American History Tellers - The Cold War - An Ideological War | 1

Episode Date: January 3, 2018

For nearly 50 years, the United States and Soviet Union waged a global war of ideas fueled by politics, intrigue, and nuclear weapons. But how did the polarized ideologies of these two global powers threaten the existence of the entire world?This is Episode 1 of a six-part series on the Cold War. We’ll discover how the United States’ suspicion of communism not only led to a global stand-off, but threatened the freedom and democracy Americans so cherished at home.For more information on the subjects and themes discussed in the episode, see the book “Global Cold War,” by Odd Arne Wested. It’s an amazing dissection of the ideologies that dominated the Cold War. See also, “Many Are the Crimes,” by Ellen Schrecker, for an in-depth discussion of McCarthyism and the real world effects of the Red Scare.For more info about Bentley Glass, the geneticist under investigation at the beginning of the article, see Audra Wolfe’s article, The Organization Man and the Archive: A Look at the Bentley Glass Papers. Wolfe’s book, “Competing with the Soviets,” was also crucial to our understanding of the Cold War.Support us by supporting our sponsors!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondery Plus subscribers can binge new seasons of American History Tellers early and ad-free right now. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Imagine that it's 1951. You live in Rosebank, a leafy section of North Baltimore, about three miles north of Johns Hopkins University. One Friday morning, you're at home, having your second cup of coffee, when there's a knock at the door. You open it, and a man in a black suit flashes a badge. Hello, sir. I'm from the FBI. Mind if I come in and ask you a couple of questions about your neighbor, the biologist at the university? Of course. The two of you sit down to chat. You know your

neighbor occasionally worked for the government, so this all feels routine. How long have you known him? The agent starts off with softballs. A couple of years. What's his family like? We're not particularly close, but he's respectable, quiet, keeps to himself, teaches Sunday school at the Baptist church around the corner. In fact, his parents were missionaries. He was born in China. Oh, China. Does he speak Chinese? You don't know. But sensing an opening, the agent gets a little more aggressive. The FBI has reason to believe that your neighbor has had contact with communist organizations. Six years ago, it seems he was the faculty sponsor for a student dance organized by American Youth for Democracy, which

is a well-known communist front. Can you think of any other times your neighbor has associated with communists? This is ridiculous. He's a staunch and loyal American citizen. He has no use whatsoever for communism or any other foreign ideology. Are you sure? How do you know? How can you know? The interview ends. You show the agent out and sit back down for a few minutes to collect your thoughts. Truth be told, you don't really know your neighbor all that well. I mean, you like him, but he does sometimes express his views as slightly left of center. You remember during the war, he once asked you to sign a petition protesting segregation in the military.

And in the newspapers, you've read that the civil rights movement is riddled with communists. You finish your coffee and think about your cousin's son, who's fighting the communists somewhere in the mountains of Korea. Your mind wanders a bit, back to when you took your daughter to the movies last week. The newsreel before the matinee showed streams of Eastern European refugees fleeing to the West,

abandoning everything for a chance at freedom. You think about mushroom clouds and the treasonous scientists who stole atomic secrets and passed them on to Stalin. You resolve to watch your neighbor more carefully. After all, the nation is at war. I'm Saatchi Cole. And I'm Sarah Hagee. and Jinx Jenkins. Follow Criminal Attorney on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Sachi Cole.

And I'm Sarah Hagee. And we're the hosts of Scamfluencers, a weekly podcast from Wondery that takes you along the twists and turns of the most infamous scams of all time,

the impact on victims, and what's left once the facade falls away. Follow Scamfluencers on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts.

From Wondery, this is American History Tellers. Our history, your story. Hi, I'm Lindsey Graham. And no, in case you were wondering, not that Lindsey Graham. I am, though, an American and deeply interested in our shared history. So on this show, I partnered with PhD historians to take you to the events, the times, and the people that shaped America and Americans, our values, our fights, and our dreams. We'll put you in the shoes of everyday citizens as the Cold War, the American Revolution, Prohibition, or the Gold Rush were happening. And we'll show you how history affected them, their families, and affects you now. We're starting American History Tellers with a six-episode

series about the Cold War. This is part one. There's an iconic photograph that you may have seen from 1945, near the end of the Second World War. The British, American, and Soviet leaders of the Grand Alliance, Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt, and Joseph Stalin, are sitting next to each other in wooden chairs, looking chilly under their February coats. FDR sports a cape. Churchill's got his trademark cigar, and if you look closely, you can see FDR's cigarette holder. They're sitting so close to one another that their elbows almost touch, but they're each staring off in a different direction, lost in their own thoughts.

There's another version of this photograph, one with a wider focus. In that one, a small army of advisors and diplomats mill around behind the three leaders. Few wear hats or topcoats, but most are bareheaded. They must have been cold. There's a set of arched doorways in the back and several Persian rugs scattered over the ground. The people in this photograph are gathered in a courtyard of the Lavadia Palace in Yalta, a Soviet-controlled resort town on the Black Sea. For a week in February 1945, the grounds of this once-eleg elegant palace were transformed into the meeting headquarters for a summit that would decide the fate of post-war Europe. Almost no one in this photograph seems happy.

Even on the verge of victory against Hitler, Roosevelt is especially grim. And with the knowledge of hindsight, he doesn't look well. A stroke would kill him just two months later, leaving his vice president, Harry Truman, to see the United States through the end of the war. One person, though, has just the faintest hint of a smile, and that's Stalin. Given everything that's happened later, it's hard to remember that Churchill, FDR, and Stalin gathered that day as allies. During the Second World War, the United States, the UK, and the Soviet Union

came together in a grand alliance to defeat Germany and Japan. But within two years of that peace, the West would be locked in a conflict with the Soviet Union that threatened to destroy the entire world. This was the Cold War, the epic conflict that pitted the United States

against the Soviet Union and capitalism against communism. Is this news? Mr. Khamershev himself? We must guard against the military-industrial complex. From Stettin to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across... Do you know whose politics he is conducting? Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. For most of the second half of the 20th century, the idea of the Cold War affected nearly every aspect of American life,

from electoral politics to social movements to fashion trends. The Cold War ended in 1991 when the Soviet Union collapsed. But today, we're going to talk about its origins. Specifically, we're going to focus on the period from 1945 to 1954, when the battle lines were drawn. What was the Cold War about, anyway? How did a botched agreement at Yalta turn into a global conflict that lasted nearly half a century? And how did this all-or-nothing mindset affect individual Americans? How did it affect even people who didn't think of themselves as political?

By 1947, two years after the war had ended, things were looking up for many Americans. The soldiers, sailors, and pilots had come home, ready to start new lives in the new suburbs. The veterans packed into college classrooms, tuition paid by the GI Bill. Women showed off their legs in new nylon stockings, a modern miracle that had been off-limits during the war. By the next year, the shortages had ended. American shoppers threw away their ration books, filled their carts with as much meat, butter, and sugar as they could afford. But for many Europeans, even those basic consumer goods remained out of reach until 1947. The war in Germany had officially ended in June 1945, but the effort to rebuild had stalled. You could still see bombed-out buildings on the streets of London and Berlin.

Families everywhere shivered, unable to find coal to heat their stoves. Survivors of concentration camps had no place to go and no one to go with. And everywhere, people were starving. Europe was facing both a humanitarian and a political crisis. In France, Italy, Turkey, and Greece, communist parties promised full bellies and warm stoves. But at least citizens in these countries had a choice. In Eastern and Central Europe, Stalin had installed communist governments that promised to follow only Soviet orders. Back at Yalta, Churchill and FDR had agreed to give Stalin a sphere of influence in Eastern Europe. They didn't really have much choice in this. The other allies needed the Soviet Union to stay in the war to defeat Hitler's

Germany, and Stalin's Red Army had already occupied most of the territory east of Berlin anyway. But at Yalta, the three leaders agreed that all the liberated territories would have democratic elections after the war. Stalin, though, had no intention of honoring this promise. More than 10 million soldiers from the Red Army had died fighting Nazi Germany, and Stalin saw Eastern Europe as his reward for their sacrifice. The Soviet leader interpreted his right to a sphere of influence to mean full control over the countries between Germany and Russia. By 1947, Stalin had installed puppet governments in Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, and Albania.

This is why so many historians start the story of the Cold War with Yalta. Yalta sets up a straightforward morality tale. Stalin promised to allow democratic elections in Eastern and Central Europe. For these historians, by breaking that promise, Stalin created the conflict that ultimately led to the Cold War. After all, once Stalin started taking over governments,

who knew where he would stop? If the United States wanted to protect freedom and democracy, the story goes, it had no choice but to oppose communism on every front. And, according to this view, if the United States started a nuclear arms race or squashing civil liberties, it was really Stalin's fault. The more we learn about the Cold War, though, the more we wonder about this origin story. It doesn't really hold up to historical scrutiny. Among other things, in 1947, the United States was the only country with an atomic bomb, which gave it quite a bit of leverage over its enemies. The Soviet Union

had suffered unimaginable losses during the war. On top of the approximately 10 million soldiers killed in battle, somewhere between 10 and 20 million more civilians had died through the German occupation, the Holocaust, and widespread famine. The Soviet Union wasn't really in a position to be taking over the world in 1945. But, as you might have guessed by now, this particular origin story was popularized by a generation of American historians who wrote during the Cold War. Soviet historians told a mirror-image origin story for the Cold War that presented the Soviet Union as a peaceful victim of the United States' imperialist aggression.

Over time, though, historians have come to understand that both of these origin stories illustrate a central characteristic of the Cold War, black-and-white thinking. The Cold War was a you're with us or you're against us kind of conflict. It pitted capitalism against communism in an all-out existential struggle. Ad Arna Westad, one of the leading historians of the Cold War today, has spent years combing archives all over the world. His research documents the ways that ideological concerns drove this conflict.

In his influential 2005 book, Global Cold War, Westad shows how the United States and the Soviet Union both sought what he calls global ideological predominance. American and Soviet leaders disagreed on the content of their ideologies, but they agreed that only one or the other could ultimately prevail. What Westad is suggesting here, and he's likely right about this, is that we have to take these ideologies seriously, because U.S. and Soviet leaders took them seriously. Let's spend a little time with each of them, starting with the United States. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by the Creator with certain unalienable rights, To Americans, this line from the Declaration of Independence is deeply familiar, almost second nature.

It's been drilled into our cultural memory, from high school speech classes to Fourth of July parades. Throughout American history, American leaders have used the language of individual freedom and liberty to justify their actions, both at home and abroad. Soviet leaders rejected individual liberty in favor of what they said was the collective good. When the communists seized power in 1917, they promised to liberate Russian peasants and industrial workers, the so-called proletariat, from the tyranny of capitalism. The Bolsheviks claimed to represent the interests of the people, even if the people didn't realize it yet. If democracy got in the way of collective justice, then the Soviets would do away with democracy.

In Soviet ideology, economic liberation was more important than political freedom, because personal freedom was meaningless to people with nothing to eat. So why is this a problem? Why couldn't the United States and the Soviet Union leave each other alone, each letting the other pursue their preferred form of liberty and justice. Why should it matter if a biology professor in Baltimore occasionally signed a communist petition? In the United States, some have long espoused that the country is part of a grand plan, a manifest destiny ordained by God to spread freedom and liberty across the land. Soviet communists made the same kind of claims

to historical inevitability, but being atheists, they appealed to philosophy instead of religion. And their god? Communist philosopher Karl Marx. According to Marx, capitalism was just a temporary but necessary phase on the way

to inevitable socialist revolution. These ideologies, ephemeral and only of the mind, nevertheless had real-world consequences. Let's say, for example, that you're an American businessman who purchased a banana plantation in Guatemala. You've raised the money to buy this property from investors, and you purchase it legally. You see, this is a free transaction between two individuals at liberty to use their capital however they'd like. If an American has the money to invest overseas, purchase it legally. You see, this is a free transaction between two individuals at liberty to use their capital however they'd like. If an American has the money to invest overseas and

someone's willing to sell to him, then why not? But now consider the same transaction from the perspective of a Guatemalan peasant. You might question the right of the seller to claim ownership of the land. After all, without your labor, this banana plantation would just be a strip of jungle. Over the years, hundreds of workers had died while hacking down palms in the tropical heat. What if these workers banded together, changed the political system to benefit themselves? The American businessman would lose his investment. But what should matter more, according to the peasants? The Americans' money or Guatemalan lives? In their purest forms, the ideologies of capitalism and communism

excluded the very possibility of the others' existence. In the Pacific Ocean, halfway between Peru and New Zealand, lies a tiny volcanic island. It's a little-known British territory called Pitcairn, and it harboured a deep, dark scandal. There wouldn't be a girl on Pitcairn once they reach the age of 10 that would still have heard it. It just happens to all of us. I'm journalist Luke Jones and for almost two years I've been investigating a shocking story that has left deep scars on generations of women and girls

from Pitcairn. When there's nobody watching, nobody going to report it, people will get away with what they can get away with. In the Pitcairn Trials, I'll be uncovering a story of abuse and the fight for justice that has brought a unique, lonely Pacific island to the brink of extinction. Listen to the Pitcairn Trials exclusively on Wondery Plus. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app, Apple Podcasts or Spotify. For years, American scandal has taken you deep inside the biggest controversies and Wondery app, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify. Exclusive season, The Hare Krishna Murders. Dive into the twisted world of a rogue sect of Hare Krishnas. When devotees mysteriously disappear, the trail leads to a dark web of deceit, greed, and even murder.

Or explore the sordid tale of Enron, as we reveal the shocking depths of corporate fraud that led to one of the biggest bankruptcies in American history. From political conspiracies to corporate corruption, these in-depth investigations will keep you on the edge of your seat. Experience American scandal like never before, Thank you. to start listening today and uncover the real story behind America's most notorious scandals. The story told at the beginning of this show was about a real person, a geneticist named Bentley Glass. Glass's name was eventually cleared, but every time he signed on for a new government contract, the FBI reopened

his file. It's an inch thick, full of interviews with colleagues and neighbors just like the one I described earlier. J. Edgar Hoover himself signed letters asking agents to investigate why, exactly, Glass had donated $5 to an interracial youth group in 1944. This story might be shocking or even ridiculous, except for the fact that it repeated itself time and time again in the late 1940s and early 50s. Hoover's FBI was obsessed with finding communists. Just having been in the room with a known communist was enough to get you a visit from the feds. In recognizing a communist, physical appearance counts for nothing. If he openly declares himself to be a communist, we take his word for it.

If a person supports organizations which reflect communist teachings, or organizations labeled communist by the Department of Justice, she may be a communist. If a person defends the activities of communist nations while consistently attacking the domestic and foreign policy of the United States, she may be a communist. If a person does all these things over a period of time, he must be a communist.

But there are other communists who don't show their real faces, who work more silently. So, imagine that you're a young professor teaching at a liberal arts school on a year-to-year contract. Like many of your friends, you supported former Vice President Henry Wallace's campaign for the presidency in 1948. Wallace was a bit of an oddball, a teetotaling mystic that made a fortune selling hybrid corn.

Even so, you admire his unusually outspoken commitment to civil rights. Wallace opposed the poll tax. He hired black and white campaign workers, and he refused to speak to segregated audiences. You knew that the American Communist Party had endorsed Wallace's campaign, but Wallace himself was clearly not a communist, and neither were you. That fall, Wallace lost the election badly, coming in fourth behind arch-segregationist Strom Thurmond. So you pack away your buttons and pamphlets and moved on with your life. But a few months later,

some strange things start happening. You catch one of your neighbors flipping through your mail. At work, your colleagues are avoiding eye contact. One day, your department head calls you in for a chat. Hey, thanks. Come on in. Have a seat. We need to talk about something. This morning, two federal investigators came to my office. They came to me to talk about you. You shift in your chair while he shuffles some papers and taps his pencil. The FBI wants you to give them the names of the local Communist Party members involved with the Wallace campaign. And if you refuse to cooperate, they said they might subpoena you to come testify in Washington in front of HUAC, the House Committee on Un-American Activities. This is outrageous. What about my freedom of speech? The choice is yours, of course, but I hope you'll cooperate.

Having a faculty member testify before HUAC would be deeply embarrassing to the college. And if that happens, I can't guarantee your contract will be renewed. This is crazy. You can't fire me. What about academic freedom? Of course you wouldn't be fired. And of course this college is committed to academic freedom above all else. But under the circumstances, the trustees might recommend that the college get by with one less historian next year. And don't even think about going up there and taking the fifth because the only people who take the fifth are people with something to hide. Are you with us, or are you against us?

Ideological thinking was everywhere in the late 1940s and early 50s, from college campuses to Congress. In the spring of 1947, President Truman requested $400 million from Congress to stabilize the governments of Turkey and Greece. Here's President Truman. I believe that it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures. The free peoples of the world look to us for support in maintaining their freedoms. If we falter in our leadership, we may endanger the peace of the world, and we shall surely endanger the welfare of this nation.

Truman's Pledge of Support for for free countries became known as the Truman Doctrine. Later that summer, he announced a massive effort to rebuild Europe, named the Marshall Plan, after his Secretary of State, George Marshall. Marshall Plan dollars jolted Western Europe out of its economic depression, bankrolling everything from apartment buildings to scientific laboratories. For Truman, the point of the Marshall Plan was to contain communism within its existing borders without directly confronting the Soviet Union. In fact, as an act of goodwill, or maybe masterful diplomacy, Truman offered Marshall Plan funds to any country that wanted them,

including the Soviet Union and its Eastern European satellites. But Stalin saw things differently. To him, the Marshall Plan wasn't a humanitarian effort or even a well-calculated investment in global security. Instead, Stalin saw the Marshall Plan as a bald effort to shore up capitalism on the verge of its collapse. Wealthy Europeans would get Coca-Cola and nylons, but what about the workers? To Stalin, the Marshall Plan represented an act of economic and psychological warfare. If Europeans could fill their bellies and heat their homes, they did not need the help of the Communist Party. An economic stimulus could lull the masses into

accepting capitalism instead of overthrowing it. The only solution was to mount a psychological warfare campaign of his own. Already, American and Soviet leaders were interpreting each other's actions through an ideological lens that colored everything with suspicion. The Americans saw little communist parties popping up all across Europe and assumed that the Soviets must be plotting global revolution. For their part, the Soviets accused Americans of trying to dull the senses of an awakening proletariat through easy credit and consumer goods. This cycle of distrust, bad faith, and misunderstanding would happen time and time again throughout the Cold War. It didn't help that both countries insisted on spreading their ideological message through secret channels

and front organizations. Imagine that it's April 1949. You're on a well-deserved holiday to Paris, happy to see that the shops are once again selling baguettes and cheese. The city seems unusually cosmopolitan this week. As you pass by the sidewalk cafes, you hear snippets of French, of course, but Italian, Spanish, German, and even some Slavic languages you can't quite identify. When one of the patrons drops a flyer, you pick it up. A lovely sketch of a dove fills the top half of the page, and you realize it's a Picasso.

You translate the red-block letters underneath. The flyer announces a World Congress of Partisans for Peace happening right now across town. More than 2,000 people converged on Paris for this event, determined to voice their commitment to peace and their opposition to war. When you first see the flyer, you consider abandoning your plans for the Louvre. And there's a rumor you heard that Broadway star Paul Robeson was on the program. Robeson mostly lived abroad, so this could be your only chance to hear his famed bass voice.

But then, back at your hotel, you read a story about the Congress in the International Herald Tribune. According to that newspaper, almost all of the speakers at the Congress are communists, including Robeson. One of the organizers told a reporter that the real threat of war, and I'm quoting, is directed against the Soviet Union and not against the United States. Well, this does not sound like peace at all. You want nothing to do with it. Tomorrow, you will see the Mona Lisa after all. The World Peace Congress was a common form operation. Officially known as the Communist

Information Bureau, the Common Form was the International Communist Party's main propaganda tool in the first decade of the Cold War. Stalin activated it in the fall of 1947 in direct response to the Marshall Plan. If the Americans wanted to convince Europeans to stick with capitalism by appealing to their pocketbooks, then the Soviet Union would lure them to communism by appealing to their hearts. To get its message across, the common form relied on front organizations. The Soviets had perfected this technique in the 30s in a slightly different organization, the Comintern. During the 1920s and 30s, the Comintern built an astonishing media empire to promote the cause of communism around the globe. The mastermind of the Comintern

was a German communist named Willy Munzenberg. Munzenberg ran dozens, possibly hundreds of newspapers, publishing houses, film production companies, and charities. Officially, most of these organizations claimed to be involved in workers' aid, but in reality, they were all sponsored by the Comintern. Munzenberg's fronts opposed racism, fascism, colonialism. They raised money for famines and flood relief. They supported labor movements and recruited volunteers for the Spanish Civil War. And they did all of this globally, not just in Europe, Asia, and Africa, but also in the United States.

The sheer number of front groups meant that almost anyone who had been involved with center-left political activity in the 1930s had probably, at some point, been involved with the Communist Party. And so, when Stalin reactivated the Common Forum in 1947, tens of thousands of Americans who had never actively considered themselves communists found themselves guilty by association. Maybe you once attended a meeting of the World Federation of Scientific Workers, or briefly held a membership in the League of American Writers, or maybe, like Bentley Glass, our professor from the beginning of this episode, you supported students involved with American Youth for Democracy. In the late 1940s, a handful of U.S. politicians saw this situation as an opportunity to advance their careers. One of the ambitious Red Baiters was Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy.

His endless badgering of potential communists gave the phenomenon the name by which we still know it today, McCarthyism. You'd be forgiven if you were confused the first time you heard about McCarthyism. How could a person get in trouble for just being in the same room with a communist? I mean, the First Amendment guarantees Americans the right to freedom of assembly and freedom of speech, so what's the problem here? Historian Ellen Schrecker solved this riddle in a series of books about the American Red Scare. Her work shows that McCarthyism didn't work by sending people to jail. It worked by costing people their jobs. All told, only a couple hundred Americans spent time in jail for their communist associations,

and most of them were sentenced for contempt of Congress. HUAC asked them to name names, they refused, and they went to jail. But like our hypothetical university lecturer, the vast majority of Americans who got caught up in anti-communist scares simply lost their jobs or couldn't get hired in the first place. They were in the wrong place at the wrong time and somehow came to the attention of the authorities. In March 1947, Truman signed an executive order that required a loyalty check for every federal employee. Everyone who worked for the government, from diplomats to janitors, had to pass a security investigation. If you had ever been involved with one of those common-term front groups, forget it. The Attorney General drew up a list of several dozen supposedly subversive organizations, and any involvement with even one of them was enough to get you blacklisted.

And not only in government, but also in Hollywood, in academia, even certain unions. But what were the authorities looking for exactly? Was communism illegal? Can you outlaw a political party? The short answer is yes. In 1948, the Truman administration charged the leaders of the American Communist Party of violating the Smith Act. The Smith Act made it illegal to, quote,

teach and advocate the overthrow and destruction of the government of the United States by force and violence. As Schrecker explains it, Marxist doctrine suggested that a proletarian uprising was inevitable and that the Communist Party welcomed that revolution. Therefore, in the logic of 1948, American communists were guilty of advocating the overthrow of the United States government. I'm Tristan Redman, and as a journalist, I've never believed in ghosts. But when I discovered that my wife's great-grandmother was murdered in the house next door to where I grew up, I started wondering about the inexplicable things that happened in my childhood bedroom. When I tried to find out more, I discovered that

someone who slept in my room after me, someone I'd never met, was visited by the ghost of a faceless woman. So I started digging into the murder in my wife's family, and I unearthed family secrets nobody could have imagined. Ghost Story won Best Documentary Podcast at the 2024 Ambees and is a Best True Crime nominee at the British Podcast Awards 2024. Ghost Story won Best Documentary Podcast at the 2024 Amby's and is a Best True Crime Nominee at the British Podcast Awards 2024. Ghost Story is now the first ever Apple Podcast Series Essential. Each month, Apple Podcast editors spotlight one series that has captivated listeners with masterful storytelling, creative excellence, and a unique creative voice and vision. To recognize Ghost Story being chosen as the first series essential, Wondery has made it ad-free for a limited time, only on Apple Podcasts. If you

haven't listened yet, head over to Apple Podcasts to hear for yourself. Dracula, the ancient vampire who terrorises Victorian London. Blood and garlic, bats and crucifixes, even if you haven't read the book, you think you know the story. One of the incredible things about Dracula is that not only is it this wonderful snapshot of the 19th century, but it also has so much resonance today. The vampire doesn't cast a reflection in a mirror. So when we look in the mirror, the only thing we see is our own monstrous abilities. From the host and producer of American History Tellers and History Daily comes the new podcast, The Real History of Dracula. We'll reveal how author

Bram Stoker raided ancient folklore, exploited Victorian fears around sex, science, and religion, and how even today we remain enthralled to his strange creatures of the night. You can binge all episodes of The Real History of Dracula exclusively with Wondery Plus. Join Wondery Plus and The Wondery App, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify. So far in this show, we've imagined situations in which you, or someone you know, has been falsely accused of having ties to the Communist Party. The vast majority of people caught up in the Red Scare were not communists. Many of them were on the right side of history.

They got in trouble because they opposed fascism, or aided Jewish refugees in the 30s, or because they supported civil rights. This happened so frequently that many people started to think that the Red Scare was a witch hunt, a contemporary version of the Salem witch trials. Playwright Arthur Miller made the analogy explicit in his 1953 play The Crucible. There were no actual witches in Salem,

and many Americans found it equally hard to believe that their neighbors or co-workers might be secret agents. Now put yourself in the shoes of a scientist working on the American nuclear project in Los Alamos, New Mexico. It's January 1950. Let's say you're a physicist or maybe a chemist. You've been living in the high desert since 1943 when you moved there to join the top-secret efforts to build a brand-new destructive weapon. It's beautiful country, a picture-perfect scene from the American Southwest, a landscape full of sagebrush, wildflowers, and Native American pueblos. On hot days, the sun cooks the pines and junipers that cover the mountains, and the air smells like gin.

At sunset, the sangrated crystal mountains to the east glow blood red. During the war, living at Los Alamos felt like some combination of military base, low-security prison, and dude ranch. You and the 6,000 other scientists, engineers, technicians, and security staff all lived and worked behind barbed wire. Los Alamos was a company town, with the military providing the schools, the hospitals, the theaters, even an ice rink. Every dormitory and Quonset hut was plastered with posters reminding you of the security provisions, not that you were likely to forget. Still, on the occasional day off, Los Alamos felt

a bit like a camp. In the fall, you go horseback riding. In the winter, skiing. And since the wars ended, the lab's been a looser place. Now, your mail comes to your actual address instead of a post office box in Santa Fe. You can tell your family where you are, even invite your relatives out for a visit. You still have to pass through multiple checkpoints if you leave the site, but the worries are different now. Now, instead of worrying about whether you and your team will beat the Germans to the bomb, the security staff is obsessed with communism. The military detail in charge of security has been impossible to deal with since September, when President Truman announced that the Soviets had tested a bomb of their own.

It's understandable, but you, like most members of the scientific staff, think they're overreacting. In your opinion, there were two big secrets to the bomb. Number one, that it existed, and number two, that it worked. After Hiroshima, you wouldn't need spies to know the answer to those questions. The Soviets were perfectly capable of building a bomb on their own. But the military investigators and the FBI do not see it that way. Ever since September, they've been sniffing around, asking questions almost every day. The implications are ridiculous. Half the scientists at Los Alamos knew someone who'd been a member of the Communist Party in the 30s. And for the scientists who'd emigrated from Europe just a step ahead of the Nazis, that number was probably higher. So imagine then how shocking it must have been

to see a familiar face staring out from the front page of the newspaper. On February 3rd, 1950, British authorities arrested Klaus Fuchs on charges of atomic espionage. At the time of his arrest, Fuchs was working at Harwell, the British nuclear research facility. Our scientists would have known him as a brilliant physicist who had lived and worked at Los Alamos from 1944 to 1946. Fuchs knew everything there was to know about the atomic bomb. He attended the Trinity test in Alamogordo in 1945. What was worse, he knew almost as much about the American plans to build a hydrogen bomb,

so much so that he held a patent for one of the possible designs. And now he had confessed to being a Soviet spy. Fuchs was the first atom spy, but he wouldn't be the last. In 1951, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were tried for passing nuclear secrets to the Soviets. But unlike Fuchs, the Rosenbergs never confessed. Their case became a cause célèbre for people of conscience who assumed the couple, Jewish lefties from New York, had been framed. Their execution in 1953 made them martyrs for McCarthyism.

For 40 years, the Rosenbergs' reputation stayed intact, at least among the left. But in 1995, the United States government began declassifying materials from a top-secret counterintelligence project that changed everything. Starting in 1943, the Army Signal Intelligence Service began intercepting and decrypting Soviet intelligence messages. This was the Venona Project, a project so secret that not even Roosevelt knew about it. Remember, the Soviet Union was, at the time, a U.S. ally. Venona confirmed what the FBI and military brass suspected. Stalin had spies in the United States. Lots of them. The exact numbers are still disputed, but some historians think that the Soviets had almost 350

covert agents working with the United States. These spies worked at Los Alamos, in the State Department, and at the CIA. The Rosenbergs were most definitely guilty. But this still didn't justify the Red Scare. In the early 1950s, the FBI and HUAC were accusing so many people of being communists that more and more skeptics and critics started pushing back on these claims.

For instance, when communists gained control of the Chinese mainland in September 1949, hardliners blamed communist spies here in the U.S. for undermining foreign policy that, that what? Could have reversed a Chinese civil war from the halls of Congress? The following year, Senator Joe McCarthy claimed to have a list of 205 communists working in the State Department. In 1954, McCarthy aimed his sights at the Army. This time, he claimed to have a list of 130 subversives who worked at military facilities. By now, McCarthy's anti-communist hearings had become such a circus that both Republicans and Democrats refused to attend. And yet, McCarthy's attacks continued until one day in June,

when someone had finally had enough. Let us not assassinate this lad further, Senator. But you've done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency, sir, at long last. Have you left no sense of decency? That's the voice of Joseph Welch, chief counsel for the U.S. Army, defending a young lawyer from McCarthy's attacks. Welch's comments were a sensation. It's as if his remarks snapped 150 million people out of a trance. We know from historian Ellen Schrecker's work that the blacklisting continued, but the reckless, high-profile accusations stopped with Joe

McCarthy's humiliation that day in June. The Red Scare inflicted enormous damage in the United States. People watched what they said and who they said it to. Neighbors informed on neighbors. People with mainstream views found themselves trapped in lies about what they did years and years ago in their youth. But the Red Scare also damaged national security by failing to distinguish between manufactured and actual threats. The Red Scare was a quintessential Cold War phenomenon. According to Cold War ideology, the United States was supposed to be a beacon of freedom and liberty. But some saw a conflict. How could Americans criticize the Soviets for thought control while simultaneously requiring its citizens to take loyalty oaths?

Purity tests, black and white thinking, all or nothing, us against them. In Cold War America, opposition to communism became more important than loyalty to American values. From Wondery, this is episode one of the Cold War for American History Tellers. On the next episode, we dig deeper into how you fight an ideological war, delving into how the CIA enlisted Catholics in their campaigns against communism, why the State Department embraced jazz as a secret weapon, and how the United States hoped to contain global communism without direct confrontation. If you like American History Tellers, you can binge all episodes early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Prime members can listen ad-free

on Amazon Music. And before you go, tell us about yourself by filling out a short survey at wondery.com slash survey. American History Tellers is hosted, sound designed, and edited by me, Lindsey Graham, for Airship. This episode is written by Audra Wolfe, Ph.D. Executive Producers are Ben Adair and Hernán López for Wondering. In November 1991, media tycoon Robert Maxwell mysteriously vanished from his luxury yacht in the Canary Islands. But it wasn't just his body that would come to the surface in the days that followed. It soon emerged that Robert's business was on the brink of collapse, and behind his facade of wealth and success was a litany of bad investments, mounting debt, and multi-million dollar fraud.

Hi, I'm Lindsey Graham, the host of Wondery Show Business Movers. We tell the true stories of business leaders who risked it all, the critical moments that define their journey, and the ideas that transform the way we live our lives. In our latest series, a young refugee fleeing the Nazis arrives in Britain determined to make something of his life. Taking the name Robert Maxwell, he builds a publishing and newspaper empire that spans the globe. But ambition eventually curdles into desperation, and Robert's determination to succeed turns into a willingness to do anything to get ahead. Follow Business Movers wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen ad-free

on the Amazon Music or Wondery app.