Trump and the Theatre of the Absurd - parallels with McCarthyism

People are rightly worried with Trump's rhetoric echoing Hitler's Nazi Germany, 'othering' or alienating, others.  But it was pointed out to me recently also how spookily similar Trump's presidency is, to McCarthyism and the communism scare in 1950's America, from a friend who is currently reading  The Life and Times of The Thunderbolt Kid, by the rather splendid, Bill Bryson.  My friend pointed me to the following excerpt (from Chapter 7, page 186 onwards).
Bryson wrote this book in 2006, but he could easily have been talking about Trump in places: 

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"Only one thing came close to matching the fearfulness of teenagers in the 1950s and that was of course Communism. Worrying about Communism was an exhaustingly demanding business in the 1950s. Red danger lurked everywhere – in books and magazines, in government departments, in the teachings of schools, at every place of work. The film industry was especially suspect. ‘Large numbers of moving pictures that come out of Hollywood carry the Communist line,’ Congressman J. Parnell Thomas of New Jersey, chairman of the House Un-American Activities Committee, gravely intoned to approving nods in 1947, though on reflection no one could actually think of any Hollywood movie that seemed even slightly sympathetic to Marxist thought. Parnell never did specify which movies he had in mind, but then he didn’t have much chance to for soon afterwards he was convicted of embezzling large sums from the government in the form of salaries for imaginary employees. He was sentenced to eighteen months in a prison in Connecticut where he had the unexpected pleasure of serving alongside two of the people, Lester Cole and Ring Lardner Junior, whom his committee had put away for refusing to testify.

Not to be outdone, Walt Disney claimed in testimony to HUAC that the cartoonists’ guild in Hollywood – run by committed reds and their fellow travellers, he reported – tried to take over his studio during a strike in 1941 with the intention of making Mickey Mouse a Communist. He never produced any evidence either, though he did identify one of his former employees as a Communist because he didn’t go to church and had once studied art in Moscow. 

It was an especially wonderful time to be a noisy moron. Billy James Hargis, a chubby, kick-ass evangelist from Sapulpa, Oklahoma, warned the nation in weekly sweat-spattered sermons that Communists had insinuated themselves into, and effectively taken over, the Federal Reserve, the Department of Education, the National Council of Churches and nearly every other organization of national standing one could name. His pronouncements were carried on five hundred radio stations and two hundred and fifty television stations and attracted a huge following, as did his many books, which had titles like Communism: The Total Lie and Is the Schoolhouse the Proper Place to Teach Raw Sex? 

Although he had no qualifications (he had flunked out of Ozark Bible College – a rare distinction, one would suppose), Hargis founded several educational establishments, including the Christian Crusade Anti-Communist Youth University. (I would love to have heard the school song.) When asked what was taught at his schools, he replied, ‘anti-Communism, anti-Socialism, anti-welfare state, anti-Russia, anti-China, a literal interpretation of the Bible and states’ rights’. Hargis eventually came undone when it was revealed that he had had sex with several of his students, male and female alike, during moments of lordly fervour. One couple, according to The Economist, made the discovery when they blushingly confessed the misdeed to each other on their wedding night. At the peak of the Red Scare, thirty-two of the forty-eight states had loyalty oaths of one kind or another. In New York, Oakley notes, it was necessary to swear a loyalty oath to gain a fishing permit. In Indiana loyalty oaths were administered to professional wrestlers. The Communist Control Act of 1954 made it a federal offence to communicate any Communist thoughts by any means, including by semaphore. In Connecticut it became illegal to criticize the government, or to speak ill of the army or the American flag. In Texas you could be sent to prison for twenty years for being a Communist. In Birmingham, Alabama, it was illegal merely to be seen conversing with a Communist. 

HUAC issued millions of leaflets entitled ‘One Hundred Things You Should Know About Communism’, detailing what to look out for in the behaviour of neighbours, friends and family. Billy Graham, the esteemed evangelist, declared that over one thousand decent-sounding American organizations were in fact fronts for Communist enterprises. Rudolf Flesch, author of the bestselling Why Johnny Can’t Read, insisted that a failure to teach phonics in schools was undermining democracy and paving the way for Communism. Westbrook Pegler, a syndicated columnist, suggested that anyone found to have been a Communist at any time in his life should simply be put to death. Such was the sensitivity, according to David Halberstam, that when General Motors hired a Russian automotive designer named Zora Arkus-Duntov, it described him in press releases, wholly fictitiously, as being ‘of Belgian extraction’. No one exploited the fear to better effect than Joseph R. McCarthy, Republican senator from Wisconsin. In 1950, in a speech in Wheeling, West Virginia, he claimed to have in his pocket a list of two hundred and five Communists working in the State Department. The next day he claimed to have another list with fifty-seven names on it. Over the next four years McCarthy waved many lists, each claiming to show a different number of Communist operatives. In the course of his spirited ramblings he helped to ruin many lives without ever producing a single promised list. Not producing evidence was becoming something of a trend.  

Others brought additional prejudices into play. John Rankin, a senior congressman from Mississippi, sagely observed: ‘Remember, Communism is Yiddish. I understand that every member of the Politburo around Stalin is either Yiddish or married to one, and that includes Stalin himself.’ Against such men, McCarthy looked almost moderate and fairly sane. 

Such was the hysteria that it wasn’t actually necessary to have done anything wrong to get in trouble. In 1950, three former FBI agents published a book called Red Channels: The Report of Communist Influence in Radio and Television, accusing 151 celebrities – among them Leonard Bernstein, Lee J. Cobb, Burgess Meredith, Orson Welles, Edward G. Robinson and the stripper Gypsy Rose Lee – of various seditious acts. Among the shocking misdeeds of which the performers stood accused were speaking out against religious intolerance, opposing fascism and supporting world peace and the United Nations. None had any connection with the Communist Party or had ever shown any Communist sympathies. Even so, many of them couldn’t find work for years afterwards unless (like Edward G. Robinson) they agreed to appear before HUAC as a friendly witness and name names. 

Doing anything at all to help Communists became essentially illegal. In 1951, Dr Ernest Chain, a naturalized Briton who had won a Nobel Prize six years earlier for helping to develop penicillin, was barred from entering the United States because he had recently travelled to Czechoslovakia, under the auspices of the World Health Organization, to help start a penicillin plant there. Humanitarian aid was only permissible, it seems, so long as those being saved believed in free markets. Americans likewise found themselves barred from travel. Linus Pauling, who would eventually win two Nobel prizes, was stopped at Idlewild Airport in New York while boarding a plane to Britain, where he was to be honoured by the Royal Society, and had his passport confiscated on the grounds that he had once or twice publicly expressed a liberal thought. 

It was even harder for those who were not American by birth. After learning that a Finnish-born citizen named William Heikkilin had in his youth briefly belonged to the Communist Party, Immigration Service employees tracked him down to San Francisco, arrested him on his way home from work, and bundled him on to an aeroplane bound for Europe, with nothing but about a dollar in change and the clothes he was wearing. Not until his plane touched down the following day did officials inform his frantic wife that her husband had been deported. They refused to tell her where he had been sent. 

In perhaps the most surreal moment of all, Arthur Miller, the playwright, while facing congressional rebuke and the possibility of prison for refusing to betray friends and theatrical associates, was told that the charges against him would be dropped if he would allow the chairman of HUAC, Francis E. Walter, to be photographed with Miller’s famous and dishy wife, Marilyn Monroe. Miller declined. 

In 1954, McCarthy finally undid himself. He accused General George Marshall, the man behind the Marshall Plan and a person of unquestioned rectitude, of treason, a charge quickly shown to be preposterous. Then he took on the whole of the United States Army, threatening to expose scores of subversive senior staff that he claimed the Army knowingly shielded within its ranks. In a series of televised hearings lasting thirty-six days in the spring of 1954 and known as the Army–McCarthy hearings, he showed himself to be a bullying, blustering buffoon of the first rank without a shred of evidence against anyone – though in fact he had always shown that. It just took this long for most of the nation to realize it. 

Later that year McCarthy was severely censured by the Senate – a signal humiliation. He died three years later in disgrace. But the fact is that had he been just a tiny bit smarter or more likeable, he might well have become President. In any case, McCarthy’s downfall didn’t slow the assault on Communism. As late as 1959, the New York office of the FBI still had four hundred agents working full time on rooting out Communists in American life, according to Kenneth O’Reilly in Hoover and the Un-Americans. 

Thanks to our overweening preoccupation with Communism at home and abroad America became the first nation in modern history to build a war economy in peacetime. Defence spending in the Fifties ranged between $40 billion and $53 billion a year – or more than total government spending on everything at the dawn of the decade. Altogether the US would lay out $350 billion on defence during the eight years of the Eisenhower Presidency. More than this, 90 per cent of our foreign aid was for military expenditures. We didn’t just want to arm ourselves; we wanted to make sure that everybody else was armed, too. 

Often, all that was necessary to earn America’s enmity, and land yourself in a lot of trouble, was to get in the way of our economic interests. In 1950, Guatemala elected a reformist government – ‘the most democratic Guatemala ever had’, according to the historian Howard Zinn – under Jacobo Arbenz, an educated landowner of good intentions. Arbenz’s election was a blow for the American company United Fruit, which had run Guatemala as a private fiefdom since the nineteenth century. The company owned nearly everything of importance in the country – the ports, the railways, the communications networks, banks, stores and some 550,000 acres of farmland – paid little taxes and could count confidently on the support of a string of repressive dictators. 

Some 85 per cent of United Fruit’s land was left more or less permanently idle. This kept fruit prices high, but Guatemalans poor. Arbenz, who was the son of Swiss immigrants and something of an idealist, thought this was unfair and decided to remake the country along more democratic lines. He established free elections, ended racial discrimination, encouraged a free press, introduced a forty-hour week, legalized unions and ended government corruption. Needless to say, most people loved him. In an attempt to reduce poverty, he devised a plan to nationalize, at a fair price, much of the idle farmland – including 1,700 acres of his own – and redistribute it in the form of smallholdings to a hundred thousand landless peasants. To that end Arbenz’s government expropriated 400,000 acres of land from United Fruit, and offered as compensation the sum that the company had claimed the land was worth for tax purposes – $1,185,000.

United Fruit now decided the land was worth $16 million actually – a sum the Guatemalan government couldn’t afford to pay. When Arbenz turned down United Fruit’s demand for the higher level of compensation, the company complained to the United States government, which responded by underwriting a coup. 

Arbenz fled his homeland in 1954 and a new, more compliant leader named Carlos Castillo was installed. To help him on his way, the CIA gave him a list of seventy thousand ‘questionable individuals’ – teachers, doctors, government employees, union organizers, priests – who had supported the reforms in the belief that democracy in Guatemala was a good thing. Thousands of them were never seen again. 

And on that sobering note, let us return to Kid World, where the denizens may be small and often immensely stupid, but are at least comparatively civilized. fn1 Nuclear testing came to a noisy peak in October 1961 when the Soviets exploded a fifty-megaton device in the Arctic north of the country. (Fifty megatons is equivalent to fifty million tons of TNT – more than three thousand times the force of the Hiroshima blast of 1945, which ultimately killed two hundred thousand people.) The number of nuclear weapons at the peak of the Cold War was sixty-five thousand. Today there are about twenty-seven thousand, all vastly more powerful than those dropped on Japan in 1945, divided between possibly as many as nine countries. More than fifty years after the first atomic tests there, Bikini remains uninhabitable."