The liberal war against the Left

[DerekG]

I've become cognizant of the gulf that separates those who want the American empire to end, and those who merely want it tamed. One of the catalysts for this discovery is the recent Ward Churchill controversy. While one could certainly disagree with some of the finer, less cogent points splayed across his infamous essay, I can't help but be dismayed at the animosity some progressives have for the man. It might be helpful to remind you all that liberals allied with the Right before, in that precarious post-war era, and the results were not pretty. Be careful: the current cadre of rightists, unlike their predecessors, will not stop with the radicals.

The following is an excerpt from Elizabeth Schulte's essay, "The Ongoing War on the Left: From McCarthyism to COINTELPRO."

http://www.counterpunch.com/schulte04092005.html


--snip--



Democratic President Harry Truman put in place the Loyalty Act in 1947, which forced 8 million government workers to sign anti-communist loyalty oaths to keep their jobs and allowed the FBI to investigate more than 2 million federal workers. Under the McCarran Act, or the Internal Security Act, signed by Truman in 1950, offenders were eligible for deportation.

Meanwhile, thousands of people were called up to be grilled at HUAC hearings about their communist connection.

Many went to prison, where they faced harsh conditions and abuse. Black CP leader Henry Winston lost his eyesight as a result of lack of medical care in a segregated Indiana prison. Philip Frankfeld, who had been expelled by the party when he was thrown in prison under the Smith Act in 1953, was so badly beaten by inmates in the Atlanta Penitentiary that he was almost blind when he came out.

The other constant threat held over the heads of communists was deportation. In 1967, New York Post editor James Wechsler called the Immigration and Naturalization Service "an agency that seems to specialize in the muddled application of quiet, prolonged mental torture." He was absolutely right.

Passed in 1952, the Immigration and Nationality Act, or Walter-McCarran Act, allowed "aliens" to be arrested without a warrant, held without bail and deported. They could kept in jail for 10 years. Upon its passage, and with the Korean War going badly for the U.S. military, the Immigration Service immediately rounded up Chinese immigrants on the East and West Coasts.

While the number of people deported was nowhere near as high, the number detained was astounding. According to David Caute's The Great Fear, in California alone, 190 "subversive aliens" were arrested for deportation between 1948 and 1956. Only three were actually deported, but 46 of the others didn't have their charges dropped until 1964.
For almost 20 years, the federal government tried to deport Harry Bridges, the Australian-born leader of the San Francisco longshore strike of 1934. U.S. officials used every trick in the book, including offering ILWU members bribes to name him as a Communist. They never succeeded. Other union leaders whose names were not so well known were also persecuted, and thousands of union activists lost their jobs as a result of the witch-hunt.

Workers who were refused to testify before HUAC--asserting their Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate themselves--were fired. When HUAC came to Baltimore in 1957, 15 of 22 workers who took the Fifth lost their jobs, including seven Bethlehem Steel workers with seniority ranging from 10 to 20 years. Their union, the anticommunist United Steelworkers, refused to intervene.

The HUAC hearings also created a hysterical atmosphere in some workplaces, leading to incidents in which anti-communist workers attacked and ran left-wingers out of the plants.

In the end, the U.S. ruling class benefited greatly from the Red Scare, successfully driving communists and socialists, who had been leaders of the great shop-floor struggles of the 1930s, out of the labor movement.

Union leaders played their part by purging the unions of communists. In 1949, the CIO expelled 11 "red" unions. By 1954, 59 out of 100 unions had changed their constitution to bar communists from holding union office--a provision that was only recently dropped--and 40 unions barred communists from being rank-and-file members.

In the face of this attack, liberal organizations turned their backs on radicals--and in many cases joined in. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), instead of defending communists, conducted its own witch-hunt to oust radicals from its ranks--such as ACLU founding member Elizabeth Gurley Flynn. It was later discovered that throughout the McCarthy years, the ACLU dutifully reported the names of communists to the FBI.

--snip--

http://www.counterpunch.com/schulte04092005.html

[ixion]

1. a look at just a slice of gov't suppression of the left

You can go back to the union busters in the 30's, prohibition in the 20's... and not long before that the same people were driving the genocide of native americans, all in the name of 'buidling the Kingdom of God on Earth." Really. It's god's work to maim beyond recognition anything that threatens the power structure, you see. Jeebus said so.

:eyes:

[Pepperbelly]

2. Counterpunch ought to be renamed OUTRAGE and DISTORTION.

Not this article in particular although I do note that for the most part, it is ancient history.

The writers are always so outraged. Remind me of righties in that regard.

[DerekG]

3. It's hardly "ancient history"

The triumph of the Right--an ethos partially discredited after the fall of fascism in Europe--could only have happened with the complicity of the Cold War liberals. The legacy of Harry Truman and co. is laid bare everytime you open a newspaper.

[Lefty_the_Right]

4. And Oswald returned from the USSR when????

I know that by the time he returned in 1962 the HUAC was over, and McCarthy was already embarrased and shamed, but it still strikes me as incredibly odd that Oswald was not punished as a defector at the least.