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7:56 AM 8/22/2018 – Cristhian Bahena Rivera: Interpretation (as always, hypothetical) by M.N.: The Demiurge says…

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Gov. Kim Reynolds

________________________________

Cristhian Bahena Rivera
“Bahena”:  Look! = Bak! (Bach, bakh, etc. – Turkish)
Bāhén a = Scars (Chinese)

Interpretation (as always, hypothetical) by M.N.: The Demiurge says: 
?
“You, who call yourselves “Christians”, (meaning: “judge me by your Christian laws”!) you, “Chinese” (New York slang: gay), how can I tell you, in what language, in Chinese, or in Turkish, so you would understand: you have to feel the pain of my SCARS, the pain of my German mothers whose daughters were raped and killed by your “Christian” invaders after the War. This pain of mine flows like a thousand small rivers (“Rivera”s). They are the same German girls, and the same German mothers, like your mothers, just living in Iowa. I owe you, Iowa! I owe you, Brooklyn! (?NY).” 
?
I think, it is possible that the suspect IS NOT the killer, that he is telling the truth, that he “blacked out”: he might have been attacked and rendered unconscious by the same kidnappers who designated him as a patsy from the beginning. It is just the possibility and the hypothesis but it has to be considered. 
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Cristhian Bahena Rivera – Google Search
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24-year-old man arrested, charged with murder of Mollie Tibbetts
mollie tibbetts – Google Search
Mollie Tibbetts case: Man leads police to body, faces murder charge
Mollie Tibbetts, missing Iowa student, found dead, her father says – Fox News
McCarthyism and the Second Red Scare
The spy who made McCarthy | Global
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fbi is deeply and secretly antisemitic – Google Search
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Cristhian Bahena Rivera – Google Search
 

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Mollie Tibbetts case: Man in country illegally charged with murder …

<a href=”http://6abc.com” rel=”nofollow”>6abc.com</a>3 hours ago
Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation Special Agent Rick Rahn said that Cristhian Bahena Rivera, 24, was charged with murder in the death of …
Mollie Tibbetts slain: Suspect Cristhian Bahena Rivera faces first …
The Gazette: Eastern Iowa Breaking News and Headlines12 hours ago
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Washington Post

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The Gazette: Eastern Iowa Breaking News and Headlines

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Read the criminal complaint, arrest warrant in the Mollie Tibbetts case

<a href=”http://DesMoinesRegister.com” rel=”nofollow”>DesMoinesRegister.com</a>12 hours ago
Authorities on Tuesday charged 24-year-old Cristhian Bahena Rivera with first-degree murder in the death of 20-year-old Mollie Tibbetts, the …
Story image for Cristhian Bahena Rivera from The Gazette: Eastern Iowa Breaking News and Headlines

Watch Replay: Cristhian Bahena Rivera charged in Mollie Tibbetts …

The Gazette: Eastern Iowa Breaking News and Headlines14 hours ago
Update 6:17 p.m.: U.S. Sens. Chuck Grassley and Joni Ernst of Iowa today released the following statement regarding the announcement from …
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Undocumented Immigrant Arrested in the Death of Missing University …

Us Weekly13 hours ago
Cristhian Bahena Rivera has been arrested and charged with murder in the first degree of missing University of Iowa student Mollie Tibbetts, …
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READ MORE: Arrest warrant and affidavit for Cristhian Bahena Rivera

<a href=”http://kwwl.com” rel=”nofollow”>kwwl.com</a>13 hours ago
Cristhian Bahena Rivera is now in custody, after investigators say he admitted to interacting with Tibbetts while she was out on a jog on July 18 …
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24-year-old man arrested, charged with murder of Mollie Tibbetts
 

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MONTEZUMA, Iowa (KCRG-TV9) — A 24-year-old man in the U.S. illegally is charged with murder in the death of Mollie Tibbetts.
The 20-year-old University of Iowa student was last seen July 18 near Brooklyn, Iowa.
During a news conference Tuesday, authorities announced a body found Tuesday morning in rural Poweshiek County is believed to be Mollie Tibbetts.
They said Cristhian Rivera faces a first degree murder charge.
Officials said Mollie Tibbetts was taken while jogging. They said surveillance cameras showed Rivera’s vehicle following Tibbetts the night she disappeared. Police said when they interviewed Rivera, he confessed to the killing, and later led them to her body. They said Rivera had left her body in a cornfield in rural Poweshiek County, near Guernsey.
The Division of Criminal Investigation said Rivera has been living in Poweshiek County illegally between 4 and 7 years.
CLICK HERE to view a complete timeline regarding the search for Tibbetts.
Gov. Kim Reynolds has issued a statement on Mollie Tibbetts:
“Today, our state woke up to heart-wrenching news. As a mother, I can’t imagine the sorrow felt by the Tibbetts family. We are all suffering over the death of Mollie, knowing that it could have been our own daughter, sister or friend.
“I spoke with Mollie’s family and passed on the heartfelt condolences of a grieving state. I shared with them my hope that they can find comfort knowing that God does not leave us to suffer alone. Even in our darkest moments, He will comfort and heal our broken hearts.
“I want to recognize and thank our local, state and federal law enforcement community for their coordinated and tireless efforts to find Mollie.
“Over the past month, thousands of Iowans searched and prayed for Mollie’s safe return. Now, we are called to come together once again to lift up a grieving family. The search for Mollie is over, but the demand for justice has just begun.
“As Iowans, we are heartbroken, and we are angry. We are angry that a broken immigration system allowed a predator like this to live in our community, and we will do all we can bring justice to Mollie’s killer.”
_____
The University of Iowa has also released a statement:
“We are deeply saddened that we’ve lost a member of the University of Iowa community. Our thoughts are with Mollie Tibbetts’ family, friends, and classmates.
Losing a fellow student and member of our Hawkeye family is difficult. President Harreld and I share in your grief and encourage you to reach out if you are in need of support.
A list of resources can be found on the university’s safety and support website (<a href=”http://www.uiowa.edu/homepage/safety-and-support” rel=”nofollow”>http://www.uiowa.edu/homepage/safety-and-support</a>) or by calling one of these offices:
• University Counseling Services (319-335-7294)
• Student Care and Assistance (319-335-1162)
• UI Employee Assistance Program (319-335-2085)
_____
Fred Hubbell, Democratic nominee for Iowa governor, released the following statement:
“This is truly heartbreaking. For Mollie’s parents, her family and friends, any words today will be of little comfort. As a parent and grandparent your worst nightmare is losing your child. I know this must be an unimaginable loss. Please know our family and Iowans everywhere share your grief and are united in pursuit of justice. I want to commend our law enforcement officials who worked around the clock to investigate this crime. In this state, if you break the law, you will face the consequences.”
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24-year-old man arrested, charged with murder of Mollie Tibbetts

KCRG8 hours ago
MONTEZUMA, Iowa (KCRG-TV9) — A 24-year-old man in the U.S. illegally is charged with murder in the death of Mollie Tibbetts.
Watch Replay: Cristhian Bahena Rivera charged in Mollie Tibbetts …
The Gazette: Eastern Iowa Breaking News and Headlines13 hours ago
Gov. Reynolds issues heartfelt statement on Mollie Tibbetts
<a href=”http://kwwl.com” rel=”nofollow”>kwwl.com</a>12 hours ago

Mollie Tibbetts case: Man leads police to body, faces murder charge
 

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While authorities have yet to confirm the body is Tibbetts, they arrested Cristhian Bahena Rivera, 24, on first-degree murder charges.
The discovery dashed the hopes of family and friends who had scoured Poweshiek and nearby counties as rewards grew to nearly $400,000. Tibbetts, officials said, is believed to have been abducted on July 18 as she went out for an evening jog.
Rivera, who’s an undocumented immigrant, told them Monday that he saw and pursued her, getting out of his car and running beside Tibbetts. She warned him she would call police, officials told reporters Tuesday.
The suspect, who said he blacked out at some point, led authorities to the field Tuesday morning, they said. A body, dressed in Tibbetts’ clothing, was covered in corn leaves.

It is unclear why Rivera killed Tibbetts, said Rick Rahn, special agent in charge at the Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation.
“I can’t really speak to you about the motive,” Rahn said. “I can just tell you it seems that he followed her and seemed to be drawn to her on that particular day and for whatever reason he chose to abduct her.”
An autopsy to determine when and how the woman died is planned for Wednesday.
Authorities had been looking for Tibbetts about a month when they found home surveillance video that showed a car following a woman running.
After watching it for hours, investigators found clues that led them to Rivera. He didn’t resist when authorities tried to detain him, Rahn said.
The suspect is an undocumented immigrant who authorities believe has been in the area for four to seven years, Rahn said. Charges were filed in district court in Poweshiek County and bail was set at $1 million. If convicted Rivera could get life in prison without parole. Iowa does not have the death penalty.
President Donald Trump referred to the case while speaking at a rally in Charleston, West Virginia.
“You heard about today with the illegal alien coming in very sadly from Mexico. And you saw what happened to that incredible beautiful young woman. Should have never happened. Illegally in our country,” he said. “We’ve had a huge impact but the laws are so bad, the immigration laws are such a disgrace. We’re getting it changed but we have to get more Republicans.”

Police: Tibbetts told suspect she would call cops

Authorities said the suspect followed Tibbetts on July 18, the video recorded by a home surveillance system shows.
According to court documents, the suspect said in an interview that when he approached Tibbetts, she pulled out her cell phone and told Rivera she was going to “call the police” and that caused him to get angry.
He said he blacked out and woke up at an intersection in rural Poweshiek County, court documents say.
Rahn said the suspect told investigators he realized he had put the woman in the trunk of his car and when he took her out, he saw blood on the side of her head, the document says. He left the body in a cornfield and covered it with corn leaves, it adds.
Shawn Neudauer, a spokesman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said the agency on Tuesday sent a detainer request to local authorities for Rivera, who is from Mexico. That means ICE could take custody of Rivera if he was released from local custody.
Rahn said Tibbetts’ digital footprint, which included data from a fitness tracker known as a Fitbit, played a role in solving the case.
Tibbetts’ father, Rob Tibbetts, when reached earlier Tuesday, had no comment.
Other politicians weighed in on Tibbetts’ death.
Gov. Kim Reynolds said she called Tibbetts’ family.
“I spoke with Mollie’s family and passed on the heartfelt condolences of a grieving state,” Reynolds said. “I shared with them my hope that they can find comfort knowing that God does not leave us to suffer alone. Even in our darkest moments, He will comfort and heal our broken hearts.”
She complained about a broken immigration system that allowed a “predator” to live in her state.
Sens. Joni Ernst and Chuck Grassley also sent condolences and called for action on illegal immigration.
“Too many Iowans have been lost at the hands of criminals who broke our immigration laws. We cannot allow these tragedies to continue,” they said.
Vice President Mike Pence called Tibbetts an amazing woman.
“Heartbroken by the news about Mollie Tibbetts. Mollie was an amazing young woman and we are praying for her parents, brothers & friends in this time of unimaginable grief. … We commend the swift action by local, state, & federal investigators working in Iowa in apprehending an illegal immigrant, who’s now charged with first-degree murder. Now, justice will be served. We will never forget Mollie Tibbetts,” he tweeted.

Extensive and lengthy search

Tibbetts was

last seen jogging

 on July 18 in the small community of Brooklyn, Iowa, about an hour east of Des Moines, according to the Poweshiek County Sheriff’s Office.

Before she went missing, Tibbetts’ brother dropped her off at her boyfriend’s house so she could dog-sit, HLN reported. Her family reported her missing after she did not show up for work the next day.

The poster distributed asking for information about Mollie Tibbitts' disappearance.

The poster distributed asking for information about Mollie Tibbitts’ disappearance.

Investigators launched an extensive search for Tibbetts across the area, including in ponds, fields and from the air.
Rahn said last week that authorities had received more than 1,500 tips and conducted more than 500 interviews in the case.
Tibbetts was studying psychology at the University of Iowa and wanted to get a doctorate and write books, her father said.
Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly spelled the first name of the suspect.

CNN’s Dave Alsup, Sheena Jones, Chris Boyette, Kevin Liptak, Noah Gray, Cameron Markham and Kara Devlin contributed to this report.

Mollie Tibbetts, missing Iowa student, found dead, her father says – Fox News
 

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Mollie Tibbetts, missing Iowa student, found dead, her father says
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What we know so far about the disappearance of 20-year-old college student Mollie Tibbetts. The body of missing college student Mollie Tibbetts was found Tuesday, her father and two sources told Fox News, bringing an end to an intensive search that 
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McCarthyism and the Second Red Scare
 

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PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, AMERICAN HISTORY (<a href=”http://americanhistory.oxfordre.com” rel=”nofollow”>americanhistory.oxfordre.com</a>). (c) Oxford University Press USA, 2016. All Rights Reserved. Personal use only; commercial use is strictly prohibited (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice).
date: 21 August 2018

Summary and Keywords

The second Red Scare refers to the fear of communism that permeated American politics, culture, and society from the late 1940s through the 1950s, during the opening phases of the Cold War with the Soviet Union. This episode of political repression lasted longer and was more pervasive than the Red Scare that followed the Bolshevik Revolution and World War I. Popularly known as “McCarthyism” after Senator Joseph McCarthy (R-Wisconsin), who made himself famous in 1950 by claiming that large numbers of Communists had infiltrated the U.S. State Department, the second Red Scare predated and outlasted McCarthy, and its machinery far exceeded the reach of a single maverick politician. Nonetheless, “McCarthyism” became the label for the tactic of undermining political opponents by making unsubstantiated attacks on their loyalty to the United States.
The initial infrastructure for waging war on domestic communism was built during the first Red Scare, with the creation of an antiradicalism division within the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the emergence of a network of private “patriotic” organizations. With capitalism’s crisis during the Great Depression, the Communist Party grew in numbers and influence, and President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal program expanded the federal government’s role in providing economic security. The anticommunist network expanded as well, most notably with the 1938 formation of the Special House Committee to Investigate Un-American Activities, which in 1945 became the permanent House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). Other key congressional investigation committees were the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee and McCarthy’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. Members of these committees and their staff cooperated with the FBI to identify and pursue alleged subversives. The federal employee loyalty program, formalized in 1947 by President Harry Truman in response to right-wing allegations that his administration harbored Communist spies, soon was imitated by local and state governments as well as private employers. As the Soviets’ development of nuclear capability, a series of espionage cases, and the Korean War enhanced the credibility of anticommunists, the Red Scare metastasized from the arena of government employment into labor unions, higher education, the professions, the media, and party politics at all levels. The second Red Scare did not involve pogroms or gulags, but the fear of unemployment was a powerful tool for stifling criticism of the status quo, whether in economic policy or social relations. Ostensibly seeking to protect democracy by eliminating communism from American life, anticommunist crusaders ironically undermined democracy by suppressing the expression of dissent. Debates over the second Red Scare remain lively because they resonate with ongoing struggles to reconcile Americans’ desires for security and liberty.

Keywords: anticommunismcommunismMartin DiesFederal Bureau of Investigationfederal loyalty programJ. Edgar HooverHouse Un-American Activities CommitteeJoseph McCarthypolitical repressionRed Scare

The second Red Scare refers to the anticommunist fervor that permeated American politics, society, and culture from the late 1940s through the 1950s, during the opening phases of the Cold War with the Soviet Union. This episode lasted longer and was more pervasive than the first Red Scare, which followed World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. Popularly known as “McCarthyism” after Senator Joseph McCarthy (R-Wisconsin), who made himself famous in 1950 by claiming that large numbers of Communists had infiltrated the U.S. State Department, the second Red Scare in fact predated and outlasted McCarthy, and its machinery far exceeded the reach of a single politician. “McCarthyism” remains an apt label for the demagogic tactic of undermining political opponents by making unsubstantiated attacks on their loyalty to the United States. But that term is too narrow to capture the complex origins, diverse manifestations, and sprawling cast of characters involved in the multidimensional conflict that was the second Red Scare. Defining the American Communist Party as a serious threat to national security, government and nongovernment actors at national, state, and local levels developed a range of mechanisms for identifying and punishing Communists and their alleged sympathizers. For two people, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, espionage charges resulted in execution. Many thousands of Americans faced congressional committee hearings, FBI investigations, loyalty tests, and sedition laws; negative judgements in those arenas brought consequences ranging from imprisonment to deportation, loss of passport, or, most commonly, long-term unemployment.
Interpretations of the second Red Scare have ranged between two poles, one emphasizing the threat posed to national security by the Communist Party and the other emphasizing the threat to democracy posed by political repression. In the 1990s, newly accessible Soviet and U.S. intelligence sources revealed that more than three hundred American Communists—some Manhattan Project technicians and other government employees among them—indeed did pass information to the Soviets, chiefly during World War II. Scholars disagree about whether all these people understood themselves to be engaged in espionage and about how much damage they did to national security, but it is clear that the threat of espionage was real. So too, however, was repression in the name of catching spies. The second Red Scare remains a hotly debated topic because Americans continue to differ on the optimal balance between security and liberty and how to achieve it.
Anticommunism has taken especially virulent forms in the United States because of distinctive features of its political tradition. As citizens of a relatively young and diverse republic, Americans historically have been fearful of “enemies within” and have drawn on their oft-noted predilection for voluntary associations to patrol for subversives. This popular predisposition in turn has been easier for powerful interests to exploit in the American context because of the absence of a parliamentary system (which elsewhere produced a larger number of political parties as well as stronger party discipline) and of a strong civil service bureaucracy. Great Britain, a U.S. ally in the Cold War, did not experience a comparable Red Scare even though it too struggled against espionage.1
Explaining American anticommunism requires an assessment of American communism. The 19th-century writings of Karl Marx gave birth to an international socialist movement that denounced capitalism for exploiting the working class. Some socialists pursued reform through existing political systems while others advocated revolution. Russia’s Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 encouraged those in the latter camp. The American Communist Party (CPUSA), established in 1919, belonged to the Moscow-based Comintern, which provided funding and issued directives, ostensibly to encourage Communist revolutions around the world but in practice to support Soviet foreign-policy objectives. The CPUSA remained small and factionalized until the international economic crisis and the rise of European fascism in the 1930s increased its appeal. During the Great Depression, “the heyday of American communism,” party members won admiration from the broader Left for their effective organizing on behalf of industrial and agricultural workers and for their bold denunciation of lynching, poll taxes, and other instruments of white supremacy. In 1935, party leaders adopted a strategy of cooperating with noncommunists in a “Popular Front against fascism.” Party members joined or organized groups that criticized Adolf Hitler’s policies and supported the Spanish resistance to General Francisco Franco. They also drew connections between fascism abroad and events at home, from the violent suppression of striking miners, textile workers, and farmworkers, to the unfair trial of the “Scottsboro boys” (nine African American teenagers from Alabama accused of raping two white women), to prohibitions on married women’s employment. Not always aware of the participation of Communists, diverse activists worked through hundreds of Popular Front organizations on behalf of labor, racial and religious minorities, and civil liberties. The CPUSA itself grew to about 75,000 members in 1938; many times that number participated in Popular Front causes.2 Because rank-and-file members often kept their party affiliation secret as they attempted to influence Popular Front groups, the term “front organization” came to connote duplicity rather than solidarity.
The Popular Front period ended abruptly in August 1939, when the Soviet and German leaders signed a nonaggression pact. Overnight the CPUSA abandoned its fight against fascism to argue for “peace” and against U.S. intervention in Europe. Exposing the American party leadership’s subservience to Moscow, this shift alienated many party members as well as the noncommunist leftists and liberals who had been willing to cooperate toward shared objectives. In June 1941, Hitler broke the pact by invading the Soviet Union, and the Soviets became American allies. Reversing course again, American Communists enthusiastically supported the Allied war effort, and the party’s general secretary, Earl Browder, adopted a reformist rather than revolutionary program. With Hitler’s defeat, however, the fragile Soviet-American alliance dissolved; U.S. use of atomic weapons in Japan and Soviet expansionism in Eastern Europe inaugurated the long Cold War between the two powers. In 1945 William Z. Foster replaced Browder at the head of the American party, which now harshly denounced capitalism and President Harry Truman’s foreign policy. Riven by internal disputes and increasingly under attack from anticommunists, the CPUSA became more isolated. Its numbers had dwindled to below 10,000 by 1956, when the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev officially acknowledged what many American Communists had refused to believe: that Stalin had been responsible for the death of millions in forced labor camps and in executions of political rivals. After these revelations, the CPUSA faded into insignificance.3
As the historian Ellen Schrecker has observed, American Communists were neither devils nor saints. The party’s secretiveness, its authoritarian internal structure, and the loyalty of its leaders to the Kremlin were fundamental flaws that help explain why and how it was demonized. On the other hand, most American Communists were idealists attracted by the party’s militance against various forms of social injustice. The party was a dynamic part of the broader Left that in the 1930s and 1940s advanced the causes of labor, minority rights, and feminism.4
Anticommunists were less unified than their adversary; diverse constituencies mobilized against communism at different moments.
During the violent industrial conflicts of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, employers and employer associations frequently avoided acknowledging workers’ grievances, by charging that foreign-born radicals were fomenting revolution. Employers often enlisted local law officers and private detectives in their efforts to quell labor militancy, which they cast as unpatriotic.
The correlation between labor unrest and anticommunist zeal was enduring. The first major Red Scare emerged during the postwar strike wave of 1919 and produced the initial infrastructure for waging war on domestic communism. Diverse strikes across the nation coincided with a series of mail bombings by anarchists. Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer charged that these events were evidence of a revolutionary conspiracy. Palmer directed the young J. Edgar Hoover, head of the General Intelligence Division of the Bureau of Investigation (later renamed the Federal Bureau of Investigation, or FBI), to arrest radicals and their associates and to deport the foreign born among them. The ensuing raids and surveillance activities violated civil liberties, and in 1924 the bureau was reined in. But Hoover became FBI director, a position he would hold until his death in 1972. Intensely anticommunist, and prone to associating any challenge to the economic or social status quo with communism, Hoover would be a key player in the second Red Scare. Other early participants in the anticommunist network were Red squads on metropolitan police forces, patriotic societies and veterans’ groups, and employer associations such as the National Association of Manufacturers and U.S. Chamber of Commerce.5
After the wartime federal sedition and espionage laws expired, and after the FBI was curbed, state and local officials took primary responsibility for fighting communism. By 1921 thirty-five states had passed sedition or criminal syndicalism laws (the latter directed chiefly at labor organizations and vaguely defined to prohibit sabotage or other crimes committed in the name of political reform).6 Through the 1920s and into the 1930s, anticommunists mobilized in local battles with labor militants; for example, in steel, textiles, and agriculture and among longshoremen. The limitations of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) in organizing mass-production industries led to the emergence of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), which organized workers regardless of craft into industry-wide unions such as the United Automobile Workers. Encouraged by the National Labor Relations Act of 1935, the CIO pioneered aggressive tactics such as the sit-down strike and further distinguished itself from the AFL with its organizing efforts among women and racial minorities. These positions attracted Communists to the CIO’s service, leading anti-union forces to charge that the CIO was a tool of Communist revolutionaries (a charge that the AFL echoed). Charges of communism were especially common in response to labor protests by African Americans in the South and by Mexican Americans in the West.7
Education was another anticommunist concern during the interwar period. Groups such as the American Legion pressured school boards to drop “un-American” books from the curriculum. By 1936, twenty-one states required loyalty oaths for teachers. School boards and state legislatures investigated allegations of subversion among teachers and college professors.8 Also in these interwar years, organized Catholics joined the campaign against “godless” communism. Throughout this period, the federal role in fighting communism consisted mainly of using immigration law to keep foreign-born radicals out of the country, but the FBI continued to monitor the activities of Communists and their alleged sympathizers.9
The political and legal foundations of the second Red Scare thus were under construction well before the Cold War began. In Congress, a conservative coalition of Republicans and southern Democrats had crystallized by 1938. Congressional conservatives disliked many New Deal policies—from public works to consumer protection to, above all, labor rights—and they frequently charged that the administering agencies were influenced by Communists. In 1938 the House authorized a Special Committee to Investigate Un-American Activities, headed by Martin Dies, a Texas Democrat. Dies was known as a leading opponent of the National Labor Relations Act of 1935, the CIO, and the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938. The Dies Committee devoted most of its attention to alleged Communists in the labor and consumer movements and in New Deal agencies such as the Works Progress Administration (WPA). For his chief investigator, Dies hired J. B. Matthews, a self-proclaimed former fellow traveler of the Communist Party who later would serve on Senator McCarthy’s staff. Matthews forged a career path for ex-leftists whose perceived expertise was valuable to congressional committees, the FBI, and anti–New Deal media magnates such as William Randolph Hearst. In one early salvo against the Roosevelt administration, Dies Committee members called for the impeachment of Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins because she refused to deport the Communist labor leader Harry Bridges; Perkins claimed (correctly) that she did not have the legal authority to deport him.10 The Bridges controversy and the Stalin-Hitler Pact of August 1939 gave impetus to the passage of Alien Registration Act of 1940, known as the Smith Act for its sponsor Representative Howard Smith, the Virginia Democrat whose own House committee was investigating alleged Communist influence on the National Labor Relations Board. The Smith Act made it illegal to advocate overthrow of the government, effectively criminalizing membership in the Communist Party, and allowed deportation of aliens who ever had belonged to a seditious organization. Congressional conservatives also engineered passage of the 1939 Hatch Act, which prohibited federal employees from engaging in political campaigning and from belonging to any group that advocated “the overthrow of the existing constitutional form of government.”11 The law’s passage was driven by the first provision, which responded to allegations that Democratic politicians were using WPA jobs for campaign purposes. It was the Hatch Act’s other provision, however, that created a vital mechanism of the second Red Scare.
To enforce the Hatch Act, the U.S. attorney general’s office generated a list of subversive organizations, and employing agencies requested background checks from the FBI, which checked its own files as well as those of the Dies Committee. FBI agents interviewed government employees who admitted having or were alleged to have associations with any listed group. Congressional conservatives continued accusing the Roosevelt administration of harboring Communists, even after Adolf Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 put the Soviets in the Allied camp. Martin Dies charged that the wartime Office of Price Administration, the Federal Communications Commission, and other regulatory agencies were run by Communists and “crackpot, radical bureaucrats.” The Civil Service Commission (CSC) created a loyalty board, which reviewed employees named by Dies. When most of those employees were retained, the Dies Committee charged that CSC examiners themselves had subversive tendencies. In 1943 the Dies Committee subpoenaed hundreds of CSC case files in an effort to prove that charge.12
The Roosevelt administration and its supporters dismissed Dies and his ilk as fanatics, but in 1946 accusations that Communists had infiltrated government agencies began to get traction. Public anxiety about postwar inflation and another strike wave was intensified by Soviet expansionism in Eastern Europe and by Russian defector Igor Gouzenko’s exposure of a Canadian spy ring. Highlighting the “Communists in government” issue helped the Republican Party make sweeping gains in the 1946 midterm elections, leading President Harry Truman to formalize and expand the makeshift wartime loyalty program.
The second Red Scare derived its momentum from fears that Communist spies in powerful government positions were manipulating U.S. policy to Soviet advantage. The federal employee loyalty program that Truman authorized in an attempt to neutralize right-wing accusations became instead a key force in sustaining and spreading “the great fear.” Truman’s March 1947 Executive Order 9835 directed executive departments to create loyalty boards to evaluate derogatory information about employees or job applicants. Employees for whom “reasonable grounds for belief in disloyalty” could be established were to be dismissed. To assist in implementing the loyalty program, the Attorney General’s List of Subversive Organizations (AGLOSO) was made public for the first time. Millions of federal employees filled out loyalty forms swearing they did not belong to any subversive organization and explaining any association they might have with a designated group. Agency loyalty boards requested name checks and sometimes full field investigations by the FBI, which promptly hired 7,000 additional agents. Among the many sources that the FBI checked were the ever-expanding files of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), which in 1945 had replaced the Dies Committee.13
During the program’s peak between 1947 and 1956, more than five million federal workers underwent loyalty screening, resulting in an estimated 2,700 dismissals and 12,000 resignations. Those numbers exclude job applicants who were rejected on loyalty grounds. More importantly, those numbers exclude the tens of thousands of civil servants who eventually were cleared after one or more rounds of investigation, which could include replying to written interrogatories, hearings, appeals, and months of waiting, sometimes without pay, for a decision. The program’s oft-noted flaws included the ambiguous definition of “derogatory” information and the anonymity of informants who provided it, the reliance on an arbitrary and changing list of subversive organizations, and a double-jeopardy problem for employees for whom a move from one government job to another triggered reinvestigation on the same grounds. Those grounds usually consisted of a list of individually minor associations that dated back to the 1930s. Because loyalty standards became more restrictive over time, employees who did not change jobs too faced reinvestigation, even in the absence of new allegations against them.14
Loyalty standards tightened as the political terrain shifted. During the summer of 1948, the ex-Communists Elizabeth Bentley and Whittaker Chambers testified before HUAC that in the 1930s and early 1940s they had managed Washington spy rings that included dozens of government officials, including the former State Department aide Alger Hiss. A Harvard Law School graduate who had been involved in the formation of the United Nations, Hiss vigorously denied the allegations, and Truman officials defended him. Hiss was convicted of perjury in 1950. Meanwhile, the Soviets developed nuclear capability sooner than expected, Communists took control in China, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were convicted, and North Korea invaded South Korea. This combination of events increased the Truman administration’s vulnerability to partisan attacks. Senator McCarthy claimed to explain those events by alleging that Communists had infiltrated the U.S. State Department. Congress then in effect broadened the loyalty program by passing Public Law 733, which empowered heads of sensitive agencies to dismiss an employee on security grounds. An employee deemed loyal could nonetheless be labeled a security risk because of personal circumstances (alcoholism, homosexuality, a Communist relative) that were perceived to create vulnerability to coercion. A purge of homosexuals from the State Department and other agencies ensued. Over Truman’s veto, in 1950 Congress also passed the McCarran Internal Security Act, which required Communist organizations to register with the U.S. attorney general and created the Subversive Activities Control Board. The new Senate Internal Security Subcommittee (SISS), headed by Patrick McCarran (D-Nevada), was soon vying with HUAC for headlines about the battle against Communists on the home front. After McCarthy claimed the loyalty program was clearing too-many employees on appeal, Truman’s Executive Order 10241 of April 1951 lowered the standard of evidence required for dismissal. That same month the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the loyalty program’s constitutionality, a reminder that all three branches of government built the scaffolding for the Red Scare. The standards changed again in April 1953 with Eisenhower’s Executive Order 10450, which extended the security risk standard to every civil service job, imposed more-stringent “morals” tests, and eliminated defendants’ right to a hearing. It was not unusual for a career civil servant to be investigated under the Hatch Act during World War II and then again after each executive order. Of the more than 9,300 employees who were cleared after full investigation under the 1947 standard, for example, at least 2,756 saw their cases reopened under the 1951 standard. Employees who had been cleared never knew when their case might be reopened. Even after the loyalty program was curbed in the late 1950s, the FBI continued to keep tabs on former loyalty defendants. Loyalty investigations often did lasting damage to employees’ economic security, mental and physical health, personal relationships, and civic participation.15
Because most of those dismissed under the loyalty program were low-level employees, the program’s policy impact, at least outside the State Department’s jurisdiction, has sometimes been underestimated. Unlike dismissals, investigations occurred across the ranks, so all civil servants felt the pressure. Case files declassified in the early 21st century indicate that loyalty investigations truncated or redirected the careers of many high-ranking civil servants, who typically kept secret the fact that they had been investigated. Many of them were noncommunist but left-leaning New Dealers who advocated measures designed to expand democracy by regulating the economy and reducing social inequalities. Their fields of expertise included labor and civil rights, consumer protection, welfare, national health insurance, public power, and public housing; their marginalization by charges of disloyalty impeded reform in these areas and narrowed the scope of political discourse more generally. Through the federal loyalty program, conservative anticommunists exploited public fears of espionage to block policy initiatives that impinged on private-sector prerogatives.16
The loyalty program for federal employees was accompanied by similar programs focused on port security and industrial security. Private employees on government contracts also faced screening, and state and local governments soon imitated the federal programs. Public universities revived mandatory loyalty oaths. In 1953, Americans employed by international organizations such as the United Nations became subject to Civil Service Commission loyalty screening, over protests that such screening violated the sovereignty of the international organizations. One researcher estimated in 1958 that approximately 20 percent of the U.S. labor force faced some form of loyalty test.17 Although espionage trials and congressional hearings were the most-sensational manifestations of McCarthyism, loyalty tests for employment directly affected many more people.
Beyond the realms of government, industry, and transport, anticommunists trained their sights on those arenas where they deemed the potential for ideological subversion to be high, including education and the media. The entertainment industry was an especially attractive target for congressional investigating committees seeking to generate sensational headlines. The House Un-American Activities Committee’s (HUAC’s) 1947 investigation of Communist influence in Hollywood was an early example. Building on an earlier investigation by California’s Tenney Committee, HUAC subpoenaed a long list of players in the film industry. Many of them, including the actor Ronald Reagan, cooperated with HUAC by naming people they believed to be Communists. By contrast, a group that became known as the “Hollywood Ten” invoked their First Amendment right to freedom of association and challenged the committee’s right to ask about their political views. Eventually, after the Supreme Court refused to hear their case, the ten directors and screenwriters spent six months in prison. For more than a decade beyond that, they were blacklisted by Hollywood employers.18 Later, “unfriendly witnesses” declined to answer questions posed by the investigating committee, by citing their Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate themselves. This tactic provided legal protection from prison, but “taking the Fifth” was widely interpreted as tantamount to an admission of guilt, and many employers refused to employ anyone who had so pleaded. Another limitation of the Fifth Amendment strategy was that it did not waive witnesses’ obligation to answer questions about others. Congressional committees pressed witnesses to “name names” of people they knew to be Communists as evidence that they were not sympathetic, or were no longer sympathetic, to communism. Whether or not they answered questions about their own politics, witnesses’ moral dilemma over whether to identify others as Communists became one of the most familiar, and to critics most infamous, of McCarthyism’s dramatic episodes.19
The entertainment industry blacklist did not end with HUAC’s investigation of Hollywood. As countersubversives issued a steady flow of accusations, the cloud of suspicion expanded. In 1950, the authors of the anticommunist newsletter Counterattack, who included several former FBI agents, released a booklet called Red Channels: The Report of Communist Influence in Radio and Television. It listed 151 writers, composers, producers, and performers and included a long list of allegedly subversive associations for each person. The booklet was riddled with factual errors. Some of those listed were or had been Communists, but others had not. In any case, they and those on similar lists found it nearly impossible to get work in their fields; some could get hired only by working under another name.
The fear of unemployment produced many ripple effects beyond those felt at the individual level. The second Red Scare curtailed Americans’ willingness to join voluntary organizations. Groups were added to the U.S. attorney general’s list over time, and zealous anticommunists frequently charged that one group or another should be added to the list, including such mainstream, reformist organizations as the National Council of Jewish Women, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and the American Association of University Women. Very few of the roughly 280 organizations on the official list engaged in illegal activity.20 Still, association with any listed group could become a bar to employment, and also potentially a justification for exclusion from public housing and veterans’ benefits. Rather than take chances, many people stopped belonging to organizations. Being known as a “joiner” of causes acquired the connotation of being an easy mark for Communists, and defense attorneys encouraged their clients to present themselves as allergic to such activity.21 Civic groups lost membership, and many Americans hesitated to sign petitions or engage in any activism that might possibly be construed as controversial.
The second Red Scare also reshaped the American labor movement. By the end of World War II, a dozen Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) unions had Communist party members among their officers. Top CIO leaders tolerated Communists at first, valuing their dedication and hoping to avoid internal division and external attack. In 1947, however, congressional conservatives overrode President Harry Truman’s veto and passed the Taft-Hartley Act, which, among other things, required all union officers to swear that they were not Communists or else to face loss of support from the National Labor Relations Board. Many trade union members, especially Catholics, were intensely anticommunist and stepped up their effort to oust Communists from their leadership. In 1948 the Communist Party made the position of its members in the labor movement more difficult by supporting the Progressive Party candidate Henry Wallace rather than President Truman. Liberal anticommunists in the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and Americans for Democratic Action joined conservatives in attacking the CIO’s leftist-led unions, which the CIO finally expelled in 1949 and 1950. The expulsions embittered many workers and labor allies, and they did not prevent right-wing groups from associating trade unionism with communism.22
Many factors combined to weaken McCarthyism’s power in the latter half of the 1950s. With a Republican in the White House as a result of the 1952 election, the partisan motivation for attacking the administration as soft on communism diminished. Opportunists such as Senator McCarthy made increasingly outrageous charges to remain in the spotlight, straining the patience of President Dwight Eisenhower and other Republican leaders such as Robert Taft of Ohio. In 1953 McCarthy became chair of the Senate Committee on Government Operations, and he used its Subcommittee on Investigations to hold hearings on alleged Communist influence in the State Department’s Voice of America and overseas library programs. The book burnings that resulted from the latter investigation, and the forced resignation of the committee’s research director, J. B. Matthews, after he claimed that the Protestant clergy at large had Communist sympathies, increased public criticism of McCarthy. Newspaper and television journalists began featuring the cases of government employees unfairly dismissed as loyalty or security risks, and various foundations and congressional committees undertook studies that gave further impetus to demands for reforming the loyalty program. McCarthy responded to his critics—from Edward Murrow of the See It Now television program to his fellow legislators—by accusing them of Communist sympathies. His conduct and that of his subordinate Roy Cohn in pressing unsubstantiated charges of disloyalty in the U.S. Army led to televised hearings beginning in April 1954, which gave viewers an extended opportunity to see McCarthy in action. McCarthy’s popularity declined markedly as a result. In December the Senate censured McCarthy. A few months later, the FBI informant Harvey Matusow recanted, claiming that McCarthy and others had encouraged him to give false information and that he knew other ex-Communist witnesses, such as Elizabeth Bentley and Louis Budenz, to have done the same.
Changes in the composition of the Supreme Court also dampened the fervor of the anticommunist crusade. Four justices were replaced between 1953 and 1957, and under Chief Justice Earl Warren the court issued several rulings that limited the mechanisms designed to identify and punish Communists. In 1955 and 1956, the court held that the federal loyalty program could apply only to employees in sensitive positions. In 1959, the court struck down the program’s reliance on anonymous informants, giving defendants the right to confront their accusers.23 Meanwhile, on a single day in 1957, the court limited the powers of congressional investigating committees, restricted the enforcement of the Smith Act on First Amendment grounds and overturned the convictions of fourteen members of the Communist Party of California, and reinstated John Stewart Service to the State Department, which had dismissed him on loyalty grounds in 1951. Members of the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee (SISS) accused the Supreme Court of weakening the nation’s defenses against communism, and FBI director J. Edgar Hoover angrily labeled June 17, 1957, “Red Monday.” Civil libertarians, by contrast, welcomed the rulings but regretted that they were based narrowly on procedural questions rather than on broad principles.24
With McCarthy’s disgrace and the Supreme Court’s restrictions on its machinery, the second Red Scare lost much of its power. One government personnel director opined in 1962 that 90 percent of the people who had been dismissed on loyalty grounds in the early 1950s would have had no difficulty under the same circumstances a decade later. Even so, the damage lasted a long time. The applicant pool for civil service jobs contracted sharply and did not soon recover. Former loyalty defendants, even those who had been cleared, lived the rest of their lives in fear that the old accusations would resurface. Sometimes they did; during President Lyndon Johnson’s administration, many talented people were passed over for appointments, not because hiring officials doubted their loyalty, but because appointing them risked politically expensive controversy.25
The loyalty programs and blacklists wound down, but anticommunism remained a potent force through the 1960s and beyond. After court rulings limited the usefulness of state and national sedition laws against members of the Communist Party, FBI director Hoover launched the secret COINTEL program to monitor and disrupt Communists and others he deemed subversive. Targets soon included participants in the civil rights, anti–Vietnam War, and feminist movements.26 Well into the 1960s, local Red Scares waxed and waned in tandem with challenges to the local status quo, above all in southern contexts where white supremacists battled civil rights activists. Segregationists such as Alabama governor George Wallace and Mississippi senator James Eastland—who not incidentally chaired SISS from 1955 to 1977—routinely linked race reform to communism and charged that “outside agitators” bent on subverting southern traditions were behind demands for integration and black voting rights.27
Scholarship on the second Red Scare has emerged in waves, responding to the availability of new sources, changing historical methodologies, and shifting political contexts.28
Initial debates centered on assessing the causes of, or motivations behind, the anticommunist furor. Richard Hofstadter’s influential interpretation explained McCarthy’s popularity in psychological terms as a manifestation of the “status anxiety” of those who resented the changes associated with a more modern, pluralistic, secular society. Treating McCarthyism as an episode of mass irrationality, Hofstadter argued that its “real function” was “not anything so simply rational as to turn up spies . . . but to discharge resentments and frustrations, to punish, to satisfy enmities whose roots lay elsewhere than in the Communist issue itself.”29 Subsequent scholarship demonstrated that Hofstadter’s view neglected the role of elites, from congressional conservatives to liberal anticommunists to the FBI, in orchestrating the second Red Scare. Some accounts emphasized the partisan pressures from Republicans and southern Democrats on the Truman administration.30 Others placed a larger share of the responsibility on Cold War liberalism itself. Some of these scholars wrote from a critical stance influenced by the Vietnam-era disillusionment of the New Left, while others applauded liberal anticommunism and focused on how McCarthy had discredited it.31 After the post-Watergate strengthening of the Freedom of Information Act made FBI records accessible, attention shifted to the repressive tactics of J. Edgar Hoover, who put citizens under illegal surveillance, leaked information to congressional conservatives, and stood by informants known to be unreliable.32
In depicting a top-down Red Scare orchestrated by elites, historians writing in the 1960s and 1970s were out of step with their discipline’s shift toward social history. That disjuncture was soon mitigated by an outpouring of studies of Communist activity at the grassroots, in diverse local contexts usually far removed from foreign affairs.33
The tenor of debate shifted again when the end of the Cold War made available new evidence from Soviet archives and U.S. intelligence sources such as the VENONA decrypts. That evidence indicated that scholars had underestimated the success of Soviet espionage in the United States as well as the extent of Soviet control over the American Communist Party. Alger Hiss, contrary to what most liberals had believed, and contrary to what he maintained until his death in 1996, was almost certainly guilty of espionage. A few hundred other Americans were secret Communist Party members and shared information with Soviet agents, chiefly during World War II.34 Some historians interpreted the new evidence to put anticommunism in a more sympathetic light and to criticize scholarship on the positive achievements of American Communists.35 Others concluded that the reality of espionage did not lessen the damage done in the name of anticommunism. The stakes of the debate rose after the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States produced the Patriot Act, which rekindled ideological disagreement over the proper balance between national security and civil liberties; commentators who feared that the “war on terrorism” would be used to quell domestic dissent cited McCarthyism as the relevant historical precedent. The new evidence did not resolve scholarly differences, but it produced a more complicated, frequently less romantic view of the American Communist Party (CPUSA). The paradoxical lesson from several decades of scholarship is that the same organization that inspired democratic idealists in the pursuit of social justice also was secretive, authoritarian, and morally compromised by ties to the Stalin regime.36
The opening of government records also afforded a clearer view of the machinery of the second Red Scare, and that view has reinforced earlier judgements about its unjust and damaging aspects. In addition to new books on Hoover and the FBI, scholars have produced freshly documented studies of the Attorney General’s List of Subversive Organizations (AGLOSO), the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee (SISS), and leading anticommunists and their informants.37
Scholarship since the late 20th century has tried to transcend the old debates by turning to new approaches. Comparative studies have been useful in exploring the interaction between popular and elite forces in generating and sustaining anticommunism. Michael J. Heale’s analysis of Red Scares in three states identifies a common denominator in the role of political fundamentalists who feared the trend toward a “pluralistic order and a secular, bureaucratizing state.” But local power struggles shaped the timing and target of anticommunist furor. Detroit’s Red Scare erupted as the city’s manufacturing leaders tried to defend their class prerogatives from unions; in Boston, conflict between Catholics and Protestants fueled red-baiting, while Atlanta’s Red Scare became most virulent later, as civil rights activists threatened white supremacy. These and other local- and state-level studies demonstrate that the intensity of Red Scare politics was not a simple function of the strength of the Communist threat. Rather, Red Scares caught fire where rapid change threatened old regimes. Varying mixtures of elite and grassroots forces mobilized to defend local hierarchies, whether of class, religion, race, or gender.38International comparisons are bearing fruit too, not least by bringing into sharper relief distinctive aspects of state structure and political development that encouraged or restrained Red Scares.39
Attention to gender as a category of historical analysis has added another dimension to our understanding of the second Red Scare. The “containment” strategy for halting the spread of communism abroad had a domestic counterpart that prescribed rigid gender roles within the nuclear family. Domestic anticommunism was fueled by widespread anxiety about the perceived threats to American masculinity posed by totalitarianism, corporate hierarchy, and homosexuality. Congressional conservatives used charges of homosexuality—chiefly male homosexuality—in government agencies to serve their own political purposes. High-ranking women in government too were especially frequent targets of loyalty charges, as conservative anticommunists tapped popular hostility to powerful women to rally support for hunting subversives and blocking liberal policies.40
A related trend in the literature situates McCarthyism within a longer anticommunist tradition. In addition to looking at 19th-century antecedents, early-21st-century work explores the political and institutional continuities between the first and second Red Scares and also notes how conservatives’ deployment of anticommunism to fracture the Democratic Party’s electoral coalition along race and gender lines prefigured the New Right ascendancy under President Ronald Reagan.41 This longer-term view also has invited further attention to variations within anticommunism, yielding a more nuanced portrait of its diverse conservative, liberal, labor, and socialist camps.42
Even as they continue to debate the second Red Scare’s origins and sustaining mechanisms, scholars are paying more attention to its effects. Aided by newly accessible materials such as FBI files and the unpublished records of congressional investigating committees, historians are documenting in concrete detail how the fear of communism, and the fear of punishment for association with communism, affected specific individuals, organizations, professions, social movements, public policies, and government agencies.43 The drive to eliminate communism from all facets and arenas of American life engaged diverse players for many years, and scholars continue to catalogue its direct and indirect consequences.
In a useful 1988 survey of archival sources on McCarthyism, Ellen Schrecker suggests looking for evidence created by various categories of players: inquisitors, targets, legitimizers, defenders of targets, and observers.44 It is with regard to the first two categories, especially, that new sources have become accessible. FBI files on individuals and organizations are revealing both about the targets and the inquisitors; some frequently requested files are available online, and others can be obtained, with patience, through a Freedom of Information Act Request. Washington, DC–area branches of the National Archives hold records of surviving case files from the federal employee loyalty program (Record Group 478.2), the Subversive Activities Control Board (Record Group 220.6), the House Committee on Un-American Activities and its predecessor (Record Group 233.25.1, 233.25.2), the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee (Record Group 46.15), and the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations (Record Group 46.13). The rich papers of anticommunist investigator J. B. Matthews are at Duke University. The Roosevelt, Truman, and Eisenhower Presidential Libraries hold relevant collections on each administration’s handling of “the communist problem.” The Library of Congress holds the papers of Supreme Court justices Hugo Black and William O. Douglas and of Truman’s attorney general James McGranery, while the papers of the many U.S. and state legislators who were prominent among the accusers and the accused can be found in various archives in their home states. Records of the American Legion can be found at the State Historical Society of Wisconsin and Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan.
The Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives at New York University holds the papers of the prime target of the second Red Scare—the Communist Party USA—as well as many related collections. The Fund for the Republic studied McCarthyism and subsequently became a target; its papers are at the Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library at Princeton University. Also at Princeton are the papers of Paul Tillett Jr., a political scientist who in the 1960s collected but never published a wide range of data on McCarthyism, and American Civil Liberties Union papers. Because so many groups and individuals participated in the second Red Scare in one role or another, manuscript and oral-history collections in archives all over the country hold relevant material. Good examples include the State Historical Society of Wisconsin, which holds the records of the Americans for Democratic Action, Highlander Folk School, and United Packinghouse Workers Union, among many other pertinent collections; the National Lawyers’ Guild papers at the Bancroft Library, University of California at Berkeley; the papers of the Civil Rights Congress at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library; and labor movement records at the Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University, and the George Meany Memorial AFL-CIO Archives, University of Maryland.
Among the many published memoirs of participants, see Owen Lattimore, Ordeal by Slander (1950); Whittaker Chambers, Witness (1952); Alger Hiss, In the Court of Public Opinion (1957); Peggy Dennis, Autobiography of an American Communist (1977); and John J. Abt, Advocate and Activist: Memoirs of an American Communist Lawyer (1993).

Further Reading

Fried, Richard M. Nightmare in Red: The McCarthy Era in Perspective. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.Find this resource:
Goldstein, Robert Justin. American Blacklist: The Attorney General’s List of Subversive Organizations. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2008.Find this resource:
Griffith, Robert. The Politics of Fear: Joseph R. McCarthy and the Senate. 2d ed. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987.Find this resource:
Haynes, John Earl, and Harvey Klehr. Early Cold War Spies: The Espionage Trials That Shaped American Politics. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006.Find this resource:
Heale, Michael J. McCarthy’s Americans: Red Scare Politics in State and Nation, 1935–1965. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1998.Find this resource:
Johnson, David K. The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004.Find this resource:
Olmsted, Kathryn S. Red Spy Queen: A Biography of Elizabeth Bentley. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002.Find this resource:
Oshinsky, David M. A Conspiracy So Immense: The World of Joe McCarthy. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.Find this resource:
Schrecker, Ellen. Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America. Boston: Little, Brown, 1998.Find this resource:
Storrs, Landon R. Y. The Second Red Scare and the Unmaking of the New Deal Left. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012.Find this resource:
Theoharis, Athan G., and John Stuart Cox. The Boss: J. Edgar Hoover and the American Inquisition. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988.Find this resource:

Notes:

(1.) Joan Mahoney, “Civil Liberties in Britain during the Cold War: The Role of the Central Government,” American Journal of Legal History 33, no. 1 (1989), 53–100; Markku Ruotsila, British and American Anti-communism before the Cold War (New York: Routledge, 2001); and Michael J. Heale, “Beyond the ‘Age of McCarthy’: Anticommunism and the Historians,” in Melvyn Stokes, ed., The State of U.S. History (New York: Berg, 2002), 131–153.
(2.) On Communist Party membership, see Soviet and American Communist Parties, in Revelations from the Russian ArchivesLibrary of Congress. For an introduction to the vast literature on the Communist Party, see Harvey Klehr, The Heyday of American Communism: The Depression Decade (New York: Basic Books, 1984); Robin D. G. Kelley, Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists during the Great Depression (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990); Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (New York: Verso, 1997); and Kate Weigand, Red Feminism: American Communism and the Making of Women’s Liberation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002).
(3.) Curt Gentry, J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991), 442; and Robert Conquest, The Great Terror: A Reassessment, 40th anniversary ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).
(4.) Ellen Schrecker, Age of McCarthyism: A Brief History with Documents (Boston: Bedford, 1994), 3; see also Michael Kazin, “The Agony and Romance of the American Left,” American Historical Review 100, no. 5 (1995), 1488–1512. Since the opening of Soviet archives at the end of the Cold War, an outpouring of scholarship has elaborated on both sides of the paradox—on one hand, the American party’s complicity in espionage and with the Stalin regime, and on the other hand, its vital role in democratic social movements. For skepticism of this dualistic assessment of American communism, see John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, In Denial: Historians, Communism & Espionage (San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2003), 134–139.
(5.) Chad Pearson, “Fighting the ‘Red Danger’: Employers and Anti-communism,” Athan Theoharis, “The FBI and the Politics of Anti-communism, 1920–1945,” and Michael J. Heale, “Citizens versus Outsiders: Anti-communism at State and Local Levels, 1921–1946,” all in Robert Goldstein, ed., Little “Red Scares”: Anti-communism and Political Repression in the United States, 1921–1946 (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2014). See also Kim E. Nielsen, Un-American Womanhood: Antiradicalism, Antifeminism, and the First Red Scare (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2001).
(6.) The U.S. Supreme Court upheld a Minneapolis sedition law in 1920. Heale, “Citizens versus Outsiders,” 46–47.
(7.) Heale, “Citizens versus Outsiders,” 53.
(8.) Ellen Schrecker, Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America (Boston: Little, Brown, 1998), 67.
(9.) Heale, “Citizens versus Outsiders”; Theoharis, “The FBI and the Politics of Anti-communism.”
(10.) Schrecker, Many Are the Crimes, 44; Landon R. Y. Storrs, The Second Red Scare and the Unmaking of the New Deal Left (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), 53–85, 88.
(11.) Eleanor Bontecou, The Federal Loyalty-Security Program (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1953); and Rebecca Hill, “The History of the Smith Act and the Hatch Act: Anti-communism and the Rise of the Conservative Coalition in Congress,” in Goldstein, ed., Little “Red Scares,” 315–346.
(12.) Dies was not alone; in 1944, Governor John Bricker of Ohio, who was the Republican nominee for vice president, claimed that Communists ran the whole New Deal. Storrs, Second Red Scare, 79–81, 251 (quotation), 287.
(13.) Bontecou, Federal Loyalty-Security Program; Storrs, Second Red Scare.
(14.) Storrs, Second Red Scare (program statistics, 292).
(15.) Storrs, Second Red Scare, 111, 286–292. On the dismissal of homosexuals, see David Johnson, The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).
(16.) Storrs, Second Red Scare. For different interpretation of the relationship between anticommunism and liberalism, see Jennifer Delton, “Rethinking Post–World War II Anticommunism,” Journal of the Historical Society 10, no. 1 (2010), 1–41.
(17.) Ralph S. Brown Jr., Loyalty and Security: Employment Tests in the United States (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1958).
(18.) Larry Ceplair and Steven Englund, The Inquisition in Hollywood: Politics in the Film Community, 1930–1960 (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1980); Victor S. Navasky, Naming Names (New York: Viking, 1980); Patrick McGilligan and Paul Buhle, Tender Comrades: A Backstory of the Hollywood Blacklist (New York: St. Martin’s, 1997); and Gerald Horne, The Final Victim of the Blacklist: John Howard Lawson, Dean of the Hollywood Ten (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006).
(19.) Navasky, Naming Names; Schrecker, Age of McCarthyism, 54–61; and Alice Kessler-Harris, A Difficult Woman: The Challenging Life and Times of Lillian Hellman (New York: Bloomsbury, 2012).
(20.) Robert Justin Goldstein, American Blacklist: The Attorney General’s List of Subversive Organizations(Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2008).
(21.) Storrs, Second Red Scare, 186–189.
(22.) Nelson Lichtenstein, State of the Union: A Century of American Labor (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003); and Steven Rosswurm, ed., The CIO’s Left-Led Unions (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992).
(23.Peters v. Hobby, 349 U.S. 331 (1955); Cole v. Young, 351 U.S. 536 (1956); Green v. McElroy 360 U.S. 474 (1959); and Vitarelli v. Seaton, 359 U.S. 535 (1959). In the early 1950s, by contrast, the U.S. Supreme Court had helped legitimize the Red Scare. Dennis v. United States, 341 U.S. 494 (1951), for example, upheld the Smith Act; Bailey v. Richardson 341 U.S. 918 (1951) affirmed a lower court’s ruling upholding the federal loyalty program.
(24.Watkins v. United States, 354 U.S. 178 (1957); Yates v. United States, 354 U.S. 298 (1957). See Michal R. Belknap, The Supreme Court under Earl Warren, 1953–1969 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2005); Arthur J. Sabin, In Calmer Times: The Supreme Court and Red Monday (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999); and Robert M. Lichtman, The Supreme Court and McCarthy-Era Repression: One Hundred Decisions (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012).
(25.) Storrs, Second Red Scare, 203–204.
(26.) Early-21st-century scholarship on COINTELPRO includes David Cunningham, There’s Something Happening Here: The New Left, the Klan, and FBI Counterintelligence (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), and Seth Rosenfeld, Subversives: The FBI’s War on Student Radicals, and Reagan’s Rise to Power (New York: Picador, 2013).
(27.) Jeff Woods, Black Struggle, Red Scare: Segregation and Anti-communism in the South, 1948–1968(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2004); and George Lewis, The White South and the Red Menace: Segregationists, Anticommunism, and Massive Resistance, 1945–1965 (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2004).
(28.) For a more comprehensive discussion, see Ellen Schrecker, “Interpreting McCarthyism: A Bibliographical Essay,” in Schrecker, Age of McCarthyism, and Heale, “Beyond the ‘Age of McCarthy.’” Also see John Earl Haynes, Communism and Anti-communism in the United States: An Annotated Guide to Historical Writings (New York: Garland, 1987).
(29.) Richard Hofstadter, Anti-intellectualism in American Life (New York: Knopf, 1963), 41–42. See also his essay, “The Pseudo-conservative Revolt,” in Daniel Bell, ed., The New American Right (New York: Criterion, 1955).
(30.) Earl Latham, The Communist Controversy in Washington: From the New Deal to McCarthy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966); and Alan D. Harper, The Politics of Loyalty: The White House and the Communist Issue, 1946–1952 (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1969).
(31.) See Athan Theoharis, Seeds of Repression: Harry S. Truman and the Origins of McCarthyism (Chicago: Quadrangle, 1971). By contrast, see Richard Gid Powers, Not without Honor: The History of American Anticommunism (New York: Free Press, 1995).
(32.) Kenneth O’Reilly, Hoover and the Un-Americans: The FBI, HUAC, and the Red Menace (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1983); and Athan G. Theoharis and John Stuart Cox, The Boss: J. Edgar Hoover and the Great American Inquisition (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988).
(33.) Examples include Mark Naison, Communists in Harlem during the Depression (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983); Maurice Isserman, If I Had a Hammer: The Death of the Old Left and the Birth of the New Left (New York: Basic Books, 1987); Robbie Lieberman, My Song is My Weapon: People’s Songs, American Communism, and the Politics of Culture, 1930–1950 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989); Kelley, Hammer and Hoe; Randi Storch, Red Chicago: American Communism at Its Grassroots, 1928–35(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007); and Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights, 1919–1950 (New York: W. W. Norton, 2008).
(34.) Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev, The Haunted Wood: Soviet Espionage in America—the Stalin Era (New York: Random House, 1999); and John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999). These findings stimulated a long list of case studies of various spies and alleged spies, including Harry Dexter White, William Remington, Philip and Mary Jane Keeney, and of course Alger Hiss.
(35.) John Earl Haynes, Red Scare or Red Menace? American Communism and Anticommunism in the Cold War Era (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1996); and Haynes and Klehr, In Denial. Haynes and Klehr acknowledged McCarthyism’s abuses, but bestselling popular interpreters of the new findings did not; see, for example, Ann Coulter, Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism (New York: Three Rivers, 2004); and M. Stanton Evans, Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight Against America’s Enemies (New York: Three Rivers, 2009).
(36.) For a discussion of these debates, see Ellen Schrecker, “Soviet Espionage in America: An Oft-Told Tale,” Reviews in American History 38, no. 2 (2010), 355–361.
(37.) For example, John Sbardellati, J. Edgar Hoover Goes to the Movies: The FBI and the Origins of Hollywood’s Cold War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012); Athan Theoharis, Chasing Spies: How the FBI Failed in Counterintelligence but Promoted the Politics of McCarthyism in the Cold War Years(Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2002); Goldstein, American Blacklist; Christopher John Gerard, “‘A Program of Cooperation’: The FBI, the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, and the Communist Issue, 1950–1956” (Ph.D. diss., Marquette University, 1993); Michael J. Ybarra, Washington Gone Crazy: Senator Pat McCarran and the Great American Communist Hunt (Hanover, NH: Steerforth, 2004); Kathryn S. Olmsted, Red Spy Queen: A Biography of Elizabeth Bentley (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002); and Robert M. Lichtman and Ronald D. Cohen, Deadly Farce: Harvey Matusow and the Informer System in the McCarthy Era (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008).
(38.) Michael J. Heale, McCarthy’s Americans: Red Scare Politics in State and Nation, 1935–1965 (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1998). See also Don E. Carleton, Red Scare! Right-Wing Hysteria, Fifties Fanaticism, and Their Legacy in Texas (Austin: Texas Monthly Press, 1985); Philip Jenkins, The Cold War at Home: The Red Scare in Pennsylvania, 1945–1960 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999); Don Parson, Making a Better World: Public Housing, the Red Scare, and the Direction of Modern Los Angeles(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005); and Colleen Doody, Detroit’s Cold War: The Origins of Postwar Conservatism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013).
(39.) Mahoney, “Civil Liberties in Britain during the Cold War”; Ruotsila, British and American Anti-communism before the Cold War; and Luc van Dongen, Stéphanie Roulin, and Giles Scott-Smith, eds., Transnational Anti-communism and the Cold War: Agents, Activities, and Networks (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).
(40.) Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books, 1988); Robert D. Dean, Imperial Brotherhood: Gender and the Making of Cold War Foreign Policy (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001); Kyle A. Cuordileone, Manhood and American Political Culture in the Cold War (New York: Routledge, 2005); Johnson, Lavender Scare; and Storrs, Second Red Scare.
(41.) Michael J. Heale, American Anticommunism: Combating the Enemy Within, 1830–1970 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990); Robert Justin Goldstein, Political Repression in Modern America: From 1870 to the Present (Cambridge, MA: Schenkman, 1978); Goldstein, ed., Little “Red Scares”; Alex Goodall, Loyalty and Liberty: American Countersubversion from World War I to the McCarthy Era (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013); Storrs, Second Red Scare; and Doody, Detroit’s Cold War.
(42.) See Jennifer Luff, Commonsense Anti-communism: Labor and Civil Liberties between the World Wars(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012); Ruotsila, British and American Anti-communism; and Judy Kutulas, The American Civil Liberties Union and the Making of Modern Liberalism, 1930–1960(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006).
(43.) A sampling of this early-21st-century work includes, in addition to works cited above, Phillip Deery, Red Apple: Communism and McCarthyism in Cold War New York (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014), on the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee; Clarence Taylor, Reds at the Blackboard: Communism, Civil Rights, and the New York City Teachers Union (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011); Alan M. Wald, American Night: The Literary Left in the Era of the Cold War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012); Edward Alwood, Dark Days in the Newsroom: McCarthyism Aimed at the Press(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2007); David H. Price, Threatening Anthropology: McCarthyism and the FBI’s Surveillance of Activist Anthropologists (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004); Amy Swerdlow, “The Congress of American Women: Left-Feminist Peace Politics in the Cold War,” in Linda K. Kerber, Alice Kessler-Harris, and Kathryn Kish Sklar, eds., U.S. History As Women’s History: New Feminist Essays (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 296–312; Shelton Stromquist, ed., Labor’s Cold War: Local Politics in a Global Context (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008); Robbie Lieberman and Clarence Lang, eds., Anticommunism and the African American Freedom Movement: “Another Side of the Story” (New York: Palgrave, 2009); Aaron D. Purcell, White Collar Radicals: TVA’s Knoxville Fifteen, the New Deal, and the McCarthy Era (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2009); and Susan L. Brinson, The Red Scare, Politics, and the Federal Communications Commission, 1941–1960(Westport, CT: Praeger, 2004).
(44.) Ellen W. Schrecker, “Archival Sources for the Study of McCarthyism,” Journal of American History75, no. 1 (1988), 197–208.
The spy who made McCarthy | Global
 

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Like pathologists trying to explain a freak viral outbreak, American historians have been poring over the McCarthyist phenomenon for the past half-century, striving to explain how a small group of legislators, the House Un-American Activities Committee, managed to paralyse US democracy and scar a generation.

But the great, ironic secret at the committee’s roots has emerged only now, in Moscow. According to newly unearthed KGB files, the committee’s founding father – the man who paved the way for Senator Joe McCarthy’s witch-hunts – was a Soviet spy.
His name was Samuel Dickstein, a Democratic congressman from Manhattan who created the committee’s prototype in 1934 as a means for hunting down home-grown Nazis. His campaign against the spread of American fascism and his post-war service as a New York judge are honoured by a commemorative collection of his papers in the American Jewish Archives.

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But to the NKVD (the KGB’s precursor) Dickstein was an important, if troublesome, agent whose mercenary instincts earned him the codename ‘Crook’. For just over two years, at the onset of the second world war, his handlers believed he was worth the money. It was the first and – as far as anyone knows – the last time the Soviet spymasters managed to ‘buy’ a member of Congress.
Dickstein’s espionage has come to light now as a result of an unusual deal struck by the US publishers Random House and the KGB’s old-boy network, the Association of Retired Intelligence Officers. In return for a lump-sum payment, two researchers – Allen Weinstein, a US espionage expert, and Alexander Vassiliev, a retired Russian agent – had roughly two years, 1994 to 1996, to rummage through an assortment of KGB dossiers. They were then able to check what they found against US intercepts of Soviet intelligence communications from the period.
In their book The Haunted Wood, Weinstein and Vassiliev portray an unfamiliar America, where some of the richest and brightest of the New Deal era vied with one another to spy for Stalin. It was the high-water mark of the American left. The Haunted Wood describes a world where: ‘Avowed or covert Communists, democratic socialists, farmer-labour activists, and Roosevelt Democrat loyalists found common ground within the many new agencies and older departments of FDR’s government.’ The spies who sprouted from this ferment came in many varieties. Alongside Dickstein, who sold his services mainly for money, there were egalitarian New Deal policy wonks, who spied out of anti-fascist conviction, and the daughter of the US ambassador in Berlin, who did it for love and sex.
Another traitor unmasked by Weinstein and Vassiliev is Lawrence Duggan, the head of the Latin American section in Roosevelt’s State Department, who was apparently desperate to strike a covert blow for socialism.
According to Boris Bazarov, the Washington station chief, Duggan told his Soviet handlers: ‘The only thing which kept him at his hateful job in the State Department where he did not get out of his tuxedo for two weeks, every night attending a reception, was the idea of being useful for our cause.’ From the NKVD documents, Duggan comes across as a typical member of a substantial group of young American intellectuals, which included Alger Hiss – another rising State Department star in the late thirties. Their faith in the American way of life had been shaken by the Wall Street crash and the Depression, and they viewed the Soviet Union as the most effective remaining bulwark against Hitler.
Dickstein was different. He was 42 years old when he first made contact with Soviet agents in 1937. By then he had been a congressman for the Lower East Side for 15 years, and was very much part of the corrupt world of big city politics. There is evidence that he demanded under-the-counter payments from immigrants for help in securing US visas.
In The Haunted Wood, the Lithuanian-born New Yorker emerges as a jaded and cynical player. He put a price on his information, and let it be known he was available to the highest bidder. He began by offering details on Russian rightwingers living in the US, but went on to supply secret details of the 1940 war budget.
He demanded $2,500 per month for his work and complained bitterly when he was tentatively offered a fifth of that amount. It was at this point his handlers dubbed him the ‘Crook’. One of them noted in his report back to Moscow: ‘We are fully aware who we are dealing with. ‘Crook’ is completely justifying his code name. This is an unscrupulous type, greedy for money, consented to work because of money, a very cunning swindler.’ When the Soviets withheld payments – suspecting (with some justification) they were being palmed commonly-available gossip at absurdly high prices – Dickstein complained he had been paid by British intelligence ‘without any questions’.
Weinstein, a veteran US spy-watcher, says he and Vassiliev (who now lives in Britain) were unable to stand up Dickstein’s claims to be a part-time British agent, because our intelligence records from the era remain sealed. ‘It was his claim. It could have been a boast. At this point there’s no way of telling,’ Weinstein says.
But Dickstein’s Soviet handler, Peter Gutzeit, took him at his word and was clearly taken aback by such brazen promiscuity: ‘We are shocked,’ Gutzeit sniffed to his superiors ‘but here it is normal.’ Dickstein clearly saw selling secrets as a lucrative sideline to his legislative work, maximising the financial returns of office. But leafing through some of his personal records in the National Archives, it is at least possible to conceive of another, more sympathetic, side to Dickstein.
The files suggest that he went in search of NKVD roubles only after his self-styled crusade against the Nazis was mutated by a Congress steeped in anti-Semitism into the red-baiting witch-hunt it ultimately became.
In a December 1933 radio address, Dickstein set out the case for his Special Committee on Un-American Activities. While chairman of the Immigration and Naturalisation Committee, he said he had unearthed enough evidence of German infiltration ‘to define the Nazi government here as the most dangerous threat to our democracy that has ever existed’.
He pointed to new pro-Nazi organisations springing up across the US, such as the Friends of New Germany, and the Silver Shirts of America, which espoused the creation of a racially pure Aryan society and the segregation of Jews.
When his proposal went to the floor of the House in March 1934, however, it met determined resistance. One congressman warned against an ‘investigation of the German government or the so-called ‘persecution’ of the Jews in Germany’.
Another congressman, from Texas, waxed lyrical about his state’s tolerance for Jews. ‘Througout my life, I have been friendly with the Jewish race. We played together as boys…Some of my closest friends in life have been Jews. In every place in Texas where I have lived there has been no discrimination whatever against Jews.’ As a Jewish immigrant himself, Dickstein would have been as aware of the realities of the American South as the plight of the Jews in Germany. But to win his prize, he said what was required of him, promising Congress: ‘This committee has nothing to do with the affairs being conducted in Germany…We are not interested in what happens in Germany.’ Dickstein got his committee, but the chairmanship went instead to John McCormack of Massachusetts, who divided its investigations equally between US Nazi sympathisers and a range of leftwing groups including trade unions. By 1937, Dickstein began looking for other outlets for his anti-Nazi zeal and had become a paid Soviet agent.
When the committee was reconstituted in 1938 as the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) under the rightwing leadership of Martin Dies, it turned almost its entire attention to the pursuit of suspected communists. Dickstein failed to win a seat on the new panel. He looked on powerlessly in 1939 as US ‘brownshirts’ under the leadership of the ‘American Fuhrer’, Fritz Kuhn, rallied in Madison Square Garden.
Without access to HUAC’s inner workings, he was of diminishing interest to his Soviet spymasters. Having paid him a total of $12,000 (now worth about $133,000), the NKVD decided in 1940 that he was more trouble than he was worth.
After five more years in Congress, Dickstein served as a New York judge until he died in 1954. Senator Joseph McCarthy fell from grace the same year, but by then Dickstein’s mutant creation had run amok across the US.
The committee itself stumbled on until 1976, when Congress finally killed it off. The damage it had done to American society is still visible today – for example in the almost physical horror of socialism and social democracy. After all these years, it is somehow fitting to discover that it was the brainchild of a traitor.

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Trump rewrites history as Russia probe pressure mounts
 

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Jury deliberations in Paul Manafort’s first (of two) trials are expected to end this week, and whether special counsel Robert Mueller can secure a guilty verdict against the man who led Trump’s campaign will be a pivotal moment for the probe, which Trump continues to attack as a “witch hunt.”
Alongside the news that White House counsel Don McGahn spent more than 30 hours with investigators, it seems that Mueller’s probe into Russian interference in the 2016 elections and possible conspiracy has tentacles that could be moving in directions the public does not yet understand.
A source told CNN that McGahn did not provide information that would be incriminating to the President, but Trump’s lawyers also admitted they did not get a readout from the top White House lawyer about what he said.
It bears mentioning on a daily basis that no matter what happens, Trump’s presidency will make history; the US has never encountered an administration like Trump’s, where the chief executive is convinced the government he leads is out to get him.

And history was much on Trump’s mind as he dispatched his takes on Watergate and McCarthyism on his Twitter feed over the weekend.

Rewriting history

Trump was alleging McCarthyism over the weekend, but it’s the Watergate comparisons he rejects that seem to be sticking.
It was Richard Nixon’s White House counsel John Dean who flipped on Nixon and helped bring him down. In Trump’s telling, Dean is a villain of the Watergate saga because he told the truth about his boss, the president.
Trump called Dean a “RAT” on Twitter on Sunday and denied the comparison, but The New York Times reported officials in Trump’s legal team don’t actually know what McGahn might have said before Mueller’s team.

Joseph McCarthy, a Republican senator from Wisconsin, stands before a map which charts Communist activity in the United States in 1954.

Joseph McCarthy, a Republican senator from Wisconsin, stands before a map which charts Communist activity in the United States in 1954.

Watergate wasn’t the only history Trump was rewriting Sunday, as he tried to paint Mueller as a latter-day Joseph McCarthy, the notorious anti-Communist crusader of the 1950s whose name became a stand-in for government overreach.

Brennan has publicly talked about that vote —

for Gus Hall

 for president in the 1970s — but Trump was more concerned with the ’50s on Sunday.

“Study the late Joseph McCarthy, because we are now in period with Mueller and his gang that make Joseph McCarthy look like a baby! Rigged Witch Hunt!” Trump said on Twitter.
The President may very well have studied McCarthy; in New York in the ’70s, Trump was a protege of Roy Cohn, the lawyer who decades earlier helped McCarthy try to root out communists and allege ties to the Soviet Union.

McCarthy’s effort, now seen almost universally as a stain on the country, saw him and Cohn run wild as they ruined lives and ginned up the Red Scare, alleging a communist infiltration in the State Department and producing a list of names he said were the culprits. He later held hearings about alleged communist sympathies in the Army.

 (Stylistically, McCarthy’s secret list of communists and the innuendo he used to frighten Americans with a communist conspiracy theory shares more similarities with Trump’s allegations of a “deep state” and his growing list of current and former government officials, including Brennan, whose security clearances Trump has either revoked or is reviewing).

Cohn, by the way, later worked with Roger Stone, an early Trump political ally who now figures in the Mueller investigation.

Trump appearing with Roy Cohn, who died in 1986.

Trump appearing with Roy Cohn, who died in 1986.

Trump’s ties to McCarthy are stronger than any comparison of McCarthy to Mueller, who is not a senator trying to use public hearings and reports for political gain, but rather a special counsel who by all accounts is proceeding quietly and methodically.

Verdict nears for former Trump campaign chief

The McCarthy allusion was the latest revisionist history lesson from Trump as the country waits for jurors to finish deliberating in the trial of Trump’s former campaign manager in Alexandria, Virginia, on tax evasion and fraud charges.
Earlier this month, Trump made the unwelcome comparison between that former campaign boss, Paul Manafort, and Al Capone, the infamous mob boss ultimately brought down by the IRS on tax evasion charges.
Meanwhile, it’s unclear to everyone but Mueller and his team what they’ll ultimately report. And it became clear this weekend, after Trump lashed out following a series of stories in The New York Times about White House counsel McGahn, who Trump says he early on encouraged him to cooperate with Mueller. The Times later wrote — and a source confirmed to CNN — that the White House is unclear what information McGahn may have shared with Mueller, a potentially frightening development for Trump, since McGahn could be witness to Trump’s alleged efforts to quash quash or minimize the Russian investigation.

Don McGahn in the role of John Dean?

Trump lashed out in a two-part Twitter statement Sunday, mixing a Watergate allusion with another McCarthy one.
“The failing @nytimes wrote a Fake piece today implying that because White House Councel Don McGahn was giving hours of testimony to the Special Councel, he must be a John Dean type ‘RAT.’ But I allowed him and all others to testify – I didn’t have to. I have nothing to hide……
“….and have demanded transparency so that this Rigged and Disgusting Witch Hunt can come to a close. So many lives have been ruined over nothing – McCarthyism at its WORST! Yet Mueller & his gang of Dems refuse to look at the real crimes on the other side – Media is even worse!”
Speaking later Sunday on CNN, Dean responded, saying he’d be honored to be on a list of Trump’s enemies, and pointing out that Trump should worry about McGahn’s testimony, since McGahn’s role is to be the White House’s lawyer, not Trump’s.
“You’ve got to put this in a larger perspective,” Dean said on CNN. “McGahn is doing what he should do, and what was resolved after Watergate as to who is the client of the White House counsel. The client was presumed when I was there to be Nixon. The president. Today, it’s clear that it is not the case. It’s the Office of the President he represents, and there can be real differences between the incumbent president and the office itself, and McGahn represents the office.”
While he held the same White House title as McGahn, Dean is also featuring in another of the dramas that swirls around Trump and the current and former aides talking to authorities.

The attorney representing former Trump lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen

 told Politico

 he has been consulting Dean on a regular basis. Cohen, facing his own legal problems, has indicated he could cooperate with Mueller.

“I certainly don’t want to raise expectations that Mr. Cohen has anything like the level of deep involvement and detailed knowledge that John Dean had in the Nixon White House as a witness to Nixon’s crimes, but I did see some similarities and wanted to learn from what John went through,” Cohen’s attorney Lanny Davis told Politico.
Dean cooperated with prosecutors and ultimately testified about Nixon’s misdeeds at the Watergate hearings and served four months in prison for his own obstruction of justice. It’s not clear what role if any McGahn might play in Mueller’s final report, whatever it might say, despite mounting pressure from Giuliani to get it out of the way before November elections.
Another historical note, since Trump is conflating Watergate and McCarthyism, is that a key ally of McCarthy’s before his efforts went fully off the rails was none other than Richard Nixon.

G. David Schine – Wikipedia
 

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Anti-communism and Army–McCarthy hearings[edit]

In 1952 Schine published a six-page anti-communist pamphlet called Definition of Communism,[10] and had a copy placed in every room of his family’s chain of hotels.[11] Although the pamphlet contained many errors, Time magazine called the pamphlet “remarkably succinct.”[3][12] The pamphlet introduced Schine to Roy Cohn through newspaper columnist George Sokolsky, and the two became friends.[13]Cohn at that time was Senator Joseph McCarthy‘s chief counsel, and he brought Schine onto McCarthy’s staff as an unpaid “chief consultant”. McCarthy era opponents of Communism sought to stamp out pro-Communist material. Schine and Cohn conducted a much-criticised tour of Europe in 1953, examining libraries of the United States Information Agency for books written by authors they deemed to be Communists or fellow travelers.[14][15] Die Welt of Hamburg called them Schnüffler or snoops.[16]Theodore Kaghan, Deputy Director of the Public Affairs Division in the Office of the U.S. High Commissioner for Germany and a target of the Committee, called them “junketeering gumshoes.”[17]
In November 1953, Schine was drafted into the United States Army as a private.[18] Cohn immediately began a campaign to obtain special privileges for Schine. Cohn met with and made repeated telephone calls to military officials from the Secretary of the Army down to Schine’s company commander. He asked that Schine be given a commission, which the Army refused due to Schine’s lack of qualifications, and that Schine be given light duties, extra leave and not be assigned overseas. At one point, Cohn was reported to have threatened to “wreck the Army” if his demands were not met.[19] During the Army-McCarthy Hearings of 1954, the Army charged Cohn and McCarthy with using improper pressure to influence the Army, while McCarthy and Cohn counter-charged that the Army was holding Schine “hostage” in an attempt to squelch McCarthy’s investigations into Communists in the Army.
The hearings were broadcast live using the relatively new medium of television and were viewed by an estimated 20 million people. Just prior to the hearings, Schine and Cohn appeared on the cover of TIMEon March 22, 1954, under the banner “McCarthy and His Men”.[20]
Schine and Cohn were rumored to have a sexual relationship, although there has never been any proof of this. More recently, some historians have concluded that the two were merely friends, and that Schine was heterosexual.[21][22] During this period, Schine was linked romantically with some actresses, including Rhonda Fleming and Piper Laurie.[23] Cohn’s homosexuality later became public and he died of AIDS in 1986.[24]
The Army–McCarthy hearings absolved McCarthy of any direct wrongdoing, blaming Cohn alone. The exposure of McCarthy and his methods before a television audience, however, is widely considered the beginning of the end of his career.[25] Roy Cohn resigned from McCarthy’s staff shortly after the hearings.[26]

Later years[edit]

After the hearings, Schine left politics and refused to comment on the episode for the rest of his life, so his view of his relationship with Cohn remains unknown.

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John L. Spivak – Wikipedia
 

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In October 1937, Spivak testified before a Massachusetts legislative commission investigating Communist, fascist, and Nazi activities, describing a nationwide Nazi propaganda network and accusing two employees of Henry Ford, among others, of distributing Nazi propaganda.[27] He identified another witness as a distributor of Nazi propaganda, who in turn said Spivak was being paid by the Communist Party.[28]
In a sort of sequel to Secret ArmiesHonorable Spy (1939) described smuggling and war preparations on the part of West Coast Japanese in collusion with Nazis, hiding weapons in Mexico, and spying on American defense installations with telescopic lenses. One review followed a summation of its charges with an evaluation: “How much of what Mr. Spivak sees and hears is true, we do not know. But we trust that Mr. Hoover’s F.B.I. officials. as well as the Mexican government, will look sharply into these activities.”[29]
In 1940, he was arrested for criminal libel because of charges he made in Secret Armies that an investigator for the House Un-American Activities Committee and a German instructor at Wichita State University were Nazi agents.[30]
Spivak also investigated the financial activities of Charles E. Coughlin, the Catholic radio priest who founded the National Shrine of the Little Flower in Royal Oak, Michigan.[31] One author described Spivak’s combination of documentation and advocacy in Shrine of the Silver Dollar (1940) as “in the nature of investigative reporting.”[32] A review of the historical literature on Coughlin places a sympathetic biography at one end of the scale and Spivak’s “rabid” study at the other, calling Shrine “a primary document of the brown scare,” that is, an unwarranted and hysterical fear of a right-wing overthrow of the federal government.[33]
john spivak secret armies – Google Search
 

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john spivak secret armies – Google Search
 

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The New Technique of Nazi Warfare: John L. Spivak: 9781479144891: Amazon.com: Books
 

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