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The Strange Career of Annie Lee Moss: Rethinking Race, Gender, and McCarthyism
Andrea Friedman
| Annie Lee Moss is hardly a household name. She had her fifteen minutes (or so) of fame in March 1954, when Edward R. Murrow dedicated an episode of his television news show, See It Now, to her appearance before Sen. Joseph McCarthy's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. McCarthy had charged that Moss, an African American civilian Pentagon employee who allegedly had access to top-secret coded messages, was a card-carrying member of the Communist party (CP). Murrow's broadcast went a long way toward discrediting those claims; ultimately, Moss remained an army clerk, laboring in obscurity until her retirement in 1975, at age sixty-nine. When she reappeared in George Clooney's 2005 paean to Murrow, Good Night, and Good Luck, she had been long forgotten by all but a coterie of McCarthy scholars and right-wing apologists for McCarthyism.1 |
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This seemingly unimportant federal employee had a rather strange career. Like many other Americans, she was caught up in the loyalty-security programs of the Harry S. Truman and Dwight D. Eisenhower administrations, but the extent of official attention paid to her was unusual. She was subjected to at least three investigations, three job suspensions, and several transfers for security purposes. J. Edgar Hoover believed she merited his close attention, and the secretary of defense once personally intervened on her behalf. She also appeared before both the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) and McCarthy's subcommittee. Even more strange is the enduring career of Annie Lee Moss as a symbol of Cold War politics. Long before George Clooney brought her again to the national stage, historians and pundits had offered her as a sign of McCarthy's evil or of his vindication. The debate over Moss has centered on whether or not McCarthy was correct. Was this "humble Negress" actually a Communist? And if she was, does that justify the Cold War–era red scare and the senator's part in it? For liberal commentators from Murrow to Clooney, Moss was a "little woman" who was incomprehensible as a Communist; her very insignificance communicated the absurdity of McCarthy's campaign. For conservative ideologues such as Fulton Lewis Jr., George S. Schuyler, William F. Buckley Jr., and, most recently, Ann Coulter, Moss's seeming obscurity was a cover for Communist cunning, a demonstration of the necessity for eternal vigilance.2 |
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In those tellings, Moss is merely a cipher for Joe McCarthy; her life has no meaning beyond what it can tell us about the value of his crusade. Placing Moss in her social contexts, however, enables us to understand how and why she was made (and made herself) into such a potent symbol, and in a way that precluded the recognition of her own political subjectivity. Here I revisit the careers of Annie Lee Moss, as a black woman living out the early Cold War in Washington, D.C., and as a public figure in the debates about McCarthyism, to illuminate how limited the possibilities were for imagining African American citizenship in the postwar years. Never the helpless and passive victim that she was portrayed, Moss was a community activist, a woman ambitious for herself and her family, and most likely a member, briefly, of the Communist party. Yet, in a Cold War context that made African American progress contingent on black men's continued loyalty to racial liberalism and offered few opportunities for conceptualizing black women's loyalty at all, Moss's best chances for securing her bit of the American dream lay in erasing her own agency. Her interests coincided with those of McCarthy's enemies, most prominently Murrow and the border-state Democrats Stuart Symington and John McClellan, who were able to use Moss's identity as a "poor old colored woman" against the senator by positioning themselves as her chivalrous defenders. Paradoxically, Moss became simultaneously a sign of the decline of McCarthyism and of the ascendancy of a liberal racial order secured by anticommunism and enlightened white leadership. That she did so on the eve of the explosion of a mass civil rights movement is only one of the ironies of her strange career.
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