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.

Continue reading →