When the Cold War Turned Hot
By Steve Rabson
When I was 7, in June 1950, the Cold War got hot in a hurry. Our family was staying with another family in a cottage my grandmother rented for summer vacations on Lake Ontario just north of Rochester, New York. The other dad was a colleague of my father’s in the math department at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana. Like us, there were two children in their family. It was early evening, and the four of us kids had just come back from a nearby park where we rode the merry-go-round. We were feeling mildly disappointed, having failed to grab the brass ring we passed several times as we reached out toward it from our wooden horses. An older boy with long arms succeeded and got the free ride.
Back inside the cottage, we were surprised to see both sets of parents and my grandmother gathered in front of the console radio with very worried faces. War had started in Korea. Forces from the North were overwhelming the South’s army and now occupied most of the peninsula. The announcer spoke ominously of a “communist threat to all of the Far East” which was something America couldn’t ignore. Only five years had passed since the end of World War II, in which both my father and his colleague had served. Now, at 30, might they be drafted into this one?
My mother and grandmother were lifelong pacifists. My grandmother had refused to look at the medals the Army sent her in April 1945 after her oldest son died in the crash of his Army Air Corps plane on a bombing mission in the Philippines. Fire destroyed all the wreckage, and only the crew’s dog tags were recovered, so it was never known whether enemy fire or engine trouble caused the crash. Her younger son, who had served in the Navy during World War II, found the medals buried under some old clothes in a drawer after she died in 1965.
When our vacation trip ended at Lake Ontario in August, the two families returned home to West Lafayette. Every weekday morning after that our family listened on the radio during breakfast to Cecil Brown broadcasting news of the war from Korea by very scratchy and growly shortwave transmission that made it sound as though he had a bad cold. The Korean War ended with a truce in 1953, but with the Soviet Union’s adding its newly developed nuclear arsenal to those of the U.S., U.K., and France, news on our radio was all about the existential consequences if the Cold War turned hot yet again.
That same year Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were convicted of passing atomic secrets to the U.S.S.R. and executed for spying. Both my parents, who opposed capital punishment, questioned the verdict based on the testimony of an accused co-conspirator in exchange for a plea bargain. They also suspected that antisemitism played a role in the highly sensationalized trial. My father said that the Soviet Union already had the technology to produce a nuclear weapon and hadn’t needed information from spies. When Soviet archives were opened after the end of the Cold War in 1989, they disclosed that Julius had in fact passed information, but Ethel hadn’t been involved.
That summer our family moved from West Lafayette, Indiana, to Yellow Springs, Ohio, where my father started teaching at Antioch College, and my sister and I entered middle school. Yellow Springs was only a few miles from Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. There, just inside the fence and easily visible from the highway, were mammoth, long-range Strategic Air Command bombers poised for takeoff on the runway with their payload of nuclear bombs. With all the grown-ups’ talk about the catastrophic dangers of another war, we middle schoolers worried that a Soviet nuclear attack on the base would wipe us out along with the rest of the surrounding population.
The first years of the 1950s were also when Wisconsin Sen. Joseph McCarthy launched the sweeping witch hunt that came to be known as McCarthyism, the term coined by the Christian Science Monitor. He started it in 1950 by brandishing a piece of paper in a speech claiming it listed 205 names of State Department officials who were members of the Communist Party. This was only the first of his many groundless accusations that made headlines in the press and launched a nationwide paranoia that resulted in the loss of jobs, the censoring of movies, the banning of books from libraries, and changing the names of municipalities and organizations. The Cincinnati Reds became the Redlegs for six years in the 1950s, and residents of the nearby town of Russia insisted it be pronounced Roo-shee. McCarthy even accused President Eisenhower of being a “card-carrying Communist.”
In those days, the greatest worry for my parents was that scientists and mathematicians my father knew were being targeted as security risks in Congressional investigations that led to pressures on their employers to fire them. At Antioch College, where my father taught, the administration denied a contract renewal to a colleague in the math department who had come under investigation for his political views and associations in the 1930s. This, despite his service during World War II, when he had worked on the Manhattan Project that produced the first atomic bomb along with physicist Enrico Fermi, who my father also knew. When the Atomic Energy Commission, under pressure from the FBI, voted in 1954 to withdraw J. Robert Oppenheimer’s security clearance for his associations as a college student at the University of California, Berkeley, in the 1930s, my mother noted the absurdity of banning him from access to documents he had written himself.
When we arrived in Yellow Springs, Antioch was being targeted in a smear campaign launched by a local Republican state senator, Lowell Fess. In a letter to a local newspaper, Fess claimed Antioch was “teach[ing] Marxist theories and Socialism and in some cases downright subversion, particularly as it applies to interracial relationships, and you have an institution that condones these things, it is about time that the matter be cleaned up.”
Antioch’s first president was Horace Mann, considered the founder of public education in the United States, and a well-known abolitionist and social reformer. The school’s website still describes the college, founded in 1850, as “a leader of progressive thought and innovation.” Antioch was the first college in the country to have a woman faculty member with equal standing as her male counterparts, and Antioch’s curriculum was the same for men and women. The college admitted Bblack students more than a century before the passage of civil rights laws, and during World War II it participated in a program that allowed Japanese Americans incarcerated in internment camps to enroll. Also, in the 1940s and beyond, Antioch set out to diversify the campus by offering more scholarships to people of color. Famous African American graduates include Coretta Scott King, author, activist, civil rights leader, and the wife of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.; Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton of Washington, D.C.; and A. Leon Higginbotham,Jr., civil rights advocate and chief justice of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit.
Lowell Fess, the school’s Cold War antagonist, had been mayor of Yellow Springs during World War II. Ironically, he was an Antioch alumnus, class of 1915, whose father, Simeon Fess, had been college president from 1906 to 1917. In another irony we found amusing, Fess was widely known by his nickname, “Red,” presumably for the color of his hair. A veteran of World War I, he introduced a resolution at a meeting of a local American Legion chapter calling for an investigation of “subversives” at Antioch by the House Un-American Activities Committee. “[T]here is a mass of incontrovertible evidence that Antioch College poses a clear and present danger to the security of the United States and to every man, woman, and child within its borders,” Fess wrote. He got his wish when HUAC opened an Ohio branch in Dayton and began summoning residents to its hearings.
We learned from our parents that the father of one of our middle school classmates, who worked at a local electric engineering company, was one of the ones called before the committee. They questioned him about his personal acquaintances during the time he was an electrical engineer at United Aircraft Products in Dayton, where he had been active in the United Electrical Workers union. Citing First Amendment guarantees of free association, he refused to answer their questions. They charged him with contempt of Congress and sentenced him to a year in jail. He appealed the decision, and after a long and costly ordeal, the Supreme Court overturned it in 1962.
Another classmate’s father ordered to appear before the committee similarly refused to answer any questions. He would have preferred to stand on the First Amendment, but working as a free-lance carpenter, he lacked the resources and the support of an employer for a lengthy court battle, so ended up citing the Fifth Amendment guarantee against self-incrimination to avoid prosecution. Our high school art teacher’s husband, a professor at Antioch, was also summoned before the committee. He testified that he had belonged to a Marxist study group in 1946 but refused to give the names of the other members. His case dragged on for years, but in the end the committee decided not to prosecute.
Since our family and most of our friends were members of the progressive college community, and we mostly socialized with one another, we felt little of the personal hostility generated by the anti-communists. Antioch back then was a liberal oasis surrounded by McCarthy’s true believers, not unlike the blue dot it still is today in a land of ironically labeled Red-state Trumpsters who populate most of Southwestern Ohio. I remember my father getting anxious, and angry, when I told him I had repeated his comments about McCarthy while arguing with a boy my age across town who insisted that McCarthy was great. My father admonished me never to repeat his opinions to others.
Antioch was only one among several American colleges and universities targeted for investigation during the witch hunts of the early 1950s, including Amherst, Wellesley, University of Chicago, and Harvard, where historian Arthur M. Schlesinger and economist John Kenneth Galbraith were accused of communist sympathies.
By the late 1950s, McCarthy’s witch-hunting, for which his name had become synonymous, ended ignominiously with the discrediting of his scattergun accusations and his historic censuring in 1954 by a two-thirds vote of the Senate. His troubles started with his hysterical performance as the main interrogator at the so-called Army-McCarthy hearings held by a Senate government operations subcommittee. For years, my parents had resisted buying a television, saying it hindered the intellectual development of children. They finally relented to watch the Army-McCarthy hearings in 1954 but put the TV on a bureau in their bedroom, away from us kids.
By this time, McCarthyism had become a joke among Antioch students who took to calling each other “comrade.” Outside Antioch Hall, the college’s main administration building which also housed its largest auditorium, there was a red brick patio where students held weekly folk dances. They named it Red Square.
Our family had one final—also somewhat comical—run-in with the Red Scare. My parents divorced in 1957, and my father left Antioch to take a temporary job at the American Optical Company headquarters in Southbridge, Massachusetts. AO, as it was called, had many government contracts to manufacture weapons and equipment for the military, such as gun sights for artillery pieces and periscopes for submarines. This meant my father had to get a security clearance to work there. I was still living with my mother and sister in Yellow Springs. We found out about the security clearance when, as part of the background investigation, an FBI agent in a dark blue suit came knocking at our door one afternoon. He spoke with my mother for about half an hour, then left.
Later, we learned that my father’s security clearance had been held up, not because of anything my mother told the FBI, but because he had once lived in a rooming house in New York where another tenant was named Aptheker. Herbert Aptheker had been a leading member of the American Communist Party, but this turned out to be another Aptheker, and my father’s security clearance finally came through.
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Steve Rabson moved from Providence, Rhode Island, to Fredericksburg, Virginia, in 2011 after retiring from 30 years teaching at Brown University, and now teaches part time at the University of Mary Washington. He writes books and articles about Japan and translates Japanese literature. His latest book, Training and Deployment of America’s Nuclear Cold Warriors: Keepers of Armageddon (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, U.K., 2022), is a first-person account with fellow veterans stationed at an Army nuclear weapons base in Okinawa, Japan, during the 1960s.
