Abstract
According to Fortune Magazine, a poll in 1942 “reported that 25 per cent of Americans favored socialism and another 35 per cent had an open mind about it” (p. 9). Landon Storrs’ ambitious history covers the enormous social struggles around this leftward movement in the United States from the 1930s through the 1960s. She demonstrates how the five million federal loyalty investigations—“a crucial instrument of the Red Scare” (p. 2)—were simply one element of a determined effort by the right wing to reverse these social gains and to change the topic of debate from restoring social equality to love of one’s county—as if the two could not be identical.
The book has a wonderful richness and depth, and the whole period is dramatically revived as Storrs uses biographies of individuals who participated in the various movements to illustrate this history. She selected “a cohort of women and men who entered government service in the 1930s and 1940s and then were investigated under the federal employee loyalty program” (p. 1). Her subjects are individuals who, committed to “the pursuit of democracy and equality” (p. 264), joined the federal government during the New Deal; married, divorced and remarried each other; and remained friends for decades before suffering through investigations by the federal employee loyalty program in 1947–1956. By following these participants, “many of whom carried scars for the rest of their careers” (p. 254), the book is as much a history of the New Deal as it is a history of the persecutions of the postwar Red Scare. Storrs provides enormous research—there are 87 pages of endnotes from a wide selection of personal and private sources, a meticulous chronology of the Federal Loyalty Security Program and case summaries of 42 “loyalty cases.”
While this book covers the participation of the individuals in a wide range of movements (as obscure as the League of Women Shoppers), Storrs pays particular attention to workers’ movements in the 1930s and to the government policies—the Wagner Act, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) and the LaFollette Committee—which supported these efforts. In the section “Painting the NLRB Pink,” Storrs describes how the Red Scare was simply an excuse for anti-union congressmen whose tactics “were calculated to generate titillating media coverage but the more fundamental objective was to undermine the NLRB” (p. 63).
In the same spirit, the loyalty investigations attacked “left feminism” and civil rights so that investigations of individuals were also opportunities to bolster the system of sexism and segregation. Storrs emphasizes the ferocity of the attacks on the bright, energetic and radical women who had to fight through a Red Scare designed to support male dominance and white supremacy and to “spread resentment of wage-earning married women.” She notes that today “Antifeminism, like racism, remains integral to the right’s vision” (p. 63).
How effective was the Red Scare? “It is difficult to map precisely how public policy was affected by the fact that influential left feminists of the 1930s and 1940s either were marginalized or felt so vulnerable to loyalty accusations that they eschewed positions that might be construed as anticapitalist” (p. 233). Storrs provides often painful descriptions of how these individuals responded to the public persecutions: some of them risked their employment and careers as they “challenged the loyalty program head-on … and succeeded in exposing some of the most egregious aspects of the loyalty program and bringing about reforms” (p. 194). Other defendants waffled, and still others—to the dismay of their longtime friends—adjusted their political views. She describes Leon and Mary Dublin Keyserling, “who are remembered as ‘Cold War liberals, who supported the Vietnam War and celebrated capitalism’s ability to eliminate poverty.’ Under the pressure of recurring investigations, both of them moderated their goals and language, and they elided radicalism from their autobiographical narratives” (p. 11).
One of the most poignant themes is this “eliding” of history by the participants themselves, since many of the individuals who suffered through the hearings consciously censored their memories or papers. In giving oral histories or providing drafts of memoirs, many of Storrs’ subjects “removed materials about the disloyalty charges,” and, by so doing, the attacks by the loyalty program against feminists and noncommunist leftists “were not confronted at the time and have not been recognized since” (p. 264).
Storrs emphasizes the disconnection between the intimidated radicals of the 1930s and the generation of New Left that developed in the 1960s. “But having downplayed their radicalism to salvage careers in the 1950s—or to protect spouses’ careers—leftist New Deal veterans found it hard to establish credibility with the young radicals of the 1960s” (p. 250).
If we don’t learn from history, we are fated to repeat it. As the whole controversy over “national security,” “leaks,” and “treason” plays out across our TV screens, this book is a terrific example of how these campaigns are conceived and carried out. Most importantly, this book describes the impact that the Red Scare has had upon the lives of targeted individuals. As Storrs concludes, “We could do worse than to recover the vision of some public servants who defined the pursuit of democracy and equality as the essence of Americanism” (p. 264).