Many of the 75 million or so Americans who didn’t vote for the radical reactionary conservative ticket in the last presidential election have found themselves lately waiting for the other shoe to drop.
It isn’t as if the rampant xenophobia, the preposterous cabinet appointments, the attacks on students with unpopular political views, the brutal deportations, and the mass firings at federal agencies vital to the lives of most of Americans weren’t terrible enough.
What some of us are waiting for, though, could be far more troubling than even that list of malfeasance, cruelty and ideological mayhem. We’re waiting to see if the current conservative administration and its tenuous majorities in Congress become the latest version of the conservative witch-hunting purges that plagued the turn of the 20th century and wreaked havoc in the lives of many left-of-center Americans from the 1950s on. Then as now, conservative fanatics have set their sights on weeding out the evil “enemy within.”
In the 1950s, “the enemy” were “Socialists” and “Communists.” Who might those “enemies within” be for the totalitarian right of 2025? Immigrants, scientists, environmentalists, alternative energy advocates, women, civil rights workers, LGBTQ activists, transgender children, “peaceniks,” academics, opposition journalists? That’s a good start, I guess.
Will we see the U.S. Supreme Court “defer” to the executive branch if federal MAGA law enforcement zealots actually start attacking and hounding down American citizens with liberal, class conscious, and “progressive” opinions?
Among the darkest moments of America’s conservative history involved attacks on teachers, writers, actors, cultural activists and leftist thinkers. New Mexico’s own Margaret Randall, a writer beloved around the world, fought deportation in the 1980s under the 1952 McCarren Walter Act’s prohibition against “subversive” activities such as expressing non-conservative political opinions. She ultimately won her case, but not without undergoing five years of vicious turmoil, distraction and distress.
As Clay Risen makes clear in his timely book, “Red Scare: Blacklists, McCarthyism, and the Making of Modern America,” attacks against American dissidents over the last 100 years or so have been as close as we can get to totalitarianism — save for the genocide of Native Americans, Jim Crow and Juan Crow laws, homophobic terror raids, and patriarchal woman hating, of course.
It’s not a stretch to see the current occupant of the White House as a modern Joe McCarthy, complete with blacklists, avalanches of unfounded accusations, and adoring media moguls making a killing off his antics. Risen describes McCarthy, a first-term U.S. Senator from Wisconsin, as filling his speeches with “violent rhetoric.” He “attacked with abandon,” Risen wrote. “He became a part of the political landscape, a reliable source for outrageous quotes and a bellwether for the insanity of the moment. Facts, accuracy, and consistency did not matter…. Steadily, McCarthyism became part of the conservative mainstream,” just like MAGAISM is today. The bloviating “Tail-Gunner Joe,” Risen writes, embraced the creation of the McCarren Walters act devised and championed by Senator Pat McCarren in 1952 who was “something of a McCarthy before the fact,” Risen wrote. “He defended the Spanish dictator Francisco Franco, attacked immigrants, hated the United Nations, and claimed that Communists were behind the New Deal.”
McCarren and McCarthy took inspiration from earlier Red Scares in the 1920s, when Woodrow Wilson’s U.S. Atty General, A. Mitchell Palmer, conducted raids in 36 American cities against Jewish and Italian immigrants and labor activists, arresting more than 6,000 people. Most would have been deported, if not for the heroic opposition of Louis Freeland Post, acting head of U.S. Department of Labor, who had authority over deportations at the time. Post saved some 5,500 of those arrested from being shipped offshore. Palmer’s unconstitutional raids, however, still left many of his victims traumatized and politically disengaged.
McCarthy’s ally, the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), terrorized thousands of Americans from the 1930s into the 1950s. When HUAC convened in Los Angeles in the early 1950s, “it came to the City of Angels looking for devils,” the late UNM poet Gene Frumkin recalled.
HUAC wasn’t after Hollywood at the time, but teachers and academics, Estelle Gershgoren Novak explained in her book “Poets of the Non-Existent City: Los Angeles in the McCarthy Era.” More than 400 teachers lost their jobs during that Los Angeles witch hunt. One of them was poet Tom McGrath who refused to name names when he was called before the committee that met in the Council Chambers of the LA City Hall in 1954. As Novak writes “He was what they called ‘uncooperative.’ He betrayed no one: not himself, not his friends. And for that he was fired from his job at Los Angeles State College in 1954 and forced into various
and sundry occupations, the flotsam and jetsam of the world.”
In the ‘50s, California had two thriving poetry centers, the Beats in San Francisco and a more critical and political movement in Los Angeles. McGrath was its leader. The Poetry Foundation described McGrath “as a major voice in American poetry,” as being “as close to Whitman as anyone since Whitman himself.…” His long poetic autobiography, “Letter to an Imaginary Friend,” is still available on Amazon.
McGrath was never charged with contempt of Congress, but his inspired testimony before HUAC, a terrifying assemblage of ideological dogmatists with the power of imprisonment at their disposal, set a heroic example for the loyal opposition ever since. He told “the menacing committee” in 1953, Novak writes, that “as a poet I must refuse to cooperate with the committee on what I can only call esthetic grounds.… poets have been notorious non-cooperators where committees of this sort are concerned. As a traditionalist, I would prefer to take my stand with Marvell, Blake, Shelley and Garcia Lorca…. I do not wish to bring dishonor to my tribe.”
Are those terrible times about to be reborn in the guise of a MAGA House of Representatives, a MAGA Justice Department and FBI, and a MAGA Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency? Close to 80 years ago in the Truman administration, Clay Risen writes, the “Department of Justice set the tone” for the witch hunts ahead. Truman’s attorney general, Tom Clark, created a list of subversive organizations that became public and was used by states to investigate everyone from real estate agents to undertakers, beauticians, professional wrestlers, forcing everyone they could to take loyalty oaths to prove themselves worthy Americans. UNM President Tom Popejoy in the early 1960s opposed calls for loyalty oaths on his campus, refusing, he said, to turn his professors into “second class citizens.”
Loyalty oaths were ugly enough, but this week an American citizen and physician born in Pennsylvania, Lisa Anderson, received an email from the Department of Homeland Security, NBC news reports, that said “it was time” for her to leave the country immediately. The message was clearly an error, but a terrifying one that forced Anderson to hire an immigration attorney, even though, as she said, she has nothing to do with immigration issues and never has.
Was that email some kind of Nixonian “dirty trick” weaponized to scare the wits out of all of us? One has to wonder how many more Americans are going to be plagued by the absurd incompetence of such ideological malice over the next three and a half years. This kind of cruelty, let loose since January, is heartbreaking and unforgivable. As much as I hate comparisons, it does seem more and more like McCarthyism in a red cap to me.
*Nullius in verba: take nobody’s word for it
Well said. Thank you
As always, important history. We must not forget.