It was a time of fear, suspicion, and uncertainty.

It was, in a sense, like any other time in history, and yet it was unlike any other time in history. The very ideals on which America rested faced determined opposition from without as well as from within and, in a tragic sense of irony, were shaken and cracked by those who claimed to think, speak, and act in their defense.

Speaking to the American people on Monday, April 5, 1954, President Dwight Eisenhower addressed the red, seemingly all-encompassing elephant in the room: Communism.

“We are concerned about the loss of our international friends,” he said. “We are worried about the Communist penetration of our own country.

“Now, the greater any of these apprehensions, the greater the need that we look at them, clearly, face to face, without fear, like honest, straightforward Americans, so we do not develop the jitters or any other kind of panic, that we do not fall prey to hysterical thinking.”

Hysterical thinking. By 1954, that seemed to be the way toward which the American mind had oriented all its thoughts and actions.

“Cold War fears rose to the center of American society, politics, and foreign policy,” the historian James Patterson wrote, “generating a Red Scare that soured a little the otherwise optimistic” American attitude.

Ike’s words, like those of an instructive father, sought to bridge the gap between emotion and reason, fear and comfort, uncertainty and security, the imagined and the real.

“Sometimes you feel, almost, that we can be excused for getting a little bit hysterical,” Eisenhower said. Communism was, to be sure, an “aggressive” threat, an “atheistic doctrine that believes in statism against our conception of the dignity of man.” Such a dichotomy represented “the struggle of the ages.”

And yet, it was the American ideals — “belief in decency and justice and progress, and the value of individual liberty” — that would, in the end, “carry us through.”

Not fear, but hope. Not suspicion, but confidence. Not hysteria, but calm reason and measured vigilance. Not injustice toward one another, but tolerance and respect.

Americans, Eisenhower argued, must not defeat themselves.

Then there was Joseph McCarthy, a fellow Republican who nevertheless seemed to belong to his own political party, one fueled by the worst rather than the better angels of human nature. McCarthy was, by most accounts, a miserable person who found in demagoguery an opportunity for fame and political gain.

As Jon Meacham wrote, “To him politics was not about the substantive but the sensational.” Communism was a threat, and it was hidden away everywhere: in books, schools, churches, leftist groups, the military, the government, and in programs like the New Deal and the Fair Deal. Everyone was a suspect, and yet few were guilty of actual treason.

Their crime? Thinking. Communism, instead of infiltrating and subverting America, had infiltrated and subverted McCarthy, converting him into a weapon of divisiveness and callousness that benefited the same forces he stumbled in the dark in the hope of uncovering.

Harry Truman once said that McCarthy, instead of being its greatest threat, was “the best asset the Kremlin” had.

In defending America from Communism and fascism, McCarthyites employed eerily similar methods, including character assassination, blackmail, and, worst of all, censoring, removing, and burning books deemed subversive or radical.

Communism — or, rather, leftist ideas associated, typically wrongly, with Communism — McCarthy said, must be “scrubbed and flushed” from education. McCarthy, in essence, sought the creation of a unified American mind, a kind of uniparty.

Ike resisted such fanatical efforts.

“Don’t join the book burners,” Eisenhower told Dartmouth students in 1953. “Don’t think you are going to conceal faults by concealing evidence that they never existed. Don’t be afraid to go to your library and read every book.”

One anti-McCarthy film of the era suggested that access to Mein Kampf, instead of making Nazis, seemed to make opponents of Nazism.

McCarthyism, to some historians, grew from elites and not necessarily the people at large. Surveys showed that few Americans knew Communists or could define what a Communist was.

“The internal Communist threat, perhaps like the threat of crime, is not directly felt as personal,” one survey concluded. “It is something one reads about and talks about and even gets angry about. But a picture of the average American as a person with the jitters, trembling lest he finds a Red under his bed, is clearly nonsense.”

But the Southern reaction to the Brown ruling — and indeed to the entire Civil Rights Movement — suggests otherwise. Georgia Congressman Elijah Forrester called it the work of “leftwingers” and “un-American groups” who sought “the destruction of the Anglo-Saxon race,” while another Southern statesman blamed “meddlers, demagogues, race baiters and communists” for the assault on segregation.

In Little Rock, Arkansas, white parents held signs at Little Rock Central High School declaring that “race mixing is Communism,” and the FBI did not hesitate to search incessantly, even unlawfully and often embarrassingly, for Communist influences within the Civil Rights Movement.

In response to McCarthyism, Senator Margaret Chase Smith called for a defense of “the basic principles of Americanism,” including the right to criticize, to hold unpopular beliefs, to protest, and to think independently.

Ultimately, Eisenhower’s struggle of the ages might not be against external forces at all. At its root, the struggle is one between better and worse selves — a clash within one soul for control of that soul. As Lincoln had said, there will perhaps never be a foreign foe powerful enough to conquer the American people.

“If destruction be our lot,” he warned in 1837, “we must ourselves be its author and finisher.”

If the years since the founding have taught us anything, it’s that the greatest and most immediate threat Americans face has been, and perhaps always will be, themselves.

At present, the struggle rages on, and our best selves could use reinforcements.

Dakoda Pettigrew is a senior political science and history undergraduate student whose father went to school in Cassville. He lives in Tennessee and can be reached at pettigrewdakoda6@
gmail.com.

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