JFK and RFK were quite involved on the McCarthy side of things. That would be bipartisan, hence not "divided" - you agree? google "kennedy mccarthy" and see what turns up
I consider myself something of an amateur historian. The whole left-wing media bias of today and McCarthyism to a large degree can be traced to the days of FDR and WW II. You see, the USSR wasn't our ally at first, but when Hitler opened the Eastern Front against them, they did become our ally. FDR encouraged Hollywood to add to their propaganda film production films about how great our Russian allies and their society were. Something like "enemy of my enemy is my friend" in action. Hollywood's problem is that the war ended and they didn't stop. McCarthyism was a horrible experience for the country, but McCarthy wasn't wrong about many things. The govt. was infiltrated by communists, and many people he accused of being communist were (at least at some point). JFK ran to the right of Nixon in 1960, claiming Ike/Nixon had neglected the military. He was an avowed anti-communist, and a cold war warrior. Elected, he pushed for 6% of GDP for the military budget (today it's 3% or less), and for across the board tax cuts, and for most of the elements of the Bush Doctrine (see his most famous inauguration speech). In short, he was as much a conservative as Reagan.
Google for "freedom riders" and read about the Kennedy Administration's response and actions. FWIW, Ike nationalized the national guard in Little Rock Arkansas to integrate the high school there.
Wait a second. Definitely, this was true during the war, with films like "Song of Russia" overtly propagandizing in favor of our temporary alliance with the Soviets. (Always loved this old poster, although I'm pretty sure it was actually put out by the Canadian rather than American government.) That said, how did "Hollywood not stop" after the war ended? Obviously there was an active CP organization in Los Angeles -- one of the most active in the US, in fact -- and there were secret Communists active in the film industry. But even the Holllywood Ten trials couldn't cite any actual evidence of pro-Communist or pro-Soviet materials making it into films produced *after* World War II. They just ranted and raved about "Song of Russia" and whatnot... and yeah, it was a pro-Stalin propaganda film, but one made because it was 1944 and Stalin was our buddy at the time. Even though a handful of CP members did keep working in Hollywood, it's a gigantic exaggeration to say they were producing pro-Soviet propaganda films. Screenwrite Dalton Trumbo was probably the most prominent of the Hollywood Ten... but was "Spartacus" Soviet propaganda? "Exodus"? "Roman Holiday"? Only if you're deeply paranoid. I guess it depends on your definition of "infiltrated". Were there CP members in the government? Yes. Were there many? No. Were the people on Joe McCarthy's famous "lists" actually Communists? Almost always, no. Was McCarthy an incredibly reckless, serially untruthful alcoholic? Yes. This is quite right, although only in terms of foreign policy, of course. SR
Song of Russia, North Star, Mission to Moscow, Gung Ho, Action in the North Atlantic were all propaganda films made in Hollywood for FDR before 1946. "Caught" (1949) was one of those films Hollywood didn't stop making. "The Way We Were" (1985) Streisand/Redford is a more recent example. A good read: http://www.reason.com/news/show/27732.html As for JFK, how are military spending as a % of GDP and tax cuts not domestic issues?
You really think "The Way We Were" was Soviet propaganda? Wow. Of course, there have been plenty of Hollywood films sympathetic to various figures on the left. ("Reds" obviously comes to mind, among others.) But there have also been plenty (many more, I'd say) that turned Communists into cartoon bad guys ("Rambo", anyone?). Not that I have a problem with that -- only Nazis outrank Communists as ideal candidates for cartoon bad guys in movies -- but I think anyone who seriously argues that Hollywood was a source of Red propaganda after WWII is seriously misguided. As for JFK, I think his hawkish anticommunism was very much of a piece with Reagan's. But I don't think their tax politics had much in common, even though they both cut taxes. There's a big difference between cutting taxes when the top marginal rate to 70% and cutting it to 28%. And JFK's tax cuts didn't only accrue to the top 20%. SR
When the USSR fell, there was a flood of documents from the KGB and other sources made available that we never had access to before. These documents named names and dollar amounts and objectives and that sort of thing. The Rosenbergs were guilty. Alger Hiss absolutely was a spy. There were many others as well. In Hollywood, the CPA (Communist Party) was outright funded by the USSR and Communist International (CommInt) with the express mission of spreading propaganda. Again, these Soviet/Stalin era documents show it, as well as Stalin's belief in using propaganda. The propaganda was specifically ordered to both promote the USSR and to be anti-american. There are numerous examples of each (M*A*S*H for example, written by Ring Lardner Jr.) that were produced or written by those blacklisted. In fact, the McCarthy and HUAC committees put those blacklisted in a position where the Russians/Communists left them exposed with zero support. There are modern examples, too, including Gore's film and Michael Moore's films, that are anti-caplitalist and anti-american (at least some of us see them that way). I wouldn't say these guys are actual communists (or sympathizers), though they are likely to have been influenced by earlier works by those that were. There were pro-american films, as well, but all the early ones were extremely low budget and poorly produced (deliberately). The writers had the ability to squash these kinds of things. I'm not at all saying McCarthyism was a good thing or that he was a good guy. It's just a myth that he was wrong about it all. It wasn't an Obama style tax cut, "targetted" at the middle and lower classes. He, like Reagan, cut ALL the tax rates, including the top bracket (for the rich!). http://www.slate.com/id/2093947/ Many liberals disliked Kennedy's plan on grounds of equity. Leon Keyserling, an economist who had served Harry Truman, lamented that the richest 12 percent of Americans would get 45 percent of the benefits. Michael Harrington, the scholar of poverty, called the plan "reactionary Keynesianism." The AFL-CIO came out against it. http://www.amazon.com/Red-Star-Over-Hollywood-Colonys/dp/1893554961 Red Star Over Hollywood: The Film Colony's Long Romance with the Left (Hardcover) The McCarthy era is generally portrayed as one of the darkest times in American history, and those who faced blacklisting in Hollywood have been lauded as heroes. Through ground-breaking new research and the reliance on original source materials, the Radoshes have compiled a thorough re-examination of the enchantment by some in the film industry with the Communist Party, and their betrayal by that very same party. The Radoshes describe the infatuation of "the Hollywood Party" from its roots in the 1930s, when several visited the Soviet Union. They demonstrate that, far from being innocent, the "Hollywood Ten" were committed Communists, who used and abused free-speech supporters (like Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall) for their own ends. The Communist Party, in turn, cynically used the "Ten" for its own ends -- trotting them out to speak at unrelated left-wing events for years, which prevented the Ten from individually rehabilitating their images and obtaining work. The authors also describe the way the CP line was inserted in several films, most notoriously, "Mission to Moscow." This film, designed to turn the views of a skeptical American public toward the USSR during World War II, whitewashes Stalin's purge trials of the 1930s, where many truly innocent were tortured into confessing and executed. Perhaps most interesting is the difficult path faced by those who broke with the Party and either "named names" or walked a fine line to avoid naming names. For many, being seen as an informer was worse than preventing and exposing genuine Communist infiltration. If I have any criticisms of the book, it is that the Radoshes did not take their exploration of the film colony's long romance with the left through the Vietnam War years and today. While the blacklist years were seminal, many in Hollywood contine to lean left even after the fall of the USSR, and take almost reflexively anti-Bush positions today. We are left to wonder what the leftist fathers passed on to their sons. Perhaps the authors will address this issue in a subsequent book. In the meantime, "Red Star Over Hollywood" is well worth reading.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0300061838/ The Secret World of American Communism (Annals of Communism Series) (Hardcover) As the authors make clear in the introduction, this book presents only a handful of thousands of documents regarding American communism which they found in ex-Soviet archives.The authors note that most scholorship of the fifties, sixties and seventies painted a fairly accurate picture of American communism. According to this picture, well documented here, the Soviet Union used the American communist parties as tools for Soviet foriegn policy. To that end, the Soviet Union funded the parties, controlled their public policy, directed undergound and subversive activities, and used the parties to recruit and control spies. Much of the prose is rather dry. The authors present primary document after primary document, with limited commentary interspersed between them. While some people may not like the picture this book paints of what Lenin called "useful fools" (Westerners who naively advanced the Soviet's imperialistic ambitions) they can not deny the evidence. Finally, the brevity of this account makes it a good primer on the secretive nature of an organization dedicated to an ideology bent on undermining individual freedom. However, it should not serve as the sole source of information on the subject.
Denny, this is all good material. Part of my dissertation had to do with the role of the CPUSA in American life in the 1930s-50s, so all of Harvey Klehr's and Johne Earl Haynes's books are on my bookshelf (and very well thumbed). Radosh I don't think is at quite their level of scholarship; like many other ex-Communists who broke with the party and then turned ferociously anticommunist, I think his perspective and judgment is often clouded a bit by his own emotional investment in the subject. (In other words, because the CPUSA was the dominant force in his life -- for good or (mostly) for ill -- he overstates the CPUSA's significance in American life in general.) Anyways, I'm not unfamiliar with any of this history, and I'm not at all naive about what the CPUSA was and what it did. That said, I think that the CPUSA's power and influence were (and still are by folks like Klehr and Haynes) wildly overstated. There were never very many Communists inside the US. (Party membership maxed out at well under 100,000 nationwide during WWII.) The few Communists that did exist were always hated and feared by their countrymen; if you're forced to read thousands of pages of microfilmed local Party section documents -- the ones that Klehr and Haynes excerpt from in their books, and the ones that formed the backbone of my dissertation -- it becomes quite clear that the Communists spent most of their time just trying to avoid being arrested, attacked, infiltrated, or otherwise blown up by the infinitely more powerful anticommunist forces in American society. By the mid-1950s -- in large part because McCarthyism was extremely successful, whether or not we think it was just or ethical -- the CPUSA virtually ceased to exist. But from the very beginning, it was a totally beleaguered and kind of pathetic organization. I guess what I'm getting at is that -- in my judgment, at least -- is that the CPUSA was never a real threat to American society, American democracy, or American capitalism. It was a tiny group on the fringe of society with no real power. Yes, there was a sprinkling of Communists in various prominent places in American life -- from Alger Hiss in the State Department to Paul Robeson in the radio theatre, from Harry Bridges in the West Coast longshore union to Ring Lardner and Dalton Trumbo in Hollywood. But... so what? None of them did (or could have, in any remotely realistic scenario) move the United States toward Communism. There was just zero chance it would ever happen. The political and economic institutions and traditions of our free society were far, far too strong for Communists to damage them. During the Cold War, Communists in Moscow were a very real, very existential threat to our nation. Communists in the USA, though? They were a tiny band of fringe characters, not a real threat. (If we had gone into WWIII, they may well have sided with the Soviets... but I have no doubt they would have all been immediately rounded up and sent to camps for the duration; they were all under heavy surveillance at all times. Even the city of Portland police department had a whole "Red Squad" department with no purpose other than to spy on alleged Communists.) America was a much greater threat to the CPUSA than the CPUSA was to America. So that's where we disagree. Have there been Hollywood films sympathetic to liberal or left causes over the years? Of course. Just as there have been many Hollywood films sympathetic to conservative or right-wing causes over the years. For every Warren Beatty, there's a John Wayne. But to make the jump from a few CPUSA guys active in Hollywood fifty years ago to a claim that "An Inconvenient Truth" or "Bowling for Columbine" is somehow a piece of propaganda rooted in an unbroken Hollywood tradition of Communist subversion? No way. SR
I don't know that we are more divided, but the division in my mind is causing people to not think but instead choose by that division. I don't mean to offend anyone in here, but many of the Obama backers I have encountered know very little other than he's not a republican and therefore not tied to Bush in any way. Literally I had a supporter ring my doorbell the other day and tell me that I should vote for Senator Obama not just because he's a good speaker but because we have a democratic Congress and in order for Government to be successful we need a Democratic President as well. I proceeded to tell her that the worst thing that can happen for America is to have an Imbalance in favor of one party or the other. That fuels the fire of partisan politics polarizing every Washington into a Black and White atmosphere while the rest of us live in a grey world. To me a 2 party system is flawed, terribly flawed. It either needs to be 1 and done or best of 3. IOW we either need no parties at all, simply politicians that run against each other regardless of affiliation to a political party or we need a legitimate 3rd moderate party. The fact of the matter is both parties present good ideals and bad ideals, the problem is due to the division the division is the topic at hand often is overlooked in favor of who am I siding with and how will it help/hurt my position. As someone mentioned there are a ton of political games that are played, which fucking pisses me off, because it's the well being of me my family and friends that they are playing with, people who supposedly are supposed to represent and protect me.
It's funny when Democrats invoke John F. Kennedy. If you looked at his policies today, he'd be on the right wing of the Republican Party. And as for the Bush Administration's policy of pre-emption, he'd be all over it.
I actually have little problem with there being a Communist Party in the USA or that people join it. I am no fan of what McCarthys and the Kennedys and Nixons of the time did. I spent most of my life believing that Alger Hiss was demonized, persecuted, and prosecuted by Nixon because Nixon was a vicious asshole seeking to advance his career. I believed that the story of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg was a tragic love story and that they were innocent. But based upon the scholarly work of people looking at the documents released by the Russians after the fall of the Berlin Wall, there's no way anyone who's intellectually honest can believe those things anymore. The documents detail numerous individuals, how much they paid, tasks assigned to them, and just how the communists actually did infiltrate the govt. at high levels. As someone who tries to be intellectually honest, I can hate what McCarthy did (his methods) but I can also recognize there was a there there. I don't see any reason to dismiss scholarly work because the author was a Communist. This is good reading: http://genus.cogia.net/ It is a book by Bella V. Dodd, former president of the CPUSA, and it details the party's agenda and achievements - not much about being unable to do anything but avoid being arrested. I happen to be a huge fan of M*A*S*H, the book, the movie, and the TV show. The humor, acting, and connection with the characters is top notch. There were always a few things about it that jumped out at me as being pretty obvious. First, they sucked you in with the humor and once they got your attention, they laid some serious political or moral message on you. Second, everything USA was the butt of a joke; anyone military was put down, the military brass were portrayed as idiots and philanderers, and Frank Burns (bible thumper!) was portrayed as if he were the enemy. Third, there was an obvious sympathy with the communist enemies throughout - not only were they medically treated because they're human beings (not a bad thing), but they were portrayed as smart, funny, and the equals of the main cast. It is hardly subtle in its put down of the USA. The use of alegory in numerous films post WW II is more often subtle than not. Many stories mirror the land (robber) barons vs. proletariat or "workers of the world unite!" kind of appeal made by Marx on behalf of Communism. The self congratulatory method of giving Oscars to these films reinforced their credibility, another propaganda technique. The masses may have been duped, but it's the generations of film makers that followed who were immersed in these products as "excellence" make the work of the Communists still an influence. Though there are obvious propaganda pieces that glorify (make martyrs of) the blacklisted actual communists, making it tougher to figure out who's a "sympathiser" (for lack of a better word) and who's oblivious to the basis of the craft. Yes, Michael Moore's anti-USA works are from this school of Hollywood. Gore's film was a bad powerpoint presentation based upon bad science and filled with untruths yet wins Oscars and even netted him the Nobel Prize - it's not shocking that peoples outside the USA might be anti-USA but who cares, really? There's an obvious Jewish influence on both Hollywood and the Communist movement. I'm not saying this in any way to empathize with Nazi or Neo-Nazi thought or conspiracy theories. Which of Metro-Goldwyn-Meyer wasn't Jewish? Many of the initial group of revolutionaries in the Russian Revolution were Jews, as well. The irony is that in Hollywood, these people were the most brutal of capitalists! Studio contracts for the actors, huge profits of course, and ownership of the industry from production through distribution (the studios owned the theaters until the govt. broke up their monopoly). My thesis is simple and well supported. Hollywood was infiltrated in the 1920s by the CPUSA and ultimately dominated by it through about 1960. There are certainly a handful of exceptions to the rule, but that does not change this fact.
