To microscope is to look at a given entity in eye-opening closeness, to macroscope is the contrary. In examining the nature of anything, both types of investigation are critical for success, however, it seems to me that we often favor the former to a far greater degree than the latter. We look at individual speeches, dissecting their words with the attention of a poet, we look at events and ascribe a thousand strings of causation and connection, and we look at people, characterizing them with the power of retrospection and historical omniscience. Naturally, these pursuits have merit, yet they often, in my view, block the sight of the forest with the many, tiny trees. In the context of the Cold War, the complexity of each event almost begs for the microscopic examination of each of them. To get a very good grasp of the period, however, a less magnified approach is suited. In respect to this, I will stretch time and location to show how the policy initiative of containment itself directly led to the emergence of McCarthyism – how George F. Kennan’s idea to contain the reds would grow to give McCarthy inquisitorial, draconic power.
To comprehend the evolution from containment to McCarthyism, one first has to understand the former of the two. What is containment? What were the principles upon which it operated? The idea was a young spawn of the post WW2 years, where a Foreign Service Officer, George F. Kennan reapplied the timelessly old idea of stopping the advancement of the enemy to the recently, dramatically victorious Soviet Union, encapsulated in the term ‘containment’. President Truman took little time (1948) in cementing a manifestation of the idea as a doctrine of his own. Rather like Monroe, he would have a grand, principled strategy by which to guide his approach to foreign relations – to not let the Soviets take any advantage, anywhere, by any means. I stress the foreign relations aspect of the policy; it was to stop the spread of communism via the domino effect, where one country would have a communist revolution or election, and then others would follow in a perpetual collapse. The American heartland had yet to be touched by the policy or its outgrowths. For the time being, containment served as the modus operandi in American foreign relations, and the dedication which the U.S. had to it was gruesome. Support of dictators like Pinochet or terrorist organizations such as the Contra of Nicaragua was not a rarity, neither were abundant assassination, corruption, and intelligence operations. When the Persian people had had enough of their resources being siphoned by the British and pushed for the nationalization of the oil production of Iran, the British and the Americans reinstated the Shah to squash the slightest possibility that the want to nationalize the oil industry would lead to communism. Naturally, one must consider the multifaceted character of actions such as these. Was the Shah put there to stop communism or advance western interests? Both, I would say. Such a paradigm was not rare throughout the globe. With this in mind, I hope to have clarified the extent to which the spread of left-wing thought of any kind, whether or not it was supported by the Soviets (the red bear cared very little for South America, yet the U.S. focused much attention there) became the north star of containment. It was no longer the mere delineation of territory – what land is USSR and what is NATO –containment was now an ideological issue wherein left-wing thought itself was seen as a herald of Soviet expansion, and decimated, like killing a seedling before knowing whether it is an ivy or a tomato vine.
With containment and its evolution from foreign policy principle to an ideological handbook of sorts established, let us examine McCarthyism and its evolution from containment. McCarthyism itself was a genuine reincarnation of the Spanish inquisition in America. It had McCarthy, its archbishop; its cathedrals, the committees and courts of the U.S; and its many inquisitors, not secret agents, but one’s neighbors, friends, or even kids. If anyone reported you to be a communist, even if there was no evidence, no conviction, and no even no formal charge, the accusation in and of itself was often a social blow strong enough to knock the wind out of the sails of any career, relationship, and reputation. The fear of communism allowed other biases to gain standing. In an excerpt from a speech McCarthy gave on the Senate floor regarding communists, he convicts all homosexuals to, somehow, be “mentally twisted” and unwell, and therefore, prone to communist thought. This proneness, and their preexisting ostracization from a moralizing society, made them easy targets, and one could inflate the chances of crushing someone’s life tenfold if a double charge of homosexuality and communism were laid at said someone’s feet. This fear of communism in the heartland itself evolved into a fear of gay people, with the Red Scare sprouting the Lavender Scare – a homophobic twin brother. Clearly, the psychology of the nation was gripped by fear of communism.
This posits the question; how did the 20th century’s scientific superpower devolve to have a transmuted inquisition in its borders? I think the answer lies in the psychology of conservative governance and containment in particular. At the threat of being very biased, which I am, I analyze that conservative politics runs on the fuel of fear. That is to say, if one is politically conservative – not wanting change, progress, or regulation – one does so from a place of fear. What will happen if we give gay people the right to marry – will the family dissolve? What will happen if we tax the rich – will they all leave and make this country poor? What will happen if we admit more immigrants – will our grandkids look different? These questions are raised by fear, and though I think them to be easily answerable or abortive by their nature (such as the last one), they governed and continue to govern the political ideology of many. In the mid-20th century, containment bred fear like nothing else. People were made to fear the slightest tick to the left on the politic-o-meter in a foreign land, so how could it be surprising that the psychology of left-phobia in the center-piece of a president’s foreign policy turned into a mirror psychology at home?
My logical progression is, therefore, as follows: Containment is applied ubiquitously and mercilessly as a foreign policy, which in itself transforms from targeting expansion by the USSR to targeting any political thought considered to be associated with communism. This targeting of left-wing political thought spread back home through simple diffusion – when one’s news cycle revolves around the fear of the Soviets and of any foreign nation the governing body of which may be slightly to the left of Ayn Rand, one begins to fear that one’s own neighborhood might be infested with ideological disease. In part, this was helped by the existence of Russian spies in America, but the psychology of wanting to contain and isolate communist thought is what truly allowed McCarthyism to exist – it was containment, yet instead of foreign policy, it targeted the domestic, and did so brutally.
Works Cited
McCarthy, Senator Joseph, Senate Floor Speech on Communism, February 1950
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