Remnant of "Red Scare" repealed.

[BlueTrain]

Thoreau, all good with a one-liner, said in so many words that the thing that worried him about when it came time to die was discovering that he hadn't lived.

 

[Haversack]

Edward Wrote: "Children and Young Persons (Harmful Publications) Act 1955 (the Wikipedia on this is quite good: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children_and_Young_Persons_(Harmful_Publications)_Act_1955). This made it an offence to publish or distribute comic books that depicted violence or horrific acts in a way that made them likely to appeal to children."

How did this act square with comics like 'The Bash Street Kids' and 'Dennis the Menace' in The Beano? I encountered these and others when I was nine years old when my grandfather took me to Britain for the summer in 1967. They depicted kids having fun being cruel, malevolent, and violent in ways that wouldn't fly here in the US. (Note: This is not Hank Ketcham's Dennis the Menace)

 

[BlueTrain]

It's a case of whether the comics are a bad influence on kids or if it's the other way round.

 

[Edward]

Edward Wrote: "Children and Young Persons (Harmful Publications) Act 1955 (the Wikipedia on this is quite good: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children_and_Young_Persons_(Harmful_Publications)_Act_1955). This made it an offence to publish or distribute comic books that depicted violence or horrific acts in a way that made them likely to appeal to children."

How did this act square with comics like 'The Bash Street Kids' and 'Dennis the Menace' in The Beano? I encountered these and others when I was nine years old when my grandfather took me to Britain for the summer in 1967. They depicted kids having fun being cruel, malevolent, and violent in ways that wouldn't fly here in the US. (Note: This is not Hank Ketcham's Dennis the Menace)

Never a problem: those were mostly viewed as good, wholesome fun - Kids Being Kids (and, of course, there were alternatives for the middle-class types who enjoyed being competitively censorious over the content to which their children had access - Rupert the Bear and the likes). This was more about graphic violence and horror.... c/f the way bedwetters like Michael Medved thought Quentin Tarrantino was gonig to destroy civilisation, being, along with Oliver Stone, responsible for all the murders in America, and yet had nary a word to say about htel ikes of Tom & Jerry or Home Alone.

 

[LizzieMaine]

If Medved had been active in 1947, he would have been right up there with Adolphe Menjou, Sam Wood, Robert Taylor, John Wayne, Robert Montgomery, Hedda Hopper and Walt Disney in leading the Hollywood witch hunt.

 

[ChiTownScion]

.... c/f the way bedwetters like Michael Medved thought Quentin Tarrantino was gonig to destroy civilisation, being, along with Oliver Stone, responsible for all the murders in America, and yet had nary a word to say about htel ikes of Tom & Jerry or Home Alone.

If Medved had been active in 1947, he would have been right up there with Adolphe Menjou, Sam Wood, Robert Taylor, John Wayne, Robert Montgomery, Hedda Hopper and Walt Disney in leading the Hollywood witch hunt.

Agree in full!! And when it was his turn to serve and he was of able body and Selective Service material, Medved did everything that he could to avoid military service. Dodged Vietnam by student deferment and a deferment for working in a child day care center, as I recall reading. Aging boomers who did that in their youth and then, once safely situated in middle or old age, pull their flag- waving, jingoist patriotic crap when it involves someone else, or worse, when it involves someone else's kid ... oh, please, do NOT get me started!!


But then, we saw that back in the day, right? Same damn chickenhawk conduct. And John Wayne was a poster child for that term. Although, to be fair about it, Montgomery and Taylor were World War II Navy vets. And Menjou was a captain of ambulance drivers during the First World War. Disney tried to drive ambulances for the Red Cross during that war, but arrived in France after the last shot was fired. But so many during the McCarthy Era (start with McCarthy himself and his stooge, Roy Cohn) who played the Anti Communist Patriot Card either did not serve in combat, or had a military role that never involved any actual danger.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Meanwhile, an estimated 25,000 members of the CPUSA served in WWII, despite official efforts to keep them from doing so. A number of them were imprisoned for their political beliefs after the war.

McCarthy, of course, posed as "Tail Gunner Joe," despite much obfuscation in his actual military record, and claimed to have been wounded in combat -- which I guess would be right, if you count falling on a wet deck and breaking your leg during a rowdy drunken equator-crossing party as combat. At least Nixon was honest about his own humdrum war record.

 

[ChiTownScion]

And BTW... there was a real difference in attitudes toward Sen. McCarthy between World War I vets and World War II- particularly among the latter who had served in the ETO- even within the American Legion ( an organization whose checkered history has been discussed elsewhere). The former, in general, saw him as a good guy who was trying to save us from the Red Scourge. The latter recall his efforts to mitigate punishment for Joachim Peiper and other members of the Waffen SS who committed the Melmady massacre... and despised him. McCarthy used the alibi that he was responding to the wishes of German- American constituents... and as someone who identifies as German- American, I find the implication of ANY affinity to the SS being so attributed to be offensive in the extreme.

My dad survived the winter of '44-'45 in the Ardennes, and I can tell you that the name of Sen. Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin was never spoken in our home except within the context of scorn and ridicule.

 

[BlueTrain]

John Wayne supposedly regretted not serving during WWII. To be fair, however, he was 34 in 1941 and already had two children. My father was 28 when he was drafted and not yet a father.

 

[LizzieMaine]

He could have served alongside his buddy Reagan at Fort Roach, making training films, which is where quite a few of the proud Hollywood warriors did their time in uniform. But yes, there are those -- including his widow -- who theorized that a big part of Wayne's ultra-hawkish postwar persona stemmed from his personal embarassment over his lack of war service.

 

[BlueTrain]

Possibly but it seems like everyone moved to the right after the war. All the right-wingers staked out the moral high ground early on and held on tight. And look where we at now.

 

[LizzieMaine]

The question that can legitimately raised is how much of that was natural drift and how much of it was the result of the postwar propaganda push by the National Association of Manufacturers and its many allied fronts -- quite a number of which received substantial support from the CIA.

There were quite a few leaders of the ultra-right who had been involved with the NAM and the America First movement before the war who resurfaced after the war to take up leadership roles in various "patriotic, anti-Communist" organizations, and the propaganda they disseminated during this period was both incessant and persuasive at a time when the Left was being bludgeoned into silence. Many of these same individuals went on to be involved in the rise of various radical-right movements such as the Liberty Lobby and the John Birch Society in the latter half of the 1950s, and would become the core of financial support for the Goldwaterite movement of the early 1960s.

The rightward drift of Ronald Reagan is a good example of this process in action. Although his political trajectory grew in part from his own personality as he grew older, it was greatly accelerated and primarily shaped by the eight years he spent on the payroll of General Electric, where he served as a smooth, well-paid public mouthpiece for NAM propaganda from 1954 to 1962. He served in the role under the direct control of a man named Earl Dunckel, a card-carrying Boy From Marketing who made no secret of his ultra-right wing beliefs and who used the long trips he spent on the road with Reagan to thoroughly indoctrinate him in the NAM line. Dunckel also provided a company-approved reading list for Reagan to continue the reshaping of his beliefs to suit the company's purposes. Reagan emerged from this re-education program a slickly convincing voice for the program the NAM wanted promulgated during the latter half of the 1950s.

Incidentally, Reagan got the GE job in the first place as a quid pro quo for a bit of underhanded dealing he pulled while president of the Screen Actors Guild. Super-agent Lew Wasserman -- who had Reagan himself for one of his clients -- wanted to go into TV production. But union contracts prohibited agents from also serving as producers. Reagan agreed to put over a secret deal to give Wasserman an exclusive waiver allowing to him to set up a production company -- and Wasserman, as head of the firm thus producing the GE television show, saw to it that Reagan, whose personal fortunes were at a particuarly low ebb just then, got a six-figure contract to host it. There's a word for that kind of deal, and it's not a particuarly polite one. Reagan's relationship, while SAG president, with Wasserman and his MCA corporation was extremely shady, and there were those on the Hollywood scene at the time who suggested that one reason Reagan was so vociferous about purging "reds" from the union was that doing so would help deflect attention from what he was doing behind the scenes for his own benefit and who he was doing it with.

 

[BlueTrain]

The thing that's the most difficult to swallow, I believe, is the fact that many people are really very right-wing and by that I don't mean conservative. They believe in separation of the races, maintaining the purity of the races, eugenics, staunchly anti-communist and sometimes anti-Catholic and anti-Jewish, too, when it suits them, anti-Asian (the Yellow Peril), anti-immigrant and so on. Very little of their beliefs are based on actual experience with anything but some is, to the extent that it easily overrides their stated beliefs about all the things in the Bill of Rights. Many of their beliefs conflict, too, and much of what they support really cuts their own throat.

They have good qualities, of course. They can be intensely loyal, patriotic as they define it, and never question authority--if their man is in office. The rest of the time they go on and on about overthrowing the government with their militias. It can be very unsettling to think about things like that, although other countries have experienced the same thing to some degree at one time or another.

 

[LizzieMaine]

A lot of it just boils down to simple xenophobia. "I don't like you, or what you stand for, because you're Not Like Me." The Red Scare periods after both World Wars were both marked by a sharp upswing in that kind of violent, unreasoning hatred for The Other, and that kind of xenophobia has always been one of the easiest things for demogogues to manipulate for their own purposes.

 

[BlueTrain]

True, there is that, and if you live in the South , there are other obvious examples.

 

[tonyb]

Not that I'm advocating it, but the surest way to bridge the divisions in the country would be a conflict with an external enemy -- a no-foolin' real one, an adversary that presents an existential threat.

The fear is that we wouldn't recognize an actual wolf should one appear, having seen so many yippy ankle-biters passed off as such.

 

[LizzieMaine]

One would hope so, but then again even during WWII, the most genuinely existential threat we've ever faced as a people, the McCormicks and the Hearsts and the Pattersons and the DeWitt Wallaces and the Elizabeth Dillings and the Gerald L. KKK. Smiths and others along that line found ways to foment dissension, division and defeatism by arguing that the real enemies were the ones hiding under the bed.

 

[tonyb]

^^^^^
Yeah, and it begs us to consider just what an "existential threat" and "national identity" mean. Japan didn't cease being Japan in the summer of 1945. The emporor lost his divinity, but the populace didn't abandon its language or most other aspects of its culture.

 

[Stearmen]

He could have served alongside his buddy Reagan at Fort Roach, making training films, which is where quite a few of the proud Hollywood warriors did their time in uniform. But yes, there are those -- including his widow -- who theorized that a big part of Wayne's ultra-hawkish postwar persona stemmed from his personal embarassment over his lack of war service.

One of the few props I will give to Reagan was, he did try to serve over seas, but his eye sight was so poor he was basically 4F! He did give up a big salary to serve, I have no doubt if he had done like Wayne, he would have been a much bigger star, since there was so little competition. There is no excuse for what Reagan did to his fellow actors during the 50s, he must have known he did wrong, since he did help many get jobs in the 60s. Still, a bigger gesture would have been a Presidential proclamation, or pardon!

 

[BlueTrain]

The Germans didn't stop being German, either. But the US Government had a harder time convincing people that the Germans were bad before the US entered the war, in spite of how people (like my father-in-law) said "everybody knew" that we'd be going to war with them. That finally happened but it might not have happened as soon as it did. But many Americans are descended from Germans and they had many admirable traits that Americans admired. It was easier to make people hate the "Japs" for several reasons, Pearl Harbor being the most obvious. But according to some sources, once the Americans occupied Japan, American soldiers were surprised as they became more familiar with the Japanese character. Americans also felt at home in Germany but there was no real character difference in the people.