Crying Wolf: American Anticommunism

Not Without Honor is an ambitious, largely successful effort to encompass the whole of the American anticommunist experience, from the Bolshevik Revolution to the collapse of the Soviet Union. Richard Gid Powers, whose previous work includes studies of J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI, ¹ holds that American anticommunism must be seen as a pluralistic movement of often jarring elements united only by a hatred of communism. He suggests that if the anticommunist movement is stripped of zanies such as Elizabeth Dilling and Robert Welch, mountebanks like Gaston Means (a trafficker in forged documents), political heavies like McCarthy and Martin Dies, and bureaucratic suppression artists like Hoover, then the remainder, the essence of the movement, was at bottom valid and valuable. Lamentably, Powers notes, the vicissitudes of seventy years of American politics have robbed it of honor due it in its own country.

Powers provides a chronological review of the profuse variety of American anticommunism. Its beginnings contained threads that would run throughout its subsequent history. Woodrow Wilson’s liberal internationalism, deployed to contain the Bolsheviks and compete with their appeal to the Left, coexisted with the strand Powers labels “countersubversion,” epitomized by the young J. Edgar Hoover in the postwar Red Scare. The excesses of Hoover et al. sounded a recurrent motif in the anticommunist story: noisy repression that evoked outrage and sympathy and gave the Communists status as victims and civil-liberties poster children.

In the 1920s anticommunism and communism, both in shambles, recuperated slowly, the former’s ranks filling with members of groups the Communists managed to alienate. They numbered leftists and labor activists schooled by various communist betrayals, African Americans disgusted by the CP’s loop-the-loops on the “Negro question,” Jews moved by either a concern to disprove the canard that they were all Bolsheviks or by disillusioning experiences on the left, and Catholics battling an irreligious host. Powers sketches a varied and interesting lot, including Jews like Louis Marshall of the American Jewish Committee and Abraham Cahan of the Forward, black journalist George Schuyler, and Catholics Patrick Scanlan and Father Edmund A. Walsh.

At the same time, the anticommunist persuasion suffered for the sins of its fringe elements—the grandiose red spiderweb networks of guilt by association elaborated by countersubversives or the extravagances of political plungers like Hamilton Fish. Such misadventures periodically discredited the anticommunist creed, but, Powers argues, it is a mistake to take these peripheral parts for the anticommunist whole.

The pattern recurred. The 1930s, Stalin’s destruction of his rivals, the run-up to World War II, the war itself, the Cold War, and de-Stalinization would bring new recruits to anticommunism. Yet countersubversive excesses would neutralize much of that faith’s credibility. New themes would enter anticommunist discourse: the disillusionment of journalists like Eugene Lyons after experiences in the Soviet utopia, second thoughts of intellectuals who deplored the purge trials, anger at the Hitler-Stalin pact, outrage at Eastern Europe’s fate.

The Cold War brought an unstable partnership of liberal anticommunism with countersubversion; the alliance fell apart after the Hiss case and kindred events. Powers terms the case a “disaster” for anticommunism: it “shifted the balance of power . . . from responsible liberal anticommunists” (p. 225), who gave us containment and NSC 68, to countersubversives like McCarthy.

Following out the dialectic, the collapse of McCarthyism gave (yet again) martyr status to all of anticommunism’s targets and sapped that ideology’s strength. Along with a softening of the Cold War and the trauma of Vietnam, the demonizing of McCarthyism alienated many liberals from anticommunism.

Perhaps the most interesting phase of the book treats the post-McCarthy dying fall of anticommunism. By the 1960s, liberals were obsessed with the dangers of “extremism.” They labeled as “extremists” Robert Welch and the John Birch Society (JBS), William F. Buckley, Barry Goldwater, and their followers, and anticommunists in general. ² (Powers seeks mildly to undemonize the JBS: he writes off Welch as “weird” and as dangerous only...