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FOR NEARLY FIFTY YEARS, MCCARTHYISM HAS BEEN HAUNTING ORGANIZED LABOR. BECAUSE it rarely got the attention that went to the rest of the flamboyant career of Joe McCarthy or the high-profile spy cases of Alger Hiss and the Rosenbergs, labor's encounter with the anticommunist crusade of the 1940s and 1950s has long been overlooked. Yet, as the labor movement struggles to reenergize itself and reconnect with a broader political agenda, it may have to exorcise the ghosts of the McCarthy era. Obviously, we cannot blame all of labor's current problems on the purges of the early Cold War. Still, many--from labor's declining percentage of the workforce to its poor public image--had their roots in that grim moment. Moreover, by preventing American unions from building a broad-based social movement that challenged corporate values and championed social justice, the anticommunist furor narrowed political options for all Americans.
Labor was involved from the start. Not only was it the most important institutional victim of the Cold War red scare, but many individual victims had union ties. Complicating the issue, however, was the fact that some labor leaders collaborated with the witchhunt. Driving Communists out of organized labor would, they believed, promote freedom and protect unions. They were wrong; in the long run, all sides suffered. McCarthyism weakened the entire labor movement, damaging Communists and anti-Communists alike.
There were many reasons labor was targeted during the Cold War. Anticommunism was, after all, a useful tactic for a business community seeking to roll back the gains unions had made since the 1930s. McCarthyism, however, which encompassed much more than the bizarre behavior of the junior senator from Wisconsin who gave it his name, was not just a union-busting device. It was above all an attempt to destroy the influence of every institution, idea, and individual connected to American communism--and it succeeded. For, despite the widely disseminated notion that the victims of the anticommunist crusade were "innocent liberals" or apolitical folks whose names had gotten on the wrong mailing lists, most of the men and women who were targeted during the McCarthy era were or had been in or near the Communist party, and many of them were union activists.
This should not surprise us. After all, whatever else it...
