INTRODUCTION
ROBIN HOOD, WITCHES, AND COMMIES
NEWSPAPER ARTICLE: Indiana Censor Fears Little Red Robin Hood: “Robin Hood robbed the rich and gave it to the poor. That’s the Communist line.”
FLY ON THE WALL: In the 1950s, one person on the Indiana Textbook Commission tried to bar kids from reading about Robin Hood because she thought he might turn them into communists.
Robin Hood is the legendary folk hero from the Middle Ages who stood up for the poor. Along with Robin Hood, witches were also a legend in medieval times. Almost everything that went wrong was blamed on witches. If you were named a witch, there was really no way to prove your innocence. One test was to be dropped into the village pond with a stone tied to your body. If you sank and drowned, you were not a witch. If you floated to the top, you were a witch and then you were burned.
There was no way out.
VEENA PATEL, HISTORIAN: The ordeal of the swimming test originated as an old Germanic rite and … usually involved the tying of a suspect’s wrists to their ankles and then throwing the individual into a body of water … If the suspect sank, they were presumed innocent and hauled up … Should they float, however, this was taken as confirmation of their alliance with the Devil.
FLY ON THE WALL: This book is about another kind of witch hunt: the hunt for communists in the middle of the twentieth century. Communism is a political philosophy that was defined in 1848 in a pamphlet called The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. When Marx and Engels wrote their pamphlet, factories were spreading in Europe and the United States, and working conditions were horrible. As Marx and Engels put it, the owners of the factories saw workers as parts of their new machines and not as people. The communists felt that since the people in the factories were doing the actual work, they should be getting the actual profits.
THE COMMUNIST MANIFESTO (1848): Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution.
FLY ON THE WALL: It was The Communist Manifesto that so frightened factory owners. They thought that since they had risked money to build factories, all the profits belonged to them. Russia saw political and social revolutions in 1917. Some of the leaders were in part inspired by the Communist Manifesto, calling for the workers to revolt.
THE COMMUNIST MANIFESTO: Workers of all countries, unite!
FLY ON THE WALL: The czar was overthrown, and eventually he and his entire family were executed. The American public was scared that the communist revolution in Russia might spread to the United States.
DR. JOHN WESLEY HILL, METHODIST MINISTER: If I were to deport bolshevists I would have a ship of stone with sails of lead.
FLY ON THE WALL: By the middle of the twentieth century, the world was locked in what was known as the Cold War. On one side were the world’s democracies led by the United States, including France, Britain, and Australia. Against them was the communist world led by the Soviet Union, which was made up of Russia and the many countries under its control, like Ukraine, Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania. Aligned with Russia were other communist countries such as Poland and Czechoslovakia. The fight against communism in the 1940s and 1950s became known as the Red Scare. The color red became associated with rebels and rebellion against government, especially after an uprising in Paris in 1870.
KARL MARX: The old world writhed in convulsions of rage at the sight of the Red Flag, the symbol of the Republic of Labor.
THE ALL-RUSSIAN CENTRAL EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE, APRIL 14, 1918: The flag of the Russian Republic is to be the red banner with the following inscription: the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic.
FLY ON THE WALL: Americans were so afraid of communists, or Reds, living among them that they began to hunt them like witches. These witches were called “commies, pinkos, un-American.” And that’s why there was a call to ban Robin Hood.
LIBRARIAN: How does one prove one isn’t a Communist?
LIBRARIAN: I wish I could tell.
FLY ON THE WALL: During the Red Scare, it soon became clear that, as with accused witches, the only way to float to the top of the pond and save yourself was to accuse other people of being communists or supporting communists. That included your friends and associates, and even then it didn’t always work. Witch hunts tend to take on a life of their own. They don’t just hurt the people accused. They hurt the people around them and the people who love them, and they hurt the way we all look at our neighbors.
THE DEPRESSION, FASCISM, AND THE SPECIAL COMMITTEE ON UN-AMERICAN ACTIVITIES
From “The Ordeal,” an episode of The Adventures of Robin Hood, a TV series from the 1950s, written by blacklisted writer Ring Lardner Jr.:
NOBLEMAN: The serfs are getting out of hand.
COUNT: They are beginning to grumble about their food and furnishings. They want beds to sleep on—beds, mind you! Just like us! And two meals a day!
FLY ON THE WALL: During the worldwide Great Depression of the 1930s, many could not fight for themselves. In the United States, one in four people lost their jobs. It looked like the world system was breaking down. Communism’s promise to create a better world where workers could be taken care of began to seem tempting to many.
SHEILA SAMPTON: My father was somebody who was fascinated by ideas—definitely an armchair person—and he loved sharing ideas with his students, and he loved telling stories. I believe that my father’s activist days were in the thirties and that one of the reasons to be in the Communist Party was social. It was like a way to meet girls.
ROBIN HOOD: We’re never alone as long as we have friends among the people.
JOSH: My father started in the 1930s in the Youth Communist League—and he told me of the pride he felt standing guard outside tenement buildings after the marshal had moved people’s furniture out to the street during the Depression. His father and other young communists moved the furniture back in and stood guard outside the buildings, protecting their friends who had lost their jobs and their homes.
J. ROBERT OPPENHEIMER, PHYSICIST: I saw what the Depression was doing to my students … I began to understand that deeply political and economic events could affect … lives. I began to feel the need to participate more fully in the life of the community.
FLY ON THE WALL: Even though the Depression was worldwide, the reactions weren’t the same in every country. In the United States, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected president with a “New Deal” for Americans. In the Soviet Union, a powerful dictator, Joseph Stalin, consolidated his power. Instead of peasants getting their own land, he forced them onto collective, mechanized farms. Instead of the poor being better off, they starved.
UKRAINIAN PEASANTS: There is no bread … We used to feed the world and now we are hungry.
FLY ON THE WALL: Millions of people died of famine in the Soviet Union, and anyone whom Stalin saw as a threat was executed in purges. Stalin did an excellent job of hiding these facts. Stalin believed in the big lie, and he knew how to sell it.
STALIN: Living has become better, comrades, living has become happier.
FLY ON THE WALL: But in Germany, the response was very different. A new party led by Adolf Hitler rose to power by telling people they were being unfairly treated by a world that did not recognize the superiority of the German race. Hitler was a fascist, and fascists believe that they have a way to save the world. Fascists believe in strong dictators and capitalism and that the power of capitalists and the military are the dominant forces that should run a country. In the United States people were as worried about the rising power of fascists as about the rising power of communists. To protect the country in 1938, the U.S. House of Representatives created the Special Committee on Un-American Activities to hunt down both fascists and communists within the United States, which Congress made permanent in 1945.
COMMITTEE CHAIR MARTIN DIES, DEMOCRAT FROM TEXAS (AUGUST 12, 1938): This committee is determined to conduct its investigation upon a dignified plane and to adopt and maintain a judicial attitude … We shall be fair and impartial at all times.
FLY ON THE WALL: They seemed to think that it would be easy to tell what was American and what was not.
DESTROYER OF WORLDS
FLY ON THE WALL: World War II began in 1939, when Hitler invaded Poland, and Poland’s allies, Britain and France, declared war on Germany. Most Americans didn’t want to get involved in a “foreign war,” but on December 7, 1941, Hitler’s ally Japan bombed the U.S. Naval Station at Pearl Harbor. The United States declared war on Japan. Germany and its allies declared war on the United States, and now it was a war across the globe. Refugees from Nazi-occupied countries fled to the United States, among them many German scientists.
DAVID MUNNS, HISTORIAN: Scientists in Russia, Germany, England, and the United States all knew that it was possible to unleash unheard-of energy in a nuclear bomb. The question was who would do it first.
FLY ON THE WALL: FDR decided the United States had to be the first to develop the bomb. He authorized the formation of a secret research team under the leadership of J. Robert Oppenheimer for what was called the Manhattan Project.
Then suddenly, on April 12, 1945 …
PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT IS DEAD
LAST WORDS: “I HAVE A TERRIFIC HEADACHE”
FLY ON THE WALL: Roosevelt had been elected to four terms (the only president in American history to do that). Lots of Americans didn’t even remember who was vice president. In this case it was Harry S. Truman, a men’s clothing salesman-turned-senator from Missouri. Even though nobody, including Roosevelt, had paid attention to Truman (Roosevelt had met one-on-one with his vice president exactly twice), Truman was now the president of the United States.
PRESIDENT HARRY S. TRUMAN: Boys, if you ever pray, pray for me now … When they told me yesterday what had happened, I felt like the moon, the stars, and all the planets had fallen on me.
FLY ON THE WALL: One of the things FDR had never gotten around to telling Truman was that he had authorized the creation of an atom bomb. Truman only found out about the Manhattan Project the day after he became president. Three months later, in July 1945, Oppenheimer and his team successfully detonated the world’s first atom bomb in the desert of New Mexico.
ISIDOR RABI, PHYSICIST: There was an enormous flash of light, the brightest light I have ever seen or that I think anyone else has ever seen.
TRUMAN (IN HIS DIARY): We have discovered the most terrible bomb in the history of the world.
FLY ON THE WALL: Even though Germany had surrendered on May 7, 1945, the war wasn’t over yet. The United States was still fighting Japan, and Americans were dying in the Pacific. Truman asked General George Marshall, the Army chief of staff, how many Americans would likely be killed or wounded in an invasion of Japan. Estimates were at least a quarter million.
TRUMAN: I couldn’t worry about what history would say about my personal morality. I made the only decision I ever knew how to make. I did what I thought was right.
FLY ON THE WALL: Truman gave the order to use the atom bomb. On August 6, 1945, the United States dropped the first nuclear bomb on the city of Hiroshima, Japan.
COLONEL PAUL TIBBETS, PILOT: We turned back to look at Hiroshima. The city was hidden by that awful cloud … boiling up, mushrooming, terrible and incredibly tall.
NAKAMURA IWAO, HIROSHIMA FIFTH GRADER: I had the feeling that all the human beings on the face of the earth had been killed off, and only the five of us were left.
FLY ON THE WALL: Three days later, the United States dropped a second atom bomb, on the Japanese city of Nagasaki.
J. ROBERT OPPENHEIMER, REFLECTING SOBERLY ON WATCHING THE TRINITY TESTS OF THE ATOM BOMB IN NEW MEXICO: We knew the world would not be the same … I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita … “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.”
FLY ON THE WALL: Two months later, Oppenheimer went to see Truman in the Oval Office, saying that he felt he had blood on his hands. Truman told aides that he thought Oppenheimer was a crybaby.
TRUMAN: The blood is on my hands. Let me worry about that.
FLY ON THE WALL: Afterward, Truman said he hoped he would not have to see Oppenheimer ever again.
THE AMERICAN DREAM—WHOOPS, NOT SO FAST
FLY ON THE WALL: Japan surrendered just five days after the atom bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. World War II ended. The United States now stood alone as the most powerful nation in the world. Its only rival was the Soviet Union.
OFFICE OF STRATEGIC SERVICES MEMO: Russia will emerge from the present conflict as by far the strongest nation in Europe and Asia … In the easily foreseeable future, Russia may well outrank even the United States in military potential.
FLY ON THE WALL: The threat from the Soviet Union was real. After Germany surrendered, Stalin turned the Allied victory into his personal triumph as he gobbled up all of Eastern Europe.
In March 1946, Winston Churchill, who had been the British prime minister during World War II, traveled to Fulton, Missouri, with Truman at his side and declared:
WINSTON CHURCHILL: From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an “iron curtain” has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia; all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere, and all are subject, in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and, in many cases, increasing measure of control from Moscow.
FLY ON THE WALL: Of course it wasn’t literally an iron curtain. Churchill meant that people in the countries that the Soviet Union had taken over were silenced. They were forced to become communists whether they wanted to or not. A lot of people consider this the official beginning of the Cold War. They called it a cold war because at least in theory no shooting was involved.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS: Flushed with their success against Germany and Japan in 1945, most Americans initially viewed their place in the postwar world with optimism and confidence.
FLY ON THE WALL: Most Americans were sick of war, hot or cold. After the end of World War II, the United States economy boomed. Americans had saved their money during the war—because there was nothing to buy. Now, all those factories that had been making weapons and uniforms started making cars and clothes and toys … and houses. The ultimate American dream was to own your own house. In communist countries, nobody could own anything, especially a house.
WILLIAM LEVITT, DEVELOPER: No man who owns his own house and lot can be a communist.
FLY ON THE WALL: The problem was, not all Americans could own a house—even if they had money to pay for it.
LEVITTOWN STANDARD LEASE (1948): Premises [cannot] be used or occupied by any person other than members of the Caucasian race.
FLY ON THE WALL: Levitt said it was just a business decision. White buyers would not want to buy a house if they thought that they would have Black neighbors.
WILLIAM LEVITT: The plain fact is that most whites prefer not to live in mixed communities. This attitude may be wrong morally, and someday it may change. I hope it will.
FLY ON THE WALL: Of course, often Jews were not allowed to buy houses, and sometimes Catholics too had been kept out.
EUGENE BURNETT, BLACK WAR VETERAN: [I still sting from] the feeling of rejection on that long ride back to Harlem.
HARRY BELAFONTE, BLACK ENTERTAINER: I came out of the service with great expectations that we had just defeated fascism. We’d just defeated totalitarianism. We had just defeated the philosophy of white supremacy.… I had expected America would have been open and generous and rewarding to its Black citizens who had served in the war, and served with great honor.
WADE HUDSON, WRITER: My father had risked his life for democracy, but, for him, freedom remained just a stale hope, a wishful thought, an unfulfilled dream.
FLY ON THE WALL: For some returning Black veterans, being denied home ownership was the least of their concerns. Isaac Woodard, a twenty-six-year-old Black sergeant, was discharged with $744.73 of pay from the Army, which was a lot of money in those days. On February 12, 1946 (Lincoln’s birthday), Woodard got on a bus in Augusta, Georgia, to reunite with his wife in South Carolina. A lot of other discharged soldiers were on the bus celebrating together. Some civilians complained to the driver about the whites and Blacks mingling. About an hour into the ride, Woodard asked the driver to wait a little longer for him at a scheduled stop. There were no toilets in buses then.
ALTON BLACKWELL, BUS DRIVER: Hell, no. God damn it, go back and sit down. I ain’t got time to wait.
WOODARD: God damn it, talk to me like I am talking to you. I am a man just like you.
FLY ON THE WALL: At the next stop the driver got off the bus and went to get the police.
BLACKWELL: This soldier has been making a disturbance on the bus.
FLY ON THE WALL: A police officer told Woodard to shut up and get off the bus.
WOODARD: He asked me was I discharged … When I said, “yes,” that is when he started beating me with the billy, hitting me across the top of my head … When we got to the door of the police station, he struck me again and knocked me unconscious. After I commenced to come to myself, he hollered, “Get up.” When I started to get up, he started punching me in my eyes with the end of his billy.
FLY ON THE WALL: As a result of the beating, Woodard was blinded.
ROBERT YOUNG, WOODARD’S NEPHEW: He told me they poured whiskey over him to say he was drunk. He was arrested for, supposedly, disorderly conduct, disturbing the peace and being drunk. He was not drunk. He was not being disorderly. And he did not disturb the peace.
TIME: Woodard’s blinding was … a political awakening for future civil rights leaders. Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee co-founder Julian Bond’s earliest memory of racial violence was seeing newspaper photographs of Woodard with bandages over his eyes at the age of six.
WASHINGTON POST: Hundreds of Black veterans had been attacked and an unknown number were lynched … One Black veteran had been murdered for casting a vote in a primary.
FLY ON THE WALL: In July 1946, four Black people, including a medaled veteran and his wife, were beaten, tortured, shot, and hanged from a bridge in Georgia. It is considered the last mass lynching in America.
Text copyright © 2024 by Andrea Balis and Elizabeth Levy
Illustrations copyright © 2024 by Tim Foley
