When I was growing up in the US I was taught Communism was the greatest threat our country ever faced. I was also taught that the USSR and Communist China were the greatest danger to the average American. These lessons were punctuated like so:
We were told these nations were a threat to our freedoms. And that if we were taken over by Communists that we would have to carry identification everywhere. That those in these countries are spying ON THEIR OWN CITIZENS. And that neighbors are encouraged to turn in their own neighbors for crimes against the state:
These memes were well established when I was a child. Mostly thanks to Red-Baiting Mc Carthy and those like him. With their fear mongering a wide net of social "undesirables" was ensnared. Civil rights advocates, Gays and Lesbians, social reformers of every stripe shivered at being labeled Communist. Careers and lives were destroyed as were social movements.
This is the abbreviated story of how disparate communities – from civil rights activists to homosexuals – were grouped together in mid-century America, to form – along with those few remaining American Communists and even fewer Soviet spies – the red menace, a Fifth Column of individuals and organizations to be rooted out, ostracized and punished for their treachery. It is a story to remember whenever groups are targeted for being the primary cause of a nation’s collective problems. When the contradictions of a free, equal and democratic society, complete with loyalty boards, blacklists and show trials, are not self-evident, the tales of those who were irrationally scapegoated and collectively prosecuted may be enlightening. The light that escapes from this dark period also reveals many unfortunate truths about human nature, from our tendency to conformity, to our need to place blame and oversimplify. Finally, this is a story about the flaws of a collective memory that seems to be so brief as to allow for the endless repetition of a nation’s worst sins and hypocrisy mere decades after they were committed.
In and around the 1950s an atmosphere of conformity arose within this nation of individual freedoms. Echoing the first red-scare of the 1920s, American identity was re-defined. Now Communism, not Nazism or the Japanese empire, represented its “Other.” As the nation’s most wicked evil, any citizens associated with this “‘ism” were perceived to be subversive. The lavender scare – a purging of homosexuals from the federal government for being “security risks” – is demonstrative of this treatment. It serves as a case study for all those unjustly branded Red. Gays were perceived to be Un-American and so, like Communists, they were viruses, to be quarantined. Containment of Communism at home required enhanced protection for the national body from those most susceptible to its seductions, including homosexuals and blacks. Yet the evil was imaginary until the anti-Communists created and then destroyed it. While "Communism was a threat to the United States,” the literary critic Philip Rahv famously argued, “it was not a threat in the Unites States."
Fifty years later, the historian Stephen Whitfield summarized America’s new perceived enemy:
The specter that, a century earlier, Marx and Engels had described as stalking the continent of Europe was extending itself to the United States, looming over a nation that had prided itself on its historical immunity to the apocalyptic tragedies of the either/or...By introducing ideological politics, Communism became more loathed than organized crime, exacerbating fears that were to distort and enfeeble American culture throughout the late 1940s and the 1950s."
Communists were traitors, diseased, soft, elitist, gay, integrationist and Un-American. They had to be fought with a culture of containment. This culture, echoing previous American and more general historical trends, triumphed a strong, united and masculine American response to a foreign threat that was now characterized as being subversive and secretive. This is the story of those who were contained, and who, in some cases, have yet to escape. It is meant to be a montage of the contradictions that their stories reveal when juxtaposed against the principles upon which the United States was founded. It is a lesson in the individual and national crimes and mistakes that trapped the many Americans unjustly accused of Un-American activities.
So when someone tells me someone needs to know everything I do to protect me. The first thing I think of is the Red Scare and how we're were fighting them over there so we won't see that sort of oppression over here.