Posted by David Bernstein:
The McCarthey Era and Popular Culture:
http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2007_10_21-2007_10_27.shtml#1193183321
In case you needed further evidence that the McCarthy era of popular
culture bears little resemblance to the actual McCarthy era, I give
you the following cartoonish view of the era, which, perhaps not
surprisingly, comes from a recent comic book. Richard Reed of
Fantastic Four is telling Peter Parker the Amazing Spiderman about how
failing to cooperate with HUAC ruined his Uncle Ted's career:
Uncle Ted was a writer. He found everyone interesting. He'd talk to
strangers, wear the wrong colored socks, ate at strange little
restaurants. My uncle Ted was eccentric. He was funny and colorful,
and I loved him. But he was also stubborn, and didn't care for
rules, and if you pushed him, he'd push back just as hard.
Unfortunately, this is when Joe McCarthy and the House un-American
activities committee was in full bloom looking for communists among
the military, the government, and ... the arts. If you stood out,
if you didn't conform, you had a better than even chance of being
called before the committee. At my uncle Ted was all those things.
So he was subpoenaed to appear before he lack and explain himself.
To testify. To tell them he wasn't a communist, and to name the
names of those who thought might be communists. [Uncle Ted told the
committee to go to hell, was jailed for six months for contempt,
and his life was ruined.]
Whatever one thinks about the McCarthy era, and some of my views (at
least on the relevant First Amendment issues) [1]can be found in this
paper, you didn't get hauled before HUAC because you talked to
strangers, wore the wrong colored socks, or ate at strange
restaurants. And the idea that random nonconformists had a "better
than even chance" of being called before HUAC is just laughable.
I understand this is "just a comic book," but serious Hollywood movies
such Guilty By Supsicion and The Front also go astray in conveying the
history of the era. Not to mention the grandaddy of all distortions,
The Crucible, in which Arthur Miller manages to analogize witches
(which didn't really exist) to American Communists who were loyal to
the Soviet Union (who really did).
References
1. http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=887773#PaperDownload
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