Stop Mass Hysteria

by Michael Savage

  Make no mistake, a Bernie Sanders America would eventually be the same authoritarian nightmare the Chinese under Mao and the Russians under Stalin endured. He is a communist pied piper who is leading our own children—no matter how old they may be—away before our very eyes. He’s playing the same tune to twenty-first-century Millennials that communism played to the left in the twentieth century.

  In October 1947, with the war won and the Soviet Union now our biggest concern, and with television becoming more and more influential, HUAC began hearings into communist infiltration of Hollywood.8 Almost at once, heavy hitters in the motion picture industry formed the Committee for the First Amendment and flew to Washington to testify and protest. Among their numbers were Bette Davis, Judy Garland, Gene Kelly, Humphrey Bogart, Groucho Marx, Henry Fonda, and Lucille Ball.9

  They argued it wasn’t just a question of free speech, but of ingratitude. The stars had raised countless millions for their country selling war bonds, sponsoring rubber drives, or enlisting to fight—Fonda, Kelly, and the great Jimmy Stewart among them—and had worked with the USO to entertain troops around the globe.10 11 12 Now they were being investigated?

  Because of the big names involved—the kinds of names that sold newspapers and got radio listeners to stay tuned—anticommunist sentiment surged. Hollywood came under withering fire from many right-leaning columnists, such as the powerful Hedda Hopper, and from the Hearst newspapers. Citing the 1940 hearings, the press declared celebrity members of the Committee for the First Amendment communists or communist sympathizers. Defense of the group was limited since, for one, the charges were largely true, and also because many commentators were afraid of losing their jobs. One exception was former first lady and left-wing icon Eleanor Roosevelt, who emerged from the where-are-they-now file on October 29, 1947, to write:

  The film industry is a great industry with infinite possibilities for good and bad. Its primary purpose is to entertain people. On the side, it can do many other things. It can popularize certain ideals, it can make education palatable. But in the long run, the judge who decides whether what it does is good or bad is the man or woman who attends the movies. In a democratic country I do not think the public will tolerate a removal of its right to decide what it thinks of the ideas and performances of those who make the movie industry work.13

  In late 1947, HUAC began subpoenaing people named in a series of Hollywood Reporter articles as communists. The committee wanted to determine whether sympathizers had been introducing procommunist ideas into U.S. films. Ronald Reagan, then president of the Screen Actors Guild, testified that communists within his union had tried to influence its policies. Walt Disney affirmed that communist influence in the film industry was a serious problem. And actor Adolphe Menjou expressed his desire to send all Hollywood communists back to Russia. In a prescient statement designed to undercut the left’s defense of the conspirators, he remarked, “I am a witch hunter if the witches are communists.”14

  These assertions came only a few years after Hollywood had released a string of procommunist movies. A 1942 thriller, Miss V from Moscow, highlighted the daring of Russian espionage exploits. The Boy from Stalingrad and The Battle of Russia, both released in 1943, championed Russia’s resistance to the Nazis. That same year, Mission to Moscow idealized Russia under Stalin, as seen through a U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union.

  These are but four examples from an entire genre of procommunist films, all of which were geared toward manipulating the American public’s view of the Russian government and people. Given the role movies played in shaping attitudes, they helped create an environment in which people coming into contact with subversives would feel sympathetic toward their cause.

  Many of the actors who stood accused doubled down, disastrously, noting that membership in the Communist Party was not illegal, that the real threat to American values was the demonization of people in the entertainment field, and that, under the First Amendment’s free association clause, HUAC’s inquiries were unconstitutional.

  Note that this First Amendment argument is missing one very important element: It doesn’t deny the charges. For the most part, those accused of being communists didn’t say it wasn’t true; they made the argument that being a communist is a First Amendment right, being free speech and free association. Part of the mass hysteria over this issue is people blindly accepting that proposition. The other is believing the majority of these people were wrongly accused. They weren’t; they didn’t even deny the charges!

  The First Amendment gives wide latitude to the expression of ideas and the right to meet and discuss them. But it doesn’t sanction criminal conspiracies. No reasonable person would cite the First Amendment to defend conspirators meeting to plot a murder or set up a modern slavery ring. Yet that is exactly what any organization seeking to impose communism on a free country is doing.

  If you think that’s an extreme position, you’re in for a surprise. In August 1954, the Communist Control Act made the existence of the Communist Party illegal and membership in it or support of it a criminal act. The bill passed the Senate unanimously, 85–0, and the House, 305–2. Those vote counts are a striking illustration of just how clearly patriotic Americans of the time recognized the threat communism represents. The bill was signed into law by President Dwight Eisenhower on August 24, 1954, and remains in effect to this day. Only future presidents neglecting to enforce the law allows the Communist Party of the United States to continue to exist.15

  Then, as now, there were conservative members of the Hollywood community who provided bulwarks against the socialist Hollywood mind-set. Jimmy Stewart, for example, nearly ended his friendship with former roommate Fonda over the latter’s left-wing ideology. In 1944, John Wayne, who was a big enough star not to care what people thought, was one of the founding members of the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals. Loyalty oaths were printed and signatures were required by the studios. Among those who joined Wayne were his frequent film collaborators Ward Bond, Walter Brennan, and director John Ford, along with big names like Gary Cooper, Cecil B. DeMille, Walt Disney, Clark Gable, Ginger Rogers, Barbara Stanwyck, and Robert Taylor.16 Taylor was a huge star at the time and, when he finally testified, identifying by name the so-called fellow travelers, film-loving but left-leaning France was so incensed that they called for his films to be banned. Good old France. I’ll tell you more about Taylor later.

  Institutionally, the film industry responded by blackballing acknowledged, or even suspected, communists. Just before the war, studio heads were called to Washington and had acceded to the wishes of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who asked them not to make movies about anti-Semitism. Though the media was aware of the true nature of the concentration camps, Roosevelt knew it would be tough selling another European war to Americans—tougher if they thought it was about liberating Jews. Unlike his Republican predecessor Lincoln, the great Democrat issued no form of Emancipation Proclamation.

  Among actors, the professional casualties over the course of the HUAC hearings were midlevel names like Zero Mostel, Howard Da Silva, and Larry Parks,17 who starred in the 1946 hit The Jolson Story. Henry Fonda and Edward G. Robinson were among the “gray-listed” actors, men who were big enough names that they would be permitted to work if they acknowledged the error of their ways. Robinson did; Fonda did not. He didn’t act in Hollywood for six years.18

  But the big haul for HUAC was the screenwriters. Unlike the actors, these people were intellectuals who could make the First Amendment argument, valid or not. They showed up at the hearings and defiantly refused to cooperate. HUAC would eventually charge a double handful of writers—the Hollywood Ten—with contempt of Congress for refusing to name names or for attempting to make pre-testimony statements. Members of the Hollywood Ten served sentences of between six months and one year.

  But that was only the start of their punishment. Before they were imprisoned, the Association of Motion Picture Producers declared all ten w
ould be ineligible for employment in the film industry until the contempt charges were cleared and they swore they were not communists. Nearly all left prison to find themselves unemployable. Only one, writer-director Edward Dmytryk, was able to work steadily, and only after he declared he had, indeed, been a communist and named twenty-six others.19

  The furor burned on for years, during which time the film industry released dozens of anticommunist films just as it had earlier made anti-Nazi movies. Among those produced were The Red Menace (1949), which depicted an innocent soldier being seduced to join the Communist Party; I Was a Communist for the FBI (1951), about a covert agent who had infiltrated a communist cell; and My Son John (1952), which posed the question: What is greater, loyalty to one’s country or to one’s family? (Answer: the USA.) In the same year, John Wayne and James Arness played heroic HUAC investigators in Big Jim McLain, in which Duke kicked down doors and took prisoners.

  By 1951, the tactics of those subpoenaed had changed. Rather than argue on behalf of the First Amendment, most invoked their Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate themselves as a result of refusing to implicate others. Again, let me point out they were not denying the charges. In fact, they were admitting answering the question of whether they were communists would tend to incriminate them, although the 1954 Communist Control Act was not yet law. Of course, those refusing to cooperate were placed on a blacklist.

  Fittingly, the medium that had nearly killed Hollywood by causing movie theaters to shut down in droves ultimately came to Hollywood’s rescue. By the early 1950s, television was starved for fresh, quality content. Movie stars, movie directors, and movie writers felt the young medium that sold detergent and mouthwash to the masses was beneath them. The studios, forced to make more and more shows for TV, were also forced to hire new talent. That’s where names such as Charlton Heston, Jack Lemmon, James Dean, and writer Rod Serling got their start. As late as 1957, producers were still fearful of hiring the previous pariahs.

  Producer Sam Spiegel was told not to give blacklisted screenwriters Michael Wilson and Carl Foreman credit for Bridge on the River Kwai or else the film would have trouble getting bookings.20 Instead, in a small show of resistance, he gave the credit to the author of the book, Pierre Boulle, who did not speak any English. The Best Screenplay Academy Award it earned was not rightly attributed to the actual screenwriters until 1985. It took another three years before actor Kirk Douglas and director Otto Preminger took aim squarely at HUAC and the blacklist. Both Douglas’s epic Spartacus and Preminger’s sprawling Exodus hired blacklisted writer Dalton Trumbo and put his name on the screen, in defiance of the blacklist.21

  The left would have you believe that communists in Hollywood and in other American institutions were an oppressed minority who had—as they would have you believe—been turned into political victims, rather members of an anti-American conspiracy to impose a political system that had already resulted in tens of millions of civilian deaths, with tens of millions more to come in the decades that followed. And they have turned the studio heads who blacklisted them—private business owners who had every right to refuse to allow their property to be used to spread this abhorrent message—into totalitarian villains.

  The widespread belief in this completely false narrative is one of the most insidious mass hysterias to ever have gripped the American public. Since dissolution of the HUAC in 1975, we’ve seen the rise of a new, radical left. In 2009, acting White House communications director Anita Dunn publicly praised Mao Zedong as “one of my two favorite political philosophers.”22 In a 2017 article, Establishment mouthpiece Bloomberg gleefully ran an article titled “Get Rid of Capitalism? Millennials Are Ready to Talk About It,” citing a Harvard University poll in which 51 percent of eighteen- to twenty-nine-year-olds in the United States said they opposed capitalism.23 As of this writing, the communist pied piper Bernie Sanders plans to run for president again in 2020.

  SEEING RED

  As avidly followed as they were, the HUAC hearings on William Gaines in 1954 were just Washington’s warm-up for bigger game.

  In the 1950s, television became the most powerful medium for generating hysteria to date—possibly more powerful than today’s Internet. The Web is fragmented among countless social media venues and competing shriekers. Unlike today, channel choices were limited during the early days of television, and there was little in the way of countervailing information. Fortunately, we had some stalwart professionals like Edward R. Murrow vetting and delivering the news.

  A new medium needs narrative, and Joseph McCarthy had been a storyteller all his life. While in the Marines, he attributed a broken leg to a variety of battle-related causes, depending on what story he felt like telling. The truth was, he had suffered the injury during an on-ship party. His critics claim he exaggerated his war record to qualify for a Distinguished Flying Cross and several Air Medals. Probably untrue.24 He was a tail-gunner on a bomber. During his successful Senate run in 1946, he accused his opponent of cowardice for not serving during World War II—despite his opponent having been forty-six when America entered the war, past the age of enlistment.

  These character flaws, along with his likely alcoholism25 even before his downfall, have fueled the left’s portrayal of McCarthy as a paranoid, vindictive, witch-hunting bully. Maybe their estimation of the man himself is correct. Maybe it is exaggerated. Either way, it doesn’t change the fact that his fundamental claim that communists had infiltrated the government and other highly influential institutions was true.

  In 1950, McCarthy claimed to have a list of communists who had infiltrated the U.S. Department of State. McCarthy’s story had circumstantial credibility. Communists were old enemies, as we’ve seen, and their corrosive influence was feared by most Americans. But that was before the war, before they had been our allies in defeating the hated Nazis.

  By 1950, however, the Soviet Union had successfully grabbed chunks of Eastern Europe, notably half of Germany and half of Berlin. Reports of their repressive rule were everywhere. In addition, civil war in China had left that country under communist control as of 1949—the same year the Soviet Union belatedly tested its own atomic bomb using secrets stolen from the United States. The world seemed to be turning an unpleasant shade of red.

  As a result, there were legitimate reasons to be concerned about Soviet influence in the United States. McCarthy’s fellow Republicans in the Senate were receptive to his claims. The Democrats, who were in control at the time, were less impressed. A report from a Democrat-led committee said McCarthy’s allegations were a hoax. In response, Republicans charged the Democrats with perpetrating a whitewash and went so far as to suggest it was potentially treasonable.

  That reply—excessive, full-throated, and handed to a concerned public—was the first giant step toward what the left now claims was red hysteria. It was an assertion so bold there was no backpedaling. Especially for McCarthy.

  The Republicans’ support emboldened the senator from Wisconsin, who expanded his allegations of subversive activity. In addition to those he suspected purely of communist connections or sympathies, he began exposing alleged “homosexuals” in the U.S. Foreign Service, who were considered high risks for blackmail and, thus, treason.

  There is no doubt there was potential to do harm to innocents under circumstances like these. Once an allegation was made, even by innuendo, the victim was tarred. It stuck. One powerful senator, Millard Tydings of Maryland, had labeled McCarthy’s State Department accusations a hoax. McCarthy retaliated by accusing Tydings of being in league with communists. That year, the four-term incumbent lost his reelection bid.26

  After the fall of Tydings, few senators were willing to oppose McCarthy. In 1952, even Dwight Eisenhower—the hero of World War II, the mastermind of D-Day, and that year’s ultimately successful Republican presidential candidate—offered only tepid criticism of McCarthy’s investigations. In fact, it could hardly be called criticism; he said that while he disagreed with McCarthy’s meth
ods, he approved of his goals.27 While this is today viewed merely as political pragmatism, Eisenhower may have seen through the convenient opposition to McCarthy’s investigations by liberals who were just a little too eager to defend the rights of communists.

  A year later, Arthur Miller would release his play The Crucible, which was a fictionalized account of the Salem Witch Trials. Miller had come under scrutiny for his communist sympathies and was questioned by the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1956.28

  Miller was wrong in many ways, but none bigger than this: the McCarthy hearings, unlike the witch trials in which there were no witches, were predicated on a real threat. There were subversives in the United States, in the government, and in sensitive positions. The threat was there, even if Senator Joseph McCarthy was not the perfect man to lead the charge. Not, as it turned out, in the television age, when the alleged overreach of a serious crusade could be replaced by the media-fueled mass hysteria against McCarthy, a feeding frenzy that ultimately toppled him.

  But that fate would be a few years later. In the early 1950s, the Wisconsin senator increasingly felt as though he had no restraints. When Eisenhower refused to replace a diplomat who wanted the United States to establish relations with now-communist China, McCarthy updated an earlier characterization of the communist-neutral presidencies of Franklin Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman from “twenty years of treason” to “twenty-one years of treason”—the addition being Eisenhower’s first year as president.29

  While Roosevelt and Truman had a war to win and needed communist Russia for that, we now know the alliance with Russia for those purposes wasn’t the only reason to make that allegation against them. But McCarthy considered even the war alliance bad judgment and possibly worse. Many people believed him. They remembered how Russia entered the war against Japan at the last moment, grabbing land in the region as well as placing occupation forces in Korea, which eventually led to the creation of the north and south states—and continues to impact us today. So there was a lot of truth in what McCarthy said, whether his criticism of the alliance was ultimately valid or not.