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By Root 854 0

George Simons, told the committee that “more than half of the agitators in the so-called Bolshevik revolution were Yiddish” and most of these “apostate Jews” had come from Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Simons also assured the committee that the revolution had been financed by Germany, leading Senator Lee Overman of North Carolina to state that “it would be a very remarkable thing if the Bolshevik movement started in this country, financed by Germans, would it not?” Senator William King of Utah asked the same witness whether the Bolsheviks, “the males, rape and ravish and despoil women at will?” “They certainly do,” was the answer. They are, Simons said, “the dirtiest dogs” he had ever seen in his life.21 The testimony was as fantastic and absurd as the host of manufactured atrocity stories of German soldiers entering convents to rape nuns, but it and disinformation like it galvanized the country into political passivity. The later anticommunist witch hunts differed little in their simplicity or crudity.

The Times summarized the committee’s eight months of investigations with the headline “Senators Tell What Bolshevism in America Means.” The newspaper reproduced from the report 29 “salient features which constitute the program of Bolshevism as it exists to-day in Russia and is presented to the rest of the world as a panacea for all ills.” These included “the confiscation of all factories, mills, mines and industrial institutions and the delivery of the control and operation thereof to the employees therein”; “the absolute separation of churches and schools”; “the establishment, through marriage and divorce laws, of a method for the legalization of prostitution, when the same is engaged in by consent of the parties”; “the refusal to recognize the existence of God in its governmental and judicial proceedings”; and “the conferring of the rights of citizenship on aliens without regard to length of residence or intelligence.”22

Civil and political discourse became poisoned by loyalty oaths, spy paranoia, and distrust of dissent. This manufactured fear used appeals to internal and external threats to persuade the country that it should devote a staggering half of all government spending to defense following World War II, and pour billions more into its intelligence service to prop up heinous dictators in Latin America, the Middle East, Asia, and Africa in the name of the battle worldwide against communism. The quaint literary serials, poems, local reports, town debates, and other forms of popular expression that had once been so prominent in the press, vanished from the pages of mass-produced newspapers. It was replaced by celebrity gossip; the new, angry rhetoric of the Cold War; and nationally syndicated columns. The papers became as commercialized and centralized as the rest of mass culture.

The business of mass propaganda brought vast sums of advertising revenue to all organs of mass communication. But corporate and government propaganda sharply narrowed the parameters of acceptable debate. It began the consolidation of the press by huge corporations that would end with nearly everything we see, hear, and read disseminated from roughly a half dozen corporations such as Viacom, Disney, General Electric, and Murdoch’s News Corporation. And it turned news into the elite’s echo chamber.

Liberal and radical movements at the turn of the twentieth century subscribed to the fiction that human diligence, moral probity, and reform, coupled with advances in science and technology, could combine to create a utopia on earth. It was, as the historian Sidney Pollard wrote, “the assumption that a pattern of change exists in this history of mankind . . . that it consists of irreversible changes in one direction only, and that this direction is towards improvement.”23 No longer would the poor have to wait for heaven. Justice and prosperity would arrive through human institutions.

The liberal class—buoyed by the rise of an independent press, militant labor unions, workers’ houses, antipoverty campaigns, and the rising prosperity