In 1947, the House Un-American Activities Committee (better known by the acronym HUAC) began conducting public hearings in its investigation of allegations that communists had 'taken over' the film industry. As a result of these hearings, nine screenwriters and one director — who together became known as the Hollywood Ten — were sentenced to one year i
n federal prison after being found guilty of contempt of Congress for refusing to recognize HUAC's authority to inquire into their political views.Ironically, the following year, the United States Supreme Court issued what is known as the Paramount decree, which found that the Hollywood studios — the leaders of which had pressed for the HUAC hearings — constituted an illegal, vertically integrated oligopoly (or trust), in which the eight major studios colluded to fix prices, restrict access to the production, distribution and exhibition of movies in the United States. A cynical person might look at this other 'group of eight', which did not compete in a free market but instead illegally sought to 'fix' the market — certainly not a communist attitude toward business, but not exactly in the spirit of the American dream that Hollywood had grown rich from making movies about either.
HUAC also laid the groundwork for the blacklist. This list, the existence of which studio heads vigorously denied, was used for well over a decade to keep anyone even suspected of having communist sympathies from gaining employment in the entertainment industry (which had grown to include television by the early 1950s).
HUAC also paved the way for the more well-known anti-communist witch hunts conducted by Senator Joe McCar
thy in the 1950s. In short, from late 1940s through the mid-1950s, acute fears of Soviet Russia and nuclear war fueled a number of ferocious assaults on American civil liberties — including restrictions on the rights to free speech, a free press, and especially when these were employed to criticize one's own government. People who voiced dissent, or were even suspected of doing so — often people with 'funny names' like Rosenberg or Maltz or Biberman — were accused of being "un-American" by individuals, industries and government bodies who sought to define 'Americanism' as a blind and total acceptance of the status quo. America was an unimpeachable beacon of freedom, and if you thought otherwise, you were free to 'go back to Russia', to jail or to hell.Anti-Anti-Americanism — Bringing Irony Back
In his testimony as a friendly witness before HUAC, Jack Warner began his remarks by declaring that "Ideological termites have burrowed into many American industries, organizations, and societies. Wherever they may be, I say let us dig them out and get rid of them."
Yesterday, on Hardball with Chris Matthews, Congresswoman Michelle Bachman (MN-R) became the latest to sound the "Obama isn't one of us" alarm. Only this time, she manages to trump Palin's xenophobic saber-rattling. Bachmann doesn't bother with silly innuendoes about Obama "palling around with terrorists". And she's not interested in summoning Palin's classic Everymom tone she uses when talking to rallies about Obama — "And I am just so fearful that this is not a man who sees America the way that you and I see America, as the greatest source for good in this world." — as if she's warning the neighborhood association that a godless pedophile was running for elementary school principal and ahead in the polls.
No. Bachmann just calls 'em like she sees 'em. "I think the people that Barack Obama has been associating with are anti-American, by and large" and "I'm very concerned that he may have anti-American views."
Partisan smears like this are ugly, but hardly unprecedented. What's truly terrifying, however, is that these remarks were used to pitch a much broader call to arms, in which Congresswoman Bachmann actually called for "The news media should do a penetrating exposé and [investigate] the views of the people in Congress and find out are they are pro-America or anti-America."
1 comment:
"Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?"
Aside from the fact that the Rosenbergs were persecuted and convicted less for having funny names and more for giving the most awesome weapon ever created to a state which hoped to be more or less "a boot stamping on a human face - forever" I agree with you. Recalling the all energy expended a few years ago in attempting to define patriotism as a quality of the left or right i.e. "Patriots support the War" or "Dissent is Patriotic" when it is in fact neither and dependent on the situation, I find the idea of a new effort over Americanism pretty tedious. Using such charged words as patriotic and American as political bludgeon is both intellectually lazy and needlessly divisive, because in effect the negatives of those terms is close to an indictment of treason. This generally has the effect of sucking all the meaningful debate out of a discussion and leaves us only with heated counter accusations amid general harrumphing.
I much prefer, and I find much more effective, a specific critique of one's political adversaries or perhaps a list of the ideals which one believes are the nations and an explanation of in what way one's adversaries are in variance with them. Even that though would have the potential for abuse, but it would be a fast improvement.
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