Diplomatic Black Hole: Conspiracy and Political Fear in Mid-20th Century America

By Michael Cassella-Blackburn and Darcie Hodgkins Langone

Cassella-Blackburn and Langone provide an account of the ways in which the small group of zealots known as the China Lobby conspired to create a hysterical fear of the threat of Soviet imperialism and the dangers of communism in the minds of the American public and Western leaders. The China Lobby included business leaders, publishers, and members of the United States congress, state department, and military as well as Chinese nationalists. Their work led to a diplomatic black hole, a total failure in diplomacy between the United States and the other Western nations with first the Soviet Union, then China and eventually Korea, Vietnam and even the African nations engaged in decolonization. Their conspiracy was a fight against an insidious enemy that was both outside and inside America.

 

Through exploration of the speeches, congressional testimony, personal correspondence, and articles published in early mainstream publications such as in Henry Luce's Time and Life magazines as well as in the far-reaching Reader's Digest and The New York Times, the authors guide the reader through a large and interwoven ideological movement based on political fear and accusations of conspiracy. The China Lobby's diplomatic black hole, a distortion of reality, led the American public to believe the Soviet Communists' stated plan for world domination was viable and in so doing was able to justify multiple wars in the East Asia, the overthrow of democratically elected leaders, and the diversion and stunting of post-war leftist social and economic movements.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Michael Cassella-Blackburn
• Release date: Aug 19, 2022
• ISBN: 9798201281472

Book preview

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank friends, colleagues, and editors who read and commented upon the various versions of the manuscript. Peninsula College and its Foundation generously granted funding for a sabbatical and multiple trips to the archives. The archivists were, as always, accommodating and helpful at Yale, Princeton, Stanford Universities, the Library of Congress, the National Archives, and at the Truman and Eisenhower presidential libraries. We especially want to single out Dr. Sayr Conway-Lanz, the archivist who handled the William C. Bullitt Papers at Yale University before moving on to the Library of Congress. His help was invaluable in developing an understanding of Bullitt’s obsession with Soviet communism.

Our colleagues at Peninsula College, Rich Riski, Janet Lucas, and Kate Reavey all added immensely to the editing and thought processes necessary to the writing of this book. Janet and MCB led a community class on modern American conspiracies, working through logic we often struggled to understand. My (MCB) twisted logic on conspiracy theories, fear, and diplomatic black holes also had to withstand the light of my spouse Lynne, and children, Misha and Soren. 

DHL would like to thank MCB for his persistent and generous mentorship. His contributions to my thinking, teaching, and writing have improved the quality of each. I would also like to thank Dr. Helena Patrikiou, whose fearless and passionate intelligence was a consistent boon during the writing of this book until her premature death. Her commitment to recording authentic history, as well as that of the brilliant scholars, writers, and artists of her Women’s Working Group, has bolstered my thinking and work in ways to myriad to list. Finally, I must thank my husband, Carl R Small, for engaging with my interminable chatter about Bullitt and the anti-communists and for his consistent support during this project.

Last, but certainly not least, Marina Shipova created an excellent cover for the book. Perhaps because of her Russian roots, she truly understands the colorful world of conspiracy.

Introduction

This work is a snapshot of a group of men and women who negotiated and propagandized for an American foreign policy that would, at least initially, save China from the clutches of a nefarious Soviet Union and the ideology of communism. The reader already knows, of course, that they lost. China fell to communism in 1949. But along the way, the China Lobby, as they were called, whipped up such political fear that they convinced a large portion of the American public that the Soviet Union meant to take over the world and that China was a mere pawn of Joseph Stalin and the Soviet communists. Their efforts both influenced foreign relations and helped to minimize any domestic progressive change in the United States and in countries around the world, especially those directly connected to the Cold War in Asia.

The story revolves around the China Lobby because they were in the middle of it all. Most people know something about the Red baiting of the 1950s, but the China Lobby was working hard in that role long before, during, and even after Senator Joseph McCarthy’s infamous committee first launched. Ambassador William C. Bullitt, Congressman Walter Judd, textile merchant Alfred Kohlberg and others threw around assertions and innuendos and were often far more coherent, much more long lasting, and destructive than the better-known McCarthy. Facts that did not help their arguments did not enter the discussion.

One of the more notable State Department-affiliated, yet hardly recognized, members of the China Lobby was the first American ambassador to the Soviet Union, William C. Bullitt. From his own fears, Bullitt conjured danger from Soviet communism, seeing it as a conspiracy to take over the world and enslave humankind. He was a masterful communicator, wielding facts as needed to wake up the public to this perceived threat. Bullitt and his allies in the China Lobby did whatever they could to stave off Soviet communist imperialism in East Asia and at home.

There were several members of the US Congress involved in the China Lobby. Walter Judd, a Republican Congressman and former medical missionary who worked for years as a physician in China, was a crucial member of the China Lobby who became involved in Chiang’s nationalist cause due to his concerns about Japanese aggression in China. Republican Senator William F. Knowland of California is perhaps one of the best-known China Lobbyists. Known as the Senator from Formosa, so deep was his commitment to Chiang Kai-shek’s nationalists in Taiwan, Knowland often times considered even President Eisenhower’s positions to be too liberal. There was also Styles Bridges, another powerful Republican Senator and the former Governor of New Hampshire, who was a strident anti-communist and would be one of only twenty-two senators who refused to vote for a censure of Senator McCarthy. Bridges, like Bullitt, was not above using the lavender scare to go after political opponents, and his wife Doloris Bridges would also become an outspoken anti-communist. Last, but obviously not the least, was Senator Joseph McCarthy.

Publisher Henry R. Luce and his wife, Congresswoman Claire Boothe Luce, were both powerful members of the China Lobby. While Luce's name is familiar as the founder of Time, Life and other magazines, his wife is not as well known for her anti-communism but rather for her play The Women, which became a smash on Broadway. Moreover, while the publishers of Reader’s Digest, Dewitt Wallace and his wife, Lila Bell Wallace, were not directly involved in the China Lobby, Bullitt and other anti-communist writers would find a home in their magazine.

The China Lobby was actually comprised of several overlapping organizations. The American China Policy Association, which was founded by Alfred Kohlberg along with the journalist John B. Powell and the writer Christopher Emmett, would come to play a role in the increasingly tense argument between sympathetic leftists and the anti-communists.

The Committee to Defend America by Aiding Anti-Communist China was another organizational member of the China Lobby. It was founded by the Pittsburgh-based Frederick McKee, a longtime activist, whose less vitriolic communication style had him writing in the New York Times in May of 1949 that, as Chiang’s Nationalists headed into what would become the final confrontation with Mao’s communists, the United States should offer yet more military assistance.

Representing the military, Claire Chennault, the commander of the 1st American Volunteer Group, better known as the Flying Tigers, was instrumental in helping Chiang to convince Roosevelt that General Joseph Stillwell needed to be removed from his position. He also took on the role of chief advisor to Chiang and his attempt to create a Chinese Air Force. Chennault’s wife, Anne, would become an outspoken anti-communist as well. They would be long-time supporters of the China Lobby.

The China Lobby involved not only Americans, however. Even at the time, there were rumors in Washington D.C. about possible nefarious actions happening inside the Chinese Embassy, specifically questioning where US aid dollars were going. There can be no overlooking the role that Chiang’s family played in the situation. The idea of a nationalist China had not started with Chiang Kai-shek but rather with the physician and politician, Sun Yat-sen. It was Sun who formed the Kuomintang and who wrote the foundational nationalist philosophical texts, including the Three Principles of the People. Sun’s most ardent supporter was Charlie Soong, whose children would become the most prominent Chinese supporters of the nationalist cause and the work of the China Lobby. Soong’s children included Soong Mei-ling, who would marry Chiang Kai-shek and become known throughout the world as Madame Chiang, a powerful, and some say manipulative, advocate for nationalist China. Her sister, Soon Ching-ling, had been the third wife of Sun Yat-sen and one of the leaders of the 1911 Revolution in China. A third sister married H.H. Kung, a Chinese banker and politician who, together with Charlie Soong’s son T.V. Soong, would form the China Development Finance Corporation, through which the nationalists would access foreign investment in their cause. T.V. Soong would be Chiang’s personal representative in Washington D.C. and would use his time to advocate for any number of funding schemes, at one point even proposing the outrageous idea that President Roosevelt should allow retired US general Claire Chennault to firebomb Japanese cities. While he and Chiang had many arguments and fall-outs, T.V. Soong would head the Chinese delegation to the new United Nations and negotiate with Josef Stalin in an attempt to prevent Stalin from supporting the Chinese Communist Party.

Together with other merchants, members of the foreign service, returned missionaries and the children of these missionaries, often referred to as mish kids, such as the novelists Pearl Buck and John Hersey, these men and women would come to have enormous power over United States economic decisions, if not always over foreign policy. They became a conspiracy themselves, utilizing their power to communicate their needs to not just US politicians but to the American public through mass media and private, charitable organizations from their unelected positions. Each member had a role in the China Lobby, be it contacting powerful people, writing articles in magazines, or pushing for the right moves in foreign relations. Each contributed to the conspiracy, which posited that Soviet communism not only meant to, but also was capable of, taking over the world. Some were shriller or more effective than were others, but it was they who laid the foundation for the eventual anti-communist panic.

It is no longer controversial to claim that the rise of social and alternative media has changed the nature of public rhetoric, leading in many cases to a blurring of factual reporting, not just of public events but also of personal responses to such events. With the coming of the administration of President Donald Trump and the advent of the Covid-19 pandemic, the rhetoric around conspiracy and conspiracy theories ramped up in the United States and around the world. There arose a type of performative response, often completely over-the top and in many cases seething with rage at a political enemy, in which any suggestion or idea that removed a person from the good graces of their side would garner accusations of conspiratorial thinking. This has led to a rise in the number of academics studying conspiracy theories and either the people or the algorithms that spread them. As we will see by considering the efforts of the China Lobby, the underlying use of both actual conspiracy and the manipulation of political fear through the creation of conspiracy theories, along with the wielding of the phrase as a political weapon, have changed only in amplitude, not in kind. Pick up any book or article about the growth of conspiracy theories and one finds the writer having started with a set of facts that make sense of the world according to their own ideological views. Currently, the argument over misinformation and disinformation has reached a fever pitch, with the mainstream journalists going so far as to fact check any argument in opposition to their own beliefs or assertions. In 2019, an editor at Wikipedia wrote an essay in which he attempted to determine how the editorial staff could define a Wiki edit as a conspiracy theory. His concerns included the rise of assumptions of bad faith, the existence, or not, of entities that could be corrupting information and how such accusations can poison the well. This work considers those concerns as well.

This is not, however, a book about the uses and misuses of media, not exactly. Today’s media and knowledge-production environment is one in which most people carry small computers with them at all times on which they can simply Google their questions and be guided by an algorithm towards a site that will provide them an answer that fits their ideological world view. In comparison, the China Lobby had a much harder slog in their efforts to create and control a narrative. The magazines for which Bullitt would write his increasingly fearful articles about the communist threat had only come into being in the 1920s. However, their reach expanded enormously and quickly. Reader’s Digest magazine was founded in 1922 and eventually became the magazine with the highest circulation of nearly 16 million readers. By 1938, the magazine had been translated and printed in seventeen languages. Henry Luce’s Time Magazine, founded just one year after Reader’s Digest would reach similar heights. Richard Rovere, reporting for The New Republic in 1944, claimed Time’s readership at close to four million people in the United States and Canada. Thirty-three stations across the nation carried Luce’s accompanying radio show. The China Lobby did not miss the opportunity provided by the rapid growth of what would become mass media. Neither was it missed by their opposition, as we will see.

After the tumultuous years of overt Western imperialism, economic depression, and war in East Asia, the American people wanted change: political, economic, and social change, but they also wanted normalcy, a rest from all the chaos. The China Lobby and other anti-communists did not much care about the underlying problems that were driving Americans to seek alternative ideologies and ways of living. Workers, minorities, women, and gay men and lesbians began pushing for legal and cultural rights. They all wanted legitimate outlets and opportunities rather than continuing with the status quo. However, these movements of ideas and actions became embedded in the anti-communist narrative by those who opposed them, feeding fears that could then be easily understood as part of a greater conspiracy theory. The China Lobby, in helping to create a black hole of information, created not just a fear of a world-wide communist conspiracy, they confused themselves, becoming convinced that bringing order to this changing domestic world was part and parcel of confronting the communist conspiracy.

As to how the China Lobby became so effective, we look to William C. Bullitt as an example of their methods. He was a man in the know. Having served President Woodrow Wilson as a representative of the American Peace Commission in 1919, Bullitt met with Lenin and the Bolshevik elite to formulate a peace for WWI with the other Western powers. In the 1930s, his openness toward communism and socialism had earned him the notice of President Franklin Roosevelt. Roosevelt wanted the Soviet Union as a partner in the East against Japanese aggression and hoped that Bullitt’s skills and contacts could convince the United States Congress to recognize the Soviet Union. To Bullitt’s surprise, his return to Moscow in the 1930s brought only frustration. Bullitt quickly discovered that Stalin’s word meant little and his agreement to stop the promotion of communism around the world meant nothing. Bullitt became troubled while watching the Party’s descent into the darkness of purges. The Soviet elite and then even the proletariat began hunting supposed wreckers and spies of the revolution, which of course could be anyone who owned land or disagreed with the Bolshevik party line. As the show trials and executions began, Bullitt helplessly watched as the revolution devolved further into chaos. Those three years scarred Bullitt for the rest of his life and laid the foundation for all that he subsequently did. His passion helped to drive the China Lobby to present any evidence, no matter how dubious, as a fact in order to indict the Soviet Union for its attempts to enslave the world.

The text begins with a definition of terms, delineating the different understandings of the topics under consideration such as conspiracy, conspiracy theories, and political fear and how these concepts interact with political ideologies such as nationalism, imperialism, and liberalism. We consider how political fear is both experienced and weaponized depending on the position of the individual or groups toward whom the fear-based narrative is being aimed.

Both conspiracies and conspiracy theories have likely been around for all of human history. Some conspiracy theories have few adherents while others have thousands, perhaps millions, of believers. Some conspiracy theories arise from accidental or unplanned events, and some eventually are exposed as real events contrived by people working together to achieve a particular end. A conspiracy theory need not be destructive or malicious in intent although many are. Several psychologists studying conspiracy theories have explained their function as a warning device, a signal that something within a culture is going wrong. An event or set of events has happened that upsets the normal life of people, something that they cannot find context for in their previous understanding of the world. At its root, for example, the assassination of President John Kennedy sent waves of fear through a public that had considered US presidents to hold such power that surely, they could not be murdered by a mere random killer. That fear was born before any journalist or writer wrote a word of analysis or supposition, but it provided fertile soil for those who would come to create the conspiracy theories still extant today about the President’s death. 

Conspiracy theories often arise in particular historical contexts. The United States sank into conspiratorial thinking at the end of the 19th century during the populist revolt, again in the 1920s after the First World War and the Bolshevik Revolution and of course in the 1940s and 1950s, which is the period this work covers. Both periods experienced tremendous economic and cultural stress. During the first period, people grew increasingly concerned about the rise of corporations and the control they exerted over nearly all aspects of life, including the political system. In the latter period, the China Lobby saw Stalin’s Soviet Union as the perpetrator of a vast conspiracy, a not-so-secret plan to create a worldwide communist economy. Conspiracy theories can become multi-layered and quite complex and often create an equal reactionary theory. For example, consider that in East Asia, some Chinese people had begun to wonder if perhaps the Christian missionaries were part of a larger plan by the West to control China and its people. Others, such as President Truman, wondered if the China Lobby was itself a conspiracy to perpetuate the cause of Chiang Kai-shek. As this work will show, Truman was correct. These theories in turn competed with bits and pieces of foreign policies, social narratives and with the goals stated openly by various world leaders to create a maelstrom of confusion and fear that caused untold numbers of diplomatic failures.

Moving on, we look at the world experienced by the men and women of the China Lobby, and Bullitt specifically, to place their actions in context. These men and women represent a generation that experienced enormous changes in technology, religion, economic opportunity, and even basic hygiene. These changes would influence their understanding of the world, the mechanisms by which they believed social and political change could be created, and the resulting diplomatic black hole, a chaotic miscommunication affecting the American people, the United States agenda in foreign affairs and the ultimate domestic disarray in both the United States and other countries.

Next, we address the frenzied post-World War II world, as the after-effects that spread across the globe. Bullitt specifically was concerned that there was no longer German or Japanese fascism to keep Soviet communism in check and began to engage more with the China Lobby in an effort to unite anti-communists. It was then that Bullitt re-connected with his friend Henry Luce, the owner of Time, Life, and Fortune magazines. Bullitt was an excellent public speaker and writer, having been a journalist before his State Department days. Their relationship led to Bullitt writing articles, several per year, for Time and Life throughout the 1940s and 1950s. He also knew many of the people formulating American foreign policy and he was not alone in his fears about communism spreading to the rest of Asia. At first, he focused on Europe, which the elite class had long considered the epicenter of the diplomatic and cultural world, but he saw quickly that the Truman administration had awakened to the threat of Soviet communism and was beginning to push back with the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan, among other efforts. Asia, though, seemed ripe for Soviet communism’s propaganda and the Truman administration seemed less willing to commit time and resources to fight communism in East Asia.

Given the China Lobby’s apparent focus on the East Asia, and Bullitt’s laser-focus on the Soviet Union, the next section focuses on how communist ideology was providing answers to many Americans and others around the world, regardless of Soviet plans. The working class saw that it could be an answer to the horrors of the Great Depression, a reason to never again engage in imperialism, and even a system that could address commonplace injustices. While the wealthy continued to prosper after the Depression, millions of others were barely getting by. The New Deal policies helped to be sure, but many saw little help coming for the ongoing racism, homophobia, and sexism that remained rampant and ensured unequal resources. Some turned their eyes to the Soviet Union where the communist leadership claimed to be working to create a new and equal world. Perhaps most importantly during the long, horrible depression, the Soviet people had jobs. Soviet propaganda claimed that when the working class gained control of the means of production, racism and sexism would disappear along with poverty. No longer would anyone need to work long exhausting hours at the factory and on the farm with nothing to show for it at the end but more poverty. Given the productivity of industrialization, these American communists asked, why did the masses not share in the fruits of their own labor? Certainly, the peoples of many formerly colonized countries and the Chinese peasants had little reason to trust this liberal democracy being presented by the United States. Many questioned what Western imperialists had done for the people of East Asia. Many Chinese people watched in horror as Chiang Kai-shek worked with the hated Western imperialists. In fact, Chiang’s family would enrich themselves at the expense of millions of peasants over the years during which the US supported his Nationalist Party. Many of those peasants may have wondered if a conspiracy of imperialism or capitalism had ensnared them as well.

The next section addresses the reaction of the China Lobby to Mao Zedong and the Chinese communists who won the long Chinese Civil War and took over Mainland China in 1949. Additionally, in that same year the Soviets produced their first atomic bomb. The