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The Cranberry Scare of 1959

November 19, 2020 by Lisa Reynolds Wolfe

Right before Thanksgiving in 1959 the United States was hit with a different kind of Red Scare. Primed for panic and paranoia by Senator Joseph McCarthy’s red baiting taunts, Americans reacted anxiously when told that the cranberries they expected to serve with their Thanksgiving turkeys might be contaminated by a chemical weed killer known to cause cancer in animals.

What made things worse was the fact that the danger was so close to home, lurking in plain sight on supermarket shelves and in family kitchens! No red berry was safe.

Americans were told that every kind of cranberry product could be affected whether sauce or relish, spiced or sugared, chunky or jelled, room temperature or chilled, homemade or store bought.

The announcement was made by Arthur S. Flemming, the Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare, at one of his regular weekly press conferences. He said:

The Food and Drug Administration [FDA] today urged that no further sales be made of cranberries and cranberry products produced in Washington and Oregon in 1958 and 1959 because of their possible contamination by a chemical weed killer, aminotriazole, which causes cancer in the thyroid of rats when it is contained in their diet, until the cranberry industry has submitted a workable plan to separate the contaminated berries from the uncontaminated.

Talk about a berry bomb.

For Cranberry Bog Owners, the date of Secretary Flemming’s announcement, November 9, 1959, became a “Red Monday,” dumping the industry’s biggest annual sales period into the trash heap and threatening to destroy the industry’s existence.

The cranberry industry was under attack at its busiest time of the year. At the Ocean Spray Cranberry Company in Plymouth County, Massachusetts. its president George C.P. Olsson said:

the Secretary’s announcement was ill-informed and ill-advised . . . his intentions are a cranberry witch-hunt.

A San Francisco Chronicle headline blared “A Nation Without Cranberry Sauce.”

The cranberry industry shouldn’t have been surprised, however. They had been warned.

Three years earlier the chemical in question had been approved by the Agricultural Department for the purpose of killing invasive plants that threatened to choke off the cranberry plants. This approval, though, was based on the condition that the chemical be used only after the harvesting of berries, before any fruit began to develop. Otherwise, it might find its way into the edible berries.

These instructions were strictly outlined by the government and widely and specifically disseminated in warning and educational newsletters and reports by Ocean Spray and other industry leaders to Bog Owners.

Ocean Spray had warned its collective of bog owners in a letter dated September 18, 1959. The letter stated that no berries that had been treated with the weed killer after that date would be accepted. It even required bog owners to agree to certify their berries, punishable as perjury if violated. However, when the FDA began testing cranberries for the traces of the weed killer a month later, they found it in berries shipped from Washington and Oregon.

According to Flemming, nobody knew the degree to which the national crops were potentially contaminated. Also, nobody could instruct the public on how to buy “safe” cranberries. Consequently, food chains cancelled all orders of cranberries. Cans of cranberry jelly and jars of cranberry relish were returned to the warehouse, and hundreds of millions of cranberries were seized, quarantined, and destroyed.

Fleming instructed housewives thusly:

If unsure where the cranberries came from, to be on the safe side, she doesn’t buy.

The states also reacted:

Nevada declared it illegal for any supermarket grocery store and corner mom and pop shop within its borders to carry any cranberry products.

Random dragnets were conducted by a network of Ohio, New York, California, and Michigan health board food officials.

The Governor of Oregon immediately ordered that not even one can of cranberry jelly remain on the commissary shelves of all state prisons, fearful that incarcerated men might riot on Thanksgiving if served the poisonous relish.

Individuals and the hospitality industry also panicked:

An irate father in Chicago phoned his daughter’s school board president when he found out that the school had served a spoonful of the tainted stuff in each school lunch.

A hysterical woman in Mobile, Alabama, called an ambulance after washing cranberries to make her family’s chutney recipe.

A Boston beatnik poet scribbled cranberry notations on a coffee shop blackboard and got his picture in Life Magazine.

Iowa church ladies were warned from the pulpit to wear rubber gloves and face masks if they had to touch the berries.

Restaurants crossed “cranberry sauce” off their menus, and hotels assured the public that they would not serve the berries.

Politicians pontificated through word and action:

Republican Vice President Nixon ate four heaping helpings of cranberry sauce  in front of newsmen while campaigning in Wisconsin.

Democratic Senator John F. Kennedy drank a tall glass of cranberry juice and then asked for a second one. Importantly — as I’m sure you remember — he was from Massachusetts — Land of the Cranberry.

Legislators jumped into the fray:

Dr. Boyd Shaffer, a member of American Cyanamid’s Test Team, was called to testify before Congress. He said:

“Why, it would be impossible to expose humans to aminotriazole in amounts that would be toxic, and besides there was no proof that it caused cancer in people.”

Unfortunately, Dr. Shaffer had credibility issues since Cyanamid was the chemical company that invented the weed killer. But he went on to describe the weed in detail. It was called “panic grass” he said.

Meanwhile, a one hit wonder Cranberry Blues made the pop music charts.

As the Cranberry Crisis lengthened, Ocean Spray asked the administration to declare s state of emergency in the five leading cranberry states: Wisconsin, Oregon, Washington, Massachusetts, and New Jersey. And reporters began coming up with headlines connecting Cranberry, Communism, and Cancer as “red zones.”

On November 19, a plan was implemented for the immediate testing of fresh cranberries. But it was too late to save the season from a 20% decrease in cranberry sales.

Secretary Flemming finally made a concession, posing for a photo op with his wife passing him a tray of cranberry sauce.

As for the White House, the press office had assured reporters that the President and Mrs. Eisenhower would be eating some of the nationally “approved” cranberry sauce at the White House Thanksgiving dinner table.

Everyone believed it until a dinner guest emerged from the meal and let it slip that the First Lady had insisted that applesauce, not cranberry sauce, be served.

In the end, the US government offered subsidies for the unsold cranberries which were tested and found to have no pesticide residue. In fact, after the holidays the government announced that 99% of the nation’s cranberry crop had not at all been contaminated.

In an omen of things to come, the San Francisco Chronicle detailed in its article titled “A Nation Without Cranberry Sauce!:”

“One housewife whom we know says she dumped her prepared cranberry jellies into the garbage can, then sat down and smoked a cigarette in relief at having just been saved from cancer.”

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Featured Photograph: Massachusetts Office of Travel and Tourism

Kitchen Photograph: Ethan on Flickr

Ocean Spray Photograph: Brent Danley on Flickr

Filed Under: Red Scare

The Blacklist on Broadway

October 28, 2020 by Lisa Reynolds Wolfe

Quietly and without fanfare, President Trump signed an executive order last week that, to me, is eerily reminiscent of the profiling that was common place during the Red Scare of the early Cold War years.

The order is titled Executive Order on Creating Schedule F in the Excepted Service, and it gives Trump the power to purge thousands of federal workers whose job protections have allowed them to remain apolitical over the past four years. (If you’d like to learn more about the executive order and its potential impact, you can just do a ‘google’ search.)

The administration says it’s all about getting rid of “poor performers.”  However, the workers targeted tend to include most of the non-partisan experts — scientists, doctors, lawyers, economists — whose work is supposed to be done in a way that is fact-driven and devoid of politics.

Maybe I’m jumping to conclusions. I know the Blacklist is on my mind because I just attended a “zoom” lecture on Broadway and the Blacklist, a history of the impact of the blacklist on New York theater by K. Kevyne Baar. Still, the current environment and the recent executive order remind me of all the talk about commies in the State Department back in the day. (If you’d like to know more about that, check out the post titled Witch Hunts.)

I’ve always been interested in the theater but, before this summer, I knew a lot more about blacklisting in Hollywood and on television than on the Great White Way. Then I read a fiction book titled The Chelsea Girls by Fiona Davis.

Pre publication advertising for The Chelsea Girls led me to believe that it was about the Cold War. I think that’s a stretch. It’s really fairly light reading about a friendship between two women that spans the decades, beginning in World War II.

The story about how the two girls got caught up in the Cold War is just one of several. Certainly it’s not central even though there is a role for Richard Nixon as a Congressman on the House Un American Activities Committee, and for Roy Cohn as investigator for Senator Joseph McCarthy. (Cohn is perhaps best known now for his role as Donald Trump’s lawyer.)

Even though the author asserts “I hewed closely to the stories of several blacklisted artists,” Davis’ work raises enough questions that a more scholarly history titled Broadway and the Blacklist is quite welcome.

Barr brings a lot to the table. She’s a former professional stage manager who also worked as an archivist for NYU’s Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives.

Here are  5 takeaways from her recent talk at NYU:

  • There was no blacklist on Broadway. The theater community — unions as well as management — wouldn’t capitulate to pressure from HUAC  — the House Un American Activities Committee.  You can learn more about HUAC here.
  • People who couldn’t work in Hollywood were able to work in  New York theater.  Lillian Hellman and Arthur Miller are good examples.
  • Arthur Miller wrote his play The Crucible in response to being accused of being a communist sympathizer in the 1950s.  You can read what he has to say about it here. You can rent or buy The Crucible on Amazon. The last time I checked it was also available on You Tube.
  • New York theater and the Hollywood film industry differed in two ways:
    The theater wasn’t dependent on advertising. Hollywood was.
    The New York audience kept coming!

Lastly, just think about this: What if the film industry had just said “we don’t care?”

____________________________________________

Photograph courtesy of https://newyorktheater.me.

Want to buy the books? These links will help fund Cold War Studies.

Filed Under: Red Scare

WITCH HUNTS

February 7, 2019 by Lisa Reynolds Wolfe

Have you watched the movie Trumbo? If you haven’t, stop reading now and start streaming. The film tells the story of Dalton Trumbo, a Hollywood screenwriter.

In 1947, Trumbo is at the top of the heap. His lot in life changes suddenly, though, when he is called to testify before the US Congress. Specifically, he and nine others — the Hollywood Ten — undergo a grilling by the House Un American Activities Committee.

“Are you now, or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?” he is asked.

Trumbo refuses to answer and, on November 24, 1947, a day after his testimony, he and the rest of the Ten are indicted for Contempt of Congress, and fired from their jobs.

On June 13, 1948, the Ten learn that their convictions have been upheld by the US Circuit Court of Appeals. Eight of them, including Trumbo, serve one year in prison. Each is assessed a fine of $1,000, and all are blacklisted upon their release. In other words, they aren’t able to work.

Now I’m not suggesting that you watch Trumbo because it’s 100% historically accurate. In fact, some critics have attacked the film.

Godfrey Cheshire of the Roger Ebert Journal wrote that Trumbo is ‘another of those simplistic, made-to-order films about the Hollywood blacklist in which the blacklisted movie folks are all innocent, in every conceivable way.’

Cheshire decried the film’s insinuation that Joseph McCarthy and the House Committee on Un-American Activities created the Hollywood blacklist. In reality, the blacklist was created by Hollywood studio chiefs. Cheshire also wrote that the film defended international communism: ‘it invites us to see the Communist Party USA as just another political party rather than as the domestic instrument of a hostile and ultra-murderous foreign tyranny.’

Since this film is fairly recent — it had its world premiere in 2015 — the above criticism gives you an idea of the schism over communism and the Red Scare that continues to this day. But before I talk about that, let’s go into a little more detail about what happened in the 1950s, and the contentious atmosphere that you can pick up on simply by watching the movie Trumbo.

Fear of communism was already fairly entrenched when Senator Joseph McCarthy (R-Wisconsin) came on the scene on February 8, 1950. A former Marine tail-gunner, he gave a now infamous speech to the Women’s Republican Club of Wheeling, West Virginia. In the speech, he charged that

The State Department ‘is thoroughly infested with Communists’.

He claimed that he had a list of 205 employees of the State Department who are either “card-carrying members or certainly loyal to the Communist Party.”

The next day, on February 9, he gave a similar speech in Salt Lake City, lowering the number of State Department commies to 57. Later, he explains that this is the number he meant all along.

As if Americans hadn’t been scared enough, things now went straight downhill. McCarthy was on a rampage, leaving thousands of ruined lives in his wake. In April 1953, the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Government Operations opened for business under McCarthy’s leadership. People — especially the press — muttered under their breath about the tyrant. But nobody spoke out.

Finally, four years after McCarthy started his tirade, on March 9, 1954, Edward R. Murrow, the popular CBS newscaster, had had enough. His TV series See It Now featured a “Report on Senator McCarthy.” According to the book Red Scared!, the program

includes clips of the pugnacious Red-baiter belching, picking his nose, and bullying witnesses while apparently in his cups.

“Upon what meat does Senator McCarthy feed?” Murrow asked.

The show was a smash hit and a follow-up critique of McCarthy aired on CBS the following week.

On April 8, 1954, McCarthy appeared on See It Now to respond. And on April 24, US Army vs. Senator Jos. McCarthy hearings commence and are carried live. Americans watch as “Tail-Gunner Joe” flames-out before the skilled probing of Army counsel Joseph Welch. By the time the hearings conclude on June 17, “McCarthy’s career is as good as over.”

Red Scare confusion

“Just a piece of history,” you might say.

“Doesn’t matter now. The US won the Cold War and the ‘commies’ are toast.”

Well, not so fast. Fairly recently The Huffington Post printed an article titled “The Media is On the Edge of a Murrow Moment” where they argue that Donald Trump’s inflammatory speech and unpopular policy proposals take us back to McCarthy’s witch hunt days.They argue:

Strangely, or perhaps not, Trump’s connection to McCarthy is more than metaphorical. (Indeed, the head of the Edward R. Murrow Center said Murrow would skewer Trump were he around today,)

Does this mean that the same forces of intolerance are around today as in the early 1950s? That we’ve just given them a new name? That instead of fighting commies, we’re fighting Muslims and Mexicans?

Trump scares his base

Some answer, of course. And they point to Trump’s close relationship to Senator McCarthy’s right hand man, the lawyer Roy Cohn, a close adviser to Donald Trump. In fact, Cohn was “the Donald’s” lawyer for 13 years. In a June 20, 2016 article, The New York Times says:

Decades later, Mr. Cohn’s influence on Mr. Trump is unmistakable. Mr. Trump’s wrecking ball of a presidential bid — the gleeful smearing of his opponents, the embracing of bluster as brand — has been a Roy Cohn number on a grand scale. Mr. Trump’s response to the Orlando massacre, with his ominous warnings of a terrorist attack that could wipe out the country and his conspiratorial suggestions of a Muslim fifth column in the United States, seemed to have been ripped straight out of the Cohn playbook.

Is it a stretch to equate the two? Well, here’s one more movie reference for you. Have you seen George Clooney in Good Night and Good Luck?

He plays Edward R. Murrow, and, in a memorable scene, he repeats the closing remarks in Murrow’s pivotal newscast. You can see it now in the clip below.

What do you think? Is this the role that the media plays in today’s world? Just substitute Trump for McCarthy and see what you think. And, by the way, why don’t we have a newscaster with Murrow’s gravitas anymore?

Filed Under: Red Scare

WHAT RED SCARE?

January 22, 2019 by Lisa Reynolds Wolfe

Sandwiched between the Great Depression and the US entry into World War II, the 1939 World’s Fair opened in Queens, New York, on April 30, 1939. The celebration was so ambitious that a new bridge — the Bronx-Whitestone — and a new subway line were added to New York City’s infrastructure.

Opening day was full of symbolism, as the Fair’s Grand Opening was held on the 150th birthday of George Washington’s inauguration. Never mind that the Sunday was sweltering. Hordes of visitors showed up to see the fair’s pavilions, representing many of the world’s nations — sixty to be exact. Each creation was its own small world complete with exhibits, artifacts, food, and performances.

1939 World's Fair

Postcard of George Washington at the 1939 World’s Fair

Walt Disney liked the concept so much that he modeled EPCOT on it.

He said:

The presence of sixty foreign participants makes the Fair a true parliament of the world. Here the peoples of the world unite in amity and understanding, impelled by a friendly rivalry and working toward a common purpose: to set forth the achievements of today and their contributions to the ‘World of Tomorrow’.

Unfortunately it didn’t take long for these friendly rivalries to erupt into world war. But on the Fair’s opening day, all was well.

At the center of it all were the 700-foot Trylon and 200-foot Perisphere, the symbols of the fair. The visitors loved them, referring to them as the spike and the ball.

1939 World's Fair Symbols

Spike and Ball at the 1939 World’s Fair

Inside the 16-story Perisphere, in an auditorium the size of Radio City Music Hall, thousands rode on two moving balconies and looked down on Democracy, a mammoth model of the city of tomorrow — a city of broad streets, many parks, and large buildings.

America’s largest corporations promoted their newest and most advanced products. Westinghouse even made a robot named Electro, who smoked cigarettes, counted on his fingers, and swept the house.

“Hard to top that,” you might think. “Well, guess again.”

Not to be outdone, the Soviets unveiled a 79-foot tall statue of “Joe the Worker.” Joe was made of stainless steel, and spent his days guarding the entrance to the Soviet Union’s pavilion. Also known as “Big Joe” or “working Joe,” the statue was mounted on a 188-foot pedestal, increasing his height substantially. To make his presence even more in your face, he held an illuminated Red Star, “the symbol of communism.” According to newspaper reports, Joe’s outstretched hand “could be seen for miles.”

Joe the worker at the 1939 World's Fair

Joe The Worker

The Soviet pavilion itself was massive. In fact, they had two pavilions.

One was a flamboyant display of life and achievement in the Soviet Union designed to promote tourism and to show the increased cooperation with the West that was evident in the 1930s. The other was an Arctic Pavilion, dedicated to Soviet achievements in the Arctic.

Actually the Russians had outspent the Americans on the fair — $4 million to $3 million.The facades of their building were decorated with eleven large panels representing the eleven Soviet Republics. Inside, there were paintings and sculptures by leading Soviet artists, and handicrafts from Central Asia and the Caucasus — wood carvings, lacquer work, embroidery, and hand woven carpets and rugs. Soviet films were playing, and there were performances by the Red Army Ensemble of Singers, Dancers and Musicians. They even had a reproduction of one of the stations in Moscow’s new “palace subway,” and a replica of the Palace of Soviets constructed in semiprecious stones.

Soviet Pavillion 1939

Soviet Pavillion at the 1939 World’s Fair

Hungry? Thirsty? Visitors could taste Soviet food and wine while viewing an “Intertourist Map of the Soviet Union” that featured sample travel itineraries throughout the USSR.. They also distributed informational brochures on specific destinations like Sochi. The brochure boasts:

The Caucasian shores of the Black Sea, that blissful sunny corner of the globe, has always enticed the traveler with the incomparable beauty of its scenery and the wonderful healing power of its climate . . . . This lovely resort stretches for 25 kilometers along the sea coast. Magnificent sanatoria, rest-homes, clinics, and hotels nestle amid . . . fine bathing places and sports stations.

As if this wasn’t enough, the Soviets went a step further. As mentioned above, they had a separate Arctic Pavilion, close to the main Pavilion, that was dedicated to Soviet Achievements in the Arctic. Outside, there was the airplane that Valery Chkalov flew when he made the first transpolar flight from Washington to Vancouver, Washington. Inside, visitors could see the actual hut and equipment used by the Papanin Expedition, which made scientific observations for nine months on the North Pole ice flow.

According to fair documents:

On the ceiling, on an illuminated map, the routes of the historic transpolar flights of Chkalov and Gromov, the recent flight of Kokkinaki from Moscow to America, and the route of the Papanin drift are shown. Additional exhibits record other heroic episodes and the vast scientific, industrial, and cultural progress in the Soviet Arctic.

The Soviet displays were among the most popular destinations at the fair. But they didn’t triumph for long. They earned a lot of revenue for the fair, but they also earned a lot of displeasure from members of the public who considered the flamboyant structure to be politically insulting to the host country.

Remember “Joe the Worker?” Reaction to him is a good example of what was going on.

Complaints were lodged that Joe was taller than the American flag that flew over the fairground so fair organizers increased the height of the flag. Still, the complaints continued.

Talk about one upsmanship!

towering Joe the Worker

Towering Joe the Worker

Tension between pro Soviet and anti Soviet fairgoers got a lot worse in September of 1939 when Germany launched an invasion of Poland, The Polish contingent shrouded its display in black, and the status of the Russian Pavilion came into question.

Stalin and Hitler had signed a non-aggression pact just a month before the invasion, an action that many said made the Soviets complicit in the events that triggered the Second World War.

It wasn’t long before the US State Department received a telegram from the US Embassy in Moscow stating that

the government of the Soviet Union does not intend to participate in the NY World’s Fair of 1940.

The Soviets were too busy, I guess, because at this time, they were staging an invasion of Finland.

Soon the USSR Pavilion disappeared from the Fair. Stalin’s bust was taken down, the transpolar plane was dismantled, and “Joe the worker” was taken apart piece by piece and loaded on a ship headed back to the Soviet Union where he would be reconstructed. The site was taken over by a space called the “American Common.”

OH!

After a short period of time, cooperation between Germany and the USSR began to deteriorate. The Soviet Union switched sides and became an ally of United States. But the two never really trusted each other and as soon as the war was over a new — and even more intense — Red Scare was on the horizon.

Filed Under: Red Scare

R is for Red Scare

March 15, 2018 by Lisa Reynolds Wolfe

The Red Scare was the name for the anti-communist militancy that swept the US in the years after World War II. Postwar rhetoric about Godless Communism infused all media and invaded Americans’ everyday lives. Fear of spies, threats of a communist takeover, and paranoia about nuclear war were exploited as reality as well as fantasy, and were offered in large doses in print and on film, often as entertainment but with psychologically devastating results for the audience. Red-baiting reached its peak in the US in the mid to late 1950s. The power of ant-Communist propaganda was so effective that Americans relinquished basic rights and liberties. Justice William O. Douglas warned in 1952 that

the restriction of free thought and free speech is the most dangerous of all subversions. It is the one anti- American act that could most easily defeat us.

Photograph by Hans Splinter (Flickr)

_______________________________________________________________________________

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Filed Under: Red Scare

Take a Look at The Red Scare Issue of Cold War Magazine

July 7, 2016 by Lisa Reynolds Wolfe

Our new issue of Cold War Magazine is all about the Red Scare — America’s fear of communism run rampant! Americans were afraid. And there were lots of scare tactics! Click here to go straight to the magazine.

During the First Red Scare, after the Russian Revolution of 1917, Americans were so frightened of “commies” that President Wilson committed arms and troops to a war against Bolshevism abroad. At the same time, “America First” Fanatics bolstered the level of anti-Communist propaganda at home. BTW, have you heard that term lately? Don’t miss our article on The First Red Scare.

There was a brief breather from running Red Scared between the two world wars. But it didn’t last for long. You can read all about that in our article titled What Red Scare?.

Want a brief overview? Not of the real Soviet Menace which threatened the world with nuclear destruction. We’re talking instead about anti-Communist propaganda run amok, scaring Americans into thinking that their world could end in a heartbeat — and with very little warning. Want to know more? Check out A Superficial History of the Red Scare.

Scare tactics have been around forever, I guess, but they seem especially timely now that the US is in the midst of an extremely ugly American election season. Witch Hunts is all about Joe McCarthy and Donald J. Trump. Are the same forces of intolerance around now as in the 1950s? Some think just the name has changed and that instead of fighting “commies” we’re targeting Muslims and Mexicans. Read Witch Hunts and then decide. Is it a stretch to equate the two?

In 1947, Look Magazine published an article titled How to Identify an American Communist. We take a second look. Do we really want to start being so suspicious again?

Finally, the issue ends with a baker’s dozen of Red Scare Movies. Lots to keep you entertained during the Dog Days of Summer.

Hope you enjoy the issue. To read, share, or download just click the image below.

Let us know what you think!

Filed Under: Red Scare

THE RED SCARE IN THE COLD WAR’S EARLY YEARS

December 8, 2015 by Lisa Reynolds Wolfe

Early Cold War Red Scare

1947: The first issue of the anti-Communist periodical Plain Talk is published under the editorial direction of Isaac Don Levine. It is financed by San Francisco businessman Alfred Kohlberg. A weekly called Counterattack follows shortly, published by the American Business Consultants — a group founded by a trio of ex-FBI agents, dedicated to uncovering Reds who have infiltrated company unions.

Spring 1947: Athens (Greece) becomes one of the biggest American intelligence posts in the world.

April 9, 1947: Demonstrations take place in Bogata (Columbia) at the Conference of American States. Among the activists is a young Cuban radical named Fidel Castro.

April 18, 1947: Financier Bernard Baruch addresses the South Carolina legislature. He warns: “Let us not be deceived — today we are in the midst of a Cold War.”

May 1, 1947: Rear Admiral Roscoe Hillenkoetter is sworn in as Director of the Central Intelligence Service, replacing General Vandenberg. He is the third man to hold the post in 15 months.

May 13, 1947: The Senate approves the Taft-Hartley Labor Act, requiring labor leaders to take an oath stating that they are not Communists.

June 5, 1947: Recently appointed Secretary of State George Marshall gives a speech at Harvard advocating major economic aid for struggling European countries to keep communism from gaining a foothold. The $12 billion Marshall Plan dovetails with the Truman Doctrine, implementing the policy of containment advocated by George Kennan. As LaFeber says, they are Two Halves of the Same Walnut. For his vision, Marshall is named Time Magazine’s Man of the Year.

June 20, 1947: The Senate votes to override the veto of the Taft-Hartley Act registered by President Truman on that same day.

June 27, 1947: A congressional committee holds secret hearings that lead to the formal creation of the CIA at summer’s end. Allen Dulles — not Hillenkoetter — is selected to conduct a secret intelligence seminar for a few select members of Congress. Dulles, the OSS Chief in Switzerland, had a carefully cultivated reputation as an American master spy. He was regarded by the Republican leadership as the director of central intelligence in exile. A duplicitous man, Dulles wasn’t above misleading Congress or his colleagues or even his commander in chief.

July 26, 1947: President Truman signs the National Security Act of 1947, giving birth to the Central Intelligence Agency on September 18. The agency faces fierce and relentless opponents within the Pentagon and the State Department (the agencies whose reports it was supposed to coordinate). It has no formal charter or congressionally appropriated funds for 2 more years. Also, its secrecy conflicts with the openness of American democracy.

The CIA’s stated mission is to provide the president with secret information essential to the national security of the United States.

The National Security Act says nothing about secret operations overseas. It instructs the CIA to correlate, evaluate, and disseminate intelligence — and to perform “other functions and duties relating to intelligence affecting the national security.” Hundreds of major covert actions will take advantage of this loophole.

September 26, 1947: The new National Security Council (also created by the National Security Act) holds its first meeting. The NSC, at this time, is comprised of President Truman, the secretary of defense, the secretary of state, and the military chiefs. It seldom convenes and — when it does– President Truman is rarely in attendance. Interestingly, the conduct of covert action requires the direct or implied authority of this group.

September 27, 1947: George Kennan sends (the first) Secretary of Defense James Forrestal a detailed paper calling for the establishment of a “guerilla warfare corps.” Forrestal agrees. Together Kennan and Forrestal set the American clandestine service in motion.

October 1947: The Comintern, now called the Cominform, is revived.

October 20, 1947: The House Un American Activities Committee (HUAC) holds Hollywood hearings under the stewardship of J. Parnell Thomas. Gary Cooper, Robert Taylor, Ronald Reagan, and Robert Montgomery testify as cooperative witnesses, along with studio executive heads Jack Warner, Walt Disney, and Dore Shary. Ginger Rogers’ mother is another cooperative witness.

October 21-23, 1947: The Hollywood Ten — Alvah Bessie, Herbert Biberman, Lester Cole, Edward Dmytryk, Ring Lardner Jr., John Howard Larson, Albert Maltz, Samuel Ornitz, Adrian Scott, and Dalton Trumbull — testify before HUAC. They repeatedly cite the Fifth Amendment in answer to the question, “Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of the Communist Party?”

October 24, 1947: Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Spencer Tracy, Katharine Hepburn, Groucho Marx, Frank Sinatra, Ava Gardner, Ronald Reagan, John Huston, Danny Kaye, and dozens of other Hollywood actors, directors, and screenwriters band together under the name Committee for the First Amendment in protest of HUAC’s handling of the Hollywood Ten. Several of the stars charter a plane they call the Star of the Red Sea. The plane touches down in St. Louis, Kansas City, Chicago, and, finally, Washington DC, giving a press conference at each stop.

November 24, 1947: All of the Hollywood Ten are indicted for contempt of Congress, and they’re fired from their jobs the next day.

December 14, 1947: The National Security Council issues its first top secret orders to the CIA. The agency is to execute “covert psychological operations designed to counter Soviet and Soviet-inspired activities.” Specifically, the CIA sets out to beat the Reds in the Italian elections set for April 1948. Congress never gives a go-ahead. The mission is illegal from the start. The agency is going beyond their charter.

Millions of dollars are delivered to Italian politicians and the priests of Catholic Action, a political arm of the Vatican. Suitcases of cash change hands in the four-star Hassler Hotel. Italy’s Christian Democrats win by a comfortable margin and form a government that excludes communists. A long romance between the party and the agency begins.

The CIA’s practice of purchasing elections and politicians with bags of cash is repeated in Italy — and many other nations — for the next 25 years.

December 27, 1947: The Civil Service Loyalty Review Board begins testing the loyalty of federal employees.

March 5, 1948: General Lucius D. Clay, chief of American occupation forces in Berlin, sends a cable to Washington saying he has a gut feeling that a Soviet attack on Berlin could come at any minute. The Pentagon leaks the cable.

March 6, 1948: President Truman goes before Congress warning that the Soviet Union and its agents are threatening disaster. He demands and wins immediate approval of the Marshall Plan.

The plan offers billions of dollars to the free world to repair the damage done by war and to create an American economic and political barricade against the Soviets. The US will help rebuild 19 capitals — 16 in Europe and 3 in Asia — using an American blueprint. George Kennan and James Forrestal are among the plan’s principal authors. Allen Dulles serves as a consultant.

A secret codicil gives the CIA the capability to conduct political warfare. It lets the agency skim uncounted millions of dollars from the Marshall Plan. But how?

After Congress approves the Marshall Plan, it appropriates about $13.7 billion over 5 years. In addition, any nation receiving aid from the plan has to set aside an equivalent sum in its own currency. Five percent of those funds — $685 million — are made available to the CIA through the plan’s overseas offices. This guarantees that wherever the plan flourishes in Europe and in Asia there will be a fertile environment for American spy craft.

Secret funds are the heart of secret operations. The CIA now has an unfailing source of untraceable cash. The scheme remains secret until after the cold war ends.

March 31 – April 1, 1948: The Russians give the first orders forbidding the entrance of military trains into — and the exporting of freight out of — Berlin without their approval.

May 4, 1948: George Kennan sends a top secret paper to about 20 people in the State Department, the White House, and the Pentagon. He proclaims “the inauguration of organized political warfare” and calls for the creation of a new clandestine service to conduct covert operations worldwide. He states clearly that the Marshall Plan, the Truman Doctrine, and the CIA’s covert operations are all interlocking parts of a grand strategy against Stalin.

The money that the CIA siphons from the Marshall Plan will finance a network of false fronts to recruit foreign agents. These foreigners, under CIA control, are to create underground political groups in the free nations of Europe. The underground is to spur “all-out liberation movements” behind the Iron Curtain.

May 19, 1948: Congressmen Richard M. Nixon’s and Karl Mundt’s bill to “protect the United States against un-American and subversive activities” — the Mundt-Nixon Bill — passes in the House by a vote of 319 to 58. The bill, also known as the Internal Security Act, makes it a crime to attempt to establish a totalitarian dictatorship by any means. In effect, this makes the existence of th Communist Party a violation of the law.

June 1948: Washington Witch Hunt by Bert Andrews, decrying the recent abuses of civil liberties by Red hunters, is published by Random House.

June 18, 1948: Kennan’s plans are approved in a secret order from the National Security Council. NSC Directive 10/2 calls for covert operations to attack the Soviets around the world. The strike force Kennan conceives to carry out the secret war is called the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC). It’s a cover placed within the CIA. Its chief, though, is to report to the secretaries of defense and state because the director of central intelligence is so weak.

State and Defense differ in their objectives. State wants to carry out “rumor-spreading, bribery, the organization of non-communist fronts.” Forrestal and the Pentagon want “guerilla movements . . . underground armies . . . sabotage and assassination.”

June 23, 1948: At Frank Wisner’s urging, the Western powers institute a new German currency. In immediate response, the Soviets blockade Berlin. The United States mounts an airlift to beat the blockade.

June 28, 1948: Yugoslavia’s Communist Party, under Marshal Tito, is expelled from the Cominform, becoming the first Soviet satellite nation to break free of Moscow’s rule.

June 28, 1948: The total blockade of West Berlin begins. Over the next 11 months, the United States and Britain will airlift food, medicine, and fuel to help maintain the city and the well-being of its occupants.

July 20, 1948: After a 13 month investigation, a New York grand jury returns indictments against 12 members of the National Board of the Communist Party, who are charged with conspiracy to overthrow the government of the United States.

July 28, 1948: Elizabeth Bentley, known as the Red Spy Queen, testifies before a Senate subcommittee and, 3 days later, to HUAC. She concedes that she was a courier to a Washington-based Soviet spy ring during the war. She also implicates Whittaker Chambers, the man she replaced.

August 25, 1948: In what has become known as Confrontation Day, Whittaker Chambers testifies before HUAC regarding his earlier acquaintance with Alger Hiss. Hiss looks on.

September 1, 1948: Frank Wisner takes charge of American covert action. His mission is to roll the Soviets back to Russia’s old boundaries and free Europe from Communist control. Covert operations become the agency’s dominant force, remaining so for 20 years.

December 15, 1948: Former State Department official Alger Hiss is indicted on 2 counts of perjury for denying his role in passing classified documents to the Russians. His first trial ends on July 8, 1949 with a hung jury.

Late 1948-Early 1949: Planning begins for Radio Free Europe.

Start of 1949: The CIA lacks the legal authority to carry our covert action against any nation. It has no constitutional charter from Congress and no legally authorized funds for covert missions. When engaging in covert action, the agency is operating outside the laws of the United States.

January 1949: Chinese Communist forces enter Beijing.

January 1949: Allen Dulles presents the results of a top secret investigation into the structural weaknesses of the CIA to President Truman. The report asserts:

the CIA is churning out reams of paper containing few (if any) facts on the communist threat
the agency has no spies among the Soviets and their satellites
the CIA is not yet “an adequate intelligence service” and it will take “years of patient work to do the job” of transforming it.
The report remained classified for 50 years. The implicit argument that the agency needs a bold new leader is disregarded. The National Security Council orders Director Hillenkoetter to implement the report but he never does.

Dulles begins telling his friends in Washington that unless something drastic is done at the CIA, the president faces disaster abroad.

February 1949: Hillenkoetter, the Director of Central Intelligence, meets privately with Carl Vinson, a Georgia Democrat and the chair of the House Armed Services Committee. He warns that Congress must pass formal legislation blessing the CIA and granting it a budget as soon as possible. He argues that the agency needs legal cover. Hillenkoetter submits the Central Intelligence Act of 1949 to Congress for their consideration.

May 12, 1949: The Berlin Blockade is lifted. Great Britain and the US have flown 272,000 missions, airlifting 2,325 million tons of supplies to West Berliners.

May 27, 1949: The CIA Act is rammed through Congress. Congress gives the agency the widest conceivable powers. The act gives the agency the ability to do almost anything it wants as long as Congress provides the money in the annual package. Approval of the secret budget by a small armed services subcommittee was understood to constitute a legal authorization for all secret operations.

A key clause of the 1949 Act allows the CIA to let 100 foreigners a year into the US in the name of national security, granting them “permanent residence without regard to their inadmissibility under the immigration or any other laws.”

By 1949, the US was willing to work with almost anyone against Stalin.

June 13, 1949: The Hollywood Ten, cited for contempt of congress, learn their convictions have been upheld by the US Circuit Court of Appeals. Eight of them serve one year in prison. Herbert Biberman and Edward Dmytryk serve 6 months. Each of the Ten is assessed a fine of $1,000. All are blacklisted upon their release.

July 1949: Under pressure from the army, the CIA takes over the Gehlen Group, an intelligence agency established in June 1946 by US occupation authorities in the United States Zone of Germany

July 1, 1949: Judith Coplon is sentenced to prison on charges of espionage. Judith is an alleged KGB spy whose trials, convictions and successful appeals have a profound influence on espionage prosecutions during the McCarthy era.

July 18, 1949: Baseball star Jackie Robinson testifies before HUAC, addressing the question of whether people of color in the US will be willing to fight against Russia if war is declared. He thinks they will.

August 6, 1949: Secretary of State Dean Acheson announces that the US is withdrawing support of Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist Chinese government.

August 27, 1949: Famed singer, actor, and Soviet supporter, Paul Robeson, participates in a concert in Peekskill, NY. The music is disrupted when a riot breaks out. Robeson and Pete Seeger, among other stars, return a week later to give a second concert. That one also ends when an ugly riot ensues.

August 29, 1949: Russia detonates its first atomic bomb. Americans don’t learn of this until President Truman announces the fact at a September 23 press conference.

September 1949: An air force crew flying out of Alaska detects traces of radioactivity in the atmosphere.

September 5, 1949: A team of Ukrainian dissidents sponsored by the CIA lands near the city of LVOV in the Ukraine, penetrating the Soviet Union, but “the Soviets quickly eliminated the agents.” Still, the operation sets off a huge wave of enthusiasm at CIA headquarters.

The CIA dispatches dozens of Ukrainian agents by air and land. Almost every one is captured. Soviet intelligence officers use the prisoners to feed back disinformation. Then they kill them.

After 5 years of “abortive missions, CIA discontinued this approach.” In the long run, “the Agency’s effort to penetrate the Iron Curtain using Ukrainian agents was ill-fated and tragic.”

Still, Frank Wisner starts new paramilitary adventures all over Europe.

September 20, 1949: The CIA confidently declares that the Soviet Union won’t produce an atomic weapon for at least another 4 years.

September 21, 1949: The Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) is founded.

September 23, 1949: Truman announces to the world that Stalin has the bomb.

September 29, 1949: The CIA’s chief of scientific intelligence reports that his office lacks the talent to track Moscow’s efforts to build weapons of mass destruction. He reports that the agency’s work on Soviet atomic weapons has been an “almost total failure” at every level.

The Pentagon frantically commands the CIA to place its agents in Moscow in order to steal the Red Army’s military plans. Richard Helms reflects: “ the possibility of recruiting and running any such sources was as improbable as placing resident spies on the planet Mars.”

October 1949: Four weeks after the first flight into the Ukraine, Wisner teams up with the British to run rebels into communist Albania, the poorest and most isolated nation in Europe. He sees Albania as fertile ground for a resistance army formed from exiled royalists and impoverished loyalists in Rome and Athens. There are many failed missions. The agents who survive were taken prisoner, and their messages back to the Athens station are controlled by their captors.

The flights go on for 4 years. Roughly 200 of the CIA’s foreign agents die. Almost no one in the American government knows.

October 7, 1949: The German Democratic Republic (East Germany) is formed.

October 14, 1949: Eleven leaders of the American Communist Party are convicted of advocating the violent overthrow of the US government, a violation of the 1940 Smith Act. Their 9 month trial generates 21,157 pages of testimony and costs the government a million dollars to prosecute. The trial is held in NY City under Judge Harold R. Medina. After sentencing the Red Eleven to 5 year prison terms, Medina is celebrated on the cover of Time Magazine (October 24, 1949). Among those who testify: FBI counterspy Herbert A. Philbrick, a Boston-based agent who had spent the last 9 months infiltrating Communist organizations, and Matt Cvetic, whose undercover activities took place in Pittsburg. Their escapades would soon be dramatized in autobiographical books, radio shows, a television series, and a movie.

December 7, 1949: China officially becomes a Communist country after Chiang Kai-shek and his Nationalist army flee to Formosa (Taiwan), leaving Beijing to the forces of Mao Zedong.

December 18, 1949: Mao Zedong and Josef Stalin meet for the first time — in Moscow. They will meet only once more, on January 22, 1950.

December 18, 1949: Nikita Khruschev relocates from the Ukraine to Moscow, where he is appointed a secretary of the All-Union Central Committee.

Early 1950: Frank Wisner dreams up a new assault on the Iron Curtain under the leadership of Bill Coffin with the support of the Solidarists, a Russian ultra right wing group. The CIA and the Solidarists first smuggle leaflets into Soviet barracks in East Germany. Then they launch balloons bearing thousands of pamphlets. Then they send 4 man parachute missions in unmarked planes flying as far east as the outskirts of Moscow. One by one the Solidarist agents float down to Russia and are captured and killed. The CIA is delivering its agents to the Russian secret police.

During the 1950s, hundreds of the CIA’s foreign agents are sent to their deaths in Russia, Poland, Romania, Ukraine, and the Baltic States. No accounts are kept and no penalty is assessed for failure. The missions are seen as a matter of national survival for the United States.

Years later, the CIA learns that the Soviets had known every aspect of the operations from the start. The training camps in Germany had been infiltrated.

Note: After leaving the CIA Coffin becomes known as William Sloane Coffin. He is the chaplain of Yale and one of the most passionate antiwar voices in American during the 1960s. Regarding his years in the CIA, he says: “We were quite naive about the use of American power.”

January 21, 1950: The 2nd trial of Alger Hiss ends when he is convicted of perjury. He is sentenced to 5 years in federal prison.

February 9, 1950: Senator Joseph McCarthy (R-Wisconsin), a former Marine tail-gunner, gives a speech before the Women’s Republican Club of Wheeling, West Virginia. He charges that the State Department “is thoroughly infested with Communists.” He waves a piece of paper that he claims (in some reports) bears the names of 205 employees in the State Department who are either “card-carrying members or certainly loyal to the Communist Party.” The following day he delivers a similar speech in Salt Lake City, but now the number has been lowered to 57. He later says that this is the number he meant all along.

March 1, 1950: Klaus Fuchs, German-born atomic research physicist who worked at Los Alamos before relocating to England, pleads guilty to violating the Official Secrets Act by giving the Russians atomic secrets. This activity dates back to 1942. He is sentenced to 14 years in prison.

April 10, 1950: The US Supreme Court upholds the power of congressional committees to compel witnesses to state whether or not they are now, or ever have been, Communists.

June 1950: Red Channels: The Report of Communist Influence in Radio and Television is published by a team of ex-FBI agents who published the newsletter Counterattack. A pamphlet 213 pages long, it lists 151 names, 130 organizations, and 17 publications with suspicious ties to Communist Doctrine.

June 1950: The one true source of intelligence on the Far East from the final days of WWII until the end of 1949 is American signals intelligence. On the eve of the Korean War, William Wolf Weisband, a Soviet spy, penetrates the code breaking nerve center. A linguist who translates broken messages from Russian into English, Weisband was recruited as a spy by Moscow in the 1930s. He single-handedly shatters the ability of the US to read Soviet secret dispatches. The result is the creation of the National Security Agency (NSA), the signals-intelligence service that grows to dwarf the CIA in size and power.

June 25, 1950: The US faces a surprise attack that looks like the start of World War III when the People’s Democratic Republic of North Koreas invades the Republic of South Korea.

The Korean War is the first great test for the CIA. It gives the agency its first real leader: General Walter Bedell Smith. Bedell Smith became the 4th Director of Central Intelligence in 4 years. His task is to learn the secrets of the Kremlin.

In his first days in office, Bedell Smith discovers that Frank Wisner reports to the State Department and the Pentagon, not to the Director of Central Intelligence. In a fit of fury, he informs Wisner (the Chief of Covert Operations) that his freewheeling days are over.

August 1950: Senator Pat McCarran of Nevada sees his Internal Security Act passed into law. It requires any “Communist action” or Communist front” organization to register with the attorney general. The officers of such ‘subversive’ organizations must also register. President Truman is alarmed by the broad powers of the law and calls the bill “unnecessary, ineffective, and dangerous.” His veto is overridden by both Houses of Congress. In effect, this makes the act of registration an admission of guilt in belonging to an illegal organization, while the failure to register is also a crime.

October 11, 1950: President Truman leaves for Wake Island to meet with General Douglas MacArthur. The general hates the CIA and does his best to ban its officers from the Far East. He insists that the communist Chinese would never enter the Korean War. The CIA more or less concurs, assuring Truman that it sees “no convincing indications of an actual Chinese Communist intention to resort to full-scale intervention in Korea . . . barring a Soviet decision for total war.”

Early November 1950: 100,000 Chinese troops attack and almost push the Americans into the sea.

The CIA has misread every global crisis over the past year: the Soviet atom bomb, the Korean War, the Chinese invasion.

December 1950: President Truman declares a national emergency and recalls General Dwight David Eisenhower to active duty.

December 1950: The Senate creates their own version of the McCarran Act, the Internal Security Subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Thanks to Red Scared a book by Michael Barson and Steven Heller, for the information presented in this post.

Photograph by SarahTz on Flickr.

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THE RED SCARE INTENSIFIES AND THE COLD WAR BEGINS: A TIMELINE

October 21, 2015 by Lisa Reynolds Wolfe

THE RED SCARE: 1944-1947

1944: Sam Wood, a prominent Hollywood director and producer, founds the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals to confront what he saw as a Communist takeover of Hollywood.  (Sam was best known for directing such Hollywood hits as A Night at the Opera, A Day at the Races, Goodbye, Mr. Chips, and The Pride of the Yankees.)

December 8, 1944: Moscow’s party newspaper, Pravda, launches an attack on William White’s soon-to-be published book About Russians. The book argues that Russian workers have no freedom, and that Russian industry copies American techniques.

January 3, 1945: HUAC (the House Un-American Activities Committee) is voted a permanent subcommittee of the US House of Representatives.

February 3-11, 1945: The Yalta Conference with Stalin, Roosevelt, and Churchill is held in Crimea. Roosevelt basically signs over control of Poland, Romania, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Bulgaria to the USSR. Consequently, Stalin agrees to enter the war against Japan once the fighting in Europe has ended.

April 12, 1945: President Roosevelt dies. His successor, Harry Truman, is left to handle the Cold War. Right before his death Roosevelt wrote to Churchill saying: “We can’t do business with Stalin, He has broken every one of the promises he made at Yalta.”

April 25, 1945: The founding conference of the United Nations begins in San Francisco. Attendees include all twenty-six states that banded together in 1942 against the Axis, including the USSR.

June 4, 1945: The Daily Worker reports that the National Board of the Communist Political Association has repudiated its wartime policy of cooperation with capitalism.

June 26, 1945: The UN Charter is signed on the final day of the founding conference.

July 16, 1945: The first Atomic bomb is tested at Alamogordo, New Mexico, under the code name Trinity.

July 17-August 2, 1945: Truman takes FDR’s place when the Big Three convene at Potsdam. In the middle of the conference, Churchill is voted out of office. He’s replaced on July 25 by Britain’s new Prime Minister Clement Attlee.

September 1945: A code clerk at the Russian Embassy in Ottowa (Canada), Igor Gouzenko defects with 109 pages of classified documents. He’s been part of a spy ring that collected atomic secrets and sent them back to Moscow. As a result of his revelations, several spies are uncovered, including atomic scientist Alan Nunn May and Canadian Parliament member Fred Rose.

October 18, 1945: Robert Oppenheimer, the head of the Manhattan Project that developed the A-bomb, resigns as director at Los Alamos. He will become quite vocal in his opposition to the development of the H-bomb. In the 1990s, Russian archives reveal that at least twenty-nine Soviet agents penetrated the Manhattan Project.

October 24, 1945: The United Nations Charter is ratified by fifty-one founding nations at the San Francisco Conference. Its first Secretary General is an American State Department official named Alger Hiss, who had also attended the “Big Three” Yalta conference.

November 14, 1945: A “U.S.A./U.S.S.R. Allies for Peace” rally, sponsored by the National Council of Soviet Friendship, is held at Madison Square Garden in New York. Among those sending good wishes for the event are General Dwight D. Eisenhower, Katherine Hepburn, and Orson Wells.

November 16, 1945: General Dwight D. Eisenhower testifies before the House Military Affairs Committee that “Nothing guides Russian policy so much as a desire for friendship with the United States.”

January 10, 1946: The first meeting of the United Nations convenes in London.

February 1946: Stalin announces a new kind of five year plan — an arms build-up in anticipation of a military conflict with the Western powers. Some say this is a declaration of World War 3.

February 1946: Earl Browder, acting head of the Communist Party USA since 1930, is expelled from the party for deviationism. In actuality, this meant that he supported the policies of FDR.

February 22, 1946:  The State Department’s George F. Kennan, writing as Mr. X, sends his “long telegram.” It’s really a nineteen page essay that argues that the Soviets are bent on expansionism due to their “traditional and instinctive sense of insecurity.” Kennan advocates a proactive policy of “containment,” and warns that the idea of “peaceful coexistence” with the USSR is a pipedream.

March 5, 1946: As a guest of President Truman, Winston Churchill delivers his famous Iron Curtain speech at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri: “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent . . .”

March 21, 1946: The Strategic Air Command (SAC), the Tactical Air Command (TAC), and the Air Defense Command (ADC) are established.

1946: England’s Alan Nunn May becomes the first atom spy to be tried and convicted of giving secrets to the Russians. He is sentenced to ten years in prison, but serves only about two-thirds of his time.

 March 12, 1947: President Truman addresses a joint session of Congress. He calls for $400 million in aid to Greece and Turkey to help them fight off the “encroachment of Communism.” The Truman Doctrine was resoundingly passed.

Thanks to Red Scared a book by Michael Barson and Steven Heller, for the information presented in this post.

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