The American Century: Literature since 1945 521the possible arrival of hostile forces, aliens who would rob Americans of their
comforts and complacency. In literature, related insecurities issued in a preoccupation
with evil, the possible eruption of weariness, guilt, and remorse, into the rhythms of
routine experience. In this respect, there was an almost willed dimension to the
formalism of so many writers of the 1950s: it was as if, like their fellow Americans
(although in a far more self-conscious and articulate way), they were trying to
contain their anxiety by channeling it into socially established and accepted
structures. And in the political life of the period perhaps the most significant
expression of this fear of invasion, subversion, or even destruction by covert agencies
was the phenomenon known as McCarthyism. Joseph McCarthy was a young
senator from Wisconsin who had a self-appointed mission to wage war on anything
he saw as communist subversion. Exploiting his position on the Un-American
Activities Committee, playing on popular anxieties about the growing power of
Russia and the possible presence of an “enemy within,” he embarked on a modern-
day witch-hunt, the result of which was that many people were sacked from their
jobs and blacklisted on the mere suspicion of belonging to the Communist Party.
Guilt was established by smear; loss of job followed on false witness; and a cast of
characters that included Hollywood scriptwriters, intellectuals, and academics
suddenly found themselves the subject of vicious public abuse. McCarthy declared
that he was engaged in a battle that could not be ended “except in victory or death
for this civilization”; and, during the period when he flourished, he managed to
convince may Americans that the preservation of their material wealth and social
health depended upon him rooting out enemies of the people wherever he could
find or invent them.
One crucial fear that McCarthy exploited was the fear of the betrayal of atomic
secrets. America had unleashed strange and terrible forces when it dropped atom
bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The bomb cast its shadow over the immediate
postwar decades, just as it has done ever since; and the discovery that certain people
in the United States, Canada, and Britain had passed atomic secrets to the Russians,
who could now explode nuclear weapons of their own, clearly exacerbated public
anxieties about hidden enemies and conspiracies, and made it that much easier for
McCarthy and his committee to flourish. Fear of the potential nuclear capability of
the enemy, allied to this suspicion of a powerful enemy within, also increased the
tensions of what Winston Churchill christened the Cold War: that policy of
brinkmanship between the United States and Russia, their respective satellite states
and allies, that was based on the premise that the two superpowers were engaged in
a life-or-death struggle for global supremacy. Eisenhower’s secretary of state, John
Foster Dulles, talked of “the liberation of captive peoples” and the possibility of
turning back the communist tide. His vice president, Richard Nixon, who had first
come to public attention while serving on the Un-American Activities Committee,
announced that there would be no relaxation in the drive to root suspected
subversives out of public service. And even Eisenhower himself, despite his evident
mildness of manner, promised the American electorate, “We will find out the pinks,
we will find the communists, we will find the disloyal.” The Red scare of theGGray_c05.indd 521ray_c 05 .indd 521 8 8/1/2011 7:31:29 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 29 PM