Two Styles of Cold War History
A critical review of "Reds" by Ted Morgan and "The CIA in Guatemala" by Richard H. Immerman
Senator Joe McCarthy questioning Army lawyer Joseph N. Welch. Source: Wikimedia Commons
With the election of Donald Trump and the rise of far-right authoritarian conspiracy theories in American political discourse, I’ve been on a kick of books concerning the history of fascism, witch hunts, and conspiracy theories. It was only a matter of time before I dove into the history of the Cold War. To that end, I recently picked up Reds by Ted Morgan and The CIA in Guatemala by Richard H. Immerman in hopes of uncovering something about the psychology of authoritarianism, the role it plays in American politics, and how to recognize it in the present day. One of these ended up being a disappointment, which should be obvious by the end of this review.
To begin with, Reds is an absolute tome: a full 600 pages that aims to encompass the entire history of McCarthyism from 1914 to the present day. From the subtitle McCarthyism in Twentieth-Century America, one would expect an account of the persecution of innocent people primarily during the McCarthy era, but for the most part, it is actually a history of Soviet espionage and American counter-espionage up until 1950, after which it largely morphs into a biography of the disgraced Senator from Wisconsin himself. Largely absent from the first section is the impact of the First Red Scare on wider American society, the lives it ruined, and the people it killed (with the exception of the 1919 Palmer raids, wherein hundreds of immigrants were deported, often for little more than speaking with a foreign accent).
For example, take the Red Summer of 1919. As shown in another book I reviewed– the excellent Red Summer by Cameron McWhirter– one of the worst periods of mass white supremacist violence in American history was deeply intertwined with the American public’s paranoia over communist subterfuge– alleged plots by Bolsheviks or members of the radical IWW union were prominently featured in fantasies of a mass black uprising. There is nevertheless not a single mention of this anywhere. In its place is an account of the cat-and-mouse game between the FBI and various Soviet spies which, while interesting, gives us very little insight into the psychology of McCarthyism or really anything to do with the American public. The absence of a broader perspective becomes even more conspicuous once the book shifts to chronicling the life of Senator McCarthy himself.
The latter half of the book begins with McCarthy’s military and judicial career, spending an unnecessary amount of time laying the groundwork for the aspects of his personality and self-aggrandizing tendencies that eventually lead him to become a red-hunter. That said, there is some valuable information about him that can cast light on the broader political context of the time.
McCarthy, for one, was either a staunch antisemite or had no qualms about using antisemitism to gain power, which is a distinction without a difference. For example, in his initial run, he happily accepted the endorsement of the Lutheran Altenheim Society of Wisconsin, in spite of its antisemitic assertion that New Deal Democrats were trying to remake America according to the “Moscow-Finkelstein” pattern. In 1949 hearings led by Senator Raymond Baldwin, SS soldiers convicted of massacring surrendering American soldiers alleged those same victims were in fact the perpetrators and had tortured false confessions out of them. McCarthy, eager to please his German-American constituents, requested to take part in the war crimes hearings, which Baldwin reluctantly granted. McCarthy subsequently sided with the killer Nazis and pursued rambling, unfounded lines of questioning about Germans having their testicles injured during acts of torture. Besides the obviously suspect nature of the SS soldiers’ accusations, the antisemitic overtones of the whole incident did not go unnoticed; one of Senator Baldwin’s aides observed that most of the suspects were Jewish. This was merely a dry run for the overtly antisemitic nature of McCarthy’s more famous inquisition. Unfortunately, the book bypasses this potentially illuminating line of inquiry in favor of focusing more on McCarthy himself.
In summary, the book fails because it seems to chalk up McCarthyism solely to McCarthy’s personal failings, ambition, and self-aggrandizing character rather than to the Cold War climate. It is obvious why McCarthy would stir up such paranoia, but there is no attempt to explain why this strategy was as successful as it was. Where is the role of the American public? Forget McCarthy, what about McCarthyism? In spite of its subtitle, it is nowhere to be found. In contrast, Richard H. Immerman’s The CIA in Guatemala: The Foreign Policy of Intervention is simultaneously narrower in scope and makes for a better general outline of the psychological climate created by Cold War politics.
Unlike Morgan, Immerman begins with a background of the political, social, and economic conditions that led to the 1944 Guatemalan Revolution. Before 1944, Guatemala was a dictatorship beset by staggering inequality and oppression of the working and peasant classes, in particular the largely illiterate indigenous Andeans who usually either worked for a large landowner or lived in traditional communities away from the ranches and cities. The America-based United Fruit Company, better known today as Chiquita, came to dominate most of the economy and the land which naturally meant it was the most impacted by the new president’s economic and land reforms. Between this and the frequent labor disputes created by low pay, abhorrent conditions, and racist company policies, it is difficult to imagine how even the staunchest cold warriors could chalk the new administration’s coldness towards United Fruit up to Soviet infiltration. And yet, that’s exactly what they did.
Mainstays in the cast of the Cold War such as Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and his brother Allen Dulles became convinced that Guatemala’s democratically elected presidents Jacobo Árbenz and his successor Juan José Arévalo enacted land reform and bolstered the rights of workers not in order to reverse decades of exploitation by a series of dictators, but because of increasing communist influence. In reality, while labor organizers and radical university students were the rank and file of the movement to overthrow the previous dictator Jose Ubico, Immerman argues that it was mostly a revolution of the liberal middle classes. A communist conspiracy this most certainly was not, but in the paranoid minds of cold warriors, that is the only possible explanation.
Immerman is perfectly aware of how irrational the knights of the Cold War seem in the context of Guatemalan history and takes pains to remind us throughout the book that one has to view things through the lens of the Cold War ethos. When your foreign policy objectives include constant vigilance against even a hint of communism in the Western hemisphere, any policy that is against the interests of an American fruit company becomes evidence of Soviet infiltration. Nowhere is it a possibility that anti-United Fruit attitudes simply did, in fact, stem from exploiting the labor of uneducated, illiterate indigenous peasants for pitiful wages.
This isn’t unlike the “outside agitator” narratives dreamt up in the wake of the 2020 George Floyd Uprising, or indeed the similar narratives about the Civil Rights Movement that preceded it. If America is, in fact, systemically racist, this would make it morally culpable and require reforming or abolishing existing power structures. But whites would lose their stature if there was police reform or abolition– in the minds of racists, anyhow– so the protests must be somehow the doings of ideologues with an agenda as if having pre-existing beliefs through which to interpret the current moment makes one’s grievances invalid.
Overall, unlike Morgan, Immerman manages to both narrow the scope of his focus to a singular event in history while doing far more to illuminate the general psychological climate of the Cold War.
The sin of ignoring the broader context of a social phenomenon in favor of examining the character and personality of individual participants– i.e. the alleged “anti-company attitudes” of the Guatemalan Revolution– is one cold warriors as well as Ted Morgan are guilty of. By chalking up what Immerman calls the Cold War ethos to McCarthy’s self-aggrandizement and willingness to do anything to stay in power, Morgan fails to consider the world McCarthy embedded himself in. The question is not what motivated a demagogue to exploit the paranoia of the American public, but how much they actually went along with it and why. Where is the culpability of the postwar climate, government propaganda, or the media? Morgan doesn’t say. Immerman at least takes a broad-spectrum approach to Cold War history that includes on-the-ground economic conditions among other things Moragan covers nearly 9 decades from 1914 to its 2003 publication. Immerman covers around ten years. And yet, out of the two of them, Morgan is the one that takes about 600 pages to not say much of anything.