In case you needed further evidence that the McCarthy era of popular culture bears little resemblance to the actual McCarthy era, I give you the following cartoonish view of the era, which, perhaps not surprisingly, comes from a recent comic book. Reed Richards of The Fantastic Four is telling Peter Parker the Amazing Spiderman about how failing to cooperate with HUAC ruined his Uncle Ted's career:
Uncle Ted was a writer. He found everyone interesting. He'd talk to strangers, wear the wrong colored socks, ate at strange little restaurants. My uncle Ted was eccentric. He was funny and colorful, and I loved him. But he was also stubborn, and didn't care for rules, and if you pushed him, he'd push back just as hard. Unfortunately, this is when Joe McCarthy and the House un-American activities committee was in full bloom looking for communists among the military, the government, and ... the arts. If you stood out, if you didn't conform, you had a better than even chance of being called before the committee. At my uncle Ted was all those things. So he was subpoenaed to appear before he lack and explain himself. To testify. To tell them he wasn't a communist, and to name the names of those who thought might be communists. [Uncle Ted told the committee to go to hell, was jailed for six months for contempt, and his life was ruined.]
Whatever one thinks about the McCarthy era, and some of my views (at least on the relevant First Amendment issues) can be found in this paper, you didn't get hauled before HUAC because you talked to strangers, wore the wrong colored socks, or ate at strange restaurants. And the idea that random nonconformists had a "better than even chance" of being called before HUAC is just laughable.
I understand this is "just a comic book," but serious Hollywood movies such Guilty By Supsicion and The Front also go astray in conveying the history of the era. Not to mention the grandaddy of all distortions, The Crucible, in which Arthur Miller manages to analogize witches (which didn't really exist) to American Communists who were loyal to the Soviet Union (who really did).
I would add another "McCarthy movie" to the list: Good Night, and Good Luck. As Jack Shafer pointed out at Slate, the movie, which was critically well-received and nominated for several Academy Awards, was more Hollywood than history.
I know: I watched X-Files.
Individuals had little chance of being hauled before the committee [how many people could they actually process, actually -- there was only one HUAC] but the remote possibility affected peoples' lives.
Now if the kind of person who correctly points out that the existence of something like that casts a shadow over what should be a free country far in excess of their ability to do direct harm would admit that bizairre lawsuit judgements or harassment suits / PC codes can have a similar effect, we would have common ground.
-dk
So how, then, is it possible for you to assert with such confidence that certain movies, plays, or comic books depict the work and effects of investigations by HUAC and other loyalty inquests so grossly inaccurately? How do you know that neither state nor federal governments investigated people whose perceived flamboyance or eccentricities or homosexuality or (most to the point) personal associations some government investigator found troublesome? My UNC law emeritus colleague Dan Pollitt, who worked with Joe Rauh defending people before HUAC and in other venues in the 1950s, tells chilling stories from his own personal experience of groundless investigations (and threatened investigations) and refusals to issue passports to people on account of their rumored associations with political undesirables, their lifestyles, their criticisms of U.S. policy, and so on.
We tussled a bit about this book review of yours a while ago when you posted about it here at the Conspiracy, and about the confidence with which you seem prepared to assert a revised and correct understanding of the McCarthy era without doing the countless hours of archival digging that would be necessary to make such an assertion.
It is one thing to note that recently revealed Soviet data confirm the existence of Soviet agents in the United States during the period we call the McCarthy era. It is quite another to bounce from that to a claim that you're in a position to revise and correct the history of the entire era.
One other thought: it has been years since I've read or seen "that granddaddy of all distortions The Crucible," but wasn't Miller's point to compare the methods and attitudes of a society identifying lots and lots of people as witches (of which there were none) with the methods and attitudes of a society identifying lots and lots of people as communists (of which there were a few)?
Any claim of expertise at "conveying the history of the era" would have to take all of that into account.
That said, it's a shame when they get overly politicized. Political themes are fine. And it's understandable if some writers slant left and some slant right. As a medium, overall, they should appeal to an intellectually diverse crowd (because after all that's what their target readership will be; they are not all lefties).
Kurt Busiek -- one of my favorite comic writers -- often interjects political themes into his work and did a good job presenting fair and balanced political views. Certain characters "fit" better with different political views. It would be nice to match those characters -- for instance, Green Arrow is a die hard leftist socialist, Iron Man is a pro-security, pro-business Republican, the Question is an Objectivist libertarian -- with writers who will fairly represent those views. Frank Miller and Alan Moore, both hard leftists (though Miller's politics seem to be changing rightward), did some highly politically charged stories. And whether they intended to or not, they made some conservative-libertarian characters coming out looking the good guys (although they slammed other conservative characters as well). In the 80s, both Miller and Moore sympathized with the Anarchist Right, while slamming the establishment Right. Miller, because of his hatred of Islamfascism, seems to have gone through the same change Christopher Hitchens has.
the idea that random nonconformists had a "better than even chance" of being called before HUAC is just laughable.
but that doesn't mean that random nonconformists didn't run into other problems as a result of McCarthyism.
Thank you Eric. The fact that witches didn't exist is just about irrelevant to the quality of the analogy. Further, it is called literature David, and even if the analogy is not perfect, there is thing in literature called literary license. By taking such license, Miller was able to make a very good point about then contemporary America, and I would venture to guess that Miller knew a lot more than you about that era.
I cited his testimony to me because Pollitt is my own personal example of what David Bernstein is ignoring: primary source material, of which (in both the archival and oral history formats) there is a great deal.
Moreover, in this post and in the review essay to which he cites, David Bernstein is not simply correcting a few absurd overstatements. He is setting himself up as an expert who can accurately tell people when others are "going astray in conveying the history of the era."
Orin defends comic book PC inanity, but laughs at Yoda's optimimism and belief in the power of positive thinking. Now that was funny.
says Says the "Dog"
Off the record, he regaled the attorneys with war stories. McCarthy was a serious lush. Yeah, he (the witness) had made up the story about the commies infiltrating the boy scouts, but not the part about using girls and sex to lure in potential members -- that worked just great!
I'm afraid you lost me there, JYLD.
If someone wants to defend those four artistic works on what they actually say, go ahead. But if your point is simply that there were real abuses, and these works just grossly exaggerate or distort those abuses in an ahistorical, but artistically compelling way, I'm not disagreeing with you.
Dick King, one reason many people were so worried that the government was out to get them was that the actual Communists who were investigated consistently maintained that they were really just liberals who were being singled out for their progressive views. Those inclined to believe them who were real non-Communist progressives thought they were thus in danger, too. Put that blame on the Communists, not the investigators.
Put it this way Eric: how would you feel about a book or movie that depicted U.S. government forces lining up Japanese Americans during WWII and shooting them by the thousands? Would I need to read the archives to condemn this as ahistorical?
Infiltration to warrant the hysteria"
Hysteria, no. Investigations of reasonable scope and conducted reasonably, yes.
"and that the men carrying out the search were doing so because they had a genuine fact-based suspicion about such an infiltration,"
Depends who you mean. Many officials did have such suspicion, based on Venona, plus we had the known examples of Hiss and the Rosenbergs.
But there is considerable evidence that many innocent people were harassed in baseless investigations at various levels of government during the McCarthy era on the thinnest of grounds, including especially guilt-by-association. Plenty of people are still alive, in fact, who could tell you all about this from their own personal experience. So if you want to contradict that story, then yes, you're going to need some damned good primary source evidence, rather than your own interpretation of what you've read in a bunch of secondary sources.
Now, you might choose to trim your sails a bit and say, "but surely the specific claim that '[i]f you stood out, if you didn't conform, you had a better than even chance of being called before the committee' is hyperbolic and historically false." There, of course, I'd agree with you, though I think Orin is quite right that the statement can't be taken literally.
But in your book review and in this post you're up to something much bigger than that narrow trimmed-sails thing; you're advancing broad revisionist claims about the true merits of the loyalty inquests of the McCarthy period. That's an important project -- but I just don't think you've done the spadework that a historian would need to do in order to unsettle a current understanding, especially one that so many living people continue to testify to.
The point of this blog post was not to overturn a settled HISTORICAL understanding of anything, but to question the settled popular culture understanding. Can you find me any documentation that people were just routinely being picked up for questioning by HUAC because they were eccentrics, which is the EXACT implication of Reed's speech, even if you choose not to take the "better than even" literally. If you can provide me a single example of someone who was asked to testify before HUAC because they exhibited the sort of harmless and apolitical eccentricities of Reed Richard's uncle, I will concede that the analogy to the Japanese I gave is not apt. If you can't, I'll stand by the analogy, that it's a distortion of history, exaggerating bad actions for political or other purposes.
And again, my post only dealt with HUAC, but you continue to conflate HUAC and state and local loyalty boards. The only discussion I have in my book review about sub-federal investigations is that I DISAGREE with Redish that it was generally appropriate to fire Communist social studies and other teachers. The four popular culture sources I mentioned in the blog post, meanwhile, all specifically deal with HUAC. Please explain why you are criticizing me for not agreeing with you (or for not having done archival research) on something I haven't addressed. If your point is that the real problem was not HUAC and McCarthy, but state loyalty boards, that's an intriguing perspective, but certainly is not reflected in the relative volume of either (and especially) popular culture products or historical scholarship.
More generally, do you agree or disagree with the following two propositions, which I think are the relevant revisionist points: (a) the McCarthy era investigations were not "witchhunts" in the sense that unlike Salem witches there were actual Communists out there who were loyal to Stalin and not to the U.S., and some of them were engageed in espionage against the U.S., others would have if given the chance, and that in the 1940s some of these individuals posed a significant threat to American security?; and (b) whatever abuses and overreactions occurred in federal investigations of suspected Communists in the 1950s, they didn't approach the level that, e.g., the Spiderman comic author attributes to them? If not, what is your basis for disagreeing?
And btw, FWIW, I ran my book review past a few of the leading scholars of American Communism (Klehr, Radosh, etc), and they gave it a nice kosher stamp.
BTW, I agree that many innocents were harmed by federal investigations, e.g., in the process of investigating someone for Communist ties, someone was found to be a homosexual and forced out of his position. But the idea that "guilt by association" is inherently a baseless way to go about an investigation strikes me as going way too far. If you are looking for Communist spies in the gov't, wouldn't the first people to check be those who were associated to one degree or another with the Communist Party, including its front groups?
Anyway, it does seem worthwhile to point out that the claim "there were no witches" isn't entirely true.
the movie, which was critically well-received and nominated for several Academy Awards, was more Hollywood than history.
Well, I certainly hope so! They're not supposed to give Oscars for history.
Don't try to understand its not worth the effort. It was kind of a lame reach back to a prior exchange. Silly and not important.
It just struck me as funny that anyone, but especially a serious person like yourself, would attempt to explain the over the top generalization of a non-existant comic book character.
No bigge,
Says the "Dog"
I apologize in advance for the following comparison, but I'm reminded of a recent Michael Medved column in which he argues against slavery reparations payments by stating certain "facts" about slavery in a misguided attempt to make it appear less unsavory than it was. The point is, slavery was and is an abomination, and it deserves to remain so in the popular imagination, regardless of whether people have the "facts" right or not. The Holocaust was an abomination--quibbling about numbers or "facts" doesn't make it any less so. And while one would not wish to cheapen either of the above tragedies by comparing them to Joe McCarthy, the point remains the same. McCarthy was a brutal opportunist who lied about people he didn't know and destroyed lives and reputations for personal and political gain. It doesn't matter if it was ten or a hundred or a thousand. His name has become synonymous with reckless defamation of the undeserving, and became so for very real and regrettable reasons.
I'm not quite old enough to remember the McCarthy era, but I am old enough to be astonished than anyone would so much as lift a hair to defend Joe McCarthy. The fact that there were Communist spies in this country in no way excuses the tactics he employed and the terrible influence he exercised over this country for a brief period in the early 1950's.
As for "The Crucible," the play is not about the fact that there were no Communists or spies in America. It's a lesson in reckless persecution and mob hysteria, and how we unleash or encourage such forces at our own peril.
What a senseless, inane comment. Is this supposed to mean that, no matter how bad we are, we're still better than Stalin? That's a rather low bar to set, don't you think?
Actually it is a pretty fair comment because a lot of the defenders of the CPUSA seem to think that communism wasn't all that bad in and of tiself. The HUAC was fighting, albeit clumsily and ineffectually, an enemy that engaged in far worse behaviour. The CPUSA had a blacklist of people that they wouldn't employ in movies long before the hollywood establishment did the same to its members.
The other point I was making was that what the HUAC got up to was not as onerous in terms of government persecution of its own citizens as some of its critics would like to paint it.
I understand what you're saying, David--that witches aren't real but spies and traitors are. But it's the "imagined" threats that are the most dangerous of all. That is Miller's point.
McCarthy was most certainly not correct. He was a coward and a bully who lied about himself and other people. "Rational concern" and "McCarthy" have nothing whatsoever to do with each other.
I don't know who you're talking about, or whether you're referring to "communism" or "Communism."
"The other point I was making was that what the HUAC got up to was not as onerous in terms of government persecution of its own citizens as some of its critics would like to paint it."
I think that very much depends on who you were and why you were there.
Your line of reasoning--the enemy's actions are by definition bad, therefore whatever we do short of them is okay--justifies torture, extraordinary rendition, black site prisons, warrantless wiretapping. I'd certainly call that "bad in and of itself."
I realize that there are people like Grover who wish to condemn McCarthyism, regardless of the facts. I'd like to see some actual facts.
You, uh, must not have looked very hard.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_Hands
McCarthy was most certainly not correct. He was a coward and a bully who lied about himself and other people. "Rational concern" and "McCarthy" have nothing whatsoever to do with each other.
Of course he was correct about Communist infiltration in America. AND he also happened to be a coward and a bully who lied about himself and other people. In other words, he is just like many typical politicians that you have found throughout the ages (including today) - those that are technically correct about an underlying political issue, but still manage to demagogue it to death (i.e., illegal immigration, children's health care, the war on terror, etc.).
Are you telling me that the Congressional leadership of both parties are somehow NOT bullies who lie about the other side?? McCarthy's worst sin was that he just happened to be the first major political demagogue of the electronic mass media era. As a result, his demogoguery stuck in some minds more than most other similar figures, and they didn't know how to respond to it at the time since televised hearings were such a new phenomenon.
But that is not to say that McCarthy was "wrong" on the underlying issue. I think David Bernstein's thoughts are spot on here.
Also, I cannot match your assertions. Since the 1950's, I have requested factual confirmation about McCarthy's "lies" about people without receiving any hard evidence to back up the charges.
Yet when you get down to specifics, you write only about HUAC, which was just one piece of the sprawling loyalty bureaucracy of the late 40s and the 50s, and you rely only on secondary sources, rather than tapping into the vast amount of primary source material that is available from living sources as well as from Archives II in College Park, Maryland.
My disagreement with you is chiefly a disagreement about the methods of doing careful legal history.
Yes, there were many, still are, who don't think communism is all that bad, and who supported Stalin until many years afterward when, tentatively, it became acceptable to say the Great Man may have gone a little overboard.
As to communist teachers somebody mentioned:
Is a communist teacher in a public school there to teach, and do the commie thing on his own time? Or would he be there intending to indoctrinate the students? In other words, is commieness a hobby, or is he an active agent?
My guess is liberals would insist on the former, whether there was evidence to the contrary or not. And the other question is whether the party would allow a member to be a member merely to pass the time, and not use his position to advance the party's work.
As many have said, McCarthy's primary sin was to discredit anti-communism.
Wrong: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/01/arts/music/01seeg.html
Look at HUAC's methods.
It's not that there were no Communists in the Civil Rights Congress. There were.
It's that HUAC, in a public report, was willing to smear dozens of innocent and prominent people (without actually "hauling them" to testify) by raising the inference that they were Communists and therefore dangerous to national security.
Consider just one name on the list in the NYTimes article: James H. Wolfe, a highly regarded Chief Justice of the Utah Supreme Court. What did the government actually have on him? In a 1943 FBI memorandum, it was alleged that "it has been reported that he is a member of the Board of Directors of the League for Industrial Democracy. It has also been alleged that Chief Justice Wolfe has been sympathetic with and possibly one of the leaders behind the local Communist party. Mrs. Wolfe, wife of the Chief Justice, is a local officer of the Russian War Relief Incorporated in Salt Lake City, Utah."
Wolfe lived under the pall of HUAC's innuendo-based accusation from 1947 until 1953, when he was cleared by a special investigative committee of the Utah House of Representatives.
These were the methods that Arthur Miller was writing about.
As for the comment "McCarthy was a brutal opportunist who lied about people he didn't know and destroyed lives and reputations for personal and political gain. It doesn't matter if it was ten or a hundred or a thousand."
That's a ridiculous statement. Of course it matters. We wouldn't talk about the Holocaust nearly as much if the victims were reduced by a factor of 100, nor should we. Then there's the little matter of historical accuracy. And, finally, the "Red Scare" and investigations of Communists both predated and postdated McCarthy, and was in fact started by the Truman Admnistration, after a series of embarassing lapses. McCarthy is a convenient uber-villain, and he had his time in the spotlight, but it's ahistorical to focus only on him.
(a) the McCarthy era investigations were not "witchhunts" in the sense that unlike Salem witches there were actual Communists out there who were loyal to Stalin and not to the U.S., and some of them were engageed in espionage against the U.S., others would have if given the chance, and that in the 1940s some of these individuals posed a significant threat to American security. and
(b) whatever abuses and overreactions occurred in federal investigations of suspected Communists in the 1950s, they didn't approach the level that, e.g., the Spiderman comic author attributes to them.
I'm also waiting for an example "of someone who was asked to testify before HUAC because they exhibited the sort of harmless and apolitical eccentricities of Reed Richard's uncle."
And for your explanation of why someone looking for Communist spies wouldn't naturally start with people with Communist connections.
Your latest post says that your disagreement is purely about legal history methods, but you also made normative comments about "guilt by association," the inaptness of my analogy to exaggerations of what happened to the Japanese, and implied that archival records may show that "Uncle Ted" was a legitimate archetype.
Prof. Bernstein said, "Latinist, real people in Salem, MA who considered themselves witches in the late 17th century? Huh? And I can't imagine what "real harm" any such individuals, if they existed, did to anyone, unless they really had supernatural powers."
I can't recall the name or author, but there was a scholarly book, a historical analysis, published a few years ago about Salem and the witch trials. I never read it, but I read several reviews of it (most of which were complimentary).
In a nutshell, yes, there were real, genuine witches in Salem. That is, there were people who believed in witchcraft, and who endeavored to practice it. And there were numerous first-hand accounts of very strange phenomena occuring, that led to the hysteria that followed. You don't have to believe in the supernatural to have sympathy with the normal citizens of Salem, who were steeped in a religious culture, and who then saw strange and bizarre things happening around them which were associated with dark spiritual forces. I'm not justifying the overreaction, but it wasn't just hysteria without any foundation. There were "real" witches (whatever that means) who believed in and practiced witchcraft in Salem, and who were considered responsible for the strange happenings which were observed by numerous townspeople.
Which is the pity, because the crime would have been no less.
"McCarthy is a convenient uber-villain, and he had his time in the spotlight, but it's ahistorical to focus only on him."
I disagree. McCarthy is a very appropriate villain--an example of how we do not wish to be defined as Americans--and I think it's partly because McCarthyism still inhabits the public imagination that we have maintained a reasonable degree of sanity in the current climate of fear and uncertainty over Islamic-inspired terrorism.
Joe McCarthy was a Senator. The House UnAmerican Activities Committee was a House of Representatives committee that pre-dated Tailgunner Joe's career, and existed long after he was washed up. Both were anti-communist, both were in the legislature, but otherwise there's no connection.
Seeger was a party hack from the get-go. Lousy voice, too.
You should read Radosh's accounts of Seeger's albums coming and going according to messages from Moscow.
Anyway, the fact is that a good many were and are far more sanguine about what happened to the kulaks than they are about what happened to the hollywood ten or whomever. The latter were eggs that didn't need to be broken.
Like who, for instance?
1) McCarthy was an arrogant bungler driven more by personal ambition than anything else.
2) The Communist threat was very real.
I don't think there is anyone on the Right that would attack #1. If there is, I assure you that the rest of us will scoff them mercilessly.
The problem is that there remains to this day a bunch of people on the left that will attack #2.
My position is that in a war of spies and assassins, its undoubtable that ordinary innocent people risk getting squashed. The people most culpable for this harm are those that pretend to be ordinary people, who disguise themselves as ordinary people, who protest thier innocence and loyalty, but who in fact are spies, sabateurs, and traitors.
No one in Hollywood seems willing to blame the Hess's for what they were put through. Nor do they seem willing to blame the fact that they were actually harboring communists in thier midsts. It's easy to put all the blame on McCarthy because he was a scumbag. But Hollywood wants to not only let all thier own scumbags off the hook, but to pretend that they didn't exist or were merely harmless eccentrics.
That I think is David's point.
If J. Jonah Jameson doesn't pick up this scoop in the next Spidey issue and publish it touting Reed's absolute moral authority for some cock-eyed reason, and then subsequent issues of FF and Spidey don't include the arrival of a new team of superheroes -- The Pajama Men* -- to fact-check and post cynically mocking exposes of Richards' exaggerations and real family history, then I will agree with you.
* - Trade Mark, Copyright and Patent Pending
If someone started saying that the Germans ground up dead Jews to put in the metal used to make Volkswagens, I wouldn't expect that inaccuracy to go unnoticed simply because the Holocaust was bad anyway.
There are to things I think everyone ought to agree to.
1) McCarthy was an arrogant bungler driven more by personal ambition than anything else.
2) The Communist threat was very real.
I don't think there is anyone on the Right that would attack #1. If there is, I assure you that the rest of us will scoff them mercilessly.
If this were true, Treason by Ann Coulter would not have sold so well.
Neither would it be an excuse to rehabilitate the Nazis.
Who are these scumbags you refer to?
"duranty" should be a verb. Or an adjective. Like "fisk".
HUAC started in 1934, originally to look into Nazi influences. McCarthy was a senator in charge of the Senate Committee on Government Operations. The Committee on Government Operations included the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. The famous television hearings were actually part of the Army-McCarthy hearings were not part of HUAC and occurred in 1952.
Eric Muller is quite correct that there were all sorts of loyalty oaths imposed at all levels of government. People were constantly hassled about these and some prosecuted if a minor official got a jones for them. He is also correct that David Bernstein is trying to get a revisionist wedge in here.
Now as to 2) The communist threat was very real WHICH COMMUNIST THREAT PRAY TELL? 1) is quite specific. How about perfecting 2). Until you do it remains in the when did you stop beating your wife category.
Did you notice that Robeson lied about his affinity for Communism in that same article?
Finally, would you be as agitated if an organization dominated by Nazis in 1940 had been subjected to the same treatement?
So, the biggest problem is that somehow the communists got to name the era, and of course they named it after the least creditable character possible. It's like calling fundamentalist Christianity "Jonesism" (after the reverend in Guyana), long-haired hippy Californians "Mansonites", or mild socialists "Stalinists". That the "McCarthyism" label stuck might be the best proof there is of the corruption of the American mass media by the left.
The China Hands were US govt officials who supported Mao and other Communists. For that, they were criticized.
Where's the harm?
No one has posted anything bad that McCarthy did. If he were really so bad, it would not be hard to cite some evidence.
That's a very long list indeed, Richard--virtually half the population of the United States, it seems, and all of them in Hollywood, slaving away for Uncle Joe. But you're right, it was a dumb question, if only because the response was so predictable.
Should he/she be cleaning the Army code room in the Pentagon?
Same question in the 50's - Should a member of the CPUSA be cleaning the Army code room in the Pentagon?
Does anyone NOT see the connection!!!
Moslems (CAIR) are already screaming McCarthyism.
Where are the lines drawn? What risk is not worth taking?
And don't bring up BS about Christians. When was the FIRST time a Christian strapped on a bomb and blew up some children?
These are real questions that have to be answered. If they are not, if PC is maintained and we start having things go BOOM then the backlash will not be fun. Reasonable actions for understandable reasons are FAR FAR better then Frighted people reacting after an attack. The PS BS stops reasonable actions for understandable reasons. They are going to get a LOT of people killed and make thing far worse.
Remember the CPUSA was being used by the USSR. Spies were being planted. And McCarthy DIDN'T WIN the Communists did. You don't believe it? Look at how the Media treated the USSR and Stalin from the 60's until AFTER THE USSR fell.
Remember as bad as the Commies were they didn't think blowing up random childre was a good idea.
Jesus, Mary...and Joseph. Here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_McCarthy
If you want to dispute the factualness of that article, be my guest.
"Finally, would you be as agitated if an organization dominated by Nazis in 1940 had been subjected to the same treatement?"
Joe McCarthy had no problem with that.
What do you find so strange or out of place?
You don't see the connections?
You don't believe that the PC crowd will not bring up McCarthy when any actions are talked about against radical moslems?
Nothing like reading a post like this in a thread about Joe McCarthy to hammer home the point that irony truly is dead.
Of course, McCarthy accused a lot more than 15 people. Even conceding that several he named were Communists (including even one or two who were incorrectly exonerated at the time) scarcely excuses his recklessness.
Perhaps one reason liberals were not in a great rush to join McCarthy in condemning Communism is that they were spending so much of their time defending themselves from his accusations.
You know, McCarthyite anti-communism (incidentally, the word McCarthyism originated with McCarthy acolyte Bill Buckley, not the communists) was a greater immediate danger to American freedom than Soviet militarism or even Soviet espionage. The CPUSA was not going to win the election and the USSR wasn't going to invade via Alaska.
McCarthy could probably not tell between a Communist and a columnist; nevertheless, his Stalinist tactics eventually gave the moral high road to those who had once fellow-travelled or actively supported Stalin and his henchmen throughout the world.
For decades, the epithet of choice directed against one’s opponent has not been “Communist”, but “fascist”, used to smear and assassinate any democratic conservative (even democratic liberal!) that does not do the left’s bidding. This same left now quibbles about the use of the term “fascist” in reference to a millenarian, mass-murdering, mass-movement which actually has its roots in Nazi fascism – the Islamic fascists.
Fancy that.
I agree with everything Zathras wrote in the preceding paragraph.
I would just like to point out that in a later issue of the Civil War series (Fantastic Four #542), Reed admits that he made up the story he told to Peter and revealed his real motivation for supporting the Superhuman Registration Act. Reed had apparently invented a working version of Asimov’s psychohistory and predicted that unless Superhumans were controlled through registration and mandatory training, it would lead to a catastrophe that would kill billions (as opposed to the 600 or so who died in Stamford which lead to the Act).
So that the Religious Society of Friends was suddenly a subversive organisation, and lost it's tax-exempt status, which smacked it with a property tax bill in excess of it's annual revenues, because it was religiously opposed (and had been for 300 years) to taking any oath.
Eason Monoroe was fired from his position at San Francisco State University for the same reason.
And to what purpose? An oath under duress cannot be valid. Those who would actually be prone to the things they are to swear, will forswear; if someone was devoted to the "violent overthrow" of something, why would they refuse the oath?
The Levering Oath was still in effect in Calif. until the early '70s, which was how long it took for Monroe to be allowed to return to SFSU.
So the "trickle-down" effect of the HUAC was certainly something which affected lots of people, both at the gross level (e.g. Monroe) and the petty level (e.g. all those who chose not to speak out, lest they be accused of/suffer for being, "disloyal").
As for the play, yes, I think Miller was asserting that real disloyal Communists were as, or at least almost as, ephemeral, as witches.
So you are upset that Muller juxtaposes what you said, with how it reads, yet you reserve the right to take how you read his statements, and then explicate them.
Not the best piece of evidence for the quality of your other interpretations.
Richard AubreyAs to communist teachers somebody mentioned:
Is a communist teacher in a public school there to teach, and do the commie thing on his own time? Or would he be there intending to indoctrinate the students? In other words, is commieness a hobby, or is he an active agent?
My guess is liberals would insist on the former, whether there was evidence to the contrary or not. And the other question is whether the party would allow a member to be a member merely to pass the time, and not use his position to advance the party's work.
That is a recipe, if it were to be enacted as policy, for a level of “political correctness” on a national scale (in the intent the phrase was originally used; i.e. the thoughts one expresses are correct, per the political doctrine of the state/party). Who, under that regime, gets to set the policies/ideas/facts/relationships, are correct to teach. Is Zinn’s “People’s History of the United States” too socialist/progressive/communist to be read by high school students? What about Animal Farm, or the, aforementioned, Crucible?
Elizabeth I said she wouldn’t make a window into men’s souls; it still seems a pretty good idea. In the marketplace of ideas, there ought not be a class of them which can’t be discussed. If they really are that bad, they will lose, so long as the skills of critical thinking have been taught.
And those Democrats you allude to... the one’s like Truman (Korea), and Kennedy (or do you think that The Thaw, under Khrushchev made it possible for him to attack Fidel, and kept him from withdrawing from Indochina)? The Dems who were hawkish against the “commies”. Those Dems?
Oddly enough, I (who studied Russian at DLI, and Russia both before and after) think that the struggle of the Cold War was overblown (there was no bomber gap, there was no missile gap). It was serious, but the odds of the Soviets overthrowing the US was nil. It would have been (as it still is) foolish for a nation which had the means to spy on the US to refrain.
1. I vehemently disagree with Professor Bernstein that the Holocaust wouldn't have been nearly as bad if the numbers were smaller. That, to me, concedes one of the key arguments of the deniers and revisionists, which is that the 6 million number may be inaccurate and that therefore there's too much talk about the Holocaust. In fact, the Holocaust would have been just as bad in many ways if it were 1 million. Indeed, it would have been just as bad in certain ways if it simply consisted of the Germans gassing Jews at Auschwitz (i.e., if the other concentration camps, Kristalnacht, etc., never happened).
What makes the Holocaust different from any other event that caused millions of people to die is the intentions behind it and the methods used to carry it out. That, and not the 6 million figure (which really is an estimate and might well be off in one direction or the other), is the important point.
2. I don't think one can view HUAC or McCarthy in isolation. The fact is, even if there was a legitimate need to investigate whether Communists were doing the USSR's bidding in the US government, it nonetheless TURNED into a hysteria where communists, suspected communists, and people who had nothing to do with communism, all of whom were NOT doing the USSR's bidding, were not only fired from the federal government, but were fired from state and local governments and private businesses, and in some cases imprisoned.
To put this in terms that conservatives here might relate to-- it is as if the government reacted to a series of school shootings by hauling in gun owners before committees at all levels of government, successfully getting gun owners fired and in some cases imprisoned, etc. The fact that the school shootings might be a perfectly good subject of a limited governmental investigation doesn't provide any justification for what actually happened.
3. I don't think that Professor Bernstein can historically separate HUAC and the other anti-communist hysteria, either. A little Eugene Volokh slippery slope analysis might be useful here-- HUAC set a tone. It whipped up public sentiment about the threat of communist infriltration. Certainly few in the federal government tried to stop any of the state, local, and private investigations or make the point that they should be limited to finding people who are actually assisting the USSR or anything else. Indeed, HUAC itself overreached, as did McCarthy.
Andrew J. Lazarus statement:
is evidence that at least some those on the left do not think that the Communists were a real threat.
BTW I read the Wikipedia article cited. Mr. Lazarus did not read it very carefully, as the article states that Herbert Block, political cartoonist for the Washington Post, coined the phrase "McCarthyism."
The question of whether a communist agent should be allowed to indoctrinate students who are in his classroom as a matter of state mandate seems more serious to me than it does to you. I wonder if the same insouciance would be appropriate wrt, say, creationism.
The USSR wasn't going to overthrow the US. Now we know. The problem was, from my point of view, how much it would cost if they tried and failed.
You don't need a gap in anything to cause a couple of dozen million dead. Win or lose.
And the motivation to try would come from an incorrect picture of how easy it would be. The authors of "A War to Be Won" explain that Hitler's logistics guys told him he'd lose on the Eastern Front (I simplify their point) but he went ahead anyway. Never, ever diss the logistics guys.
Thus, it is prudent to be so strong as to overcome the most powerful and ill-advised wishful thinking. If I found we'd won the Cold War with $1.98 to spare, I'd probably start losing sleep all over again. I'd rather find we wasted trillions.
Why is it that no one can give me a name of some innocent person who was recklessly accused by McCarthy?
No, we don't all agree that Joseph McCarthy was an absolute disgrace. If he were really so bad, then there would be some specific factual allegations against him.
It seemed to me that he was saying: So what if Hollywood and other media sources exagerate somewhat the despicableness of McCarthy and associated organizations. If the overall effect is to villify McCarthy's methods and make us a lot less reluctact to use them, that is a whole lot better than trying to minimize the influence he had by pointing out everything he (and others) didn't do.
DB's argument is pretty simple: Hollywood and the media consistanty exagerate the influence and civil rights violations occassioned by the actions of McCarthy and HUAC.
In light of the argument Gardener makes, why do these exagerations even register on DB's radar? Read my next post and I will explain.
Sure. How about the Hollywood Ten? They were privately-employed screenwriters (well 9 of them were; the other one was a director). Not KGB agents. Not Communists in the State Department. SCREENWRITERS.
And they were convicted of contempt of Congress and thrown in jail.
There is no justification for that unless one believes that it is within the powers of the federal government to control the content of privately-financed motion pictures.
Because you systematically discard all evidence in favor of any name we propose. But hey, I'm a masochist: please, tell me why John Davies was a communist agent.
I'll concede that they were not sufficiently enthusiastic for your taste about the prospects of Chiang Kai-Shek. (Of course, some of the Americans who were enthusiastic were on Chiang's secret payroll.)
Communists, though? Any evidence? Anywhere in those VENONA decrypts?
You don't see serious people like Klehr and Radosh embracing McCarthy, only buffoons like Ann Coulter. Whose side are you on?
I was interested to see this topic, as I have a some affection for arguments that go against the conventional wisdom. Senator McCarthy has a mythic presence in American politics, but how far has myth taken us away from historical reality?
Professor Muller's comments seem right on to me (along with the always reliable Dilan). Taking into account the responses to Muller from Professor Bernstein and others, I think the charge that this is designed as a wedge issue sticks in this case.
And for those who want to attack my statement, I ask you to answer the following yes/no Qs:
1. Was Alger Hiss a spy or not?
2. Did the mainstream Democrats at the time defend him or kick him to the curb as a traitor?
I really don't know much about this case, but what exactly is the accusation? Are you saying that McCarthy was wrong to hold State Dept officials accountable for their policies? Mao was a disaster for China and for American interests. If they promoted Mao, then maybe they should have been fired so that they don't make any more bad State Dept policies. What did McCarthy do wrong?
I address the Hollywood Ten in my book review. They wound up in jail because they were ordered by the CPUSA to raise a bogus First Amendment argument, and then refuse to testify. Congress asked Frank Sinatra to testify about his ties to the mafia, it had the same right to ask the Hollywood Ten about their ties to another criminal conspiracy. (For that matter, Congress holds hearings all the time about the content of the media, see eg Tipper Gore).
Oh, my, do we have some bad arguments here! First, there's a HUGE difference between Communists in the State Department (the ostensible purpose of Joe McCarthy's inquiries) and Communists in the motion picture industry. Essentially, one involves espionage by an asserted enemy of the United States in the highest reaches of policymaking and policy implementation. The other involves THE FILM INDUSTRY! Not being able to see the difference between these two things is a terrible lack of perspective.
Second, I don't see how the Hollywood Ten's First Amendment argument is bogus. It is true that Congress can hold hearings relating to the film industry. But that's a lot different than saying that Congress can ask you about your intimate associations and expressive activities on the grounds tha these might be relevant to a claim by Congress that the motion picture industry is filled with people with an objectionable ideology.
The analogy to Tipper Gore would be if HUAC held a hearing about how the movies were too leftist or not patriotic enough. I wouldn't think that this would be a good use of a Congressional committee's time, but if they want to fulminate about political ideology, I suppose that is their right. But Al Gore and the other members of that committee never asked Frank Zappa and Dee Snider what the political ideologies of their friends and relatives were and what political events they attended.
Finally, let's assume the CPUSA "ordered" the Hollywood Ten to take the stand they did. Exactly how is that relevant? Was the stand not principled? Is standing up for a principled limit as to what Congress can ask you about your political activities and intimate associations when you are hauled before the government under the Klieg lights and pursuant to the awesome power of force that the federal government controls not a perfectly legitimate thing to do, whether or not the Communist Party put them up to it?
This is classic guilt by association-- because the Communists were behind the protests, they were irrevocably tainted and cannot be evaluated on their own merit.
I will say it again-- these people went to jail not because they were doing the USSR's bidding in the federal government, but because a runaway investigation that was ostensibly about rooting out Communist spies in the government turned into a culture war against allegedly leftist Hollywood in which Congressional subpoenas were misused to haul people in and ask them about their political activities.
Again, many of the people in this thread are conservatives. Can't you imagine the same thing being done to the right? What would happen if the Democrats decided to investigate conservative dominance of Fox News and talk radio, and its connections to the Republican Party, and started bringing in Brit Hume and Rush Limbaugh and asking them if they attemded meetings and who else was at the meetings and what they discussed?
The fundamental error here is in conflating an investigation of espionage in the government with an investigation of ideology in the populace. If no line is drawn between the two, the First Amendment freedoms of all of us can be at risk.
As soon as you tell me you are at least as disturbed by the government's persecution of American Nazi supporters before WWII, who were not, unlike the Communists, acting under orders of a foreign power, and were not engaged in espionage like the CPUSA, then I'll grant you that you are a consistent civil libertarian, and not someone who has been duped by the popular media's portrayal of the Hollywood Ten as heroes.
The only really telling question was already asked above: are you equally disturbed about the use of HUAC and the Smith Act against supporters of Germany before WWII? Is so, you get points as a consistent civil libertarian. If not, this reflects that your substantive view is that being a Stalinist in the late 1940s was significantly less immoral than being a Nazi in the late 1930s. I should note that Geoff Stone's recent book is a very, very rare example of a critic of the 1950s Red Scare acknowledging and criticizing its antecedents in the government's fight against potential Nazi subversion in before WWII.