This unprepossessing gentleman is I.F. Stone, crusading journalist and truth-teller. I’ve been reading The Haunted Fifties, a collection of his writings that includes a four-page piece he wrote in December 1953 — more than seven decades ago — that stopped me in my tracks. It could literally have been written yesterday. Which tells me some very disturbing things about my own country’s history and the throughlines that lead directly to Trump’s racist authoritarianism.

The piece is called “Bleak Landscape of the Resistance,” and recounts a meeting in Chicago organized by the American Committee for the Protection of the Foreign Born, which definitely sounds like a group that could have been formed last week in Minneapolis. (The article can be downloaded from the I.F. Stone’s Weekly Archive, or you could buy a copy of The Haunted Fifties through an online used bookseller.)

I don’t think we realize how bad things were in the 1950s. It went far beyond Joe McCarthy. The executive branch — yes, under the “moderate” stewardship of President Eisenhower — was just as committed as McCarthy to rooting out “subversive” elements, which meant any one who had ever displayed the slightest shade of pinko.

Reading Stone’s piece made me realize that McCarthy is the convenient fall guy for a much broader and more intense anti-immigrant regime that was just as destructive as anything Trump has managed to do. To label this period “The McCarthy Era” is to absolve many others of their complicity in a campaign of oppression that led to the deportations of many — including American citizens who happened to be born elsewhere.

Calling it “The McCarthy Era” also isolates this period as an outlier in our history when the truth is quite the opposite: Trump may be cruder than Ike or John Foster Dulles or J. Edgar Hoover or A. Mitchell Palmer, but his official actions are very much in line with similar episodes that litter the dark side of American history.

Let’s start with the fact that the American Committee for the Protection of the Foreign Born was on the Attorney General’s list of subversive organizations. Its leader had served six months in jail after refusing to hand over records to a grand jury. The secretary of the Los Angeles chapter had been imprisoned for a year and was subject to denaturalization proceedings. (Which meant, yes, that she was a citizen.) The secretary of the Michigan branch faced trial for refusing to give records to the House Un-American Activities Committee.

Many of the targeted had emigrated to America during the 1930s or World War II. They fled the Nazis and the widespread destruction of the war. Some were socialists or even Communists — at a time when, you may recall, the United States and the Soviet Union were allies. (Even those who broke with the Soviets after World War II were still considered suspect.) Many were active in the labor movement. Some were newspaper editors or publishers who should have enjoyed the protection of the First Amendment. One, Stanley Nowak, was a prominent Michigan politician who had served for a decade in the state legislature.

People from Eastern Europe were targeted but, as Stone writes, so were Mexican-Americans:

Reports to the conference from Los Angeles pictured terror and lawlessness — the use of roadblocks and sudden raids on areas in which persons of Mexican origin live, the invasion of their homes without warrants, the exile to Mexico of native-born Americans of Mexican parentage.

Gee, that sure sounds familiar. As does Stone’s conclusion:

The suffering in terms of broken families and disrupted lives is beyond the most sympathetic imagination. As serious is the moral degradation imposed by spreading terror. People are afraid to look lest they be tempted to help, and bring down suspicion on themselves. This is how good folk in Germany walked hurriedly by and shut their ears discreetly to telltale screams.

Oh, and for those concerned about journalism in our age of oligarchy, Stone reports that one of Chicago’s leading newspapers (a Hearst publication) “published a smear attack and telephoned the Committee’s various sponsors and schedule speakers in an effort to frighten them off.” Fox News, as bad as it is, never tried to do that.

I knew things were bad in the early Fifties. I didn’t realize how bad, or how pervasive the government’s involvement was, or how precisely it parallels what we’re going through today. The mechanisms of power that enable Trump have been in place a long time, and they have been used just as heartlessly before. The Fifties spawned their own backlash in the Sixties. I can only hope that we will also see a new dawn after this long dark night.

Title reference, for those too young to recall.