American Labor and the Cold War

Labor and the Cold War: The Legacy of McCarthyism

Labor and the Cold War The Legacy of McCarthyism
Ellen Schrecker The political repression of the McCarthy period had a deleterious impact on American labor. Only the Communist Party was as deeply affected. Not only was the entire left wing of the labor movement destroyed, but many of the people who came under fire had union ties, such as the Hollywood Ten, or the thousands of maritime workers thrown out of their jobs because of the federal government’s Korean War Port Security program. We cannot ignore the damage that McCarthyism did to the lives and careers of these men and women; but if we are to understand its broader impact on American labor, we need to focus on its institutional fallout. We should not exaggerate that impact nor blame it for negative developments that stemmed from structural economic change. Nonetheless, the anticommunist crusade of the late 1940s and 1950s did make a difference to the labor movement, even if that difference manifested itself mainly in shifted priorities and lost opportunities. If nothing else, McCarthyism tamed American labor and brought it into the Cold War political consensus. Moreover , by preventing the nation’s unions, if so inclined, from building a broad-based social movement that challenged corporate values and championed social justice, McCarthyism narrowed political options for all Americans. I use the term “McCarthyism” advisedly here. The phenomenon that we are looking at encompasses much more than the political career of the aberrant senator from Wisconsin who gave it a name. It began years before he burst into the headlines, waving his ever-changing lists of Communists in the State Department; and it continued for several years after he self-destructed in the eyes of the nation’s television viewers at the Army-McCarthy hearings in the spring of 1954. Nonetheless , the word has historical specificity. It is a convenient and concise way to refer to the anticommunist political repression of the early Cold War, to the multistranded domestic campaign to destroy the influence of every idea, institution, and individual connected to American Communism. There were many reasons why McCarthyism targeted the labor movement. Ever since the late nineteenth century, red-baiting has traditionally been associated with attempts on the part of hostile employers to suppress unions and weaken community support for organized labor. The McCarthy era’s focus on labor was 7 thus, in part, an updated version of all those earlier campaigns. Certainly, in those industries where antagonistic employers faced militant left-wing unions, anticommunism was a useful way to roll back the gains those unions had made since the late 1930s.1 Similarly, red-baiting had long been a useful weapon for conservative labor leaders and their allies to wield against their left-wing rivals.2 But perhaps the most important reason why McCarthyism focused on American labor was because Communism focused on American labor. If we are to understand how McCarthyism operated and how it affected the labor movement and the rest of American society, we must relieve ourselves of the myth that most of its victims were “innocent liberals,” apolitical folks who somehow turned up on the wrong mailing lists, or whose parents had once subscribed to the Daily Worker. True, such unfortunate individuals did exist, and they often got a lot of attention.3 But most of the men and women who were called before congressional investigating committees, hauled before grand juries, or blacklisted by the entertainment industry were or had been in or near the Communist Party (CP). And many of them were union activists. This should not surprise us. After all, whatever else it stood for, the Communist Party claimed to speak for the working class. Naturally, it sought a niche within those organizations that most directly represented the interests ofAmerican workers: their unions.And, at least for a few years during the 1930s and 1940s before McCarthyism drove them out, Communists did have some influence within American labor. Never as extensive as its supporters hoped or its enemies feared, that influence was nonetheless of some significance within a number of unions. Eliminating it affected the labor movement in ways we are just coming to understand. Although the Cold War is over, American Communism has been such a demonized and contradictory movement that it still provokes impassioned debate.4 On the one hand, the Communist Party was an authoritarian political sect whose adherents tried to conform to an inappropriate Soviet model and closed their eyes to the...