In August 1950, President Truman presided over a post-war America that was growing increasingly alarmed over the spread of Communism. In modern politics and popular culture, the era is routinely portrayed as something akin to mass hysteria on a par with the Salem witch hunts. Even the phrase "Red Scare" connotes a sense of general panic. This is an incomplete picture.
The Iron Curtain wasn't a myth, and it took the extraordinary Berlin airlift to keep half that city free. North Korea's invasion of South Korea earlier that summer was quite real. The U.S. secrets of the hydrogen bomb had been stolen by domestic Communists and handed to the Russians. Moreover, when the Soviet Union fell, we learned that double agents, or Americans with perverse loyalties, had indeed pervaded the government. Alger Hiss, for one, really was a spy. Communism really was a threat.
None of this justifies the dishonesty of men like Joseph McCarthy or the ham-handed excesses of politicians like Richard Nixon. Careers were ruined, lives shattered, Americans pitted against each other by the government, and encouraged to snitch on their neighbors and friends. My parents experienced this oppression firsthand. As I write these words, I realize that they apply in some measure to our own times as well.
In 1950, it was conservatives in and out of government trying to trample freedom of expression and freedom of association. Today it is people in and out of government who consider themselves liberal who are doing it. The FBI, it's worth highlighting, has been a willing accomplice to censors and scaremongers in both eras.
In any event, Harry Truman was speaking to Congress shortly after an appellate court had upheld the convictions of 11 Communists, mostly for what they said and thought, not for anything they did. Civil libertarians were appalled, whilst red-baiters in Congress called for more stringent criminal laws restricting the rights of Americans.
Seeking a middle ground, Truman delivered a speech on the topic, which you can read here.
The section that struck me this week was this one:
Nevertheless, there are some people who wish us to enact laws which would seriously damage the right of free speech and which could be used not only against subversive groups but against other groups engaged in political or other activities which were not generally popular. Such measures would not only infringe on the Bill of Rights and the basic liberties of our people; they would also undermine the very internal security they seek to protect.
Laws forbidding dissent do not prevent subversive activities; they merely drive them into more secret and more dangerous channels. Police states are not secure; their history is marked by successive purges, and growing concentration camps, as their governments strike out blindly in fear of violent revolt. Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear.
And that's our quote of the week.
Carl M. Cannon is the Washington bureau chief for RealClearPolitics. Reach him on Twitter @CarlCannon
