Twentieth-Century
America
Ted Morgan
(Random House)
And with his grip on dramatic performance and the fear of his country-men --- fear of Communism, fear of him --- it may well have happened ... but for one thing. His greatest enemy shot him down in mid-flight. His name: Joe McCarthy.
As proof, Morgan takes us all the way back to the Russian Revolution, the rise of the Bolsheviks, and the consequent wave of fear that swept America, resulting almost instantly in an investigation of "reds." A pro-Soviet rally in New York City in 1919, caused U. S. Senator, Lee Overman, to call a hearing, "the first of many congressional investigations of Communism, which in 1919 was a brand-new topic." The hearings lasted a month, brought in twenty-five witnesses, and provided us with this fascinating back-and-forth: Archibald Stevenson, a lawyer and an expert on Bolshevism, was asked by Overton,
"Do they have as many wives as they want?"
Stevenson: "In rotation."
"A man can marry and then get a divorce when he gets tired and get another wife?"
"Precisely."
"They can renounce the marital bond at will?"
"Precisely."
Reds also takes us into that period where the 339th Infantry Regiment of the United States, on September 4, 1918, joined the British at Archangel to rout Bolshevik troops --- an invasion that lasted for almost a year, created a near-mutiny, left some 400 Americans dead, and was a constant source of anti-American propaganda for the Stalinists.
Morgan takes us from these excursions, into Mitchell Palmer's deportation of radicals, the rise of the Communist Party in the United States, the works of the Comintern, the coming of paid government operatives, WWII, J. Edgar Hoover, the hearings of the House Unamerican Activities Committee, the Eastland Committee, and the astonishing rise (and equally astonishing fall) of Joseph R. McCarthy. It ends with a few thoughts on the politics of anti-terrorism in present day America.
Morgan has produced a great number of words, not only in Reds but with his seven previous volumes --- including works on Somerset Maugham, Winston Churchill, and Franklin D. Roosevelt. He may be a sterling researcher, but his writing style can be straight out of Ennui Village. For example, there is an extended exegesis on a minor "friendly witness" named Harvey Matusow. It takes up a dozen pages and --- not being all that vital in the annals of espionage, red-baiting, and the question of paid informants --- could have been dispensed with in a paragraph.
In addition, Morgan's characterizations of the individuals involved can be klunky. Soviet spy Valentin Markin wore elevated shoes and his "hair stood up, like the hair of cartoon characters struck by electricity adding another inch, and his arrogance compensated for his bantam size." Hungarian Communist Josef Peters looked "somewhat like a mustached and bushy-eyebrowed chow dog strutting on its hind legs." The New York Communist Party in 1948 included Robert Thompson ("thick-necked and verbose,") and Carl Winter ("flabby and soft.") One gets the feeling that Morgan may be bored with the very facts and is struggling to bring some life to the page.
It is only when he gets to the very real conflicts, the astonishing dramas, and the wonderful characters in subversive-stalking does Reds come to life. The chapters on early Joe McCarthy are worth the price of the book. They include his little-known involvement in the Malmédy Massacre controversy where, late in WWII, over a hundred American soldiers were captured and massacred by the German SS.
McCarthy headed up a senatorial investigation in 1949 which was, surprisingly, not about the death of so many unarmed American prisoners, but whether German troops captured later had been brutally questioned by the U. S. Army. Excerpts from the transcripts shows McCarthy's techniques in full flower: insults, sarcasm, innuendo, and self-pity, plus a strange sort of interest in certain private parts. The Senator returns again and again to the question of whether SS men had been "kicked in the genitals," "injured in the testicles," "kicked or kneed in the groin."
Morgan, as I say, can write up a storm when he is onto something good: McCarthy, and Attorney-General A. Mitchell Palmer, J. Edgar Hoover with his pathological hatred of Martin Luther King, Jr. But when he gets off the track, he does so badly. For example, Morgan's affection for the works of the House Unamerican Activities Committee comes as a surprise. His thesis is that there was a real and present dangerous threat of Communist invasion in the film industry and that the work of HUAC to uproot them was honorable and true. However the author's attacks on those who by necessity used the Constitution for protection against self-incrimination sounds ominously like McCarthy's garish references to "Fifth Amendment Communists."
Why could they not tell the truth? The answer was that if you admitted membership, you would have to name others, which made you a stool pigeon. But between the posturing cardboard heroes who took the Fifth and those who named names, the former were cowards afraid of admitting their allegiance, while the latter were doing their duty as citizens under oath before a congressional committee. Some of the latter were opportunists trying to avoid the blacklist, but others had left the party and felt it was proper to expose its underhandedness.
Once you were under oath to the HUAC, if you gave any answers whatsoever (outside of name and address) you were required, under pain of arrest and imprisonment, to name any and all names of those you had gone to meetings with, eaten with, slept with, associated with, worked with --- all the while giving opinions on their loyalty or lack of it.
Such gossip was not only malicious, but a vicious way used by many to get back at old enemies. "Be a tattle-tale," Morgan is saying --- "It's OK. Your patriotism requires that you do so."