A Rough Analogy from History

 

                                                    US Senator Joe McCarthy 

                                        (credit: United Press, via Wikimedia Commons) 

A short post today, but I think it makes a point worthy of attention.

Almost always, if we look long enough, we can find examples in history to inform and enlighten us about what is going on in our own times. Consider, for example, the case of Senator Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s.

McCarthy was the chief “commie hunter” in the world in those times. By the 1950s, US intelligence services had proved beyond any reasonable doubt, that there had been, and very likely still were, agents spying for the USSR in practically every sector of American life. Though many of these agents were doing nothing more than promoting communist organizations in the US and other nations of the free world, a few really were stealing major secrets and selling them to the USSR. 

McCarthy and his followers used legitimate fears of real threats to whip up public paranoia. Ordinary citizens began to imagine that they were seeing “commies” everywhere. Even next door.

McCarthy's hearings led large sectors of the American public to believe that there were, for sure, commies all over the film industry, the entertainment industry, and the publishing industry. And, more dangerously, facilities where vital scientific research was going on. Some of these fears, I will reiterate, were based on facts. A prime example of this came from the Rosenbergs, who were found to have procured and sold the secrets of building an atomic bomb to the USSR. They were caught, accused, convicted, then executed (by electric chair) in 1953. The Rosenbergs were, by the way, not immigrants, but full blown, born and raised, Americans. 

                                        Ethel Rosenberg (credit: Wikimedia.org) 

But most of the accusations McCarthy was shouting about were groundless. Most of those he accused turned out to have never betrayed the US to a foreign power in any way. They had simply criticized some of their country's policies and gone to a few meetings. And let us not forget that criticizing policies with which one disagrees is a patriotic thing to do in a democracy. Democracy lives, grows, and evolves by dissent and compromise.

It is true that there were many in film, entertainment, literature, and other sectors of American life who had once belonged to Communist organizations, openly, right in the US. But belonging to a Communist party is not illegal now in the US, nor has it ever been so. In addition, in the 1930’s in particular, little was known about life inside the USSR. Stalin’s camps had not yet been anything more than rumored. 

Lots of very smart people were fooled for years by Communist propaganda into thinking that the Communist way of governance offered the big majority of citizens a better way to live. Why? Because, in the Depression era of the 1930s, there seemed to be only two options to associate oneself with if one was interested in politics. Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, and the other fascist leaders, on the one hand, or the USSR and all others who openly opposed fascism on the other. The fascists' aggressions against people within their own societies and against other nations were much better known than what Stalin was up to. For millions of people, the fascists were clearly dangerous, vicious men. The USSR seemed more enlightened, kinder. 

The West, in the meantime – America, Britain, France, etc. – seemed to want only to avoid having to confront the crimes of the fascist leaders. The USSR, the home of Communism in those times, was the hero that opposed the fascists. If you were a person who cared about decency and sense, you were moved by that fact and at least curious about what communism was and who the folk promoting it were. So you read books and magazines and went to meetings just to see what communism was about, never dreaming that all of this might be used against you 10 or 15 years down the road in the late 1940s and early 1950s.

          

                                               American entertainer and film star, Lena Horne (1946)  

                                                            (credit: Wikipedia) 

                       

                                                  Charlie Chaplin (film star, writer, and director)  

                                             (credit: Strauss-Peyton Studios, via Wikipedia)

The encouraging thing to notice in McCarthy's times and then apply to our times is that for a few years, Joe McCarthy wielded enormous power in the US. Accusations and innuendoes that came out of his Senate sub-committee hearings destroyed or severely damaged the careers of a significant number of prominent American figures. Dalton Trumbo (played by Brian Cranston in the recent movie about Trumbo’s life) had to work secretly under names other than his own for years because of McCarthy’s accusations. Lena Horne, Pete Seeger, Charlie Chaplin, Orson Welles, and many others had their careers seriously damaged by similar allegations arising from McCarthy’s sub-committee hearings. Writer Ernest Hemingway committed suicide. 

But McCarthy fell. 

His bullying, threatening tactics caused most of the US public to turn against him, largely because some of the Senate sub-committee hearings that he chaired, ones investigating supposed “commie sympathizers” in the US Army, were televised. The visual images finally showed the public, beyond all doubt, what a bully he really was. He ended up being censured by the US Senate, and he died shortly thereafter in 1957 at the age of 49.

Why is all this important now? Because the US has a dangerous bully in its politics now. And he has a lot of public support. But that support is shrinking. And the exact nature of his intentions and tactics is becoming clearer to the US public with every day that goes by.

Furthermore, like McCarthy, who was a Republican, Trump, the current bully is not synonymous with Republicanism. That party still has a platform, some parts of which still seem very sensible to many voters, in spite of the damage to American unity that Trump has done. Balanced budgets, smaller government, robust free markets, and a strong military all still make good sense to many Americans, despite their having acquired a profound distaste for Donald Trump, the man.  

My bet is that media coverage will eventually end this bully’s reign. Gradually, as more and more of the public see what he is, he’ll lose his base. 

In the thinning shadow of the mushroom cloud, nevertheless, have a great day.