Weekend Beacon 3/16/25
Last week, while Trump hosted Ireland's prime minister at the White House, the parish of St. John the Beloved, just across the river, held its annual Irish-Italian cookoff. The competition is closer than you think—one side is a cornucopia of potatoes, corned beef, cabbage, and potatoes (did I mention potatoes?) and the other side is a sea of red.
Speaking of seeing red, Harvey Klehr returns to the Weekend Beacon with an incisive review of Clay Risen's Red Scare: Blacklists, McCarthyism, and the Making of Modern America.
"Risen covers virtually all the episodes that transfixed America during this era, from HUAC hearings on Hollywood to the Henry Wallace presidential campaign of 1948, from the Smith Act trials of leaders of the CPUSA, to the testimony of Elizabeth Bentley, from the Chambers-Hiss confrontation to the government campaign against labor boss Harry Bridges. He delves into the China Lobby, recounts the Rosenberg case and its aftermath, the controversy over 'naming names' before congressional committees, the farcical pageants that reenacted supposed communist takeovers of American towns, investigations of teachers, and McCarthy’s rise and fall. He concludes with an examination of how external events and President Eisenhower’s careful campaign led to McCarthy’s overreach and the Supreme Court cases that drove a stake in the government’s war on domestic communism.
"While Risen makes an effort to incorporate the revelations of the past quarter-century that have so discomfited proponents of the argument that all of the hoopla about Soviet spies was concocted by troglodytes anxious to discredit the New Deal, he also minimizes their significance. While 'almost all [communists] were loyal Americans,' he writes, 'a small fraction did spy for the Soviet Union.' Thus, while the 'threat of Soviet espionage was minor, it was not an invention of the administration’s enemies.' Paradoxically, he admits it included 'some of the New Deal’s best and brightest,' among them Alger Hiss and Larry Duggan, high-ranking officials in the State Department, but glosses over the abundant evidence that Harry Dexter White, the number two man in the Treasury Department, was a Soviet source, and does not mention dozens of the government officials implicated by Elizabeth Bentley, regretting that her testimony about 'the humdrum flow of stolen information that she had ferried out of Washington [was turned] into a firehose of secrets fatal to the health of the republic.' Most American communists were not spies, but virtually all the spies were communists.
"Contra Risen, the American security apparatus at the end of World War II did not go 'looking for new threats to counter.' Several investigations in 1944-1945 had turned up evidence of Soviet espionage, including the Amerasia case and the involvement of Arthur Adams and Clarence Hiskey in stealing atomic bomb secrets. Beginning in 1947, the Venona intercepts began yielding clues indicating that some 350 Americans had worked for Soviet intelligence during the war. A significant number were government officials and virtually all were communists. Only 125 to 150 were ever identified by American counterintelligence (after the 1989 opening of archives that number increased), but the flow of information they turned over included material on radar, sonar, proximity fuses, jet propulsion, and, most significantly, the atomic bomb. Internal discussions of American diplomatic negotiating tactics, arms production, and a host of other topics went from sources in virtually every government department to Moscow. Minor it was not."
From Moscow to Beijing, David J. Garrow reviews Seven Things You Can’t Say About China by Sen. Tom Cotton.
"Cotton’s title encapsulates the seven threats he believes the CCP poses: above all military—'China is preparing for war'—but also economic, political, and cultural. Cotton has read very widely in the scholarly and journalistic literature on China, and this energetically written, richly documented book is a political tour de force that should be read by all of his congressional colleagues and by every Trump administration policymaker."
"The CCP has ... undertaken 'the largest peacetime military buildup in history,' generating not only 'the largest military on earth' but also 'the world’s largest submarine fleet' and 'the world’s largest ballistic-missile stockpile.' In stark contrast, 'the U.S. Army has shrunk to its smallest size since the start of World War II,' the Navy 'to its smallest size since World War I,' and the Air Force 'has never been smaller, older, or less ready for combat.'
"What’s worse, 'the day is fast approaching when China’s nuclear forces will overmatch ours,' and China’s and Russia’s combined—don’t forget their 'no limits partnership'—'already overmatch America’s nuclear forces today.' China’s nuclear weapons are 'much newer and more advanced' than America’s, and 'our senior military leaders believe that China is abandoning its long-standing no-first-use policy,' Cotton reports. In short, China’s nuclear forces 'threaten our national survival and way of life.'"
"There’s much more in this tightly argued book, from acknowledging how with the COVID epidemic, 'all the evidence from the beginning pointed to a lab leak' from China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology to how 'no social-media app has harmed our kids more than TikTok.' Yet three nonmilitary topics merit brief mention. It may seem arcane to all of us who don’t focus on international trade policy, but Cotton persuasively suggests that 'the worst geopolitical mistake in American history may have been granting China permanent most-favored-nation status and allowing it to enter the World Trade Organization,' in 2000 and 2001 respectively. By doing so, 'we built up our most formidable enemy and empowered it to devastate our economy and threaten our national security' as China gained dominance both in manufacturing and in technologically essential rare metals."
Good thing there are other places we can get those rare earth metals!
From enemies abroad to heroes at home, Stuart Halpern reviews A Man on Fire: The Worlds of Thomas Wentworth Higginson by Douglas R. Egerton.
"Born in Massachusetts in 1823, Higginson was a crusader for many causes, encouraged by his mother’s wish that he set himself 'on a course that will lead to perfection.' A boxer in his teens and a graduate of Harvard by 17 (he later returned for his graduate studies), Higginson dedicated his life to fighting for what he called a 'Sisterhood of Reforms' that would enable America to live up to the promise of its principles. Though he was the descendant of New England’s first white settlers, he, as Egerton puts it, 'cast his lot with the persecuted and oppressed.' Along the way, he interacted and often befriended his era’s most seminal figures. He mentored a young Emily Dickinson, sipped tea with Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and maintained close ties with Mark Twain and Henry David Thoreau. He debated abolitionist strategies with Frederick Douglass, hosted Ralph Waldo Emerson, and had frequent dinners with Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
"In one of his 100 essays in the Atlantic Monthly, Higginson argued for the compatibility of 'physical vigor and spiritual sanctity.' Though he treasured the quiet that would enable his writing, brashness was his preferred strategy. 'Loud language,' he once asserted, was needed to reach those whose ears were 'stuffed with southern cotton.'"
"When he assumed command of the First South Carolina Volunteers in 1862, Higginson did so with full faith that his troops, despite their earlier brutalization as slaves, would make mighty and courageous soldiers. The role was a dream realized. Earlier he had written that leading free blacks in defense of those enslaved would be 'the most important service in the history of the War,' though, Egerton notes, he never imagined he would be the one to do it. The unit’s success earned Lincoln’s praise.
"Alas, the colonel’s military career ended after a cannonball nearly took off his head. The sword was quickly replaced with a pen. Higginson petitioned Congress for equal pay for black soldiers and never forgave Lincoln, even after he had been assassinated, for not achieving this goal. His book about the experience, Army Life in a Black Regiment, emphasized his troops’ heroism while downplaying his role. Though Egerton doesn’t mention it, Army Life, written as it was by the pugilist preacher, stresses the biblically infused sense of mission his troops held. 'Their memories,' Higginson wrote, 'are a vast bewildered chaos of Jewish history and biography; and most of the great events of the past, down to the period of the American Revolution, they instinctively attribute to Moses.'"
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