Transcript
The Pumpkin and the Paper
1948 / 1950
December 1948. Two investigators from Congress drive out to a farm in Maryland. The owner walks them to his pumpkin patch.
Film of confidential State Department papers, hidden by a man who once carried secrets for Soviet intelligence. Soviet spies were real.
Fourteen months later, a first-term senator, Joseph McCarthy, gave a dinner speech in Wheeling, West Virginia.
He held up a sheet of paper. Communists, he said, in the State Department.
A reporter wrote down 205.
In Denver the next day, he told reporters the list was in his other bag.
That night, it was 57.
The radio station erased its tape. He never made the list public.
Film you could hold up to the light. A list nobody saw. How far should a free country go to catch the enemies inside it?
Loyalty
1947
Truman asked Congress to help contain Communism abroad. Nine days later, he ordered loyalty checks on every federal worker.
Dorothy Bailey, a government training officer, lost her job in 1949. She was never told who had accused her.
The loyalty program checked more than 4.7 million people by 1953. About 560 were removed or refused a job. Its own chairman said in 1950 it had found no case of espionage.
In October 1947, the House Un-American Activities Committee called Hollywood to Washington.
Robert E. Stripling Mr. Lardner, are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?
The chairman kept pressing. Ring Lardner Jr., a screenwriter, answered.
Ring Lardner Jr. I could answer it, but if I did I would hate myself in the morning.
Ten men from the movie business refused to answer. Prison followed, for contempt of Congress. All had been Communist Party members. Joining wasn't a crime.
The studios had already promised not to knowingly hire a Communist. They admitted “the danger of hurting innocent people.” That was the blacklist.
The Pumpkin Papers
1948–1950
In August 1948, Whittaker Chambers, an editor at Time, told the committee he'd been a Communist. He named Alger Hiss, a former State Department official.
Alger Hiss I am not and never have been a member of the Communist Party.
Most of the committee believed him. A first-term congressman from California, Richard Nixon, didn't.
Hiss sued him for libel. Chambers answered with typed copies of State Department papers.
Then came the pumpkin film. Kodak said it was made in 1945, too late for Chambers's story. Hours later, Kodak reversed itself. That type of film was on sale in 1938.
The FBI matched the typing to the Hiss family's old typewriter. Too much time had passed to charge spying, so Hiss was tried for lying under oath.
A second jury convicted him of perjury.
Secretary of State Dean Acheson I do not intend to turn my back on Alger Hiss.
Army codebreakers had been reading pieces of Soviet cables. Released in 1995, they showed hundreds of people in the United States had helped Soviet intelligence.
One cable describes an agent code-named ALES. An analyst's footnote says, “Probably Alger Hiss.” Most historians agree. A few still dispute it.
The Soviets had the bomb. China was Communist. Hiss was convicted.
Then a British scientist confessed he'd given Moscow atomic secrets. Six days after that news, McCarthy went to Wheeling.
The Number
1950
Republicans kept asking who lost China. At Wheeling, McCarthy said he knew.
Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy The bright young men who are born with silver spoons in their mouths are the ones who have been the worst.
The 205 came, by his own account, from a 1946 letter: 284 employees flagged, minus 79 already gone. The letter never called any of them Communists.
A Senate committee under Millard Tydings investigated. Its Democrats called the charges “a fraud and a hoax.”
The first Republican to stand up to him was the Senate's only woman, Margaret Chase Smith.
Sen. Margaret Chase Smith But I do not want to see the Republican Party ride to political victory on the Four Horsemen of Calumny—fear, ignorance, bigotry, and smear.
McCarthy, two rows behind her, left without a word. Smith recalled he called her and her cosigners Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. There were six.
In September, Congress passed the McCarran Internal Security Act.
President Harry S. Truman In a free country, we punish men for the crimes they commit, but never for the opinions they have.
Both parties overrode his veto within a day.
In 1952, the government readied six camps for an emergency. One was Tule Lake, where Japanese Americans had been held. None was ever used.
After his staff helped beat Tydings in November 1950, few senators dared cross him.
Who Paid
1950–1953
Nineteen days after Wheeling, the State Department told senators it had forced out 91 employees as security risks. Most were gay men.
Officials said gay workers could be blackmailed. The only example senators heard was an Austrian officer from before World War I.
In 1953, Eisenhower made “sexual perversion” grounds for firing federal workers. Thousands of gay men and lesbians lost their jobs. Historians call it the Lavender Scare.
In 1950, the FBI arrested Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, New Yorkers with two small sons. They were convicted of conspiring to pass atomic secrets to the Soviets.
Judge Irving R. Kaufman I consider your crime worse than murder.
He blamed them for the Korean War’s casualties. Then he sentenced both to die.
People around the world asked for mercy. Eisenhower refused.
They were executed on June 19, 1953. Their sons were ten and six.
Venona later showed Julius had run a spy ring. The case against Ethel was thin, and her brother later admitted lying about her.
In 1952, Paul Robeson sang to thousands across the Canadian border, because he wasn’t allowed to cross it.
McCarthy’s aides toured Europe purging American libraries. A few books were burned.
Eisenhower refused to attack McCarthy by name.
President Dwight D. Eisenhower Don’t join the book burners.
Point of Order
1953–1954
By 1953, McCarthy chaired the Senate’s investigations subcommittee. His chief counsel, Roy Cohn, was 26.
Then the Army drafted Cohn’s friend and unpaid consultant, David Schine. The Army said Cohn bullied it for favors. McCarthy said the Army held Schine hostage to stop his investigations.
In March, Edward R. Murrow of CBS let McCarthy’s own film clips make the case against him.
Edward R. Murrow We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty.
In April, the Senate opened hearings on the Army’s fight with McCarthy. Television carried them live. For 36 days, millions of Americans watched.
Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy Point of order, Mr. Chairman.
Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy …a young man named Fisher… who has been for a number of years a member of an organization…
Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy …which was named, oh, years and years ago, as the legal bulwark of the Communist Party.
Joseph N. Welch Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness.
Joseph N. Welch Let us not assassinate this lad further, Senator. You have done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?
His ratings fell through the spring.
In December the Senate condemned him, 67 to 22. Every Democrat voting said yes. Republicans split evenly. It condemned how he treated Senate committees, not how he hunted Communists.
Later evidence suggests a few people on his lists had helped Soviet intelligence. He never proved a single case. Reporters stopped listening. He died in 1957, at 48.
Have You Ever Been
1954–1995
McCarthy fell. The fear he'd ridden outlasted him.
Paul Robeson, the singer and actor, had praised the Soviet Union. In 1950, the government canceled his passport.
In 1956, a congressman asked him why he didn't stay in Russia.
Paul Robeson Because my father was a slave, and my people died to build this country, and I am going to stay here and have a part of it just like you.
In 1957, the Army Map Service fired an astronomer, Frank Kameny, for being gay. He fought back.
In 1995, the government released the Venona cables. The spies had been real.
Both parties had wanted to contain Communism. They fought over how far to go at home. In 1950, Margaret Chase Smith had put her answer in writing.
Sen. Margaret Chase Smith The right to criticize. The right to hold unpopular beliefs. The right to protest. The right of independent thought.