The dramatic ongoing crackdown against free speech and academic freedom by the Trump Administration has been very widely condemned as “McCarthyism” by its numerous public critics.
Although these current proposals vastly exceeded any of the anti-Communist measures advocated by the junior senator from Wisconsin during the early 1950s, this controversy prompted me to investigate that historical movement of three generations ago, and I recently published a pair of articles on the topic.
In the first of these, I explained that after carefully reading most of the main pro-McCarthy books, I concluded from the factual evidence they provided that the senator had been just as erratic and dishonest as his mainstream and liberal critics had always alleged.
Although McCarthy was generally correct in his claims about the enormous dangers America had faced from the infiltration of Soviet Communist agents, he was frequently wrong about everything else, and his tendency to make wild, unsubstantiated accusations severely damaged the credibility of the anti-Communist cause that he championed. Moreover, he was very much of a latecomer to the issue, having only launched the public 1950 attacks on Communism that brought him to fame after most of the more important Soviet agents had already been unmasked and removed from our government service by the far more competent anti-Communist investigators who had preceded him.
Then in the second article I explored the social and ideological roots of McCarthyism, noting that it heavily drew its support from Midwesterners, Catholics, and particular ethnic groups such as Irish-Americans and German-Americans, with McCarthy himself being a perfect representative of all those different elements.
But less than a decade earlier, these same groups had also been among the strongest supporters of Father Charles Coughlin, the enormously popular anti-Communist radio priest of the 1930s, who had enjoyed the support of tens of millions of devoted American followers before being censored and suppressed by the Roosevelt Administration.
Around the same time that Coughlin was purged from the media, some of America’s most highly-regarded public intellectuals had suffered that same fate at FDR’s hands. These victims included influential academic scholars and leading journalists, as well as famed aviator Charles Lindbergh, long regarded as our greatest national hero.
Liberals, leftists, and Communists had led those sweeping political purges that began in the early 1940s, with much of America’s Anglophile East Coast WASP establishment also heavily involved in such attacks. When McCarthy launched his anti-Communist crusade a few years later, these exact same groups were his primary targets so many of the ordinary Americans who supported the senator must surely have regarded his campaigns as political payback.
Those same sentiments probably also extended to some of McCarthy’s most powerful supporters such as Joseph Kennedy, who had been removed from his post as ambassador to Britain and greatly vilified for holding foreign policy views similar to those of Lindbergh. The Kennedy patriarch then became a leading supporter of McCarthy, as did his entire family, including sons John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy.
Several years before McCarthy launched his effort, longtime progressive Sen. Burton K. Wheeler of Montana had been one of several important elected officials driven from office by completely false accusations of fascist sympathies, and as early as 1943 he had correctly predicted that exactly this sort of public political backlash would eventually occur.
Given these facts, the infamous “Red Scare” of the late 1940s and 1950s cannot be properly understood without considering the corresponding “Brown Scare” that had dominated American political life just a few years earlier. But for the last three generations, nearly all our history textbooks and mainstream media accounts have ignored or minimized those important prior events, although they actually amounted to a “Great American Purge.” Such serious omissions have severely distorted our understanding of the actual roots of McCarthyism.
A good example of this problem may be found in Red Scare, a sweeping narrative history of that era published just a few weeks ago by New York Times journalist Clay Risen. The work has been widely praised and I found it excellent, with its 450 pages effectively covering the period during which anti-Communist controversies dominated American politics. This stretched from the immediate postwar period before McCarthy had even entered the Senate down to his 1957 death as a politically-broken and ostracized figure over a decade later.
But although Risen’s extensive bibliography ran more than a dozen pages and included hundreds of items, apparently none of those works ever highlighted the crucial pre-history of the political movement that he described and analyzed.
For example, towards the beginning of his story he recounted the controversial 1949 prosecution of eleven Communist Party leaders who were charged merely for their membership in an organization allegedly advocating the violent overthrow of the American government. The statute used against them was the Smith Act of 1940, which Risen characterized as “an obscure piece of legislation” that essentially criminalized political beliefs.
But the author was obviously unaware that just a few years earlier the Roosevelt Administration had already used that same Smith Act to prosecute a far larger group of right-wingers. That very high profile case eventually became known as “the Great Sedition Trial of 1944” before it finally collapsed in 1946 when the embarrassed Truman Administration dismissed all the charges. And although Risen followed the 13,000 word Wikipedia article in describing the seven month 1949 trial of those eleven Communists as “one of the longest federal criminal proceedings in American history,” that earlier legal case had actually stretched more than four years from the initial indictment in 1942 to the final dismissal in 1946.
Similarly, any mention of FDR’s early 1940s purge and prosecution of conservatives and right-wingers is almost entirely omitted from The Right, Matthew Continetti’s very comprehensive 2022 history of “The Hundred Year War for American Conservatism.” Although the author is Bill Kristol’s own son-in-law, his narrative was surprisingly even-handed, largely free of the heavy infusion of neoconservative ideology that I had expected to find, and generally seemed worthy of the widespread praise that it received. But although McCarthy and McCarthyism were discussed on nearly 50 of its 500 pages, there was no mention of the aspects of political payback that had probably helped to inspire that movement.
Furthermore, as far as I can tell, none of the many reviewers of either of these recent major histories ever noticed those glaring omissions. This suggests that few contemporary historians are aware of those obvious and important political roots of the postwar anti-Communist movement.
As I discussed in my article last week, McCarthy’s anti-Communist campaigns that so greatly roiled American political life during the early 1950s can reasonably be understood as a second, retaliatory round of the American political battles of a few years earlier, with the roles of victims and victimizers being neatly reversed. But that hidden history—almost entirely ignored in all our narrative accounts of McCarthyism, whether hostile or supportive—is itself incomplete. There actually exists a hidden history behind that hidden history, one that involves the central role of Jews and Jewish groups.
The crucial fact so rarely expressed in mainstream works is that from the earliest days of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution down through the McCarthyism battles of the 1950s, the activist core and leadership of the Communist movement had always been heavily Jewish, both in Russia and in most other countries as well. As I wrote in 2018:
Meanwhile, all historians know perfectly well that the Bolshevik leaders were overwhelmingly Jewish, with three of the five revolutionaries Lenin named as his plausible successors coming from that background. Although only around 4% of Russia’s population was Jewish, a few years ago Vladimir Putin stated that Jews constituted perhaps 80-85% of the early Soviet government, an estimate fully consistent with the contemporaneous claims of Winston Churchill, Times of London correspondent Robert Wilton, and the officers of American Military Intelligence. Recent books by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Yuri Slezkine, and others have all painted a very similar picture. And prior to World War II, Jews remained enormously over-represented in the Communist leadership, especially dominating the Gulag administration and the top ranks of the dreaded NKVD.
Similarly, although Jews were only about 3% of our own population during the first half of the twentieth century, that same sort of huge overrepresentation was found in America’s Communist movement as I discussed in one of my earliest American Pravda articles from 2018:
Jews and Communism were just as strongly tied together in America, and for years the largest circulation Communist newspaper in our country was published in Yiddish. When they were finally released, the Venona Decrypts demonstrated that even as late as the 1930s and 1940s, a remarkable fraction of America’s Communist spies came from that ethnic background.
A personal anecdote tends to confirm these dry historical records. During the early 2000s I once had lunch with an elderly and very eminent computer scientist, with whom I’d become a little friendly. While talking about this and that, he happened to mention that both his parents had been zealous Communists, and given his obvious Irish name, I expressed my surprise, saying that I’d thought almost all the Communists of that era were Jewish. He said that was indeed the case, but although his mother had such an ethnic background, his father did not, which made him a very rare exception in their political circles. As a consequence, the Party had always sought to place him in as prominent a public role as possible just to prove that not all Communists were Jews, and although he obeyed Party discipline, he was always irritated at being used as such a “token.”
However, once Communism sharply fell out of favor in 1950s America, nearly all of the leading “Red Baiters” such as Sen. Joseph McCarthy went to enormous lengths to obscure the ethnic dimension of the movement they were combatting. Indeed, many years later Richard Nixon casually spoke in private of the difficulty he and other anti-Communist investigators had faced in trying to focus on Gentile targets since nearly all of the suspected Soviet spies were Jewish, and when this tape became public, his alleged anti-Semitism provoked a media firestorm even though his remarks were obviously implying the exact opposite.
This last point is an important one, since once the historical record has been sufficiently whitewashed or rewritten, any lingering strands of the original reality that survive are often perceived as bizarre delusions or denounced as “conspiracy theories.” Indeed, even today the ever-amusing pages of Wikipedia include an entire 3,500 word article attacking the notion of “Jewish Bolshevism” as an “antisemitic canard.”
I remember in the 1970s the enormous gusts of American praise for Solzhenitysn’s three volume Gulag Archipelago suddenly encountered a temporary headwind when someone noticed that his 2,000 pages had included a single photograph depicting many of the leading Gulag administrators, along with a caption revealing their unmistakably Jewish names. This detail was treated as serious evidence of the great author’s possible anti-Semitism since the actual reality of the enormously large role of Jews in the NKVD and the Gulag system had long since disappeared from all the standard history books.
There clearly exists a quiet recognition that an enormous fraction of the Soviet Communist agents who had infiltrated our government were Jewish, and this may be seen in a careless mistake that Risen made in his lengthy history. At one point, he briefly mentioned that most of the members of the Rosenberg spy ring that stole our atomic bomb secrets for Stalin were Jewish and he listed a number of their names, but mistakenly included Klaus Fuchs in that ethnic category, although the latter was actually among the very rare Gentile exceptions.
But for me, the most shocking discovery I described in that article was the huge role played by international Jewish bankers in financing the Bolshevik Revolution and thereby creating the world Communist movement.
Allegedly Jacob Schiff, America’s leading Jewish banker, had been the crucial financial supporter of the Bolshevik Revolution, providing the Communist revolutionaries with $20 million in funding.
My first reaction was that such a notion was utterly ridiculous since a fact so enormously explosive could not have been ignored by the many dozens of books I had read on the origins of that revolution. But the source seemed extremely precise. The Knickerbocker columnist in the February 3, 1949 edition of The New York Journal-American, then one of the leading local newspapers, wrote that “Today it is estimated by Jacob’s grandson, John Schiff, that the old man sank about 20,000,000 dollars for the final triumph of Bolshevism in Russia.”
Once I checked around a little, I discovered that numerous mainstream accounts described the enormous hostility of Schiff towards the Czarist regime for its ill-treatment of Jews, and these days even so establishmentarian a source as Wikipedia’s entry on Jacob Schiff notes that he played a major role financing the Russian Revolution of 1905, as was revealed in the later memoirs of one of his key operatives. And if you run a search on “jacob schiff bolshevik revolution” numerous other references come up, representing a wide variety of different positions and degrees of credibility. One very interesting statement appears in the memoirs of Henry Wickham Steed, editor of The Times of London and one of the foremost international journalists of his era. He very matter-of-factly mentioned that Schiff, Warburg and the other top Jewish international bankers were among the leading backers of the Jewish Bolsheviks, through whom they hoped to gain an opportunity for the Jewish exploitation of Russia, and he described their lobbying efforts on behalf of their Bolshevik allies at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference following the end of the First World War.
Even the very recent and highly skeptical analysis in Kenneth D. Ackerman’s 2016 book Trotsky in New York, 1917 notes that U.S. Military Intelligence reports of the period directly made that astonishing claim, pointing to Trotsky as the conduit for the heavy financial backing of Schiff and numerous other Jewish financiers. In 1925 this information was published in the British Guardian and was widely discussed and accepted throughout the 1920s and 1930s by numerous major media publications, long before Schiff’s own grandson provided a direct confirmation of those facts in 1949. Ackerman rather cavalierly dismisses all of this considerable contemporaneous evidence as “anti-Semitic” and a “conspiracy story,” arguing that since Schiff was a notorious conservative who had never shown any sympathy for socialism in his own American milieu, he surely would not have funded the Bolsheviks.
Now admittedly, a few details might easily have gotten somewhat garbled over time. For example, although Trotsky quickly became second only to Lenin in the Bolshevik hierarchy, in early 1917 the two men were still bitterly hostile over various ideological disputes, so he certainly was not then considered a member of that party. And since everyone today acknowledges that Schiff had heavily financed the failed 1905 Revolution in Russia, it seems perfectly possible that the $20 million figure mentioned by his grandson refers to the total invested over the years supporting all the different Russian revolutionary movements and leaders, which together finally culminated in the establishment of Bolshevik Russia. But with so many seemingly credible and independent sources all making such similar claims, the basic facts appear almost indisputable.
Consider the implications of this remarkable conclusion. I would assume that most of Schiff’s funding of revolutionary activities was spent on items such as stipends for activists and bribes, and adjusted for the average family incomes of that era, $20 million would be as much as $2 billion in present-day money. Surely without such enormous financial support, the likelihood of any Bolshevik victory would have been far lower, perhaps almost impossible.
When people casually used to joke about the total insanity of “anti-Semitic conspiracy theories” no better example was ever tossed around than the self-evidently absurd notion that the international Jewish bankers had created the worldwide Communist movement. And yet by any reasonable standard, this statement appears to be more or less true, and apparently was widely known at least in rough form for decades after the Russian Revolution, but had never been mentioned in any of the numerous more recent histories that shaped my own knowledge of those events. Indeed, none of these very comprehensive sources had ever even mentioned Schiff’s name, although it was universally acknowledged that he had funded the 1905 Revolution, which was often discussed in enormous detail in many of those very weighty books. What other astonishing facts might they similarly be concealing?…
In 1999, Harvard University published the English edition of The Black Book of Communism, whose six co-authors devoted 850 pages to documenting the horrors inflicted upon the world by that defunct system, which had produced a total death toll they reckoned at 100 million. I have never read that book and I have often heard that the alleged body-count has been widely disputed. But for me the most remarkable detail is that when I examine the 35 page index, I see a vast profusion of entries for totally obscure individuals whose names are surely unknown to all but the most erudite specialist. But there is no entry for Jacob Schiff, the world-famous Jewish banker who apparently financed the creation of the whole system in the first place. Nor one for Olaf Aschberg, the powerful Jewish banker in Sweden, who played such an important role in providing the Bolsheviks a financial life-line during the early years of their threatened regime, and even founded the first Soviet international bank.
- American Pravda: The Bolshevik Revolution and Its Aftermath
Jewish Bankers and the Bolshevik Revolution
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • July 23, 2018 • 7,000 Words
Numerous subsequent works of solid scholarship by highly-regarded mainstream academics have drawn upon extensive archival research to confirm some of these surprising facts about the sources of funding for the Bolsheviks.
For example, in his excellent 2009 book History’s Greatest Heist, historian Sean McMeekin demonstrated that without the crucial financial involvement of Aschberg, the very fragile early Bolshevik regime probably could not have survived. The political upheaval touched off by the Bolshevik coup and the civil war that soon followed had brought Russia’s own industry to a complete standstill, so without the heavy importation of weapons and other war material as well as the cash to pay for such vital trading goods, Lenin’s forces would have faced a desperate situation.
Similarly, the sources of early financial backing for the Bolsheviks were discussed by Richard B. Spence in his 2017 volume Wall Street and the Russian Revolution, 1905-1925. I was especially impressed that he treated the fragmentary evidence regarding these highly controversial matters in the extremely cautious and careful manner that they warranted.
For these reasons, I found Spence’s analysis far superior to what was provided in the somewhat similarly named 1974 book by Anthony Sutton, although the latter work is much more frequently cited in discussions of this topic.
These very important historical facts regarding the origins of Communism are probably almost unknown in mainstream circles today, and they were also rarely if ever reported in similar media outlets of the 1930s and 1940s. But during those same years, Coughlin regularly provided such information to his enormous radio and print audience, and I suspect that his wider coverage of such touchy matters was an important factor behind the determined efforts of the Roosevelt Administration and Jewish groups to remove him from the airwaves and ban his weekly newspaper. As I discussed in last week’s article:
Launched in the late 1920s, Coughlin’s syndicated weekly radio show eventually became political and grew tremendously popular. At his 1930s peak Coughlin had amassed an enormous national audience estimated at 30 million regular listeners, amounting to roughly one-quarter of the entire American population, probably making him the world’s most influential broadcaster. By 1934 the priest was receiving over 10,000 letters of support each day, considerably more than President Franklin Roosevelt or anyone else…
Over the years that followed, Coughlin grew increasingly critical of Jews and Jewish influence, given their hugely disproportionate role as Wall Street bankers, whose activities he regarded as so damaging to the interests of the ordinary American workers whom he championed. In March 1936 he began publishing a weekly political newspaper called Social Justice and it reportedly reached a peak circulation of about a million subscribers in the late 1930s, making it one of the most widely read publications in America, having more than ten times the combined circulation of the Nation and the New Republic, the leading liberal weeklies. The complete archives of Social Justice are conveniently available on this website.
Coughlin had always been hostile to Communism, and after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in July 1936, he began strongly supporting the anti-Communist Nationalist forces, who were also backed by Hitler and Mussolini. Meanwhile, Jewish groups overwhelmingly supported the opposing Loyalist side, heavily backed both by foreign Communists and by Stalin’s Soviet Union. This further increased Coughlin’s suspicion of Jews.
During this same period, Jewish groups and most of the American mainstream media began harshly condemning Nazi Germany for the persecution of its tiny 1% Jewish minority, and these public attacks reached a crescendo after dozens of Jews were killed in the November 1938 Kristallnacht riots, probably orchestrated by some Nazi leaders.
But Coughlin claimed that Jewish bankers had played a crucial role in the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution that brought Soviet Communism to power, while the very heavily Jewish regime thereby established had been responsible for the deaths of many millions of Christians, easily explaining the Nazi hostility toward Jews and their influence. Coughlin was naturally outraged that our media focused so much of its attention upon the dozens of Jewish deaths at the hands of German Nazis rather than the millions of Christian deaths at the hands of Bolshevik Jews…
In 1938 Coughlin established a new anti-Communist political organization called the Christian Front, and according to Wikipedia it soon attracted several thousand members, mostly Irish-American men in New York City and other East Coast urban centers. Around that same time, Coughlin was regularly vilified as a fascist sympathizer and the Roosevelt Administration began making efforts to remove him from the airwaves. These efforts intensified after World War II broke out in September 1939 and Coughlin become a leading opponent of American intervention in that military conflict.
In January 1940, the FBI raided the Brooklyn headquarters of the Christian Front and arrested 18 men on charges of plotting to overthrow the U.S. government. But although one defendant committed suicide, the trials of all the others ended in acquittals or hung juries, thus humiliating the federal prosecutors.
But pressure continued and by September 1940 Coughlin was forced to end his radio broadcasts. Then in April 1942 the Espionage Act of 1917 was invoked to ban his Social Justice newspaper from the mails, effectively eliminating nearly all his national media influence. Thus, government action had been used to silence the voice of America’s leading broadcaster and also ban the distribution of one of our largest national newspapers, actions vastly more serious than anything done during the anti-Communist domestic campaigns of the Korean War era a decade later.
This extreme crackdown on Coughlin continued as FDR’s Attorney General Francis Biddle soon convened a federal grand jury to indict him and his publication on charges of sedition. Biddle then worked out a deal with Coughlin’s ecclesiastical superior Archbishop Edward Mooney, promising that the U.S. Justice Department would drop its prosecution of the priest if he closed Social Justice and permanently ceased all his political activities. With Mooney threatening to suspend his ministry, Coughlin agreed to those severe terms. Although he remained the pastor of his local church and lived until 1979, his political and media activities had come to a final end.
Even aside from their huge role in American Communism and their successful efforts to suppress Coughlin, Jews and Jewish groups had also been very heavily involved in the other political conflicts and purges of the early 1940s, notably including the battle against the anti-war America First movement and aviator Charles Lindbergh, its top public spokesman and long our country’s greatest national hero. As I discussed earlier this year:
Alarmed by their growing fear that America might be drawn into another world war without voters having had any say in the matter, a group of Yale Law students launched an anti-interventionist political organization that they named “The America First Committee,” and it quickly grew to 800,000 members, becoming the largest grass-roots political organization in our national history. Numerous prominent public figures joined or supported it, with the chairman of Sears, Roebuck serving as its head, and its youthful members included future presidents John F. Kennedy and Gerald Ford as well as other notables such as Gore Vidal, Potter Stewart, and Sargent Schriver. Flynn served as chairman of the New York City chapter, and the organization’s leading public spokesman was famed aviator Charles Lindbergh, who for decades had probably ranked as America’s greatest national hero.
Throughout 1941, enormous crowds across the country attended anti-war rallies addressed by Lindbergh and the other leaders, with many millions more listening to the radio broadcasts of the events. Mahl shows that British agents and their American supporters meanwhile continued their covert operations to counter this effort by organizing various political front-groups advocating American military involvement, and employing fair means or foul to neutralize their political opponents. Jewish individuals and organizations seem to have played an enormously disproportionate role in that effort.
Lindbergh’s political destruction came about when he gave a public speech that candidly named the main groups opposing his efforts and pushing our country into a totally unnecessary war.
These facts, now firmly established by decades of scholarship, provide some necessary context to Lindbergh’s famously controversial speech at an America First rally in September 1941. At that event, he charged that three groups in particular were “pressing this country toward war[:] the British, the Jewish, and the Roosevelt Administration,” and thereby unleashed an enormous firestorm of media attacks and denunciations, including widespread accusations of anti-Semitism and Nazi sympathies. Given the realities of the political situation, Lindbergh’s statement constituted a perfect illustration of Michael Kinsley’s famous quip that “a gaffe is when a politician tells the truth – some obvious truth he isn’t supposed to say.” But as a consequence, Lindbergh’s once-heroic reputation suffered enormous and permanent damage, with the campaign of vilification echoing for the remaining three decades of his life, and even well beyond. Although he was not entirely purged from public life, his standing was certainly never even remotely the same.
Although Lindbergh had mentioned the important role of the British and the Roosevelt Administration, those statements passed without notice or challenge. But his willingness to mention Jewish groups as well unleashed a gigantic firestorm of controversy, a public backlash so severe that his America First organization even soon considered disbanding.
This occurred despite the fact that everyone knew his statement was correct. Indeed, in his private journals, Lindbergh mentioned the surprising reaction of one of his close associates in America First, prominent progressive journalist John T. Flynn:
Flynn says he does not question the truth of what I said at Des Moines, but feels it was inadvisable to mention the Jewish problem. It is difficult for me to understand Flynn’s attitude. He feels as strongly as I do that the Jews are among the major influences pushing this country toward war. He has said so frequently, and he says so now. He is perfectly willing to talk about it among a small group of people in private. But apparently he would rather see us get into the war than mention in public what the Jews are doing, no matter how tolerantly and moderately it is done.
American Communism was very heavily Jewish and a large, often overwhelming fraction of the Soviet Communist agents shared that same ethnic background. Some examples of this important information were contained in Jewish Organisations’ Response to Communism and to Senator McCarthy, a short but interesting 2008 book by Israeli-born academic Aviva Weingarten, brought to my attention by Kevin MacDonald’s 2018 review, which highlighted some of the crucial elements.
For example, a Senate committee investigated Communist subversive activity during late 1952 and early 1953. During those public hearings, 124 of the witnesses called refused to answer questions by invoking the Fifth Amendment, and Weingarten found that seventy-nine of those appeared to be Jews, thirty-two were non-Jews, while the ethnic origins of the remaining thirteen were uncertain.
Even more dramatic was the case of Fort Monmouth, the site of some of our most important radar research, an operational center that had once employed Julius Rosenberg and other members of his spy ring. In Blacklisted by History, M. Stanton Evans devoted a full chapter to the story of the huge espionage operation uncovered at that facility, with a couple of Soviet defectors revealing that thousands of its crucial scientific documents had been spirited away to the USSR, a discovery that prompted a full security investigation. According to Weingarten, of the forty-two laboratory staff subsequently suspected of Communist activity and dismissed, thirty-nine were Jewish while a fortieth had a Jewish wife.
Aside from such espionage activity, Jews and Jewish groups, whether Communist or not, had also been in the forefront of the previous ideological purges against which McCarthyism probably represented a populist, retaliatory reaction. So under these circumstances, we would certainly expect Jewish Communists and Jewish leftists to constitute many or most of the targets of McCarthy’s accusations, with his movement following in the footsteps of Coughlin, many of whose erstwhile supporters had enlisted in the Wisconsin senator’s crusade. Yet this was not at all the case.
In 1954 William F. Buckley, Jr. and L. Brent Bozell published McCarthy and His Enemies, the first major defense of the controversial senator. In that work, they allocated nearly 100 pages to a careful examination of the “Nine Public Cases” of alleged Communist subversive agents that McCarthy had focused upon during the 1950 Tydings Hearings that cemented his national reputation, devoting a chapter to each of these. Some of these individuals did seem like Communist sympathizers, while the evidence seemed rather weak for others.
But in carefully reading that book, I was rather surprised that not a single one of those suspected Communists named by McCarthy seemed to be Jewish, whereas a random sample would have probably have resulted in six or seven being in that ethnic category. This made me wonder whether McCarthy was going out of his way to avoid naming Jewish Communists or fellow travelers. In sharp contrast, when other government investigators rounded up the atomic bomb spy ring around the same time, the Rosenbergs and nearly all the other Soviet Communist agents arrested were Jewish.
This very surprising ethnic skew of McCarthy’s named targets seemed to continue over the next couple of years, raising strong suspicions that it was intentional. One obvious possibility was that McCarthy recognized the enormous power wielded by Jewish organizations and Jewish dominated media outlets, leading him to deliberately restrict his accusations to Gentile targets in hopes of minimizing Jewish hostility and any dangerous accusations of “anti-Semitism.” But the arrest of the almost entirely Jewish spy ring involving the Rosenbergs had failed to provoke any such major backlash, nor had the earlier accusations leveled against Harry Dexter White and the various other Jewish agents of Stalin unmasked during the previous couple of years. Moreover, events quickly proved that McCarthy was extremely reckless and erratic in his accusations, hardly the sort of individual who would be expected to implement such a cautious strategic plan. So some other factor was probably responsible.
I think the most likely answer to this puzzle was provided in The Judas Goats, published in 2006 by renowned conspiracy-researcher Michael Collins Piper. This interesting work discussed the numerous cases of American political movements and leaders that Piper argued were secretly under the control of Jewish puppet-masters, who sought to divert activists into matters less threatening to the existing Jewish domination of our country. Piper devoted most of a chapter to the case of McCarthy.
One of Piper’s personal mentors was DeWest Hooker, almost never mentioned in mainstream histories but a prominent figure in the American nationalist fringe, someone who had earlier also been a mentor to George Lincoln Rockwell, founder of the 1950s American Nazi Party. Hooker claimed to have discovered that McCarthy’s entire anti-Communist campaign had been orchestrated by an organization called the American Jewish League Against Communism (AJLAC) and was intended to divert public attention away from the overwhelming number of Jewish Communist agents. According to Hooker, the AJLAC was primarily funded by the powerful Jewish financier Bernard Baruch and had recruited McCarthy as its front-man for the project. Hooker set forth this strartling information in a 1954 sworn affidavit that Piper published interspersed with a few of the latter’s own italicized notes:
I had an astounding interview for two hours some time ago with Norman L. Marks of the American Jewish League Against Communism, Inc.
As a matter of fact, I was brought along by another party, and Mr. Marks did not know anything about me (hence he really opened up because the person who took me was “trusted” by him).
The AJLAC has offices at 220 West 42nd Street, New York City. Its national chairman is Alfred Kohlberg. Its executive director is Rabbi Benjamin Schultz, and its treasurer is Harry Pasternak. Listed on its national board are the following: Bern Dibner, Lawrence Fertig, Theodore Fine, Benjamin Gitlow, Hon. Walter R. Hart, Herman Kashins, Eugene Lyons, Norman L. Marks, Morris Ryskind, Rabbi David S. Savitz, Nathan D. Shapiro, George E. Sokolsky, Maurice Tishman, Rabbi Ascher M. Yager…
Mr. Marks, listed above and on the letterhead of the AJLAC as a member of the national board, said: “Far and away the principal financial contributor to the AJLAC is Mr. Bernard Baruch. ”When questioned on this point as to what percentage he would say Mr. Baruch contributed, he answered: “About 85% or 90% of the funds.”
I said that I had thought Mr. Kohlberg was the main contributor to the AJLAC and Mr. Marks answered: “Well, he contributes some but nothing like what Baruch contributes.” I asked Mr. Marks why Baruch’s name did not appear on the letterhead. He stated that Baruch was very emphatic about NOT having his name appear on the letterhead, and that it was to be unknown that he contributed funds to it…
He said there were only two purposes for its founding: That the Number One purpose was to take the heat off the Jewishness of Communism, and a secondary aim was to get the Jews out of Communism and to support Zionism. He said that: “for a while there, almost all the spies of the Communists that were turned up were Jews and that they had become concerned, and thought that something should be done to take the sting off the Jews. They wanted to show the Christian world that ALL Jews were not Communists”…
Marks stated: “We were the ones that wrote the speeches for McCarthy back in West Virginia that started his buildup into the famous anti-Communist that he is today. Our pressure on the press resulted in his getting as much attention as he has. In return for this build-up he agreed not to call up or expose Jews in the Communist movement by the investigations through his sub-committee.”
Mr. Marks stated that a lot of Jews called McCarthy an anti-Semite but little did they know that “he is the best friend the Jews ever had.”
Marks went on to say that “other investigations might have turned up Jews and McCarthy had been given credit for them, but that if we traced the record back, we would find that McCarthy actually did not call up a single Jew in that period when the heat was on the Jews.” He later qualified these remarks by saying that “while McCarthy was operating as a temporary subcommittee under the Truman administration, he did not call up any Jews; that when he once got himself elected as the chairman of the permanent investigating committee, in the new administration, he then began to call witnesses “as they came.”
[That is, whether the witnesses were “Jewish or not,” according to Hooker—Ed.]
Mr. Marks continued: “But that doesn’t make much difference now because he accepted our own men to work right with him. For example, he accepted as his top man next to him our man Roy Cohn, which was arranged through another of our men, George Sokolsky”…
Mr. Marks went on to say that “not only is McCarthy under our control but so are Jenner and Velde, who also took our men to work right with them. Benny Mandel and Robert Morris represent us on the Jenner Committee.” He mentioned Robert Kunzig as “their man” for Velde.
Marks also stated definitely that Professor Louis Budenz was under “their control” and one of “their men,” and that he was working to take the “heat” off the Jews.
[Budenz was a well-known “ex-communist” who became a leading figure in the so-called anti-communist movement, key elements of which had come under the control of the Zionist and Trotskyite elements. Hooker’s revelations explain why—Ed.]
He stated that [Alfred] Kohlberg, their national chairman, was the one who “found” Budenz when he was testifying in Washington and Kohlberg “picked him up and practically supported him for a while in order to get him started and built up to the man he is today in the anti-Communist movement.”
Marks also stated that they got “their man Robert Morris” elected recently as a judge in New York City, and that Victor Lasky was another one of their men who did a lot of “press work” for them, and “made speeches favoring their people, for example, Robert Morris.” He said, “All these people agreed to take the ‘heat’ off the Jews.”
I recall now another statement by Mr. Marks that “there is a vast pooling of information in the New York City area and throughout the country which is connected with our organization.”
I asked if J. B. Matthews and his files were in on “the deal” and he said: “Yes, we have access to all of his files.”
[J. B. Matthews was a prominent “anti-communist crusader” in the period, but, clearly, under the control of the Zionist-Trotskyites.—Ed.]
He said that they have at least “thirty Communists on our payroll who report information to us,” and that “we know everything that goes on in this field”…
Don’t misunderstand me: I’m just as anti-Communist as any of you, but I don’t want our country to be led head-long into traps which enable these pseudo-patriots to “use” the fine instincts of the American people and the anti-Communist movement for their own diabolical ends.
In other words, some of these pseudo-patriots are “anti-Communist,” meaning “anti-Stalin communism,” but are pro-as hell another form of Communism (American brand) leading to dictatorship by them in our own country and the rest of the world under Bernard Baruch and the crowd he represents.
(Signed) DeWest Hooker
As a strong confirmation of Hooker’s claims, Piper quoted several paragraphs from John Edgar Hoover, published in 1972 by investigative journalist Hank Messick, a leading organized crime writer, describing the founding of the AJLAC:
Varied were the motives of the League’s founding, but one of them was self-protection…. Many of the intellectuals in America were Jewish. During the New Deal some had achieved high position. Moreover, Karl Marx himself was the son of a Jew who later became a Christian. To adopt the sane position, to resist unfair smears and the attempts of bigots to portray the Jew as pro-red, might only make people mad. Better to go on the offensive against the Communist menace itself. Such was the attitude of some Jews—or at least the excuse they offered their friends—as national hysteria built up in 1948.
The possibility of the anti-Communism attack turning into a persecution of the Jews was very much on the minds of the government officials charged with prosecuting the alleged atom bomb spies, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. For that reason a Jewish judge was chosen, and the prosecuting staff selected to try the case was composed of Jews. One of their members was Roy Cohn.
According to Messick, the AJLAC and most of its leading members had lined up behind Republican Thomas Dewey’s 1948 presidential campaign and were just as surprised as everyone else when Truman was unexpectedly reelected, leading them to eventually recruit McCarthy as the front-man for their anti-Communist project:
The unexpected defeat of Dewey in 1948 upset a good many people, and made it necessary for the American Jewish League Against Communism to revise its program. It needed a new political figure behind whom it could rally. Coincidentally, the league had come into possession of a one-hundred page FBI report on Communist influence on government. The report was originally leaked to an intelligence officer in the Pentagon with instructions to pass it on to leaders of the league…We have the word of none other than Roy Cohn that the secret FBI document was read, and conferences held, in New York and Washington. As Cohn put it, “a small group” took “upon itself the responsibility of getting the story across to America.”
The League decided it should approach a senator rather than a representative. At a meeting in Washington in November 1949, a special committee of the league “sifted carefully through the roster of United States senators for one who might successfully undertake the task of educating his fellow Americans. ”They narrowed the list down to four possibilities, all Republicans. In turn, each senator was given a look at the FBI report. Each was urged to go on the warpath. Each was promised financial support. The first three men on the list refused. The fourth took the document home and read it carefully. Next morning he called a member of the League and told him he was “buying the package.” That fourth senator was Joseph McCarthy.
Many historians have noted with considerable surprise that an obscure first-term senator such as McCarthy soon attracted massive national media coverage for the accusations he made to an unimportant Republican Women’s Club in Wheeling, West Virginia although earlier attacks on Communist subversion by far more prominent political figures had largely been ignored. But if McCarthy were merely acting as the front-man for a powerful and well-connected Jewish organization, this result becomes much less mysterious.
I also found it quite interesting that Hooker’s affidavit reported that most of the other top anti-Communist public figures from that period were also operating under such Jewish influence and control. These allegedly included J.B. Matthews, a leading anti-Communist researcher, who in 1953 provoked a major media firestorm when he published a strange article declaring in its first sentence that “the largest single group supporting the Communist apparatus in the United States is composed of Protestant clergymen.” That accusation sounded as odd to his contemporaries as it does to us today, but it becomes a little less inexplicable if Matthews were acting under Jewish influence, working to point public suspicion in all directions except towards their own ethnic group.
According to Piper, the McCarthyite attacks on Soviet Communist agents may partly be understood as a battle fought on American soil between those Jews who were loyal to Stalinist Communism and their bitter enemies in the Trotskyite-Zionist Jewish faction:
And although McCarthy was very much correct, it seems, in pointing out that there were indeed “communists in the government,” it is probably safe to say that the war that was being fought out on Capitol Hill during the McCarthy hearings and in the media was actually hardly more than an overflow, into the United States, of the long-standing war between the surviving Russian Nationalist Communist elements in the Soviet Union (formerly led by Josef Stalin) and their bitter enemies in the Jewish-Zionist-Trotskyite movement which was now ensconced on American soil.
All of this, of course, is not to say that McCarthy was not sincere in his motives, but he was very clearly being manipulated by forces that were far beyond his comprehension.
And the fact that his chief “advisor” was the ubiquitous Roy Cohn, who continued to play a major role as a Zionist “fixer” (at the same time doubling as an organized crime lawyer) points precisely toward those forces that were guiding McCarthy toward ultimate destruction…
And it is probably no coincidence that one of McCarthy’s most prominent targets—former Gen. George C. Marshall—was actually one of the most outspoken American critics (during the Truman administration) of the establishment of the Zionist state of Israel…
These revelations regarding the McCarthy era are not intended to suggest that there were no disloyal communist traitors within the American system. In truth, in many respects, the late Senator McCarthy did indeed correctly target a large number of communists within the government, the media, and academia. But there was clearly much more to the story of McCarthy than we had ever known before…
The Zionists and the Trotskyites had effectively merged, having found common cause, and began their drive to take over and manipulate—as an Enemy Within—the genuine “anti-communist” movement in America, acting as Judas Goats, leading real patriots to destruction.
In the more conspiratorial corners of today’s Internet, accusations that prominent political figures represent “controlled opposition” are extremely common, almost ubiquitous, and often based upon little or no supporting evidence. But in the case of Sen. Joseph McCarthy this seems likely to have actually been the case, whether or not the hard-drinking lawmaker himself fully understood the situation at the time. And similar factors may have heavily influenced the behavior of many of the other most prominent anti-Communists of that era.
McCarthy himself was reckless, erratic, blustery, and dishonest, an obvious political train-wreck waiting to happen. But most observers agree that his 1954 political destruction was primarily due to terrible mistakes made by Roy Cohn, the young, well-connected Jewish prosecutor from New York City whom he had named as the chief counsel to his Senate committee early the previous year.
Probably McCarthy’s most important public political patron had been Joseph Kennedy, one of the wealthiest men in America and for decades a powerful figure in the Democratic Party, who had successfully elevated his son John to a U.S. Senate seat in November 1952 and was already positioning him for an eventual run for the presidency. When McCarthy assumed the chairmanship of his committee in early 1953, the elder Kennedy lobbied hard for his other son Robert to be appointed chief counsel, but the senator selected Cohn instead, with Robert named assistant counsel. This decision was much easier to understand if McCarthy also had hidden Jewish sponsors who could match the power and influence of the Kennedy family.
The choice of Cohn proved utterly disastrous for the senator. Although Cohn was far more intelligent, competent, and better educated than McCarthy, he was just as reckless and dishonest, while also being remarkably arrogant and privileged. As a closeted homosexual in his mid-20s, he immediately brought on board a wealthy but totally unqualified Jewish friend of the same age named G. David Schine, widely suspected of being his lover. The public antics of the two young men on their high-profile investigatory junket to numerous European cities produced hugely negative headlines.
Within a few months bitter personal hostility also developed between Cohn and the younger Kennedy, leading to the resignation of the latter, who eventually rejoined the committee as chief counsel for the Democratic minority in early 1954. He thereby threw his weight to the side of McCarthy’s political opponents during the Army-McCarthy Hearings that eventually destroyed the Wisconsin senator.
Adding insult to injury, Cohn soon launched a major campaign to purge similarly closeted homosexuals from government service as “security risks” in a so-called “Lavender Scare.” This naturally raised the profile of his own sexuality and the resulting rumors soon extended to the unmarried McCarthy as well, with some of the senator’s many enemies even publishing such accusatory stories. These suspicions continued despite McCarthy’s September 1953 marriage to one of his closest female aides.
Even Cohn’s personal strengths proved damaging to McCarthy as the lackadaisical senator fell increasingly under the spell of his much more energetic and competent subordinate, so much so that Cohn often seemed more in charge of matters than his nominal superior. For example, when Cohn and McCarthy issued conflicting requests to various government officials, the latter sometimes weren’t sure which demand should take precedence.
Cohn’s extreme arrogance ultimately proved politically fatal. With World War II having only ended a few years earlier and the Korean War still raging until July 1953, compulsory military service was considered part of the American social contract and the U.S. Army was generally held in high esteem. Cohn had successfully used his political connections to dodge the draft and the same had also been true for his close friend Schine, an embarrassing fact that McCarthy’s bitter media enemies soon highlighted. So as the committee began investigating security problems at Army installations, the military leadership reviewed Schine’s status and drafted him, probably in retaliation.
Cohn reacted with total fury to this development, with the young staffer personally calling the top Army leadership on dozens of occasions, repeatedly threatening them with the most dire political consequences unless Schine were granted all sorts of special privileges. He even demanded that his totally unqualified young friend be immediately made an officer and allowed to perform his military service as a McCarthy staffer, effectively nullifying his draft status.
The Army soon disclosed Cohn’s totally improper behavior, leading to weeks of the Army-McCarthy Hearings, nationally televised gavel-to-gavel, which drew a gigantic audience estimated at 80 million, representing half of all Americans. This onscreen performance of both McCarthy and Cohn proved very damaging, and McCarthy’s disapproval numbers soon spiked.
A decade later, the raw television footage of many of the crucial scenes of those hearings was released as the popular 97 minute documentary Point of Order, and watching those helps to explain the sharp resulting decline in McCarthy’s public standing.
It is well known that many of the most serious blows to McCarthy’s reputation came from Joseph Welch, the shrewd Boston lawyer who had been retained as the Army’s special counsel. But I had not realized that some of Welch’s most damaging statements had been his blatant hints at the homosexuality of Cohn, Schine, and perhaps the senator himself, hints that he expressed in terms probably well understood by the American audience of that era but that I had previously missed.
The important subtext of such homosexual insinuations was covered in considerable detail in Gossip Men, an otherwise rather dull and politically-correct book published in 2021 by Christopher M. Elias. Partly due to these factors, Cohn was soon forced to resign.
Republican President Dwight Eisenhower had long despised McCarthy, waiting for the right opportunity to move against him, and the senator’s sharp decline in popular support provided exactly that opening. Having been seriously damaged by his televised attacks against the U.S. Army and by the loss of Cohn, and with the president of his own Republican Party now fully aligned against him, McCarthy’s fate was sealed, and within a few months the full Senate had overwhelmingly voted to censure him. This permanently broke his political and media power and he soon became forlorn, ignored, and adrift, gradually drinking himself to death over the next couple of years.
Following his resignation, Cohn himself went on to a long career as a notoriously ruthless and controversial but often highly effective private attorney in New York City. Relying upon his strong political connections, favor-trading, and great expertise in blackmail and bribery, he spent decades representing the interests of the high and low alike, ranging from business corporations and wealthy executives to the local Archdiocese to top Mafiosi, notably including his mentoring of a young real estate developer named Donald Trump.
Along the way, Cohn sometimes defrauded or cheated his own clients, with some of those victims claiming that they were fearful that he might deploy his gangster friends to have them killed if they crossed him. Cohn’s long history of improper behavior eventually caught up with him, finally leading to his disbarment in 1986 just weeks before his death from AIDS at age 59, coming after he had jumped the queue and become one of the earliest recipients of AZT.
Cohn’s extremely controversial life story was told in the 1988 bestseller Citizen Cohn by liberal Washington Post journalist Nicholas von Hoffman, with the longest section covering his time with McCarthy. Although the biographer seemed surprisingly sympathetic to his subject, I found Cohn to have almost no redeeming features whatsoever, the sole exception being his apparently sincere anti-Communism, which ironically enough was the single item that drew the most hostility from his social peers in New York City.
The author also reported that during the early 1950s Cohn once candidly told a television producer in Washington that “Not all Jews are Communists, but most Communists are Jews.”
For those who prefer digesting that material in a different format, that 500 page book soon became a 1992 Made-for-TV movie of the same name starring James Woods, which is also now freely available for viewing on YouTube.
One of the most shocking incidents in that film illustrated the secret culture of personal blackmail that apparently so heavily dominated American political life during the seemingly placid 1950s and the 1960s. In 1968, J. Edgar Hoover was intensely hostile to presidential candidate Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, and asked Cohn to recruit one of his own closest friends, the highly-regarded Democratic Rep. Neal Gallagher, for an important task. Hoover told Gallagher to attack Kennedy’s reputation by disclosing that as Attorney General the candidate had approved wiretaps on the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., and then hold public hearings highlighting that damaging story.
However, Gallagher balked at taking on such a powerful Democrat, someone who might soon be in the White House. So Hoover retaliated by having Life Magazine run a story based upon leaked FBI wiretaps that Gallagher had once asked his friends in organized crime to cart away and dispose of a dead body that had somehow turned up in the basement of Gallagher’s own home. Hoover promised further embarrassing disclosures unless the insubordinate congressman resigned.
That resulting media scandal naturally threatened Gallagher’s reelection in his New Jersey district, so he had Cohn pass along the demand that Hoover disavow the story as false, warning that unless this quickly occurred he would take the much-feared FBI director down with him.
As a congressman, Gallagher had the right to give a one-minute speech each day on any topic, and he declared he would use that opportunity to denounce Hoover for having spent twenty-eight years living lavishly at high government expense in a “man and wife” relationship with Clyde Tolson, the second-ranking FBI official during all of that time. He promised to make that same public accusation every twenty-four hours during all of the weeks until Election day, and this serious threat caused Hoover to back down and have Life retract the story, allowing Gallagher to win reelection. But several years later, very shortly before Hoover’s death, Gallagher was suddenly indicted on numerous counts of corruption and income-tax evasion and sent to prison, leaving me to wonder whether the vengeful FBI director may have had a hand in that outcome.
When I watched the film, the whole Gallagher incident seemed so wildly implausible that I assumed it must have been the product of the fertile imagination of a Hollywood screenwriter. But it turned out to be contained in the book as well, and was further externally confirmed by the stories in Life Magazine and various other published sources.
During the early 1950s, McCarthy and his wild accusations attracted more political attention than anyone in America other than the sitting president, but he proved an extremely flawed vessel for the anti-Communist cause that he soon personified. McCarthy’s political rise had probably been orchestrated by a powerful Jewish Zionist faction, using him against their Jewish Communist rivals and also foisting the equally flawed Cohn upon him. The extreme recklessness of the McCarthy/Cohn team eventually led to their downfall, and the domestic cause of anti-Communism largely fell with them.
Yet oddly enough, during exactly these same years, there was a very different anti-Communist figure having none of those flaws and not under the control of any Jewish faction, being just as critical of Zionism as he was of Communism.
Whereas McCarthy was crude, ignorant, and factually careless, Prof. John Beaty of Southern Methodist University was a highly-regarded academic scholar, scrupulously careful with his facts. McCarthy’s supposedly heroic war record was largely fictional, while Beaty had spent his war years performing crucial intelligence work in a position of great trust. McCarthy’s repeated attacks against our military leadership outraged Eisenhower and ultimately led to the senator’s political destruction, while Beaty’s important work attracted glowing praise from numerous top military commanders.
But while McCarthy’s self-destructive behavior made him one of the most famous—and infamous—individuals in America and therefore the subject of countless later books, the extremely dangerous information presented by Beaty ensured that he received virtually no media coverage whatsoever, either at the time or long afterward. Beaty’s name is almost never mentioned in any of the books or articles describing those years, and he is so invisible that I only stumbled across his existence by accident.
I first mentioned Beaty’s very interesting story in a 2018 article, but then discussed it at greater length in 2019:
Some years ago, I came across a totally obscure 1951 book entitled The Iron Curtain Over America by John Beaty, a well-regarded university professor. Beaty had spent his wartime years in Military Intelligence, being tasked with preparing the daily briefing reports distributed to all top American officials summarizing available intelligence information acquired during the previous 24 hours, which was obviously a position of considerable responsibility.
As a zealous anti-Communist, he regarded much of America’s Jewish population as deeply implicated in subversive activity, therefore constituting a serious threat to traditional American freedoms. In particular, the growing Jewish stranglehold over publishing and the media was making it increasingly difficult for discordant views to reach the American people, with this regime of censorship constituting the “Iron Curtain” described in his title. He blamed Jewish interests for the totally unnecessary war with Hitler’s Germany, which had long sought good relations with America, but instead had suffered total destruction for its strong opposition to Europe’s Jewish-backed Communist menace.
Beaty also sharply denounced American support for the new state of Israel, which was potentially costing us the goodwill of so many millions of Muslims and Arabs…
He was scathing toward the Nuremberg Trials, which he described as a “major indelible blot” upon America and “a travesty of justice.” According to him, the proceedings were dominated by vengeful German Jews, many of whom engaged in falsification of testimony or even had criminal backgrounds. As a result, this “foul fiasco” merely taught Germans that “our government had no sense of justice.” Sen. Robert Taft, the Republican leader of the immediate postwar era took a very similar position, which later won him the praise of John F. Kennedy in Profiles in Courage. The fact that the chief Soviet prosecutor at Nuremberg had played the same role during the notorious Stalinist show trials of the late 1930s, during which numerous Old Bolsheviks confessed to all sorts of absurd and ridiculous things, hardly enhanced the credibility of the proceedings to many outside observers.
Then as now, a book taking such controversial positions stood little chance of finding a mainstream New York publisher, but it was soon released by a small Dallas firm, and then became enormously successful, going through some seventeen printings over the next few years. According to Scott McConnell, founding editor of The American Conservative, Beaty’s book became the second most popular conservative text of the 1950s, ranking only behind Russell Kirk’s iconic classic, The Conservative Mind.
Books by unknown authors that are released by tiny publishers rarely sell many copies, but the work came to the attention of George E. Stratemeyer, a retired general who had been one of Douglas MacArthur’s commanders, and he wrote Beaty a letter of endorsement. Beaty began including that letter in his promotional materials, drawing the ire of the ADL, whose national chairman contacted Stratemeyer, demanding that he repudiate the book, which was described as a “primer for lunatic fringe groups” all across America. Instead, Stratemeyer delivered a blistering reply to the ADL, denouncing it for making “veiled threats” against “free expression and thoughts” and trying to establish Soviet-style repression in the United States. He declared that every “loyal citizen” should read The Iron Curtain Over America, whose pages finally revealed the truth about our national predicament, and he began actively promoting the book around the country while attacking the Jewish attempt to silence him. Numerous other top American generals and admirals soon joined Stratemeyer in publicly endorsing the work, as did a couple of influential members of the U.S. Senate, leading to its enormous national sales.
Having now discovered that Beaty’s views were so totally consistent with those of nearly all our Military Intelligence professionals, I decided to reread his short book, and found myself deeply impressed. His erudition and level-headedness were exactly what one would expect from an accomplished academic with a Columbia Ph.D. who had risen to the rank of colonel during his five years of service in Military Intelligence and on the General Staff. Although strongly anti-Communist, by all indications Beaty was very much a moderate conservative, quite judicious in his claims and proposals. Bendersky’s hysterical denunciation reflects rather badly upon the issuer of that fatwa.
Beaty’s book was written nearly 70 years ago, at the very beginning of our long Cold War, and is hardly free from various widely-held errors of that time, nor from deep concerns about various calamities that did not come to pass, such as a Third World War. Moreover, it was published just a couple of years after Mao’s victory in China and in the midst of our own involvement in the Korean War, so its discussion of those large contemporary events is far more lengthy and detailed than would probably be of interest to present-day readers. But leaving aside those minor blemishes, I think the account he provides of the true circumstances behind America’s involvement in both the First and Second World Wars and their immediate aftermath is greatly superior to the heavily slanted and expurgated accounts we find in our standard history books. And Beaty’s wartime responsibility for collating and summarizing all incoming intelligence information and then producing a daily digest for distribution to the White House and our other top officials surely provided him a far more accurate picture of the reality than that of the typical third-hand scribe.
At the very least, we should acknowledge that Beaty’s volume provides an excellent summary of the beliefs of American Military Intelligence officers and many of our top generals during the first half of the twentieth century. With copyright having long lapsed, I’m pleased to make it available in convenient HTML format, allowing those so interested to read it and judge for themselves:The Iron Curtain Over America
- John Beaty • 1951 • 82,000 Words
Early last year, I published a long article further discussing Beaty’s material and his background and also assessing his credibility, which seemed quite high.
A West Virginian born in 1890, Beaty earned his B.A. and M.A. at the University of Virginia, then completed his doctorate in Philosophy at Columbia University in 1921. Beginning in 1919 he spent his entire academic career teaching English at Southern Methodist University (SMU) in Dallas, becoming a full professor in 1922 and finally retiring in 1957. For much of that time, he served as department chairman, and was a successful novelist and scholar, being the author or co-author of a dozen books, eventually used at over 700 American colleges and universities. During that long career, he enjoyed a number of academic honors and distinctions, even serving as president of the Conference of College Teachers of English, and prior to 1951 seems to have never attracted any significant controversy.
But Beaty was a patriotic individual who held a commission in the military reserves and as America moved towards involvement in World War II, his status was activated in 1941 and he joined our Military Intelligence as a captain, serving until 1947 when he left the army with the rank of full colonel and resumed his academic teaching career. During those war years, his government role had been an important one, serving as Chief of the Historical Section while also being responsible for summarizing all available American intelligence and producing the daily briefing report distributed to the White House and all of our other top political and military leaders. Later in the war, he was also required to interview and debrief thousands of our returning military servicemen, including very senior ones, summarizing their information and experiences for government files. Given such crucial activities, there were probably few Americans more familiar with nearly all aspects of our wartime information than Beaty when he returned to civilian life in 1947…
Many world developments greatly alarmed him. Stalin’s Soviet Union had seized half of Europe, while his subservient Communist parties held enormous influence in much of the rest, including France, Italy, and Greece. Beaty regarded the 1949 Communist victory in China as a gigantic strategic defeat for the West, and the sudden outbreak of the Korean War the following year had now drawn American forces into direct military conflict, with our inexperienced and under-equipped troops suffering serious early defeats at the hands of a large Chinese army.
During these years Beaty had been working on a book aimed at describing the root causes of our recent disasters and providing a candid account of the world war against Germany that we had recently fought. He believed that unless the American people learned these facts and mobilized themselves politically, they might both lose their traditional freedoms and be driven into a ruinous third world war against the powerful Communist bloc. So in December 1951 he published The Iron Curtain Over America.
Although Beaty had an illustrious academic career and stellar wartime credentials, he was a strong conservative Christian and a committed anti-Communist, and his fairly short but heavily documented book crossed every sort of impermissible red line in American publishing, especially with its focus upon what he regarded as the enormously pernicious role of organized Jewish groups in American politics. He was scathing towards the policies of Democratic Presidents Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman, but equally hostile towards many of their leading opponents such as Gov. Thomas Dewey, the Republican Presidential candidate in both 1944 and 1948. Given such sentiments, it was hardly surprising that his book was only released by a small Dallas publisher, with the author himself having to cover the costs of the initial print-run.
- Prof. John Beaty and the True Origin of the Jews
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • January 29, 2024 • 12,900 Words
The exact factors that made Beaty’s work so important also explained why it received almost no public media attention, either at the time it was originally released or during the many decades that have since followed.
By Ron Unz
