Spine #117 – 1950
“You want to live dangerously – is that it?”
“Something like that,” said the girl. “It’s better than being bored to death.”
State Department Murders
In this early Gold Medal publication, a humdinger of a McCarthyite story written by Edward S. Aarons under the pseudonym Edward Ronns, our main character is Barney Cornell. He’s a State Department lackey who is intensely investigated by a commanding congressman. His alleged crime: a charge of compassion for communism by selling classified information to former assets in Central Europe. We’re talking big secrets, dangerous secrets. You ever hear of Project Cirrus? The atomic weapons program capable of releasing “a deadly cloud of radioactive dust of short life cycle, a thousand times more deadly than any poison gas during the period of its activity”? This was the very project on which Cornell was detailed. The Reds got information about Cirrus from somewhere. Was it Barney? That’s what his bosses at the State Department were looking to uncover.
Barney’s got to go on the run with the hopes of clearing his name with a man whose got pull in Congress, the newspapers, and executive branch agencies. This fictional bigwig is Jason Stone who embodies the power players of 1950s. Oh yeah, and Barney had the hots for Stone’s wife! Could this tangled heap of love be the motivation Stone needs for destroying Barney’s life and reputation as revenge for macking on his lady? Well, Barney doesn’t get the opportunity to find out as Stone turns up dead at his holiday home in Calvert Beach.
Early in the book, Barney meets up with Stone’s wife and his State Dept. supervisor, Paul Evarts, at a restaurant on the outskirts of town. A couple things about this spot gives our lead character the heebie jeebies. At first, it’s the longer hair styles of the male waitstaff and the attention paid to him instead of Stone’s wife. Then, Paul sits next to Barney within knee touching knee proximity throughout their entire conversation. That crossed the line and the meeting ends abruptly with a homophobic holler and Barney storming out of the restaurant.
It’s blatantly obvious that Paul is a gay character and even more evident that, by describing three failed marriages and tensions with Barney, he lived his life in the closet. Later in the book, during the corny climax, it’s discovered that Stone kept a black book of secrets about pests and pipsqueaks he wanted to squeeze. Guess who has an entry in that ledger? Paul Evarts. Ronns gives this particular plot point a little dimension to show that it wasn’t so much Evarts’s homosexuality that made him run Red. It was living life with a deep secret that, if exposed, would ruin him due to the social expectations of the times.
State Department Murders was published in 1950, two years after Spillane’s I, the Jury. This was the same year of Senator McCarthy’s infamous speech at Wheeling, West Virginia. Our favorite senator touched a match to America’s paranoia soaked collective consciousness by stating “…the State Department, which is on of the most important government departments, is thoroughly infested with Communists.” Yikes! Seriously, Joe? “I have in my hand fifty-seven cases of individuals who would appear to be either card carrying members or certainly loyal to the Communist Party, but who nevertheless still help to shape our foreign policy.”
At an event in Ohio later that year, McCarthy referenced a list of 205 State Department employees who were supposedly Commies. Did communist infiltration within America’s foreign ministry spread? No, it didn’t. Historical research discredits McCarthy’s accusations as being political fireworks intended to demean and deface opponents from the other side of the aisle.
Why, you ask? Before Truman there was FDR who led the nation through war and economic depression. That’s a long time not to have a Republican president. Ike wouldn’t be elected until 1952. That’s 18 years of being locked out of the White House. But, Eisenhower wasn’t cut from the McCarthy cloth. Did this matter? Not to Senator Robert Taft from Ohio, “Mr. Republican” and Mr. Establishment, who told Joe McCarthy to keep on going with his witchhunts. Taft was aware of the demagogue’s appeal to the masses and the heat it was putting on Democrats.
What’s most important about Tailgunner Joe’s meteoric rise was his timing. McCarthy’s concentration of conspiracy concepts found fuel in the mood of the postwar political climate. Don’t get me wrong, the U.S.A. after World War II was on top. We contributed to the military defeat of Germany, did the heavy lifting against Japan, and ended things with a bang by developing the sexiest and scariest weapon ever known to man. The economy was a-booming thanks to no Stalingrads or Nankings being fought in North America. Much of the rest of the world was bombed into moonscape. Europe and Asia wanted stuff after the war, but couldn’t build a thing. That’s what happens when cities and factories are incinerated. We could manufacture things and had plenty to give. They were broke. We had capital. Things were looking…exceptional. That was until the foreign policy setbacks of 1949.
Nuclear monopoly gave Uncle Sam one big swinging dick. When the Soviets detonated their own device in August of ’49, that humbled things enough to where Sammy had to figure out whether he was “hard” or “soft” on communism. Plus, on the heels of the that big boom, was the collapse of Chaing Kai Shek’s nationalist forces to Mao’s insurgents. Those weren’t good headlines for President Truman.
Pessimism grew within the first world’s most powerful nation as Americans looked at the outside world. One of the bummers about a democratic republic is the institution of democracy itself. In order to get a majority of votes, it can be beneficial for demagogues to rely on dubious information, perpetuate nasty personal attacks, and prey on people’s fears, anger, and ignorance. With the timing ripe from communist gains overseas, McCarthy rode the wave of insecurity to popular prominence. This was the real world in which our fictional Barney Cornell found himself to be an employee of the State Department; the wrong place at the wrong time.
“If you want to be against McCarthy, boys, you’ve got to be a Communist or a cocksucker.”
Senator Joe McCarthy
Let’s get back to the main plot twist and resolution of State Department Murders which centers around Paul Evarts…the poor bastard. Turns out that Paul was the killer of Jason Stone, and the leaker of Project Cirrus info to the communists. And for most of the book, he was making like a helper to Barney when it came to running from the cops and the FBI. So what made Paul go turncoat and eventually dead? This is where the significance of State Department Murders comes into focus for readers in the 21st century. Paul Evarts, and the pressures that made him count as a Commie coward, were culturally representative of the “Lavender Scare.”
During the Fifties, “healthy” heterosexual habits and happy households were indicators of good ol’ American values and strong constitutions against communism. In the sack, anything deemed excessive or degenerate was considered “deviant.” We can put much of the blame on policymakers and department directors wielding wild rhetoric and hammering homophobia. J. Edgar Hoover, Joe McCarthy, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and Richard Nixon come to mind. Employees of diplomatic and national security agencies were particularly scrutinized for possible deviant sexual behaviors. When you analyse pop culture primary sources from the early 1950s, like State Department Murders, straight womanizers were given a bit of a pass compared to gay men.
Barney from the book is a prime example. Here he is chasing a married woman around until he crossed paths with one Sally Smith, an innocent character to be fair, who in the process of providing refuge from his pursuers confesses her love for him out of the blue and sleeps in the same bed…naked! Yep, they did it. Or at least anyone who can read the print on these pulpy pages will surely surmise. Barney got a pass while Paul got bullets.
In the age of McCarthy, exceptions were made in order to create and court conspiracies. Enter Roy Cohn.
“Truth is hardly ever an absolute -there are so many elements.”
Roy Cohn
Roy was McCarthy’s rabid chief counsel who played a major role in the tactics used against the victims of the senator’s accusations. “Roy was McCarthy’s protégé in the use of bareknuckles and battering rams, but Roy was so bad-natured and true-believing that he was soon shepherding his mentor.” Cohn was a master of manipulation, a conjurer of conspiracy, and a sage of the smear. His approach was to stick with an accusation regardless of how bogus or embellished the context might have been. Cohn could ignore critics and voices of reason which was made possible by the Democrat’s fear of being labeled “soft” on communism. That was acceptable Orwellian behavior in the days of America’s polarized postwar politics. It didn’t matter if the accused had their civil liberties trampled. McCarthy and his team loomed large.
So where is Cohn now? He’s dead. Died in 1986 of “cardio-pulmonary arrest” along with “dementia” and “underlying HTLV-3 infections.” In other words, AIDs. Cohn was a gay man wrapped in the masculine blanket of McCarthyist mania which suspended any sense of irony or hypocrisy when it came to demonizing “perverts.” According to Roger Stone, who knew Cohn towards the end of his life, Roy “was not gay. He was a man who liked having sex with men. Gays were weak, effeminate. He always seemed to have these young blond boys around. It just wasn’t discussed. He was interested in power and access. He told me his absolute goal was to die completely broke and owing millions to the I.R.S. He succeeded in that.”
Polarized politics in the present populist period have evolved from the anti-communist fears of the cold war era into a bipartisan embrace of smear. A lot has happened since 1950. Out from the rubble of the Berlin Wall rose an infinite number of culture wars and crackpot conspiracy theories.
So, where does that leave State Department Murders in an age of mutually assured political destruction? Ronns’s creation reminds us that we’ve made some progress since the “Lavender Scare” while never really ridding ourselves of the cold war culture wars that serve as political tools and sources of entertainment. Moneyed magnates and popular politicians wield immense influence in our political, cultural, and societal systems. Hysteria is wildfire-contagious, while understanding and critical thinking seem to move at a glacial pace.
It’s amazing to think, at least if you’re like your buddy C.D. Baxter here, that a Gold Medal paperback illustrates the paradox of progress when we trace our trajectory from 1950 and the early postwar period of McCarthyism to the 21st century.
“I’m immortal, Ethel. I have forced my way into history. I ain’t never gonna die.”
Roy Cohn’s Character from Angels in America
C.D. Baxter’s Quick Review
Story – Not Bad
Cover Eye Candy – Pretty Good
Later Editions
Sources
- Ellen Schreker, The Age of McCarthyism: A Brief History with Documents (Boston: Bedford/St. Martins, 2002)
- David Halberstam, The Fifties (New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1993)
- James T. Patterson, Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996)
- K.A. Cuordileone, “Politics in the Age of Anxiety”: Cold War Political Culture and the Crisis in American Masculinity, 1949-1960,” Journal of American History, Volume 87, Issue 2, September 2000, 515 – 545
- Elaine Taylor May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books, 2008)
- Larry Tye, Demagogue: The Life and Long Shadow of Senator Joe McCarthy (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2020)
- Allen Krebs, “Roy Cohn, Aide to McCarthy and Fiery Lawyer, Dies at 59,” New York Times, August 3, 1986.
- Jeffrey Toobin, “The Dirty Trickster: Campaign tips from the man who has done it all,” The New Yorker, May 23rd, 2008.
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