Category Archives: MCCARTHYISM

Red All Over: An Artist Looks Back At McCarthyism

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Sickles Sell!

MomentUs attempts to review what we used to call “defining moments,” until the phrase came to be plugged into every profile of a pol whose “compelling personal story” isn’t.

You can quibble with some choices [The Birth of The National Parks? Really?] but our favorite, McCarthyism is represented.

In there is something labeled “Hollywood,” which let’s pretend is a winking reference to the endlessly replicated fable that McCarthy had anything to do with the Hollywood Ten.

“haunting glimpses of the HUAC trial hearings with the Hollywood Ten, led by Senator Joseph McCarthy“

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McCarthy & His Ism: Who Coined The Phrase That Paid?

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Stuck On Himself    

Hats off to the kids at filmarchive.org, who’ve dug up a charming old interview with our favorite villain, Senator Joseph McCarthy.

In tonight’s episode, Joe is put on the spot, asked if Owen Lattimore invented the term “McCarthyism.”

At first he agrees, but then remembers to never pass up an opportunity to slander, and wanders into claiming variously that the Daily Worker first used it, or did so simultaneously with Lattimore [gosh, whatever might that imply?] before settling on the tale that “forty top Communists” met in New York and decided the name.

This was a period when most of the CP’s leadership was under indictment, under arrest,  or engaged in mysterious missions abroad.  The idea of forty meeting in the early 50s to discuss talking points about McCarthy is laughable.

Pediaphiles: Because Where You Get Your Bad History Matters!

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Dim Bulbs Seek Truth, Results Uncertain

Everyone enjoys a hearty laugh at the expense of the online research-challenged.  That was the stunning outcome, when one “Miss Kitty” meandered into a discussion of Owen Lattimore, armed only with what she thinks she recalls from Conservapedia and Wikipedia.

Here’s the fast facts, insofar as Kit remembers:

“While reading “Blacklisted by History,” I looked up a commie named Owen Lattimore (he’s the second one from the left, standing next to Mao Say Dung), who, while touring a Soviet death and concentration camp, callously brushed off the pleas of a desperate female prisoner to help her. He was well protected by the verifiably corrupt (by verifiably, I mean there were FBI tape recordings of tapped phone conversations discovered decades later to prove it), Truman Justice Department. There is a huge difference in the way Wikipedia portrays him and the way Conservapedia portrays him, with the writers at Conservapedia using Owen Lattimore’s own writings and other eye-witness accounts of the man’s actions to incriminate him. So the next time you want to look something up, check Conservapedia and you’ll see a big difference. Of course, the chorus of the voices on the right will say they are biased.“


I think the voices in Miss Kitty’s head are a chorus of voices on the left, and she’s channeling details of the Amerasia case not Lattimore’s, but we must hurry along.

The photo referred to actually has Lattimore standing next to Peoples Liberation Army Commander Chu Te.

Lattimore was photographed with Mao, but it looks more like this:

Cause they all look alike?

Miss Kitty’s strenuous truth-seeking doesn’t extend to actually linking to either Conservapedia or Wikipedia‘s Lattimore entries, perhaps because they might dim the lustre of her story.

They each, in their own way, are more aligned with Miss Kitty then the truth.

Conservapedia refers to claims by the now dead Marvin Liebman of a conversation with former Gulag prisoner Elinor Lipper, who mentions the Henry Wallace Siberia visit in her memoir.  

In Liebman’s version, Lipper told him Wallace’s sinister translator [Lattimore] steered the Vice President away from a woman prisoner screaming her innocence.

Several problems.

1. Lipper’s original book had no mention of Lattimore, references to him being added for the American edition after McCarthy surfaced his name.  And none refer to the incident Liebman claimed to have heard. Lipper presented all her stories as second hand.

2. By all accounts, the Wallace party saw a Potemkin village, with KGB guards pretending to by miners for the day. Lipper even claims watchtowers were removed for the occasion. Why would the Soviets spoil the show with actual prisoners?

3. Lattimore spoke some Russian, but he wasn’t Wallace’s translator for the Soviet portion of the trip.  He was along for later Mongol and Chinese conversations.

Conservapedia recalls the glory days of bipartisanship with a reference to a Lattimore slam “After the fall of China to the Communists in 1949, [by] then-Senator John F. Kennedy.”    But Kennedy wasn’t elected to the Senate until 1952, and he got in this early attack on Lattimore before the fall of Chiang, in early 1949.  But other than that, right on the money.

Conservapedia goes all in for the reference notes, referencing the maximum program anti-Lattimore pamphlet, “Communism at Pearl Harbor,” in which Lattimore basically caused World War II.

Conservapedia claims “When Lattimore resigned as editor of Pacific Affairs, he was succeeded by Michael Greenberg, a Communist Party member. Lattimore then became a member of the editorial board of the notorious Amerasia magazine.”  Lattimore resigned board membership at Amerasia before leaving Pacific Affairs.

Kitty’s far too hard on Wikipedia, which smuggles in it’s own nut-ball references on Lattimore.

Wikipedia repeats unchallenged the tales of Alexander Barmin, who years after writing his post-Soviet memoir and talking to the FBI, suddenly recalled Lattimore’s participation in a preposterous Soviet scheme to smuggle arms into China.  To a province they already occupied.

Wikipedia goes on about the FBI’s early and lengthy interest in Lattimore, without being too fussy about what those interests were.

On page 101 in part two of Lattimore’s FBI file, we learn that among other things they  tracked Mrs. Lattimore’s activities under their monitoring of “Foreign Inspired Agitation Among American Negroes.” The Bureau was concerned about the “Baltimore Committee for Home-Front Democracy,” which it reported “recommended equal opportunity to shop at any Baltimore store without discrimination because of race or color.”

When Judges Kill [Cases] – Looking Back At Lattimore

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The Court In Unhappier Days

Washington’s Federal Courthouse was the scene of some of the final acts in the Lattimore drama, where twice the presiding judge in the case threw out the government’s principal charges, gutting the case.

On May 12th the court will revisit Lattimore, with the Historical Society of the District of Columbia Circuit and the Litigation Section of the District of Columbia Bar staging a re-enactment of parts of the case, and an overview of its significance.  Several participants played small rolls in Lattimore back in the day:

Patricia M. Wald, former Chief Judge, U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit who was with Lattimore’s Arnold, Fortas &  Porter defense team,

G. Duane (Bud) Vieth, still with Arnold & Porter, the firm’s successor,

Berl Bernhard, former clerk for Judge Luther Youngdahl, who sank the government’s case.

Also participating will be conservative legal legend Miguel Estrada, whose DC Appeals Court nomination by George W. Bush was filibustered by Senate Democrats.  Despite his nomination’s failure, the Estrada is still in the fight, writing a stirring defense of the 2009 coup in his Honduran homeland.

I’m gonna guess he plays the prosecution.

Messing With Texas: McCarthyism Or McCarthy-ish?

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Which Hunt?

Months after the deed was done, establishment Republicans have discovered that Texas’s textbook commission made the state look foolish.

Early last year the elected body’s majority of dinosaur cavorting flat earthers and plain old Republicans provided countless hours of entertainment. They drew up lists of textbook publishers Do’s & Don’ts, banishing deist suspect Thomas Jefferson from the Founding Fathers while shoehorning Phyllis Schlafly into political science.

And perhaps most infamously, bringing back Joe McCarthy.

Texas Republican House Committee chairs are now shocked to discover all this is going on, vowing vaguely to do something about it. The conservative Fordham Institute found the Texas guidelines deficient, stirring the Public Education Chair Rob Eissler to a ringing expression of concern.


Fordham is probably right on the unwieldy tangle part, but when they get to McCarthy they distort the textbook mandate language in order to make the charge. Kind of like Old Joe!

Fordham said:

But Texas actually says this:

“… describe how McCarthyism, the House Un-American Activities Committee

(HUAC), the arms race, and the space race increased Cold War tensions and

how the later release of the Venona Papers confirmed suspicions of

communist infiltration in U.S. government “

….which does not tie Venona directly to HUAC or McCarthy. And McCarthy is obviously mentioned by name in the standard, while the Fordham reviewers for some reason pretend he’s only evoked by inference.

The Texas commission has an at least defensible position: the Venona intercepts certainly cover a vast menagerie of federal employees who cozy with people provable as spies.

McCarthy Was Right cranks get in trouble when they wander into the claim that Venona vindicated McCarthy, which is a crock. Cranks almost always do, and at least one commission member wanted to.

But Texas stopped short.

Why we may never know. Maybe they meant to go all the way and the wording got muddled in the chaotic horse trading which produced the standards.

So now we have apparent unhappyness over textbooks on the part of some Republican leaders, giving wing to the disgruntled many unhappy with the adopted standards.

But given the glacial pace and murky expressions of concern they shouldn’t get their hopes up.

McCarthyism’s High Tide: Owen Lattimore In The Dock

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Morris Don’t Bore Us

Thanks to the oddly webpaged Public.Resource.Org we can once again enjoy McCarran Committee counsel Robert Morris doing a victory lap the day the Committee called Owen Lattimore a “conscious, articulate instrument of the Communist conspiracy” .

It was downhill from there, as the Committee’s careful assemblige of free-floating factoids and fanciful history failed to withstand scrutiny or contact with the courts.  

Palling Around With Louis Budenz: Obama But Latest Victim Of Red Professoriat!

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Right Answers   



The hallucinatory fringes of the American right just can’t quit Bill Ayers, who of course ghost-wrote all of Barack Obama’s stirring tomes.

Obama serial fantasist Cliff Kincaid is digging deep for the cause, claiming Ayers is but the latest example of Red infiltration of academia, where they aim for the children!

Introducing a tiresome run-through of Ayer’s troubled career, Kincaid returns to a simpler time, when Louis Budenz could write articles for the American Legion with even less reference to facts than his Congressional ramblings. Somehow Ayers’s bringing down America was foretold by Budenz’s fifty year old authoritative blather.

“An important part of the Grabar analysis demonstrates that the Ayers
approach is actually an old one, and that it was described by Communist Party
defector Louis F. Budenz. The purpose is to use the educational process to
break down traditional notions of American morality, creating chaos and
confusion in the classroom and the society at large. “In undermining a nation
such as the United States, the infiltration of the educational process is of prime
importance,” Budenz wrote.”

Kincaid even ropes in Bella Dodd, a former New York Communist teachers union leader who refuted Budenz’s Lattimore hearing testimony. [They both ended up in the Catholic church, it all comes out well.]

Owen Lattimore: Out Of Print, But Never Out Of Style

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The pages of “The Browser” book blog feature an appreciation of Owen Lattimore from Michael Dillon, author of   “Xinjiang: China’s Muslim Far Northwest.”  Dillon discusses Lattimore’s never surpassed writings on China’s inner-Asian frontiers and Xinjiang  The Browser interviews an area expert touting five books in their field, and  Lattimore accounts for two of Dillon’s five.

Dillon mistakenly has Senator Joseph McCarthy chairing the House Un-American Activities Committee and poking Lattimore from that venue, but otherwise seems a sound fellow.  If anything I think he kind of undersells Pivot of Asia, Lattimore’s Xinjiang book issued as McCarthy’s fraud was beginning to unfold in 1950.  The book figured in the many investigations, with FBI wiretaps picking up conversations in Mongol between Lattimore and Mongol scholars he’d brought to Johns Hopkins to work on the book project.  Also involved on the book was the Chinese scholar Chen Hansheng, whose Comintern affiliation played a role in the McCarthy and McCarran hearings.

The Browser shares with us an image they appeared to have lifted from Amazon of a snappy 60s paperback cover for “Inner Asian Frontiers Of China,”  Amazon’s coming from a bookseller offering pricey editions of the tome.   The other Lattimore book mentioned, “Pivot of Asia,” is available free online.

Owen Lattimore Proves The Birther’s Cause!

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The Chinese Roots Of A Kenyan Anti-Colonial Worldview

Barack Obama Birthers continue to seethe and churn,  and now their obsessions have reached a moment which comes to every crackpot crusade:  their enemies’ sneering mockery has become further proof of the righteous cause.   Birthers now embrace random assertions linking them to McCarthyism, because McCarthy Was Right too!

Elitist contempt only makes them stronger, and getting called out on facts only spurs them to greater feats of makebelieve history.

Owen Lattimore has now been joined to the Birther defense in the dusty corners of America’s internet, if only indirectly.

The commentariat argument is that Birthers and McCarthy have both been called fact-challenged, but Joe was right and so are they.

One “BarryObam” takes to the pages of the Glen Burnie Forum, claiming Lattimore and others named by McCarthy were found out by subsequent historians, ergo, nanny nanny boo.

As your correspondent has reported, endlessly replicated assertion does not make fact, and the case against Lattimore remains a vague hash of McCarthy/McCarran charges sprinkled with claims unnamed historians or Soviet documents vindicate the cause.

Lattimore’s previous afterlife brush with presidential greatness came when he took some of the blame for turning a boyish Bill Clinton into the Soviet’s willing servent.

Bill Clinton’s “Road To Moscow” is one of the highlights of recent crackpot history, with the ’88 campaign’s dark muttering about Bill’s student travels taken to insane levels.  The glancing reference to Lattimore shows how the deed is done.

“As a Georgetown junior, Clinton inherited his antiwar orientation from his part-time employer, Senator J. William Fulbright. Fulbright’s views on Vietnam had in turn been influenced by scholar Bernard Fall. Fall had an academic background at institutions linked to Chinese Communist apologist Owen Lattimore.“

Well, sort of.  Starting in 1952 Fall was a graduate student at Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies in Washington.  Up in Baltimore,  Lattimore was on leave fighting McCarthy and McCarran’s charges.  And in 1953 Hopkins abolished Lattimore’s Walter Hines Page School of International Relations in an effort to get rid of him altogether.   But other than that he and Fall worked in lockstep for America’s downfall.