When you first learned about McCarthyism, what was your reaction?

[Maddy McCall]

I vividly remember thinking, "Unbelievable! Nothing like that could EVER happen in the US again!" How naive I was.

Everyday, I find that my initial reaction to McCarthyism was wrong--it can and IS happening again, only it isn't communists who are being McCarthyized this time.

How did you react when you first learned about McCarthyism?

[Prodemsouth]

1. I was a 18 yo right winger when I first really started to learn history.

Time period 79/80, first Presidential vote was for Reagan. My reaction was actually mixed because I was very anti communist. (The current Admin, and many Republicans and Conservatives remind me of the Soviets they once oppposed so much but that is another post.) To some degree I will have to say at that time I didn't see what the fuss was about. Now with the examples of today set by many Conservatives, I see how much the behavior of the McCarthyites was like that of post revolution communist.

[China_cat]

2. I was young

and saw the televised hearing that finally put an end to that era. I remember asking my grandfather why that man was so mean.

[TahitiNut]

16. Those of us who remember it as kids ...

... are probably the reason we had "the 60's." I remember steadily building a mistrust of 'adults' who said one thing and did another (like the HUAC hearings). I think this was a large part of our "don't trust anyone over 30" attitude.

I'm hoping the kids of today are assembling similar attitudes. It's the only adults along the parade route who discuss the Chimperor's New Clothes.

[laheina]

3. My reaction was probably shaped by

the way my mother presented it--at least partly.

I had seen an episode of a television show dealing with McCarthy, and I asked her about it. She gave me a brief overview, but the one comment that she made that stuck with me was that all someone had to do to be blacklisted was to be *accused.* Whether or not an individual was a communist was totally moot.

The contrast of this fact and the way that the American justice system was meant to operate was evident to me even then, and I was probably only eight years old.

[slor]

4. I was disgusted...

and I remember thinking about Nazis in America. I do owe my Mom and older sister a great debt, in that they did not try to conceal the horrors of human history from me. With very little effort, I was always liberal, though I did have a 2 week binge of Christianity at 18, following a bad experience with LSD.

[demnan]

5. Why didn't my parents do anything to stop it?

that was my first reaction. But I was young and thought they were more powerful (and intelligent) than they turned out to be.

Not saying they could have done anything about it just as now I can't. But we're a long way to McCarthyism yet. As long as Michael Moore wins Oscars, I'll continue to have hope.

[ElsewheresDaughter]

8. "But we're a long way to McCarthyism yet"...we are already there

where have you been?

just my humble opinion

[ElsewheresDaughter]

6. disgust and fear of rightwingnuts...they said Lucy was a commie

that freaked me

[no_hypocrisy]

7. I couldn't believe it could happen in America.

I then realized the personal impact it had on families' lives.

My uncle was "progressive" in the 30's. He was going to fight fascism in Spain with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade (before his father forbid him to go . . . ), and had a card for his local communist club.

Two decades later, my father was worried about getting "caught up in the net" because of the potential of the government going after his brother and his sister-in-law for their former activities. Even if you did nothing, the government didn't recognize it. You were useful to harass your commie relatives and get them to cooperate and name names. And penalties included losing your job, your neighbors avoiding you, your friends no longer your friends, etc. Jail was the last problem on your mind.

[sherilocks]

9. I was a child caught up in the middle of it

My grandmother, a card-carrying Communist, was convinced that "Negroes" and labor got a better deal through Communism. After the Rosenbergs were executed she showed up at our house and began burning a lot of papers. She also attended the various Paul Robeson concerts, including the riots described here, ( Violence in Peekskill)

http://debs.indstate.edu/a505v5_1949.pdf

My father had to go out and rescue her and drive her and others back to NYC on the back of his flatbed truck, through back roads and a gauntlet of stone-throwing freeper types.

Earl Robinson came to our home to compose his music in order to escape his blacklisting. Robinson info here:

<snip>

In the mid-1940s, and then in the 1960s, following a blacklisting that stemmed from his association with the Communist Party, Robinson worked in Hollywood on film scores, The House I Live In, A Walk in the Sun, The Roosevelt Story, California, Romance of Rosy Ridge, among others. In the mid-1950s, he chaired the music department at Elisabeth Irwin High School in New York City.

<snip>

http://www.historylink.org/output.cfm?file_id=2029

I could go on and on, but this should give you some idea. I didn't learn of it, I was there.

[Solly Mack]

10. You know how some kids are told "the boogeyman will get you"

I was told "McCarthy will get you for saying that" (I was also told Nixon would get me...among others)

it was said half-jokingly and it was explained...mainly used when you said something against any type of authority.

wasn't meant to scare....was meant to inform....and warn that it could happen again...and how bad it could get.

[yellowdogintexas]

11. hey, my mom watched the McCarthy hearings on TV when I

was about 6 or so...my first political memory is of her explaining to me why it was so wrong!!! And what an absolute villain McCarthy was, and how much she hated what Nixon did to Helen Douglas. (the main reason she first began to hate Nixon, her list of reasons to hate Nixon was actually endless!)

so I have never known anything but how evil McCarthyism was.

There will always be those who will want to set up something like it.
Remember the"Alien and Sedition Acts" from the early days of the nation?

[Mayberry Machiavelli]

12. I was fascinated, by the whole story, by McCarthy, Roy Cohn, Welch.

I came to the conclusion a while ago that all of it, can always happen again. Not just McCarthyism. Nazism, the Inquisition, slavery, torture, genocide. All of it.

It's simply contained within the elements of human nature. We try to move forward but we can't change the essential nature of the beast. The best we can do is to try to set up government laws and institutions that restrain those elements of our nature. But as we are seeing now, it doesn't always work especially if we let those restraining mechanisms fail.

When my wife and I saw George Carlin's show over Thanksgiving, he had some comments about Iraq. He first commented about the beheadings. He said that the difference between someone being beheaded, and a bomb killing a hundred people "pacifying" a neighborhood, was about 99 dead people. And he said that the torture pics etc. from Abu Ghraib, along with the beheadings, showed that as humans we are all essentially still beasts, all pretense nonwithstanding.

[ThoughtCriminal]

13. Early teens - Watergate Era

I never dreamed that it would return.

In the context of Watergate, it was quite interesting. By then, it was quite acceptable to attack the hatred of McCarthyism and the pure silliness of 1950's paranoia. There were quite a few movies and documentaries coming out at that time. CBS replayed Murrows' documentary.

Here's a fun double feature. Watch John Wayne in "Big Jim McLain" and then Woody Allens's "The Front".

[gassed]

14. Not sure... as I was a...

4 month old fetus. Small, yet fully capable of reason.

[Deja Q]

15. What a sick evil fucker he was.

Having real evidence and real people is one thing.

To baselessly call everybody you hate the enemy is simply VILE. Not to mention rude, or paranoid schizophrenic either.