Oh, Go Ahead and Make Yourself Look the Fool

I won't mind. I'll even sympathize a bit, having done the same to myself often enough.

There are certain subjects in this world about which the conventional wisdom, that which "everyone knows," is so badly wrong that unless and until you make a deliberate attempt to do the reading and bring yourself up to speed, you really risk making yourself look foolish in spouting off-hand comments about them.

Witness
The Venona Secrets
Blacklisted by History

Just sayin', it might be worth doing the reading, y'know? It might just turn out that your analogies are seriously flawed.

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Some few days after this was published, I noticed a comment on it elsewhere to the effect that these books are all suspect--suspect because, God forbid, they are published by Regnery Press. Nothing Regnery Press publishes can be worthwhile, you see, because they are a conservative publishing house.

Oh.

Of such stuff is blissful ignorance made...

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On the Infamous "Have You No Decency?" Remark

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Every so often I will read some commentary involving or referring to Joe Welch's infamous riposte to Joe McCarthy--"Have you left no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?"--and almost without exception, the commentary makes it clear that the writer knows only part of the story behind that remark. It was only a few weeks ago that I read another such bit of commentary. I thought, at the time, "You poor devil. You have only part of the story, and have no idea what an ignorant footstool you've made yourself out to be." And I thought, too, that it would be a good thing for the correct story to be "out there" in the blogosphere.

Anyone genuinely interested in the full story of Joe McCarthy has been perfectly free to pick up M. Stanton Evans' massively researched and painstakingly documented Blacklisted By History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight Against America's Enemies for a couple of years now. Of course, most of the people who cite Mr. Welch's remark are not interested in the whole story; they are simply interested in making McCarthy look bad. They do not care that McCarthy has indisputably been proven correct: the federal government in the thirties, forties, and fifties did harbor quite a lot of communists. Nor do they care overmuch that communists persist to this day, that our wonderful president, Barack Obama, Peace Be Upon Him, has been known to appoint avowed communists such as Van Jones to positions of power and influence.

I have often thought that such people either have convinced themselves that communists are a thing of the past, something from the "old days," a specter, a phantom, a chimera which Republicans hope to use to scare up a few more votes, or even that communism itself has been hideously misrepresented. It was/is a simple reformist agrarian movement, they think. Nice spread-the-wealth folks. Can't possibly be as bad as those conservatives or Republicans.

I must disagree. Communism was, and is, a murderous, totalitarian ideology, and hard-core communists are, at heart, themselves murderers.

Now, I know--I know--that at this point, some poor soul is even now scrambling for his keyboard, eager to inform me that conservatives have no room to talk, that, after all, fascism is a murderous ideology, too, and fascism is a totalitarian ideology of the right. Sorry. It isn't true, and in trying to argue for it, you are only making yourself look more uninformed than you already did. Read this excerpt, and learn that fascism sprang from the bosom of socialism, is, in fact, simply a different variety of socialism, and learn that your devastating counter-argument is stillborn: fascism, too, is a creation of the left, not the right.

I hesitated somewhat before typing up this lengthy quote from the book. My fervent hope is that reading the material will cause at least a few people to take the step of actually ordering and reading the book, but nevertheless, this extended quote is perhaps somewhat longer than most authors would prefer. Should Mr. Evans (and I will not be satisfied with someone merely claiming to be Mr. Evans) ask me to take the post down, I will of course comply, but hopefully he will approve my intent and reap some additional sales. The remainder of this post is from the book and will give you a much fuller sense of the genesis of Mr. Welch's remark to Senator McCarthy. If I have missed any typos, I apologize, but they are perhaps inevitable in the copying of such a long section. Anything in bold is something I have emphasized. Lastly, I would be remiss in not mentioning that in the book, Mr. Evans includes a photocopy of the New York Times article to which he refers.

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Having thus exhibited his instinct for the capillary, Welch would outdo himself in a third notable episode of this nature--the matter of Frederick Fisher. Fisher was a young attorney from Welch's Boston law firm of Hale and Dorr, brought down to Washington to help prepare the case for Stevens-Adams. In getting ready for the hearings, Welch had asked Fisher if there were anything in his background that could prove embarassing to the Army.

Well, yes, said Fisher, there was. He had been a member of the National Lawyers Guild, which was indeed a problem. As the Guild had the year before been branded by Attorney General Herbert Brownell as the "legal mouthpiece" of the Communist Party, and before that by the House Committee on Un-American Activities as the party's "legal bulwark," it was decided such past membership would be an incapacitating factor in hearings so heavily devoted to issues of subversion. Fisher was sent home to Boston.

Nevertheless, his name would show up in the hearings, as Welch was cross-examining Roy Cohn in what would be a famous confrontation. This began with the standard Welch technique of exaggerated buildup, to the effect that Cohn had been remiss in not communicating whatever he knew about Communists in the Army directly to Robert Stevens. This colloquy is worth quoting in extenso as an example of Welch in action and the degree to which the lovable codger could change his mien as needed.

WELCH: If you had gone over to the Pentagon and got inside the door and yelled to the first receptionist you saw, "We got some hot dope on some Communists in the Army," don't you think you could have landed at the top?
COHN: Sir, that is not the way I do things.

***

WELCH: And although you had this dope and a fresh and ambitious new Secretary of the Army, reachable by the expenditure of one taxicab fare, you never went during March, if you had it in March, did you, is that right?
COHN: Mr Welch--
WELCH: Just answer. You never went near him in March?
COHN: No, I--
WELCH: Or April? Did you?
COHN: Mr. Welch--
WELCH: Tell me, please.
COHN: I am trying, sir.
WELCH: Or April?
COHN: No, sir.
WELCH: Or May?
COHN: I never went near him, sir.
WELCH: Or June?
COHN: The answer is never.
WELCH: Right. Or July?
COHN: I communicated--
WELCH: Or July?
COHN: No, sir--
SENATOR MUNDT: I think we have covered July.
WELCH: I think it is really dramatic to see how these Communist hunters will sit on this document when they could have brought it to the attention of Bob Stevens in 20 minutes, and they let month after month go by without going to the head and saying, "Sic 'em Stevens."

***

COHN: May I answer the last statement?
WELCH: I only said you didn't say, "Sic 'em Stevens," and you didn't, did you?...You did not say "Sic 'em Stevens." Is that right?
COHN: Sir--
WELCH: Is that right?
COHN: Mr. Welch, if you want to know the way things work, I will tell you.
WELCH: I don't care how it works. I just want to know if it is right that you did not say, "Sic 'em Stevens."
COHN: No, sir, you are right.
WELCH: I am at long last right once, is that correct?
COHN: Mr. Welch, you can always get a laugh...
WELCH: Mr. Cohn, we are not talking about laughing matters. If there is a laugh, I suggest to you, sir, it is because it is so hard to get you to say that you didn't actually yell, "Sic 'em Stevens."

When McCarthy finally objected to this burlesque, the discussion wandered off to other topics. However, Welch was soon back in "Sic 'em Stevens" mode, arguing that Cohn was at fault for not having personally rushed to inform Stevens the instant that data on security problems at Monmouth surfaced. This recapped what had gone before, but with additional Welchian furbelows:

WELCH: ...you didn't tug at his lapel and say, "Mr. Secretary, I know something about Monmouth that won't let me sleep nights?" You didn't do it, did you?
COHN: I don't, as I testifed, Mr. Welch, I don't know whether I talked to Mr. Stevens about it then [in September 1953] or not...
WELCH: Don't you know that if you had really told him what your fears were, and substantiated them to any extent, he could have jumped in the next day with suspensions?
COHN: No, sir.

***

WELCH: Mr. Cohn, tell me once more: Every time you learn of a Communist or a spy anywhere, is it your policy to get them out as fast as possible?
COHN: Surely, we want them out as fast as possible, sir.
WELCH: And whenever you learn of one from now on, Mr. Cohn, I beg of you, will you tell somebody about them quick?
COHN: Mr. Welch, with great respect, I work for the committee here. They know how we go about handling situations of Communist infiltration and failure to act on FBI information about Communist infiltration...
WELCH: May I add my small voice, sir, and say whenever you know about a subversive or a Communist spy, please hurry. Will you remember these words?

This hectoring of Cohn, be it noted, came from the small voice whose clients had been pressuring General Lawton to restore asserted security risks at Monmouth. Even more ironic, if possible, it was premised on the selfsame "purloined letter" Welch had dismissively treated as a "carbon copy of precisely nothing." Now he was contending that Cohn was grievously to blame for not hand-delivering this copy of "precisely nothing" to Robert Stevens by the fastest possible method.

After sitting through these Welch sermonettes about exposing every subversive or Communist suspect Cohn had ever heard of, and being extra quick about it, McCarthy at last broke in by raising the issue of Fred Fisher. Having brought Fisher to D.C. to help out with the hearings, McCarthy opined, Welch had little standing to lecture others about proper methods of Red-hunting. In a tone heavy with disdain, McCarthy stated:

...in view of Mr. Welch's request that information be given once we know of anyone who might be performing work for the Communist Party, I think we should tell him that he has in his law firm a young man named Fisher, whom he recommended incidentally to do work on this committee, he has been for a number of years a member of an organization which was named, oh years and years back, as the legal bulwark of the Communist Party...We are now letting you know that this young man did belong to this organization for either 3 or 4 years, belonged to it long after he was out of law school...

And subsequently:

Jim [Juliana], will you get the news story to the effect that this man belonged to this Communist front organization?

This drew from Welch a much-celebrated answer, featured in all the usual write-ups and replayed innumerable times in video treatments of the hearings. It was the distilled essence of Joe Welch, worth studying in detail to get context and flavor. Along with certain other statements on Fred Fisher, Welch assailed McCarthy as follows:

Until this moment, Senator, I think I never fully grasped your cruelty or your recklessness. Fred Fisher is a young man who went to Harvard Law School and came with my firm and is starting what looks like a brilliant career with us...Little did I dream you could be so reckless and so cruel as to do an injury to that lad...I fear that he shall always bear a scar needlessly inflicted by you. If it were in my power to forgive you for your reckless cruelty I would do so. I like to think I am a gentlemean, but your forgiveness will have to come from someone other than me. (Emphasis added.)

When McCarthy then attempted to give some background on the National Lawyers Guild, plus a strong tu quoque about the harm done to the reputations of Frank Carr and other young McCarthy staffers by the charges Welch had signed his name to, the Army counsel again lamented the injury to Fisher:

Let us not assassinate this lad further, Senator. You have done enough. Have you left no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?

And, finally:

Mr. McCarthy, I will not discuss this with you further. You have been within six feet of me, and could have asked me about Fred Fisher. You have brought it out If there is a God in Heaven, it will do neither you nor your cause any good. I will not discuss it with you further. (emphasis added.)

Subsequently, we're told, Welch broke into tears and the audience in the Senate chamber responded with sustained applause. Thus the incident most remembered from the hearings, and generally viewed as the moral Waterloo of Joe McCarthy. The reckless evildoer had exposed young Fred Fisher and his former membership in the National Lawyers Guild, thus scarring the innocent lad forever, and the good, decent Welch had protested this shameful outing of a youthful indiscretion.

All of which seems very moving, and is invariably so treated. It looks a little different, however, when we note that, well before this dramatic moment, Fred Fisher had already been outed, in conclusive fashion, as a former member of the National Lawyers Guild--by none other than Joe Welch. This had occurred in April, some six weeks before the McCarthy-Welch exchange, when Welch took it upon himself to confirm before the world that Fisher had indeed been a member of the Guild, and for this reason had been sent back to Boston. As the New York Times reported, in a story about the formal filing of Army allegations against Cohn-McCarthy:

The Army charges were signed by its new special counsel, Joseph N. Welch. Mr. Welch today [April 15] confirmed news reports that he had relieved from duty his original second assistant, Frederick G. Fisher, Jr., of his own Boston law office because of admitted previous membership in the National Lawyers Guild, which has been listed by Herbert Brownell, Jr. the Attorney General, as a Communist front organization. Mr. Welch said he had brought in another lawyer, John Kimball, Jr., from his Boston office to take Mr. Fisher's place. (Emphasis added.)

Giving this news item further impact, the Times ran a sizable photograph of Fred Fisher, plus a caption noting he had been relieved of duty with the Army's legal forces. Having caused this story to appear in the nation's most prestigious daily and reputed paper of record, Joe Welch would seem to have done a pretty good job of outing the innocent lad from Boston. (it was undoubtedly this news story, or an equivalent, that McCarthy was asking Jim Juliana to bring him.) It thus develops that Welch himself had already done the very thing for which he so fervently denounced McCarthy. So the suspicion once more dawns...that something was unspeakably evil when, and only when, done by McCarthy, but perfectly proper when done by Welch and/or his clients.

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Counterpoint? Find it here. And yes, if you're wondering, I did go back and change two words in my introduction, two words which may, in retrospect, have been over the top. That's the beauty of the "edit posts" function of blogger...

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Liberal Fascism Quote #7

Then there was the inevitable progressive crackdown on individual civil liberties. Today's liberals tend to complain about the McCarthy period as if it were the darkest moment in American history after slavery. It's true: under McCarthyism a few Hollywood writers who'd supported Stalin and then lied about it lost their jobs in the 1950s. Others were unfairly intimidated. But nothing that happened under the mad reign of Joe McCarthy remotely compared with what Wilson and his fellow progressives foisted on America. Under the Espionage Act of June 1917 and the Sedition Act of May 1918, any criticism of the government, even in your own home, could earn you a prison sentence (a law Oliver Wendell Holmes upheld years after the war, arguing that such speech could be banned if it posed a "clear and present danger"). In Wisconsin a state official got two and a half years for criticizing a Red Cross fund-raising drive. A Hollywood producer received a ten-year stint in jail for making a film that depicted British troops committing atrocities during the American Revolution. One man was brought to trial for explaining in his own home why he didn't want to buy Liberty Bonds.

No police state deserves the name without an ample supply of police. The Department of Justice arrested tens of thousands without just cause. The Wilson administration issued a letter for U.S. attorneys and marshals saying, "No German enemy in this country, who has not hitherto been implicated in plots against the interests of the United States, need have any fear of action by the Department of Justice so long as he observes the following warning: Obey the law; keep your mouth shut." This blunt language might be forgivable except for the government's dismayingly broad definition of what defined a "German enemy."

The Justice Department created its own quasi-official fascisti, known as the American Protective League, or APL. They were given badges--many of which read "Secret Service"--and charged with keeping an eye on their neighbors, co-workers, and friends. Used as private eyes by overzealous prosecutors in thousands of cases, they were furnished with ample government resources. The APL had an intelligence division, in which members were bound by oath not to reveal they were secret policemen. Members of the APL read their neighbors' mail and listened in on their phones with government approval. In Rockford, Illinois, the army asked the APL to help extract confessions from black soldiers accused of assaulting white women. The APL's American Vigilante Patrol cracked down on "seditious street oratory." One of its most important functions was to serve as head crackers against "slackers" who avoided conscription. In New York City, in September 1918, the APL launched its biggest slacker raid, rounding up fifty thousand men. Two-thirds were later found to be innocent of all charges. Nevertheless, the Justice Department approved. The assistant attorney general noted, with great satisfaction, that America had never been more effectively policed. In 1917 the APL had branches in nearly six hundred cities and towns with a membership approaching a hundred thousand. By the following year, it had exceeded a quarter of a million.

One of the only things the layman still remembers about this period is a vague sense that something bad called the Palmer Raids occurred--a series of unconstitutional crackdowns, approved by Wilson, of "subversive" groups and individuals. What is usually ignored is that the raids were immensely popular, particularly with the middle-class base of the Democratic Party. Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer was a canny progressive who defeated the Republican machine in Pennsylvania by forming a tight bond with labor. He had hoped to ride the popularity of the raids straight into the Oval Office, and might have succeeded had he not been sidelined by a heart attack.

It's also necessary to note that the American Legion was born under inauspicious circumstances during the hysteria of World War I in 1919. Although it is today a fine organization with a proud history, one cannot ignore the fact that it was founded as an essentially fascist organization. In 1923 the national commander of the legion declared, "If ever needed, the American Legion stands ready to protect our country's institutions and ideals as the fascisti dealt with the deconstructionists who menaced Italy." FDR would later try to use the legion as newfangled American Protective League to spy on domestic dissidents and harass potential foreign agents.

Vigilantism was often encouraged and rarely dissuaded under Wilson's 100 percent Americanism. How could it be otherwise, given Wilson's own warnings about the enemy within? In 1915, in his third annual message to Congress, he declared, "The gravest threats against our national peace and safety have been uttered within our own borders. There are citizens of the United States, I blush to admit, born under other flags...who have poured the poison of disloyalty into the very arteries of our national life; who have sought to bring the authority and good name of our Government into contempt, to destroy our industries wherever they thought it effective for their vindictive purposes to strike at them, and to debase our politics to the uses of foreign intrigue." Four years later the president was still convinced that perhaps America's greatest threat came from "hyphenated" Americans. "I cannot say too often--any man who carries a hyphen about with him carries a dagger that he is ready to plunge into the vitals of this Republic whenever he gets ready. If I can catch any man with a hyphen in this great contest I will know that I have got an enemy of the Republic."

This was the America Woodrow Wilson and his allies sought. And they got what they wanted. In 1919, at a Victory Loan pageant, a man refused to stand for the national anthem. When "The Star-Spangled Banner" ended, a furious sailor shot the "disloyal" man three times in the back. When the man fell, the Washington Post reported, "the crowd burst into cheering and handclapping." Another man who refused to rise for the national anthem at a baseball game was beaten by the fans in the bleachers. In February 1919 a jury in Hammond, Indiana, took two minutes to acquit a man who had murdered an immigrant for yelling, "To Hell with the United States." In 1920 a salesman at a clothing store in Waterbury, Connecticut, received a six-month prison sentence for referring to Lenin as "one of the brainiest" leaders in the world. Mrs. Rose Pastor Stoakes was arrested, tried, and convicted for telling a women's group, "I am for the people, and the government is for the profiteers." The Republican antiwar progressive Robert La Follette spent a year fighting an effort to have him expelled from the Senate for disloyalty because he'd given a speech opposing the war to the Non-Partisan League. The Providence Journal carried a banner--every day!--warning readers that any German or Austrian "unless known by years of association should be treated as a spy." The Illinois Bar Association ruled that members who defended draft resisters were not only "unprofessional" but "unpatriotic."

[snip]

Hard numbers are difficult to come by, but it has been estimated that some 175, 000 Americans were arrested for failing to demonstrate their patriotism in one way or another. All were punished, many went to jail.

An' there y' have it, or at least the part that I felt like typing up. A little slice of Americana that we've chosen to ignore for--well, about ninety years now.

Now, you tell me: for all his faults, for all the accusations I heard from people--people including one of my own grandmothers when she was alive, God rest her soul--that George Bush was a Nazi, that he was going to perpetrate a coup rather than give up office (don't laugh, I heard and read this more than once during the Bush years), that he was marshalling up the Black Helicopters and so forth, did he hold a candle to what Woodrow Wilson and those aligned with him did?

I don't think so. No, that was a liberal, or a "progressive," as they often called themselves back then, and as--perhaps unwittingly--many of them are calling themselves now.

You know, just as an aside, it's been a while since I thought about the people that prophesied that George Bush was going to install himself as dictator-for-life. They were out there, you know, saying that they thought he was going to do just that.

Ain't heard from 'em in a while. I wonder if they have even the slightest sense of embarrassment.

Nah. Probably not. They're too busy calling people that say Barack Obama trends fascist "paranoid," or trying to prove that Sarah Palin's baby, Trig, really isn't hers and that this situation is somehow a threat to the republic.

And I have to note in passing that despite Mr. Goldberg's more-or-less obligatory slap at Joe McCarthy, it's pretty much beyond anything approaching reasonable doubt that McCarthy was right: the U.S. government was riddled with Soviet spies.

Order the book here.

Liberal Fascism Quote #1

The major flaw in all of this is that fascism, properly understood, is not a phenomenon of the right at all. Instead, it is, and always has been, a phenomenon of the left. This fact--an inconvenient truth if there ever was one--is obscured in our time by the equally mistaken belief that fascism and communism are opposites. In reality, they are closely related, historical competitors for the same constituents, seeking to dominate and control the same social space. The fact that they appear as polar opposites is a trick of intellectual history and (more to the point) the result of a concerted propaganda effort on the part of the "Reds" to make the "Browns" appear objectively evil and "other" (ironically, demonization of the "other" is counted as a definitional trait of fascism). But in terms of their theory and practice, the differences are minimal.

One of the things that continually amazes me is the easy characterization by those on today's political left of American conservatives as fascist, or trending towards fascism. It makes no sense, no sense at all. American conservatism is characterized by the championing of limited government, certainly less government than we have today. Today's political left is characterized by the desire for more government, always more. If fascism is closely intertwined with totalitarian government, then, it seems clear that it is today's political left that trends fascist, rather than American conservatism.

There'll be more quotes in the days ahead. I'm reasonably sure that Mr. Goldberg won't mind too much. If anything, they should help him sell a few more copies of his excellent book.

That book provokes some of the most entertaining reactions, by the way. Whenever I argue along these lines, someone will pipe up and say, "Oh, that's right out of Goldberg's Liberal Fascism," as though merely noting that constitutes a refutation. I note that as a rule, they don't bother trying to refute the book. My personal opinion is that they can't. It is well-researched and reasoned, and so far, none of the people who try a summary dismissal of the book give any evidence whatever of having actually read it. It does annoy me, though, that people act as though I never thought that fascism was a variety of socialism before I read this book. I read a pretty fair amount of Mein Kampf--not all of it, Hitler was a beastly bore of a writer--and to the best of my recollection, it was riddled with socialist claptrap, and, of course, the very name "Nazi" is an acronym standing for, in German, "National Socialist German Worker's Party." Kind of a dead giveaway, if you ask me, the sort of thing today's left keeps trying to explain away and just can't. At any rate, the ideas in this book weren't new to me, it's just handy to have all the material in one volume, and I'm glad the "used" price finally came down to where I didn't feel guilty for buying a copy.

This book, and Blacklisted by History, which came out in the same general time frame and details the enormous proof that Joe McCarthy was not a paranoid wingnut, but was in fact correct when he charged that the U.S. government at the time was riddled with communists and Soviet agents, are books that just aggravate the daylights out of the left. In the space of one year, the left was deprived of the ability--at least, if the audience is even a little informed--to call conservatives fascists and/or McCarthyites and keep a straight face.

If for nothing else, that was a glorious year.