Contents:
FBI At the Door
McCarthyism and the Red Scare
Communist? What's a Communist?
Assault on the NAACP
Crippling the Labor Movement
Follow the Money
Defeating McCarthyism
Given our current political realities, these days I've been doing a lot thinking and remembering about the McCarthy-era of the 1950s.
Both of my parents were union organizers in the 1930s and 1940s. And until the mid-1950s, they were members of the Communist Party. The union they had devoted two decades of their lives to building was destroyed by McCarthyism. Because of their support for labor and civil rights, both of them were blacklisted and for years they were hounded by the FBI and persecuted by right-wing elected officials
When I was six, the Altadena suburb where we were living came under a new law decreeing that subversives were UnFit Parents and their children could be taken and placed in foster care. So my family had to swiftly relocate to Arlington Avenue on the edge of the Leimert Park neighborhood in Los Angeles where that law did not apply.
A few years later, that was the site of my first political action and my first civil disobedience. I was nine or ten when I had to block two FBI agents from entering our home to seize Ethel Shapiro and Angelo Bertollini who were hiding in our basement to avoid deportation under one of many new laws targeting those deemed to be subversives.
Back then (and probably still today) it was a felony to lie to an FBI agent. But if my parents had answered the door and admitted they were harboring a fugitive that was also a felony. And if they refused to answer questions, that could be construed as probable-cause for an immediate search. At that time though, FBI agents were not allowed to interrogate children without a parent present — at least, not white children. So while my Mom and Dad waited just out of sight, I was sent to answer the door and tell the FBI agents that they could not enter our home and that no one inside wanted to talk to them.
As a teenager years later, I quite enjoyed defying adults, but at that age the agents were intimidating and standing against them was scary, even though I knew my parents were listening just out of sight. And these weren't ordinary adults, they were FBI who the TV said were the heroic defenders of Truth, Justice, and the American Way (you know, like Superman). So when they tried to bully and intimidate me into allowing them entry, I just hung my head and stubbornly repeated that they could not come in and no one wanted to talk to them.
Eventually they left and Ethel and Angelo were whisked away to a new safe house. I didn't see them again for years until the Supreme Court overturned that particular law. Of course, the majority of that court had been appointed by Franklin Roosevelt. Today's court is quite different.
McCarthyism — named after Senator Joe McCarthy (R-WI) — was a right-wing, white-supremacist, political and media campaign to falsely accuse people of traitorous conspiracies, stoke mass fear and hysteria, and incite racial and nationalist hatred against those anyone they considered to be un-American, subversive, pinko, liberal, or foreign-born. Also known as the Red Scare, McCarthyism was the partisan strategy of extreme right-wing Republicans and segregationist Democrats who referred to themselves as Dixiecrats.
McCarthy was the media poster-boy for the strategy that bore his name, but he was just the loud-mouth front-man. The Red Scare was planned, directed, funded and promulgated by southern plantation owners, the wealthy individuals who Franklin Roosevelt referred to as plutocrats and economic royalists, the National Association of Manufacturers, colonialist transnational corporations, and the Chicago Tribune-McCormick media conglomerate which was the Fox News of the 1950s.
The Red Scare promoters had clear specific goals:
If you're thinking that this description sounds like our 21st Century Tea Party, MAGA, and Trump, you're correct. When Obama was elected in 2008, Republicans and white nationalists began reviving the McCarthyite playbook with their Tea Party. Since 2016, Trump and MAGA have made a new McCarthyism the center of their campaigns.
And that is not surprising. First, because McCarthyism was very successful in weakening labor, attacking civil rights, and undermining New Deal social programs. And second, because the political puppeteer behind Senator McCarthy was a ruthless "fixer" named Roy Cohn. Years later, in the 1970s after McCarthyism had been discredited, Cohn became advisor and mentor to a young buccaneer-businessman named Donald Trump, teaching him the power-techniques of slander, deceit, demagogy, legal trickery, and judicial evasion.
Demagogues can construe fear terms like red, commie, subversive, wokism, grooming, and Critical Race Theory, to mean anything and fit anyone they want to destroy.
One time when I was working on the voting rights campaign in Selma Alabama, Jim Clark the notorious sheriff arrested me on a trumped up charge. As he was shoving me into his police car he called me a "communist."
Being young and brash, I retorted, "Communist? What's a communist?"
Clark wasn't stumped at all, he knew the answer right off. "A communist is any God-damned New York kike what wants our nigrahs to vote!"
Well, except for the fact that I was from Los Angeles, he had me dead to rights. For him, and for most white southerners at that time, any challenge to, or effort to change, the Jim Crow southern way of life was the ultimate evil — in other words, communism!
All across the South there were billboards falsely claiming that Martin Luther King was a communist. And as late as the mid-60s, most of the questions posed to Dr. King during a Meet The Press interview were about communist infiltration and red influence over the movement rather than the issues of racism, segregation, and voting rights. A Gallup public opinion poll in October 1965 (eight months after Selma's Bloody Sunday) reported that 75% of all Americans thought that communists were behind or at least involved in Civil Rights Movement protests.
After the Supreme Court issued its Brown v Board of Education school desegregation decision in 1954, the Dixiecrat white power-structure in the South launched an all-out campaign to destroy the NAACP.
Justified by patriotic Red Scare rhetoric, a raft of new laws targeting subversive organizations were enacted across the South. Patterned after similar Red Scare laws at the federal level, they empowered state attorneys general to designate organizations as subversive without due process or appeal. The NAACP was quickly classified and publicly vilified as such a subversive organization. Using the new laws, the legal system then targeted and attacked the organization and persecuted NAACP members.
At the same time, local White Citizens Councils were organized to inflict economic terrorism against individual NAACP members while the Ku Klux Klan was allowed to physically assault, bomb, and assassinate with impunity.
As just one example, a number of southern states enacted laws barring members of subversive organizations from public employment. All state and local employees — including school teachers and professors at public universities — were required to swear under penalty of perjury that they did not belong to subversive groups (such as the NAACP).
The NAACP was financially supported by member dues. But in the South, sharecroppers, maids, tenant farmers, and day-laborers who were barely surviving on the edge of starvation couldn't afford to join, so Black teachers in the segregated "Colored schools" formed a significant portion of the organization's dues base. At the stroke of a legal pen, teachers were forced to resign their membership or lose their jobs. Since NAACP communication was by postal mail, and almost all postal workers in the South were white with many of them members of the White Citizens Council, it was almost impossible to conceal membership in the NAACP.
That and other anti-subversive laws, economic terrorism by the White Citizens Councils, and violent terrorism by the Ku Klux Klan were effective. In Louisiana, for example, at the time of the Brown decision, the NAACP had 13,000 dues-paying member in 65 branches across the state. Three years later they were down from 13,000 to just 1700 in 7 branches all of which were in New Orleans. Everywhere else in the state, the NAACP had been eliminated as an organization.
Of course, the people were still there and many, particularly those who owned their own business or land, held fast to their membership and fought on as best they could. In a few places they were able to form local organizations with benign-sounding, non-racial names, such as Bogalusa Voters & Civic League. But valuable and courageous as those local groups were, they were isolated from the kinds of support that affiliation with a national organization had previously provided.
After World War II, the American labor movement was strong, vibrant, and enjoyed broad public support. At that time, one-third of all private-sector, nonfarm, workers were represented by unions (today it's down to around 6%).
Yes, it's true that some of those unions were racist, conservative, and focused only on the immediate bread-and-butter needs of their members. But many other unions were socially and politically progressive. In addition to fighting to improve their members' wages and working conditions, they also led broad political campaigns around social causes that went far beyond immediate day-to-day workplace issues — social security, unemployment insurance, occupational health and safety laws, affordable health care, tuition-free higher education, low-cost housing, tenement reform, rent control, and so on. And some of them also fought for racial justice, called for anti-lynching laws, and advocated for peace-oriented and (in some cases) anti-colonialist foreign policies.
McCarthyites hated and attacked all unions as a matter of principle, but their main goal was to destroy the progressive unions. They labeled ten of the strongest industrial unions in the country as communist and subversive and specifically targeted them for destruction. They succeeded in destroying eight of the ten, including my parent's union, the American Communications Association (ACA).
Only two of the ten "Red unions" survived. Over a decade of withering attacks, the United Electric Workers (UE) lost 85% of its members, dropping from 600,000 members to 85,000. Yet they still exist today as a progressive union. So too does the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) of which I was a member and Chief Shop Steward for many years.
But in the face of McCarthyite intimidation and repressive anti-union laws, most other unions echoed the approved anti-red political cant, and purged themselves of progressive officers and leftist organizers. And they avoided engaging on broader social issues, economic policies, and foreign affairs, restricting their activities to wages and working conditions within their plant gates. One result was that over time, their narrow, members-only focus diminished public support of unions in general.
My Dad and Mom lost their jobs as union organizers and were blacklisted, no other union would hire them. Even when they got ordinary jobs outside the labor movement, the FBI followed them from employer to employer, asking the owner why he was, "Employing communist traitors." After which, my parents would back on the unemployment line.
But Mom and Dad were tough, strong, and wicked smart. Somehow they kept a roof over our heads and food on the table. We survived.
The first rule of investigation is, Follow the money and the power.
For a time, my father became the business manager of the nonprofit Community Medical Center (CMC) — a job that was more of an organizing mission than managerial. In that era, the vast majority of doctors were in private practice, operating as independent professionals charging whatever the market would bear. Some operated white-only practices, refusing to treat nonwhite patients at all, others turned away the poor and the nonwhite who could not afford their fees. In the opinion of the Medical Association (AMA), that was the proper, American, way for them to do business.
In the late '40s, a group of left-leaning doctors formed the CMC, which was dedicated to offering low-cost health care to working families regardless of race or income. Union health plans contracted with CMC to provide health care for their members. The CMC was located on the border between a Black ghetto and a white working-class neighborhood, first on Western Avenue and later on Lake Street near Pico & Hoover. Unlike most medical facilities in Los Angeles, CMC doctors, nurses, and support staff were race and gender-integrated. By the early 1950s, CMC was treating 18,000 patients a year.
To the AMA, union health plans and nonprofit medical centers were subversive, un-American, and an invidious commie plot to wickedly impose socialized medicine on an innocent public. For the Los Angeles County Medical Association, opposing nonprofit health care was their a sacred duty. Moreover, in 1951 my Dad played a key role in publishing Yours for a Genuine Brotherhood: a Survey of Discrimination In the Health Field in Los Angeles — a 39 page pamphlet describing systematic race and gender discrimination in Southern California health care.
In 1954, when I was ten, the AMA asked the California Senate Committee on Un-American Activities to investigate the red menace lurking within the SoCal medical community. Commonly referred to as the "Burns Committee" after its chairman, a McCarthyite senator from Fresno, the committee was the California version of the infamous House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). They were pleased and eager to oblige the Medical Association and, of course, garner a load of free publicity for themselves.
My father's SUBPOENA to testify before the committee arrived in late November. To give their spectacle maximum local impact they held their hearing in L.A. rather than Sacramento. And, yes, "spectacle" is the correct word. Though ostensibly a legislative hearing, McCarthyite investigations into "un-American" activities were a brutal form of political theater — public shamings and degradings, incitements of hostility, and direct assaults on freedom of speech, thought, assembly, and association, complete with hero informers and villain subversives.
The local news media grabbed the story and ran it with breathless
headlines:
"Docs Here Check on Red Infiltration" — L.A. Daily News
"Doctors Defy Questions at Red Hearings" — L.A. Times
"29 Doctors Branded as Reds in L.A. Probe" — L.A.
Examiner
"Quiz Told Patients Acted as Red Links to Doctors" — L.A.
Examiner
As intended, the hue and cry prompted civic-minded do-gooders in the community to bestir themselves and take action against our little red-menace lurking on Arlington Avenue. As a child, I enjoyed answering the phone on behalf of my parents (in the 1950s kids didn't own or even much use phones, so hardly anyone ever called me). But threatening and obscene hate calls became so common that I was told not to pick up anymore. A red hammer and sickle was painted on our driveway and our car splattered with red paint. A patriotic elementary school teacher identified me to the other boys as a communist traitor — with the results you would expect.
The CMC did not survive. Patients became afraid to come in for medical care, most of the union health plans were intimidated into canceling their contracts, and some of the doctors resigned in fear. Not long after the hearing, the clinic shut down and my Dad was once again unemployed.
By the 1960s, the American Medical Association had won their war against nonprofit socialized medicine. Eventually though, HMOs did largely take over the health care marketplace, but as profit-oriented corporate behemoths rather than nonprofits. In 1971, President Nixon's aide John Ehrlichman was caught on the once-secret White House Tapes explaining to "Tricky Dick" the HMO business plan. "All the incentives are toward less medical care, because the less care they give, the more money they make." A strategy that proved so unpopular with the public that when the word "HMO" was mentioned in a movie, audiences spontaneously hissed and booed — or at least they did in my Oakland California neighborhood.
America's Red Scare pathology ran deep in the 1950s. For a significant portion of the population (particularly the white population), any dissent, any protest, any questioning of authority from a progressive or humanist standpoint was seen as un-American and close to treason. And for government officials, academic authorities, and a large segment of the mass media, speaking up for racial equality, joining a labor union, supporting the United Nations, participating in Ban the Bomb protests, or advocating other unpopular beliefs was considered subversive activity.
McCarthyites and segregationists smeared and attacked the Civil Rights Movement as communist and un-American. They accused Dr. King of being a Soviet agent. Yet it was the Freedom Movement in alliance with others that led the way in first defying and then discrediting McCarthyism and the Red Scare. What most effectively blunted and weakened the Red Scare's grip on the public mind was the courage of young Black students nonviolently rebelling against segregation (and when necessary enduring their time in jail); and images of dignified maids and sharecroppers risking their homes and their lives for the simple democratic right to vote.
It was the stark contrast between the Freedom Movement's assertion of human rights for people of color and the violent bigotry of segregationists that woke a significant portion of American whites to the fundamental hypocrisy of the flag-waving, super-patriots. One of the reasons that Dr. King's famous I Have a Dream speech was so politically important is that all 19 minutes of it were broadcast in its entirety which prevented news media from cherry-picking selected sound bites to reinforce their editorial biases. For viewers whose hearts were not locked into white supremacy, claims that King was a Soviet agent and the Movement a communist plot began to lose their credibility.
Inspired by the Civil Rights Movement, others under attack by McCarthyism became louder and bolder in their defiance. Students — Black and white — began challenging anti-democratic authorities and opposing the Vietnam War, women rose up to demand liberation and equality, movements of Latinos, Native Americans, Asians, immigrants, farm workers, renters, environmentalists, and many others rejected Jim Crow America and rebelled against the orthodoxies of corporate power.
For a long time I believed that in the 1960s we had defeated the national psychosis known as McCarthyism. But now I realize that what we actually did was drive it back down into the political sewer from whence it came. There it continued to seethe and fester until erupting again in the 21st Century in the form of Trump and MAGA.
Yet I take comfort in the knowledge that we beat back McCarthyism before. And we can — and will — do so again.
Copyright © Bruce Hartford
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