2 Cole, David D. (2003). "Enemy Aliens" (PDF). Stanford Law Review. 54 (5): 953–1004. doi:10.2307/1229690. ISSN   0038-9765. JSTOR   1229690. OCLC   95029839. Archived from the original (PDF) on August 15, 2011.
  7. ↑ "The Red Scare [ushistory.org]". www.ushistory.org. Archived from the original on 2019-11-01. Retrieved 2019-10-31.
  8. ↑ Cowley, Marcie K. "Red Scare". www.mtsu.edu. Archived from the original on 2019-10-16. Retrieved 2019-10-31.
  9. ↑ Farquhar, Michael (2003). A Treasury of Great American Scandals . Penguin Books. p.  199. ISBN   0-14-200192-9. OCLC   51810711.
  10. ↑ Hakim, Joy (1995). War, Peace, and All That Jazz. New York, New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 34–36. ISBN   0-19-509514-6.
  11. ↑ Gage, Beverly (2009). The Day Wall Street Exploded: A Story of America in its First Age of Terror . New York: Oxford University Press. pp.  160–161. ISBN   978-0-19-514824-4. OCLC   149137353. The Day Wall Street Exploded.
  12. ↑ Kennedy, David M.; Lizabeth Cohen; Thomas A. Bailey (2001). The American Pageant . Houghton Mifflin Company. ISBN   978-0-669-39728-4. OCLC   48675667. The American Pageant.
  13. ↑ O. Dickerson, Mark (2006). An Introduction to Government and Politics, Seventh Edition. Toronto: Nelson. ISBN   0-17-641676-5.
  14. ↑ Cowley, Marcie K. "Red Scare". www.mtsu.edu. Archived from the original on 2022-12-03. Retrieved 2022-12-06. Convictions under the Espionage Act and the Sedition Act were upheld in several Supreme Court cases in 1919, including Schenck v. United States, in which Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. first outlined his clear and present danger test [...].
  15. ↑ Canada. The report of the Royal Commission appointed under Order in Council P. C. 411 of February 5, 1946 to investigate the facts relating to and the circumstances surrounding the communication, by public officials and other persons in positions of trust, of secret and confidential information to agents of a foreign power, June 27, 1946. Ottawa: E. Cloutier, Printer to the King.[ verification needed ]
  16. ↑ Mocking Bird Archived 2006-06-19 at the Wayback Machine , John Simkin, Spartacus Schoolnet
  17. ↑ See for example Wedge: The Secret War between the FBI and CIA , by Mark Riebling
  18. 1 2 Powers, Richard Gid (1998). Not without honor : the history of American anticommunism. New Haven: Yale University Press. pp. 214, 225. ISBN   0-300-07470-0. OCLC   39245533.
  19. 1 2 Moynihan, Daniel Patrick (1998). Secrecy: The American Experience . Yale University Press. p.  15-16. ISBN   978-0-300-08079-7.
  20. 1 2 3 Haynes, John Earl (February 2000). "Exchange with Arthur Herman and Venona book talk". JohnEarlHaynes.org. Archived from the original on 24 February 2021. Retrieved 11 July 2007.
  21. ↑ Benson, Robert Louis; Warner, Michael (1996). Venona Soviet Espionage and the American Response 1939–1957. National Security Agency. p. xxxiii. Archived from the original on 2022-10-26. Retrieved 2021-09-17.
  22. ↑ "Did Truman Know about Venona?". fas.org. Archived from the original on 2021-07-30. Retrieved 2021-06-12.
  23. ↑ Johnpoll, Bernard K. (1994). A Documentary History of the Communist Party of the United States: Volume III Unite and Fight, 1934–1935. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press. pp. xv. ISBN   978-0-313-28506-6. OCLC   27976811. Archived from the original on 2009-10-10. Retrieved 2017-09-10.
  24. ↑ Ryan, J. G. (1997). Earl Browder: the failure of American communism. University of Alabama Press. p. 162. ISBN   978-0-585-28017-2.
  25. ↑ Roberts, Geoffrey (2006). Stalin's Wars: From World War to Cold War, 1939–1953. Yale University Press. p. 44. ISBN   978-0-300-11204-7.
  26. ↑ Sanford, George (2005). Katyn and the Soviet Massacre of 1940: Truth, Justice And Memory. London, New York: Routledge. ISBN   0-415-33873-5.
  27. ↑ Ryan, J. G. (1997). Earl Browder: the failure of American communism. University of Alabama Press. pp. 164–165. ISBN   978-0-585-28017-2.
  28. 1 2 Ryan, J. G. (1997). Earl Browder: the failure of American communism. University of Alabama Press. p. 166. ISBN   978-0-585-28017-2.
  29. 1 2 Ryan, J. G. (1997). Earl Browder: the failure of American communism. University of Alabama Press. p. 168. ISBN   978-0-585-28017-2.
  30. ↑ Selig Adler (1957). The isolationist impulse: its twentieth-century reaction. pp. 269–270, 274. ISBN   9780837178226
  31. 1 2 Ryan, J. G. (1997). Earl Browder: the failure of American communism. University of Alabama Press. p. 186. ISBN   978-0-585-28017-2.
  32. ↑ Ryan, J. G. (1997). Earl Browder: the failure of American communism. University of Alabama Press. p. 189. ISBN   978-0-585-28017-2.
  33. ↑ Countryman, Edward (2010). "Communism". In Kazin, Michael; Edwards, Rebecca; Rothman, Adam (eds.). The Princeton Encyclopedia of American Political History. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. p. 175. ISBN   978-0-691-12971-6. OCLC   320801248 . Retrieved May 3, 2011.
  34. 1 2 3 4 Storrs, Landon R. Y. (2015-07-02). "McCarthyism and the Second Red Scare". Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History. doi:10.1093/acrefore/9780199329175.013.6. ISBN   978-0199329175. Archived from the original on 2018-07-03. Retrieved 2019-11-01.
  35. ↑ "The Hiss Case in History". The Hiss Case in Story. Harvard, NYU. 2009. Archived from the original on May 14, 2011. Retrieved 2010-07-28.
  36. 1 2 "McCarthyism [ushistory.org]". www.ushistory.org. Archived from the original on 2019-10-31. Retrieved 2019-10-31.
  37. ↑ Lane, Frederick S. (2009). American Privacy: The 400-year History of Our Most Contested Right . Boston: Beacon Press. p.  130. ISBN   978-0-8070-4441-4 . Retrieved May 3, 2011. long step toward totalitarianism.
  38. ↑ Liu, Qing (May 2020). "To Be an Apolitical Political Scientist: A Chinese Immigrant Scholar and (Geo)politicized American Higher Education". History of Education Quarterly. 60 (2): 138–141, 144. doi: 10.1017/heq.2020.10 .
  39. ↑ Wheatcroft, Geoffrey (12 May 1998). "Anti-Anticommunism Again". The Wall Street Journal. ISSN   0099-9660. Archived from the original on 13 November 2022. Retrieved 8 March 2021.
  40. ↑ "U.S. Senate: The Censure Case of Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin (1954)". www.senate.gov. Archived from the original on 2010-01-07. Retrieved 2022-04-05.
  41. ↑ Cowley, Marcie K. "Red Scare". www.mtsu.edu. Retrieved 2019-11-01.
  42. ↑ "Venona and the Russian Files". The Hiss Case in Story. Harvard, NYU. 2010. Archived from the original on May 14, 2011. Retrieved 2010-07-28.
  43. ↑ Commission on Protecting and Reducing Government Secrecy. "A Brief Account of the American Experience" (PDF). Report of the Commission on Protecting and Reducing Government Secrecy. VI; Appendix A. U.S. Government Printing Office. p. A-7. Archived from the original (PDF) on May 14, 2011. Retrieved 2006-06-26.
  44. ↑ Rao, Ashok (2014-08-24). "This Soviet spy created the US-led global economy". Vox. Retrieved 2021-11-07.
  45. ↑ "How a Soviet spy outmaneuvered John Maynard Keynes to ensure U.S. financial dominance". Washington Post. ISSN   0190-8286. Archived from the original on 2022-03-17. Retrieved 2021-11-07.
  46. ↑ "Rich and red: The USSR's prize assets | Harvey Klehr". The Critic Magazine. 2020-09-19. Archived from the original on 2022-11-02. Retrieved 2022-11-02.
  47. 1 2 3 Swanson, Ana (2019-07-20). "A New Red Scare Is Reshaping Washington". The New York Times. ISSN   0362-4331. Archived from the original on 2019-07-20. Retrieved 2022-01-03.
  48. ↑ "The new red scare on American campuses". The Economist . 2020-01-02. ISSN   0013-0613. Archived from the original on 2023-07-25. Retrieved 2022-01-03.
  49. 1 2 Skidmore, David (July 23, 2019). "The US Scare Campaign Against China: The political calculations behind exaggerating the 'present danger' – from the Cold War to today". The Diplomat . Archived from the original on October 14, 2019. Retrieved December 31, 2020.
  50. ↑ "Survey of Chinese Espionage in the United States Since 2000 | Strategic Technologies Program | CSIS". www.csis.org. Retrieved 2024-01-21.
  51. ↑ Fischer, Nick (November 2003). "An Inspiration Misunderstood: Australian Anti-Communists and the Lure of the U.S., 1917–1935". Eras Journal (5). Archived from the original on 26 September 2023. Retrieved 15 September 2023.
  52. ↑ "The Red Scare: Canada searches for communists during the height of Cold War tension". CBClearning. Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Archived from the original on 25 September 2023. Retrieved 21 September 2023.
  53. ↑ Little, Douglas (1988). "Red Scare, 1936: Anti-Bolshevism and the Origins of British Non-Intervention in the Spanish Civil War". Journal of Contemporary History. 23 (2): 291–314. doi:10.1177/002200948802300208. S2CID   153602436.

Further reading

Listen to this article (12 minutes)
Sound-icon.svg
This audio file was created from a revision of this article dated 11 July 2012 (2012-07-11), and does not reflect subsequent edits.
(Audio help  · More spoken articles)
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.