Donald Trump and the Shadow of McCarthyism
Last month the Trump Administration launched an unprecedented assault against academic and intellectual freedom in America, targeting many of our most elite institutions of higher education.
As an example of this, enormous pressure was exerted against Columbia University in New York City by withdrawing $400 million in annual federal funding and demanding its full cooperation with the arrest of foreign students who had been critical of Israel’s massacre of Gazan civilians. Trump officials also required that Columbia’s prestigious Middle Eastern Studies program and other research centers be placed under “academic receivership,” ensuring their tight ideological control by pro-Israel overseers.
Faced with the dire threat of such a massive loss of funds, Acting President Katrina Armstrong acceded to those demands, but then resigned, much like her predecessor had done seven months earlier.
For similar reasons, the top leadership of Harvard University’s Middle Eastern Studies Center was forced to resign, seemingly destroying the academic independence of that prestigious institution eighty years after it had first been established. But apparently that preliminary academic concession was deemed insufficient, and Trump officials soon froze more than $2 billion in such federal funding to America’s most prestigious university. When Harvard resisted further demands, Trump illegally threatened to revoke Harvard’s non-profit status, ban all foreign students, and essentially attempt to destroy it.
Our government declared that all these attacks upon America’s top academic institutions were part of its sweeping ideological campaign to root out campus antisemitism, with that term now extended to include “anti-Zionism,” namely sharp criticism of the State of Israel and its policies.
The successful Hamas raid of October 7, 2023 had been followed by relentless Israeli attacks against the helpless civilians of Gaza, and these had prompted a huge wave of pro-Palestinian campus protests during 2024, outraging the Israeli government and its pro-Israel American supporters. The latter included many Jewish billionaire donors who exerted their enormous influence to successfully demand unprecedented crackdowns that involved the arrest of some 2,300 students and soon stamped out those demonstrations.
Despite that major success, the Zionist donors regarded their victory over the protesters as incomplete. With the pro-Israel Biden Administration now replaced by the even more strongly pro-Israel Trump Administration, they demanded that this campaign be extended to rooting out the ideological forces that they deemed responsible.
Under their influence, Trump and his top aides declared their intent to arrest and deport any foreign students who had participated in those campus protests or otherwise expressed their sharp criticism of Israel, and this soon resulted in a series of shocking incidents.
For many decades, legal permanent residents of the U.S. were assumed to possess all the same rights and privileges as American citizens, certainly including the Constitutional protections of our Bill of Rights. Their Green Cards could only be revoked for very serious crimes such as rape or murder, and cancelling student visas for ideological reasons was almost as rare.
But under Trump this completely changed. Secretary of State Marco Rubio declared that a central foreign policy goal of the American government was combatting antisemitism everywhere across the world and anti-Zionism fell into that same category. Therefore those foreign students who strongly criticized Israel should be removed from American soil, and he cancelled the visas or Green Cards of some 300 of them, ordering their immediate deportation, with the total eventually rising to 1,500.
Some of the resulting scenes were quite shocking. A young Turkish doctoral candidate attending Tufts University on a Fulbright Scholarship was snatched off the streets of her Boston-area town by six masked federal agents, hustled into an unmarked car, and transferred to a holding cell in Louisiana in preparation for her deportation. Other raids on Columbia student housing by teams of federal agents picked up a Palestinian Green Card holder with an American citizen wife eight months pregnant. A South Korean undergraduate who had lived in the U.S. since the age of seven went into hiding to avoid a similar fate, while a student from India quickly fled to Canada to avoid arrest.
None of these university students had committed any crimes, but they were seized by federal agents in campus raids or grabbed from the streets of their cities merely for having expressed public criticism of the foreign government of Israel. Nothing as bizarre as this had ever previously happened in America.
For example, the Tufts student was abducted for having co-authored an op-ed in her campus newspaper a year earlier supporting the implementation of policies passed by an overwhelming vote of her own university’s Community Senate. The text of the piece that prompted her arrest was so anodyne and dull that I found it difficult to read without nodding off.
Repressive police states that arrest students for criticizing the government have hardly been uncommon throughout history. But I’d never previously heard of one that only implemented such measures for criticizing a foreign government. This demonstrated the true lines of sovereignty and political control governing today’s American society.
The declared aim of the Trump Administration and its ideological allies has been to completely root out and eliminate anti-Zionism across American universities. However, I think the likely outcome of this harsh ideological crackdown may be to destroy intellectual freedom at those institutions, thereby also destroying much of their global influence. Several weeks ago, I discussed these strange and alarming developments in an article.
The Forgotten Menace of Soviet Communist Subversion
As might be expected, these dramatic Trump Administration attacks against free speech and academic freedom provoked a huge wave of sharp criticism, both across the mainstream media and among private individuals, and the word most often used to condemn such policies was “McCarthyism.” Throughout the month of March, I saw that term regularly expressed in angry YouTube interviews, published opinion pieces, and even in some of my personal email exchanges.
Yet although my own very critical article ran well over 7,000 words, it included no mention of either Sen. Joseph McCarthy nor his anti-Communist political crusade of the early 1950s. Trump’s actions seemed orders-of-magnitude more serious and unjustified than anything ever proposed by McCarthy, so I regarded any such comparisons as absurd and ridiculous.
Over the last three generations, the political methods employed by that notorious Republican junior senator from Wisconsin have become an almost universal byword for attacks against freedom of thought and speech, so much so that in recent years they have often been found in the angry accusations of Republicans, conservatives, and right-wingers as well as by their more leftward counterparts. Indeed, with a few notable exceptions, any popular defense of McCarthy or his policies has become so rare that “McCarthyism” has almost been transformed into a generic, non-ideological term for totally unjustifiable political repression.
Two-term President Ronald Reagan was widely credited by his supporters with having won our half-century long Cold War against the Soviet Union and they also claimed that he had revitalized our economy, so at the time they hailed his policies as “Reaganism.” Yet although he loomed very large during his own era, his political stature has dwindled away so rapidly during the last couple of decades that I almost never see him favorably cited by conservatives younger than fifty, nor any mention of his eponymous package of policies. Indeed, no one has even bothered creating a Wikipedia page on “Reaganism.”
Meanwhile, McCarthy and his brand of politics are still widely discussed, and I think that no other political figure from our nearly 250 year national history has inspired a similar term that remains in common use. Indeed, many have suggested that McCarthy ranks as the single most universally vilified figure in American political history, while “McCarthyism” has become the shorthand for spewing forth careless, error-prone, and often dishonest accusations of treachery against political opponents. The Wikipedia page for that term runs a massive 14,000 words.
As I’ve often explained, I spent most of my life paying little attention to modern American history, drawing my limited understanding from introductory textbooks and the mainstream media coverage that I absorbed. Therefore, I never questioned that the accusations of Communist espionage and subversion made by Sen. McCarthy had been wildly exaggerated and often fallacious, nor that the resulting McCarthyite era had represented a terrible black mark in American politics. According to that standard account, his dark shadow over American society was only lifted when he over-reached himself and was politically destroyed through the joint efforts of Republican President Dwight Eisenhower, the Democratic Party, and the American Army establishment.
But as I began reading more serious historical works, my perspective changed. I discovered that Communist spies and agents of influence in America had been far more numerous and powerful than I had ever imagined, and this became an important early strand in my American Pravda series.
Almost exactly a dozen years ago I opened my original article of that name by describing these shocking revelations, although I still expressed great skepticism toward McCarthy himself and his methods:
In mid-March, the Wall Street Journal carried a long discussion of the origins of the Bretton Woods system, the international financial framework that governed the Western world for decades after World War II. A photo showed the two individuals who negotiated that agreement. Britain was represented by John Maynard Keynes, a towering economic figure of that era. America’s representative was Harry Dexter White, assistant secretary of the Treasury and long a central architect of American economic policy, given that his nominal superior, Secretary Henry Morgenthau Jr., was a gentleman farmer with no background in finance. White was also a Communist agent.
Such a situation was hardly unique in American government during the 1930s and 1940s. For example, when a dying Franklin Roosevelt negotiated the outlines of postwar Europe with Joseph Stalin at the 1945 Yalta summit, one of his important advisors was Alger Hiss, a State Department official whose primary loyalty was to the Soviet side. Over the last 20 years, John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr, and other scholars have conclusively established that many dozens or even hundreds of Soviet agents once honeycombed the key policy staffs and nuclear research facilities of our federal government, constituting a total presence perhaps approaching the scale suggested by Sen. Joseph McCarthy, whose often unsubstantiated charges tended to damage the credibility of his position.
The Cold War ended over two decades ago and Communism has been relegated to merely an unpleasant chapter in the history books, so today these facts are hardly much disputed. For example, liberal Washington Post blogger Ezra Klein matter-of-factly referred to White as a “Soviet spy” in the title of his column on our postwar financial system. But during the actual period when America’s government was heavily influenced by Communist agents, such accusations were widely denounced as “Red-baiting” or ridiculed as right-wing conspiracy paranoia by many of our most influential journalists and publications. In 1982 liberal icon Susan Sontag ruefully acknowledged that for decades the subscribers to the lowbrow Readers Digest had received a more realistic view of the world than those who drew their knowledge from the elite liberal publications favored by her fellow intellectuals. I myself came of age near the end of the Cold War and always vaguely assumed that such lurid tales of espionage were wildly exaggerated. I was wrong.
Since my knowledge of American history ran no deeper than my basic textbooks and mainstream newspapers and magazines, the last decade or so has been a journey of discovery for me, and often a shocking one. I came of age many years after the Communist spy scares of the 1950s had faded into dim memory, and based on what I read, I always thought the whole matter more amusing than anything else. It seemed that about the only significant “Red” ever caught, who may or may not have been innocent, was some obscure individual bearing the unlikely name of “Alger Hiss,” and as late as the 1980s, his children still fiercely proclaimed his complete innocence in the pages of the New York Times. Although I thought he was probably guilty, it also seemed clear that the methods adopted by his persecutors such as Joseph McCarthy and Richard Nixon had actually done far more damage to our country during the unfortunate era named for the former figure.
During the 1990s, I occasionally read reviews of new books based on the Venona Papers—decrypted Soviet cables finally declassified—and they seemed to suggest that the Communist spy ring had both been real and far more extensive than I had imagined. But those events of a half-century earlier were hardly uppermost in my mind, and anyway other historians still fought a rear-guard battle in the newspapers, arguing that many of the Venona texts were fraudulent. So I gave the matter little thought.
Only in the last dozen years, as my content-archiving project made me aware of the 1940s purge of some of America’s most prominent public intellectuals, and I began considering their books and articles, did I begin to realize the massive import of the Soviet cables. I soon read three or four of the Venona books and was very impressed by their objective and meticulous scholarly analysis, which convinced me of their conclusions. And the implications were quite remarkable, actually far understated in most of the articles that I had read.
Consider, for example, the name Harry Dexter White, surely unknown to all but the thinnest sliver of present-day Americans, and proven by the Venona Papers to have been a Soviet agent. During the 1940s, his official position was merely one of several assistant secretaries of the Treasury, serving under Henry Morgenthau, Jr., an influential member of Franklin Roosevelt’s cabinet. But Morgenthau was actually a gentleman-farmer, almost entirely ignorant of finance, who had gotten his position partly by being FDR’s neighbor, and according to numerous sources, White actually ran the Treasury Department under his titular authority. Thus, in 1944 it was White who negotiated with John Maynard Keynes—Britain’s most towering economist—to lay the basis for the the Bretton Woods Agreement, the IMF, and the rest of the West’s post-war economic institutions.
Moreover, by the end of the war, White had managed to extend the power of the Treasury—and therefore his own area of control—deep into what would normally be handled by the Department of State, especially regarding policies pertaining to the defeated German foe. His handiwork notably included the infamous “Morgenthau Plan,” proposing the complete dismantling of the huge industrial base at the heart of Europe, and its conversion into an agricultural region, automatically implying the elimination of most of Germany’s population, whether by starvation or exodus. And although that proposal was officially abandoned under massive protest by the allied leadership, books by many post-war observers such as Freda Utley’s The High Cost of Vengeance have argued that it was partially implemented in actuality, with millions of German civilians perishing from hunger, sickness, and other consequences of extreme deprivation.
At the time, some observers believed that White’s attempt to eradicate much of prostrate Germany’s surviving population was vindictively motivated by his own Jewish background. But William Henry Chamberlin, long one of America’s most highly-regarded foreign policy journalists, strongly suspected that the plan was a deeply cynical one, intended to inflict such enormous misery upon those Germans living under Western occupation that popular sentiment would automatically shift in a strongly pro-Soviet direction, allowing Stalin to gain the upper hand in Central Europe, and many subsequent historians have come to similar conclusions.
Even more remarkably, White managed to have a full set of the plates used to print Allied occupation currency shipped to the Soviets, allowing them to produce an unlimited quantity of paper marks recognized as valid by Western governments, thus allowing the USSR to finance its post-war occupation of half of Europe on the backs of the American taxpayer.
Eventually suspicion of White’s true loyalties led to his abrupt resignation as the first U.S. Director of the IMF in 1947, and in 1948 he was called to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Although he denied all accusations, he was scheduled for additional testimony, with the intent of eventually prosecuting him for perjury and then using the threat of a long prison sentence to force him to reveal the other members of his espionage network. However, almost immediately after his initial meeting with the Committee, he supposedly suffered a couple of sudden heart attacks and died at age 55, though apparently no direct autopsy was performed on his corpse.
Soon afterward other Soviet spies also began departing this world at unripe ages within a short period of time. Two months after White’s demise, accused Soviet spy W. Marvin Smith was found dead at age 53 in the stairwell of the Justice building, having fallen five stories, and sixty days after that, Laurence Duggan, another agent of very considerable importance, lost his life at age 43 following a fall from the 16th floor of an office building in New York City. So many other untimely deaths of individuals of a similar background occurred during this general period that in 1951 the staunchly right-wing Chicago Tribune ran an entire article noting this rather suspicious pattern. But while I don’t doubt that the plentiful anti-Communist activists of that period exchanged dark interpretations of so many coincidental fatalities, I am not aware that such “conspiracy theories” were ever taken seriously by the more respectable mainstream media, and certainly no hint of this reached any of the standard history textbooks that constituted my primary knowledge of that period…
The particular timing of events may sometimes exert an outsize influence on historical trajectories. Consider the figure of Henry Wallace, probably still dimly remembered as a leading leftwing Democrat of the 1930s and 1940s. Wallace had been something of a Midwestern wonder-boy in farming innovation and was brought into FDR’s first Cabinet in 1933 as Secretary of Agriculture. By all accounts, Wallace was an absolutely 100% true-blue American patriot, with no hint of any nefarious activity appearing anywhere in the Venona Papers. But as is sometimes the case with technical experts, he seems to have been remarkably naive outside his main field of knowledge, notably in his extreme religious mysticism and more importantly in his politics, with many of those closest to him being proven Soviet agents, who presumably regarded him as the ideal front-man for their own political intrigues.
From George Washington onward, no American president had ever run for a third consecutive term, and when FDR suddenly decided to take this step during 1940, partly using the ongoing war in Europe as an excuse, many prominent figures in the Democratic Party launched a political rebellion, notably including his own two-time Vice President John Nance Garner, who had been a former Democratic Speaker of the House, and James Farley, the powerful party leader who had originally helped elevate Roosevelt to the presidency. FDR selected Wallace as his third-term Vice President, perhaps as a means of gaining support from the powerful pro-Soviet faction among the Democrats. But as a consequence, even as FDR’s health steadily deteriorated during the four years that followed, an individual whose most trusted advisors were agents of Stalin remained just a heartbeat away from the American presidency.
Under the strong pressure of Democratic Party leaders, Wallace was replaced on the ticket at the July 1944 Democratic Convention, and Harry S. Truman succeeded to the presidency when FDR died in April of the following year. But if Wallace had not been replaced or if Roosevelt had died a year earlier, the consequences for the country would surely have been enormous. According to later statements, a Wallace Administration would have included Laurence Duggan as Secretary of State, Harry Dexter White at the helm of the Treasury, and presumably various other outright Soviet agents occupying all the key nodes at the top of the American federal government. One might jokingly speculate whether the Rosenbergs—later executed for treason—would have been placed in charge of our nuclear weapons development program.
As it happens, Roosevelt lived until 1945, and instead of running the American government on behalf of Stalin, Duggan and White both died quite suddenly within a few months of each other after they came under suspicion in 1948. But the tendrils of Soviet control during the early 1940s ran remarkably deep.
As a striking example, Soviet agents became aware of the Venona decryption project in 1944, and soon afterward a directive came down from the White House ordering the project abandoned and the records of Soviet espionage destroyed. The only reason that Venona survived, allowing us to later reconstruct the fateful politics of that era, was that the military officer in charge risked a court-martial by simply ignoring that explicit Presidential order.
In the wake of the Venona Papers, publicly released a quarter century ago and today accepted by almost everyone, it seems undeniable that during the early 1940s America’s national government came within a hair’s breadth—or rather a heartbeat—of falling under the control of a tight network of Soviet agents. Yet I have only very rarely seen this simple fact emphasized in any book or article, even though this surely helps explain the ideological roots of the “anti-Communist paranoia” that became such a powerful political force by the early 1950s.
Obviously, Communism had very shallow roots in American society, and any Soviet-dominated Wallace Administration established in 1943 or 1944 probably would sooner or later have been swept from power, perhaps by America’s first military coup. But given FDR’s fragile health, this momentous possibility should certainly be regularly mentioned in discussions of that era.
