The Future of American Hate

...Little Rock and the Residue of McCarthyism the future of american hate By Marquis Childs So completely have Senator McCarthy and his apparatus of intimidation vanished from the national stage that it seems almost as though the McCarthy interval had never been...

...No demagogue could succeed except regionally, we would like to believe, because no single element could be exploited nationally with an effective hate-mongering propaganda...

...However temporary and tentative this may have been, it did great harm...

...He did for a time exercise a very considerable power...

...This same anti-intellectual-ism in its crudest and most violent form was the chief resource of the Nazis in their appeal to the frightened middle class in the Germany of the inflation-ridden Twenties...

...Negroes, taking positions they never held before, have advanced in status in a truly impressive fashion, and this has been accomplished with very little friction...

...In an ostensibly free society, the long hairs, the triple-dome boys, the eggheads may not work so well under a barrage of abuse and behind the barriers of an elaborate security system...

...Nor does it appear likely...

...It would be consoling to think that the whole McCarthy episode was nothing more than a bad dream, a kind of political colic that has now happily passed away...

...And the mob in Little Rock that shouted "Jew" at Benjamin Fine, education editor of the New York Times, made it clear that the conflict is not merely one between Negro and white...

...What in the light of recent events is dismaying about the episode is not that he went so far but that he was able to do this with such limited capacities...

...This is merely to suggest the province that a determined demagogue might try to carve out for himself in a time of troubles...

...In the late summer, a large-scale race riot was narrowly averted on Chicago's South Side, where Negroes newly arrived from the South in large numbers have been confined for the most part to a ghetto of appalling slums...

...Moreover, he had accepted support from wealthy interests, in particular Texas oil interests, to such an extent that it would have been difficult for him to take a share-the-wealth tack...

...after all, from his Shrine of the Little Flower in Michigan, developed a very large following with his attack on the bankers and the internationalists before he was silenced by his church...

...Louis Post-Dispatch, .. paper he served from 1926 to 1944 and rejoined recently...

...McCarMarquis Childs, for the past dozen years a nationally syndicated columnist, achieved renown as Washington correspondent of the St...

...He drove the President to frustration and something like despair as he humiliated the Secretary of the Army and high-ranking Army officers...

...But there were from 10 to 15 million unemployed in the country, and the cry of "every man a king" had an engaging universality...

...thy lacked any real conviction or genuine drive...

...And not alone, it must be added, in the South...

...however successful our recovery from that particular episode may seem, it is doubtful that as a people we learned anything from it that has made his better able to resist present and future assaults on our fundamental values...

...For a moment, when he championed 100-per-cent parity for farm prices, it seemed as though he might be about to shift to an indigenous radicalism in order to exploit the growing discontent with the Eisenhower Administration...

...This is all the more remarkable in view of the great power he once wielded, with Senators in solemn debate comparing him at the peak of his influence to Hitler...

...One may say that these are merely the dark places that exist in any society and particularly in a democracy as heterogeneous as ours...

...In Southern California, Gerald L. K. Smith may have fringe support, but he is engulfed in the great mass, with a large concentration of Negroes and Mexicans...

...A Hitler could not get a firm hold in a country so vast and with so heterogeneous a people...

...The grim prospect is for other Little Rocks and, if not Little Rocks, then for violence and bloodshed in areas where the tension is greatest...

...In addition to several books on the Washington scene, he wrote Sweden: The Middle Way in 1936 and edited a new edition of Brooks Adams's America's Economic Supremacy in 1947...

...One difficulty in assessing the significance of the McCarthy phenomenon for the present and the future is that at his zenith his capacities were exaggerated while after he had begun to decline he was dismissed as just a symptom of the postwar jitters...

...Father Coughlin...

...Under the rule of last on, first off, with developing unemployment the Negro would see his gains melt away, and the white worker under the pressure of fear for his job would be inordinately jealous of the Negro's status...

...This, however, was beyond him...

...The Ku Klux Klan may flourish in the South, but it could not possibly make any real headway in the cities of the North where a large proportion of the population is Catholic and where the Jews are a substantial minority...

...The question one must ask today is where McCarthy might have gone, and where another McCarthy could go today, if he had, as Senator Flanders suggested, the capacities of a Hitler...

...When he had played out the Communist scare, and overplayed it for the television audience in the lengthy hearings in which his performance finally became repetitive and boring, he was finished...

...But this ignores the sanction given these dark-places by the prejudices, for the most part unwritten and unspoken, that infect a very large part of the country-club segment of American life...

...He intimidated the Senate of the United States to such an extent that only a few venturesome souls—Senators Benton of Connecticut, Lehman of New York, Flanders of Vermont, Hennings of Missouri—undertook to point out the damage he was doing at home and abroad and thereby prepare the way for the final vote of censure...

...Equally dismaying to anyone concerned with the coherence and stability of this country is the fact that so many who consider themselves to be conservatives were convinced that McCarthy was working in their interest...

...But recent events should dissipate any such comfortable illusion...

...And it is undeniable that in the aftermath of Little Rock the atmosphere everywhere has been troubled as the two races have been made newly aware of their heritage of hatred...

...Jews, Catholics, foreigners all are hated because all are identified with hateful change that must at any cost be stopped in America if not in the world...

...that we can expect to find in the President an understanding and active champion of those values...

...We have enjoyed an unparalleled prosperity in the years since the end of the war...

...Finally, it is time to recognize that we have counted very heavily on our luck...

...Not inconceivably, a series of regional explosions could produce a national crisis, and, lacking any positive leadership from the present occupant of the White House, such a crisis could open the way to a new and more formidable McCarthy...

...But we have taken a great deal on faith, and we have for long conveniently ignored the strata of prejudice, distrust, suspicion and hate that underlie the prosperous, determinedly bright surface of American life...

...judging by his handling of the Little Rock situation or of McCarthy himself...

...The suggestion from a Senator Jenner or a Senator Eastland that the court is somehow corrupted by Communism finds a loud echo in a thousand White Citizens Councils across the South...

...The tensions so evident in America today owe something to the squeeze of rising prices as well as to the social upheaval of integration...

...They were so eager to accept his anti-Communism that they failed to see that in his own confusion of ends and means he was capable of wholesale destruction, undermining the basic safeguards of a stable society...

...In these Council meetings, every change of violence and demagoguery on the racial, religious, political theme is rung...

...If our diversity does seem to insure us against a demagogue with a nationwide appeal, it does not mean that we shall escape the consequences regionally of a time of troubles exploited by hatemongers...

...We have had a feeling of confidence in our very diversity...

...Thanks to that prosperity, we have made important gains in equality of job opportunity...

...This diversity—diffuseness is perhaps a more accurate word—may truly be our salvation...

...He had no real interest in the kind of attack that might have made it possible to develop a new line and draw new followers...

...This is, of course, a charitable interpretation of the motives of the wealthy and influential who saw in him a convenient weapon with which to fight unwelcome change...

...Even before his death, the Senator from Wisconsin had lapsed into a resentful obscurity in which his pronouncements were largely ignored...

...It is here, perhaps, that one may suggest not a parallel but an object lesson...

...Huey Long, with far greater capacity in almost every department than McCarthy, was, at the time of his assassination, about to carry to the West and the North the political appeal that had been so demonstrably successful in the South...

...In large areas, and not alone in the South, it is Ku KIux Klanism versus the rest of the world...

...But in retrospect it is apparent that to compare McCarthy, as Senator Flanders and others did, with that demonic genius, Hitler, who organized and led a movement that nearly brought down Western civilization, was to succumb to the fears generated by McCarthyism...

...Our dismayed reaction to the Soviet earth satellites has brought with it a realization of what the technique of fear and intimidation may have meant in terms of scientific achievement and intellectual development...

...The mobs at Little Rock, the rise of the White Citizens Councils, the racial tensions now seen to be so close to the surface of American life reveal a stratum and substratum on which a skillful, dedicated demagogue could build a more menacing and more substantial structure than McCarthyism...

...But if we should now be in for a recession or even a "rolling readjustment," this advance would be jeopardized...

...Thus economic tensions could compound the racial conflict...

...The hatreds boiling up out of the school integration conflict, with Little Rock as their menacing symbol, are evidence of the stuff on which McCarthyism flourished...

...We shall never know whether he could have done in Michigan what he succeeded in doing in Arkansas and Louisiana...

...The Jacobins of the Right (and make no mistake that they are any less dangerous than the Jacobins of the Left) who applauded McCarthy are in many instances those who now denounce the Supreme Court— not the integration decision but the Court itself...

...We refuse to believe this because we have faith in our democratic convictions...

...It is a prejudice that identifies the longhair, the intellectual, with the troublemaker, with Communism, and it is only a short step to the Jew and the foreigner...

...A brilliant and resourceful demagogue, he enjoyed his own performance and his own power too greatly to bring to any political undertaking the dedication of an effective leader...

...His agents, Cohn and Schine, swept through Europe like avenging young angels, demoralizing our embassies and information service libraries...

...But, even as one sa\s this, one comes back to the way in which McCarthy was able to break down sanctions and safeguards guaranteeing the rights of the individual by due process of law...