The Cultural Frameworks of Prejudice: Reputational Images and the Postwar Disjuncture of Jews and Communism

AbstractResponses to prominent reputations provide a framework for understanding the growth and decline of group prejudice. In the 1930s, the connection between American Jews and Communism was both an empirical and cognitive reality—Jews constituted a significant portion of the American Communist Party and many Americans stereotyped them as such. However, by mid-century, the perceptual linkage between Jew and Communist had largely vanished. We explain the change in public attitudes by treating prejudice as a cultural framework for collective memory. Building on CitationBlumer (1958) and the empirical conclusions of other prominent sociologists of the period, we argue that group prejudice depends on a group's distinctiveness, its perceived moral imbalance, and the discursive utility of attacks. When components of this three-part frame weaken, prejudice dissipates. Specifically, we claim that the specificity of reputations serves as a concrete stand-in for more diffuse images of social groups. While group position is not only the result of the reputation of prominent figures, the public images of these figures help to shape prejudice and its decline. As an empirical case, we examine the cultural framework for interpreting the linkage of American Jews and Communism in the late 1940s and early 1950s through the reputations of Alger Hiss, Roy Cohn, and Adolf Hitler. Presented by reputational entrepreneurs, these images emphasize American Communists who were decidedly non-Jewish, underline the prominence of anti-Communist American Jews, and delegitimize public anti-Semitism. ACKNOWLEDGMENTSWe wish to thank William Brustein, Arnold Dashefsky, Glen Jeansonne, Peter Novick, Jeffrey Olick, Devah Pager, Richard C. Rockwell, Howard Schuman, and Barry Schwartz for comments on an earlier draft of this article. We appreciate the help of Caroline Carr in gathering data. We are grateful to Cheryl Sutherland, the librarian and archivist at the National Opinion Research Center, for making available survey data from the 1940s on anti-Communism and anti-Semitism, as well as to the archivists at The Yiddish Scientific Organization, Center for Jewish History.NOTESNotes1 Despite the radicalism of many Finnish Americans (CitationKivisto 1984), they were not targeted to the same extent as Jews, perhaps because they were located in peripheral regions (e.g., the Upper Midwest) or perhaps because, unlike anti-Semitism, anti-Finnish attitudes were not deeply rooted in American culture.2 The American Communist Party also tried to strengthen its association with Jews. In 1938, Moissaye Olgin, leader of the Jewish Communists, “proposed as a road to the Jewish masses that the Communists establish themselves as ‘inheritors of the best in Jewish culture’” (CitationProceedings 1938, as quoted in CitationHowe and Coser 1974:343).3 Surveys during the period of World War II, both by the National Opinion Research Center and by Opinion Research, found that approximately 60 percent of the American population felt that Jews had too much power in the United States. While these surveys do not ask about Communist orientation per se, they demonstrate generalized suspicion of alleged Jewish political and economic control.4 According to CitationPeter Novick (1999:92), “the popular association of Jews with Communism dated from the Bolshevik Revolution. Most of the ‘alien agitators' deported from the United States during the Red Scare after World War I had been [Jewish].”5 In retrospective research, one is always at the mercy of the particular questions asked. Perhaps the earlier question, which mentions religious groups, primed subjects, but the sharp decline is still striking and makes sense in light of other data.6 Admittedly, the party was smaller at this point, but public concern about Communism had certainly grown since the 1930s.7 In making this claim, we do not neglect the various forms of anti-Semitism that continued into the 1960s, including quotas at elite universities, restricted covenants in neighborhoods, or exclusion from hotels. However, these forms of polite anti-Semitism were qualitatively different from the explicit prejudice found in the 1930s (e.g., CitationDinnerstein 1994).8 The fact that, as we discuss below, elite WASPs became seen as supporters of Communism suggests that acculturation, status, and wealth by themselves do not prevent a group from being linked to radical social change.9 Although our data reveal a group-level phenomenon, prejudice research historically involved the examination of individual behavior and action (CitationBlumer 1958). These examinations explain prejudice social psychologically (CitationDollard et al. 1939; CitationKaufman 1957; CitationHoffman and Hurst 1990), attitudinally at an aggregated level of individual correlation (CitationHarlan 1942; CitationMaykovich 1975; CitationSullivan, Pierson, and Marcus 1982; CitationCase, Greeley, and Fuchs 1989) or through self-interest—the idea that “individuals develop negative affects and rigid stereotypes toward individuals with whom they are in competition and conflict” (CitationQuillian 1995:587; see CitationBonacich 1972). The “classical prejudice model” (CitationBobo and Hutchings 1996:953; see CitationAllport 1954), where racial and ethnic conflict stem from individually learned ideas and feelings of dislike, and the “stratification beliefs model,” where “individuals' beliefs about social inequality may affect whether they perceive members of other groups as competitive threats” (CitationBobo and Hutchings 1996:954), are by-products of the social psychological analysis of racial prejudice.10 By collective memory, we do not refer to representations of specific historical events, but rather to how groups are remembered, including their role in historic events, as well as stereotypes and other cultural issues.11 Future research should operationalize and test these variables, such as through news accounts of the civil rights movement and attitudes toward African Americans in the Deep South where prejudice once widely expressed disappeared over time.12 Our argument does not depend on the awareness of the majority of the American public of these figures (that Hiss was a WASP or Cohn was a Jew), but that those who were aware of this public issue were likely to be aware of their social location. Surveys did not ask if Hiss was a WASP or if Cohn was a Jew, but media reports raise these social positions frequently. Our data do not permit us to assess how the public responded to these media claims, other than in those surveys that found a diminution of prejudice. Further, our argument does not depend on the assertion that all Americans were aware of a linkage between Jews and Communists, although, as noted, a significant portion of the population held the belief.13 In the years after World War II, Communism was advancing in non-Western arenas such as China, Southeast Asia, and Korea, and perhaps some diminution of the Jewish character of Communism resulted from these global successes. However, our focus is how Communism is seen within the United States. Global movements should only marginally affect this, particularly given the widespread public concern about Communists in American politics in the late 1940s and early 1950s.14 While we focus on how non-Jewish Americans viewed Jews, we do not claim that the actions of Jews themselves had no effect. In part because of the claims that Jews were “aliens” and “Communists,” there was a push within important segments of the Jewish community to assimilate into the “mainstream” (CitationGoldscheider and Zuckerman 1984; CitationCohen 1988; CitationWertheimer 1993). Although demographic analysis is not central to our claims, large-scale Jewish immigration essentially ended by the mid-1920s. By the 1950s, the Jewish population would naturally have seemed more “American” than was true in the 1930s. Of course, with the changing cultural and social capital of first-, second-, and third-generation Jewish Americans, they were different. Radical parents produced children who embraced capitalism. However, the presence of prominent Jewish-German émigrés and the passage of the Displaced Persons Acts of 1948 and 1950 might have generated a fear of Jewish leftists.15 The Washington Post's headline the morning after Acheson's statements captures the response that Acheson provoked: “ACHESON NOT TO TURN BACK ON HISS/CITES BIBLE VERSES” (as quoted in CitationWeinstein 1978:506).16 A contributing factor may have been that the FBI served as a home for many upwardly mobile Irish Catholics whose grievances toward the Anglo-Protestant upper class were well established (Peter Kivisto, personal communication, 2006).17 All evidence suggests that McCarthy was personally tolerant of Jews, although early in his Senate career he had defended Nazi war criminals (CitationHerman 2000:6). Surely, Cohn's Jewishness provided McCarthy cover from potential attack, and McCarthy may have wished to defend himself from “any hint that his anticommunism was really anti-Semitism in disguise” (CitationHerman 2000:211).18 Additional research is needed on whether or not the same process of delinking Jews and Communism occurred in Western Europe.19 The patterns of prejudice reduction for blacks and Catholics were not the same as for Jews because of their different social placements, their larger segment of the population, and their smaller influence in American cultural industries, given the size of their population, but the basic processes seem similar.