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President Donald Trump and Republicans have a new bogeyman — communism. The president devoted much of a speech earlier this month to warning Americans of the supposed red menace.
If it all sounds familiar, it is. Republicans, then led by Wisconsin Sen. Joseph McCarthy, did the same things in the 1950s.
The language, the targets, the lists of “enemies.” It’s the same page, from the same playbook that was trotted out 75 years ago.
Today, we have the benefit of that history — and the internet’s vast resources of information — to help us not go down the dark, divisive path that Trump is hoping he can entice us to follow.
At a time when Americans should have been celebrating their shared history, Trump dusted off the red scare playbook. He mentioned communism dozens of times in speeches on July 3 and July 4.
“Communism is a mortal threat to American liberty,” he said at a July 3 speech at Mount Rushmore in South Dakota. The event was meant to honor America’s 250th anniversary. After touting a version of our history and our long commitment to democracy, the president made this historically dubious claim: “It is the greatest threat to our country, including World War I, World War II, Pearl Harbor or even 9/11.”
Trump went on: “You can be a communist or you can be a patriot. You cannot be both.”
His meaning was clear: The people he labeled as communists — “radicals and extremists,” newcomers to America, those who advocate for Indigenous recognition, those who point out the shortcomings and misdeeds of our past leaders — are not patriots, not Americans, in his view.
This is a very dangerous division, which Americans have rejected before, and must reject again.
In 1950, it was Maine’s own Sen. Margaret Chase Smith who condemned that era’s red scare and its tactics.
“The American people are sick and tired of being afraid to speak their minds lest they be politically smeared as ‘Communists’ or ‘Fascists’ by their opponents,” she said in her now famous “Declaration of Conscience” speech, delivered June 1, 1950 on the floor of the U.S. Senate. “Freedom of speech is not what it used to be in America. It has been so abused by some that it is not exercised by others. The American people are sick and tired of seeing innocent people smeared and guilty people whitewashed.”
Such words echo again today. As does her warning to the Republican Party: “The nation sorely needs a Republican victory. But I do not want to see the Republican Party ride to political victory on the Four Horsemen of Calumny — Fear, Ignorance, Bigotry, and Smear.”
Smith’s speech did not end McCarthy’s reign of terror. It went on for another four years. But, he was ultimately censured by his Senate colleagues and was largely ignored by them until his death in 1957.
There were real consequences to this dark era in American history. Constitutional freedoms were ignored. Thousands of people lost their jobs because of false accusations of communist sympathies. So-called Hollywood black lists ended film careers. Fear of persecution prompted many people to remain silent and many good ideas were not shared for fear of being labeled as an agitator or traitor. Some people died.
The divisions, dehumanization, and unfounded fears spread by Trump must be rejected before people are again unjustly harmed in the name of political gamesmanship.
We must once again abide by the warning of Margaret Chase Smith and turn against fear, ignorance, bigotry and smear.
