Abstract
Senator Joseph McCarthy at a press conference in 1954
Credit: Eve Arnold/Magnum
The severe and widespread repression of the post-war United States was far more ferocious than today’s restrictions. The contemporary pervasive and censorious attacks on individuals for perceived sexism or racism, even when accompanied by Twitter hurricanes, are less numerous and less vicious. Even the reaction to the 9/11 terrorist attacks, which some defenders of American civil liberties worried would grow into neo-McCarthyism, was very different from the original. McCarthyism saw thousands of people lose their jobs and the imprisonment for years of more than a hundred people – the latter suspected or open members of the US Communist Party sent to jail simply for the ideas they put forward.
Nonetheless, despite this huge gap in severity, some thoughtful American defenders of freedom have argued for the aptness of the equation of the old and new. Distinguished Berkeley statistician Professor Leo Breiman, himself a victim of the original McCarthyism when in the US Army wrote in 2002: “Regretfully, I have come to acknowledge that there is more repression of free speech and free research on my campus than in the McCarthy era.”
The point was echoed by retired computer science lecturer Douglas Hainline, who witnessed McCarthyism in his native Texas; he told me: “What makes the current period ‘worse’ is that it infects the very people who should be most resistant to it. During the 1950s, intelligent people did not buy into McCarthyism even if they kept their heads down”.
It is fruitful to compare the various enforcers and instigators of the old and new repression. The role of different arms of government made the old repression particularly vicious; the dominance of civil society activists makes the new repression particularly insidious.
McCarthyism was refined by its namesake, a larger-than-life demagogic individual with a “big lie” to tell and a genius for mainstream media. Yet it was also abetted by government institutions, before and after McCarthy’s most powerful years. The less dramatic official government measures, far less well-known today, inflicted much more direct and widespread damage. It was the House Un-American Activities Committee created in the 1930s, not McCarthy, which first attacked Hollywood writers and celebrities, in the clearest censorship of that time. McCarthy came late to the active hunt for “disloyal” communists via US government loyalty boards, a Truman invention which even investigated the patriotism of postmen. Meanwhile, the courts had ruled since World War I that a “clear and present danger” allowed the curtailment of free speech – a provision that was not revised until 1969.
McCarthyism could not have survived without popular support; there was widespread acceptance that communists had disqualified themselves from the protection of civil liberties just by being communists. Indeed, in 1949 at Peekskill, ordinary people rioted to disrupt a concert by the great black communist singer Paul Robeson. Yet the predominant role was played by the three branches of government.
Thus does McCarthyism differ from the new repression, in which the leading role is played by “the very people who should be most resistant to it”. Some (not all) activists for women’s and black equality in the US clearly believe that those who have offensive views should be denied freedom of speech, thoroughly oblivious to the precedent they are setting.
If we focus only on the most serious consequences of McCarthyism to individuals, then further censorship in the present seems much less threatening. If the damage is measured by a less fearful but more universal self-censorship then the comparison is imprecise, but clearly valid.
One of the protesters at the University of Illinois demonstrates in support of Professor Steven Salaita. In 2014, Salaita had the offer of a professorial position at the university withdrawn after posting tweets that criticised Israeli policyß
Credit: Armando L. Sanchez/Alamy
The sides have changed, but the idea that free speech is a commodity which can easily be traded away is common to both unhappy periods. In less calm times it is too late to plant the idea that freedom of expression is first of all for those whose ideas we think most repugnant, and too late for it to grow roots. If we decide that we will defeat these ideas by suppression, it soon becomes a habit.
© Judith Shapiro
Case Study
Judith Shapiro remembers her parents being investigated
As a child of communist party members growing up in New York City in the McCarthy era, – a so-called “red diaper baby” – I have found the struggle for objectivity on this period a difficult but important goal. My father, a postal worker, faced Truman’s loyalty board hearings in 1948 but succeeded in demonstrating that he was not someone who followed the party line during the period of the “Molotov-Ribbentrop” [Hitler-Stalin] Pact, 1939-1941. Clearly a maverick, he had put forward trade union resolutions to open a second front in Europe at the time that the communist party was calling the war in Europe a “phoney war”. My mother, a social worker in New York City and a member of the “communist-dominated” United Public Workers, was fired from her job. I remember banner headlines in the New York City tabloids, about the successful purge of “reds” from the city’s Department of Public Welfare, and the journalists “door-stepping” her, a junior party member. I was also, by what has always seemed to me a strange coincidence, at the age of six, a witness to the pivotal Paul Robeson concert and Peekskill riots described in the main story. We had a modest summer rental there, and attended the first concert. I was much put out that for my physical protection I was not allowed to attend the second.
I also listened to the Army-McCarthy hearings the following year on the radio, perhaps just because my parents’ attention was so riveted on them. I understood the triumph they represented. Attacks on the slowly growing civil rights movement in the US southern states were part of this picture. Yet I also became aware that I should not sign petitions or join organisations, even before I had left primary school. The world seemed to change dramatically and suddenly as we entered the 1960s. To some extent the 1960s were a backlash against the 1950s.
The times seem so different now, and conformity in the US so much less that we joke that non-conformity is the new conformity. This is a reason why the new McCarthyism may be less damaging – Americans can retreat to their side of the fence and comfort zone. In the 1950s there was no place to retreat – except sometimes abroad if they had not taken away your passport. The FBI often followed you to your new employment.
Yet the common failure to place freedom of speech high enough on anyone’s agenda is a worrisome signal that a new difficult period could again ignite a more massive witch hunt. The possible emergence of a new Cold War and of growing economic insecurity shows us the risks, even if they are not yet a “clear and present danger”. Yet methods to combat censorship must take on the voluntary double burden of scrupulously avoiding suppression of the would-be censors.