“Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?”
V. That question was asked of thousands of INNOCENT Americans during the second “Red Scare” of 1945 – early 1960s. Fear stalked America. Who would the American Inquisition next single out? Who. would be guilty by association; of reading the “wrong” books?
THE story of Far Right NEED for, searches for, “enemies” – has roiled America. 1620 – 2023. In that search, persecuted innocents, demand others live by THEIR standards, rules that continually violated the Constitution became the norm.
***”Such pipsqueaks as Nixon and McCarthy are trying to get us so frightened of Communism that we’ll be afraid to turn out the lights at night.” [Helen Gahagen Douglas]
1]. Griffin Fariello: “The Red Scare”: “The Red Scare was Truman’s Cold War come home..Archibald MacLeish..: “American foreign policy was a mirror image of Russian foreign policy: whatever the Russians did, we did it in reverse. American domestic policies were conducted under a kind of upside-down Russian veto: no man could be elected to public office unless he was on record detesting the Russians, and no proposal could be enacted from a peace plan at one end to a military budget at the other, unless it could be demonstrated that the Russians wouldn’t like it.
“Led by a reactionary Congress, and with considerable aid from Harry Truman, the media trumpeted the alarm: encircled by the Soviets and betrayed from within, our nation was endangered. This fear dominated national life; steps were taken to discipline the citizenry. Loyalty oaths became the order of the day. First it was government employees..then teachers; soon Americans of all varieties were mumbling oaths of fealty. Even Las Vegas got into the act, swearing a troupe of strippers to a solemn oath..
“State and federal investigators grilled suspected citizens on their reading habits, voting patterns, and church attendance. Support for racial equality became evidence of subversive leanings. Heretical literature was banned..some communities even held book burnings..Neighbors informed on neighbors, students on their teachers..Seven war-era concentration camps were dusted off, and lists prepared of radicals to fill them.
“..the Inquisition demanded a public accounting. Witnesses before the investigating committees were expected not only to repent..but name their former comrades. The pressure to collaborate was enormous. the full weight of government and society..All one had to do was cooperate and life would be restored.”
*** “As an organized political group, the Communists have done nothing to damage our society a fraction as much as what their enemies have done in the name of defending us against subversion.” [Murray Kempton]
2] David Caute: “The Great Fear”: the House Un-American Activities “working principle..was repentance, confession, betrayal. Only he who named names could truly be said to have purged himself. What the Committee wanted..was public denunciation, public purgation, a purification of the convert by means of his public humiliation as he betrayed his old friends and comrades.
“..HCUS’s mission and highest delight was to hound radicals out of their jobs..Frequently witnesses were fired as soon as they were subpoenaed..Even those who were self-employed, or owners of small businesses, could be ruined..
“To fight subversion, McCarthy practiced it. In various executive departments he set up what he called the “loyal American underground,” a network of spies..Justice Department and FBI men sympathetic to his crusade kept him supplied with pickings from confidential files..
Columnist Drew Pearson “reported in July, 1957, that the FBI had “a complete rundown on every Congressman, his private life and his family..no Congressman, if defeated or desirous of another government job, can become a judge or hold government office without clearance from the FBI.”
“The most important factor in enabling and consolidating the purge, the great cleansing of American working life, was the performance of the Supreme Court under Chief Justice Fred Vinson..a compliant instrument of administrative persecution and Congressional inquisition.”
*** “here in America we are descended in blood and in spirit from revolutionaries and rebels – men and women who dared to dissent from accepted doctrine. As their heirs, may we never confuse honest dissent with disloyal subversion.”
[President Dwight D. Eisenhower}
3] David Halberstam: “The Fifties”: HUAC “included a large number of the most unattractive men in American public life – bigots, racists, reactionaries, and sheer buffoons..
“McCarthy’s carnival-like four-yer spree of accusations, charges, and threats touched something deep in the American body politic, something that had lasted long after his own recklessness, carelessness, and boozing..McCarthyism crystallized and politicized the anxieties of a nation living in a dangerous new era. He took people who were at worst guilty of political naivete and accused them of treason. He set out to do the unthinkable, and it turned out to be surprisingly thinkable.
“[Hoover] liked to judge people by what he defined as their Americanism – i.e. the more conventional they were, the more they thought like him and shared his prejudices, the better Americans they were..Oppenheimer offended Hoover professionally and personally..
“[Hoover] ..struck fear in the hearts of the most powerful politicians..he was the most successful of entrenched bureaucrats at a time of mounting fear, and he used fear with great skill to expand his power. He had longevity, and he had secrets..his files..concerned the moral failings of his fellow Americans, particularly those in power.”
***”If you make a pitch on a nationwide radio network for a square deal for the underdog, will they call you a Commie?…Are they going to scare us into silence?” [Frank Sinatra]
4]. David Caute: “The Great Fear”: the Truman loyalty program; 3/25/47 – a new loyalty program with Executive Order 9835. “It contained the most sinister and destructive departure in postwar domestic politics, one which was to ramify far beyond the federal service and poison wide areas of American working, educational and cultural life..”Sympathetic association” with “totalitarian, Fascist, Communist, or subversive” groups almost automatically meant trouble.
The Security Risk Concept. “A security risk is not necessarily a disloyal person; he or she may be a loyal person whose character, habits and associations make him or her vulnerable to blackmail..”The great jeopardy of the average employee stems from..enormous flexibility of the measuring rod applied by the government..lack of specificity in ultimate charges..star-chamber hearing including non-confrontation and deprivation of cross-examination..wide discretion of the security boards..absence of findings and..utter hopelessness of review, because even the reviewing courts..may not see..basic material if the government feels that it s not in the national interest to reveal it..
“Guilt By Association and Thought Control: a young civil servant charged with being “unduly critical of the United States Government; federal employee charged with having library books on Communism, Socialism, and Marxism; surgical secretary accused of having criticized monopolies and big business;..a Pentagon bootblack charged with having given $10 BEFORE he was born [needed 70 FBI interviews to clear him to shine shoes of Army officers!!!]….”
*** “The best way to take control over people and control them utterly is to take a little of their freedom at a time, to erode rights by a thousand tiny and almost imperceptible reductions. In this way, the people will not see those rights and freedoms being removed until past the point at which these changes cannot be reversed.” [ Adolf Hitler}
5] David Caute: “The Great Fear” – big business USES the “Great Fear” to attack labor
– The National Association of Manufacturers spent “several million dollars each tear” on the Wagner Act, the union shop and repeal of ‘right to work’ laws, that “were all products of Moscow’s machinations.”
– GE wanted to weaken the union. “The Communist issue provided the ideal pretext in terms of public and political relations..patriotism could be reconciled with the pursuit of profit.”
– “Without doubt the Magnavox Company..exploited the loyalty-security program in an attempt to break union solidarity.”
– The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, December, 1945, report “The menace of Socialism to Europe and its effect upon this country”: 1946 booklet “Communist Infiltration of the United States”: 1947 booklet “Communists Within the Labor Movement.”
*** “We hear about constitutional rights, free speech and the free press. Every time I hear those words I say to myself, “That man is a Red, that man is a Communist.” You never hear a real American talk in that manner.” [Frank Hague]
6] David Caute: “The Great Fear” – attacks on America’s Intellectual Institutions
“The pressures on the professions to conform were now immense. The Post Office and The Customs Bureau embarked on a massive – and largely illegal – program of censorship..a full-scale of interception and opening mail from certain countries.” Some professions re-introduced loyalty oaths.
The American teaching profession has almost invariably stood exposed as a target of suspicion and aggression at times of superpatriotic sensitivity..HCUA’s letter of June, 1949, to 81 colleges and high schools, demanding lists of textbooks used in.. literature, economics, government, history, political science and geography..
“..intimidation of librarians across the nation, by Legionaires, by Sons and Daughters of the American Revolution, by Minutemen..School textbooks become objects of hysterical debate. “That book is communistic. It advocates medical aid and hot-lunch programs..”Why show pictures of city slums? That’s what makes Communists out of people.”
“..by the middle fifties about 1,000 scientists had encountered security difficulties..in any single year, between 20,000 and 50,000 technicians, engineers, and scientists were not working. The results..inevitably made America less, not more, secure from attack.” Young scientists avoided working for the government.
*** “A nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.” [John F. Kennedy]
7]. Herbert Mitgang: “Dangerous Dossiers”
A partial list of creative people in FBI and other government files:
– Nobel Laureates: Sinclair Lewis, Pearl Buck, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, Thomas Mann
– major authors: Carl Sandburg, Theodore Dreiser, John Dos Passos, Thomas Wolfe, Dorothy Parker, John O”Hara
– troublesome playwrights: Thornton Wilder, Robert Sherwood, Elmer Rice, Maxwell Anderson, William Saroyan,
Lillian Hellman, Tennessee Williams
– poets and essayists: Archibald MacLeish [prematurely anti-Fascist!!!], Robert Lowell, Robert Frost, W.H. Auden,
H.L. Mencken, Edmund Wilson
*** “The junior Senator from Wisconsin, by his reckless charges, has so preyed upon the fears and hatred of uniformed and credulous people that he has started a prairie fire, which neither he nor anyone else may be able to control.”
[Senator J. William Fulbright]
8] Blacklisted people – see if YOU think any of these were likely Communist agents:
– Lucille Ball, Leonard Bernstein, Aaron Copland, Dolores del Rio, Albert Einstein, Ruth Gordon, Lee Grant, Lena Horne, Danny Kaye, Gypsy Rose Lee, Burges Meredith, Jessica Mitford, Zero Mostel, Linus Pauling, Edward G. Robinson, Pete Seeger, Artie Shaw, William L. Shirer, Sam Wanamaker
*** “We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. We must remember always that accusation is not proof and that conviction depends upon evidence and due process of law. We will not walk in fear, one of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason, if we dig deep in our history and our doctrine, and remember that we are not descended from fearful men.” [Edward R. Murrow; 3/9/54 “See It Now” broadcast]
9] McCarthyism is NOT over – look no further than current 2023 activities by members of the Far Right – in the media, in the state politicians who are REENACTING similar McCarthy era laws of censorship and other fear-driven works pandering to ‘”their base,” in Congress Critters holding “hearings” to whip up more fears – and 2024 votes
*** “Those who begin coercive elimination of dissent soon find themselves exterminating dissenters.”
[Justice Robert Jackson]
DO YOUR OWN RESEARCH!!! Start with historical examples of FAR RIGHT cruelty and corruption”
– Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson…Salem Witch Trials…”the only good Indian is a dead Indian”…”Barefoot, pregnant and in the kitchen”…300 Whites lynched in the South, 1830-1860…”Know Nothings”…”Dred Scott”…KKK…Gilded Age Robber Barons…”Plessy”… 1919-1920 Red Scare…Scopes Monkey Trial… Harding Administration…1929 crash…l933 Plot to overthrow the U.S. government… Silver Shirts & German-American Bund…Father Coughlin & Charles Lindbergh…120,000 innocent Japanese-Americans in WW II concentration camps & “Korematsu”…John Birch Society…attacking Rachel Carson…”tobacco defense…Watergate…”glass ceiling”…”pro-life”…rigging tax codes…Reaganism & Iran-Contra…1980s S 7L bailouts…”culture wars”…”White power”…stacking courts with reactionaries…outsourcing jobs…global warming crisis denial…2008 Crash…”Heller” & “McDonald”…”Citizens United”…”Shelby County”…”Janus”…Make America Great Again…”Dobbs & “West Virginia” & praying on the 50-yard line & private school tuition paid by tax payers…outlawing birth control…private militias…organized hate groups…January 6, 2021
*** “The philosophical conservative is someone willing to pay the price of other people’s suffering for his principles.”
[E.L. Doctorow]
*** “Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness…Let us not assassinate this lad further, Senator. You’ve done enough. Have you no sense of decency, Sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?” [ Joseph Welch – Army-McCarthy hearings]
“Have you no sense of decency, Sir, at long last?” – THIS question can be asked, right now, April, 2023e – again – of numerous FAR RIGHT groups and “personalities” contaminating public discussion, “throwing out red meat,” making millions by “telling people what they want to hear,” DELIBERATELY repeatedly pushing known LIES
THE 14 CHARACTERISTICS OF FASCISM – look them up. then. Ask YOURSELF – honestly – how many of them exist –
RIGHT NOW, April, 2023 in America.
Look up the founding Fathers’ 4 major fears – corruption, slavery, religion, mobs – ask YOURSELF , honestly – how
many have been obviously, RIGHT NOW, April, 2023, in America.
*** “WE, here in America, hold in our hands the hope of the world, the fate of the coming years;
and shame and disgrace will be ours if in our eyes the light of high resolve is dimmed, if
we trail in the dust the golden hopes of men.” [Theodore Roosevelt; Mount Rushmore]
With Justice For All 