John mccarthy afl biography of abraham lincoln
53a. McCarthyism
Senator Joe McCarthy and chief counsel Roy Cohn interrogating suspected communists.
At a speech in Wheeling, West Virginia, on February 9, 1950, McCarthy proclaimed that he was aware of 205 card-carrying members of the Communist Party who worked for the United States Department of State. This speech set off an era of paranoia and accusation and propelled McCarthy into the national spotlight.
Ladies and gentlemen, tonight as we celebrate the one hundred and forty-first birthday of one of the greatest men in American history, I would like to be able to talk about what a glorious day today is in the history of the world. As we celebrate the birth of this man who with his whole heart and soul hated war, I would like to be able to speak of peace in our time, of war being outlawed, and of worldwide disarmament. These would be truly appropriate things to be able to mention as we celebrate the birthday of Abraham Lincoln ....
Five years after a world war has been won, men's hearts should anticipate a long peace, and men's minds should be free from the heavy weight that comes with war. But this is not such a period--for this is not a period of peace. This is a time of the "Cold War." This is a time when all the world is split into two vast, increasingly hostile armed camps--a time of great armaments race ...
Six years ago, at the time of the first conference to map out the peace — Dumbarton Oaks — there was within the Soviet orbit 180,000,000 people. Lined up on the antitotalitarian side there were in the world at that time roughly 1,625,000,000 people. Today, only 6 years later, there are 800,000,000 people under the absolute domination of Soviet Russia--an increase of over 400 percent. On our side, the figure has shrunk to around 500,000,000. In other words, in less than 6 years the odds have changed from 9 to 1 in our favor to 8 to 5 against us. This indicates the swiftness of the tempo of Communist victories and American defeats in
After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, a Spanish Civil War veteran from Florida named John Hovan enlisted in the Navy, serving for three and a half years before he received an honorable discharge. After the war, Hovan worked as a civilian shoe repairman at the Quonset Point Naval Air Station in Rhode Island, until one day he was abruptly fired. “This ship’s service officer came to me and said he had to tell me something,” Hovan told me in 2009. “‘Look, I’ve gotten orders to fire you, to let you go, and I can’t get any answers why.’” Hovan soon learned the reason: President Harry Truman’s Loyalty Program, an executive order that Truman signed in March 1947 to root out Communists and other “subversives” in the federal government.
Hovan, who died in 2014, was part of a contingent of American volunteers that came to be called the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. They had gone to Spain in the late 1930s to defend a left-leaning, democratically elected government from a right-wing military revolt backed by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. The Lincoln Brigade had been organized by the Communist Party USA and the Comintern, and Hovan, like many of the volunteers, had been a member of the party. For years after his firing, he was harassed by FBI agents. “They came to the house all the time,” he told me. “They came, too, when I was working at the textile mill. They were waiting for me out at the parking lot, trying to get me to talk.” In 1958, Hovan was subpoenaed to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee, which had been established 20 years earlier. Asked if he was a member of the Communist Party, Hovan invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. After his testimony, a local paper ran an article headlined “John Hovan, Communist,” and his house was firebombed and painted with swastikas.
Hovan was one of nearly 3,000 workers fired between 1947 and 1956, the peak years of Truman’s order, which screened more than five million federal employees, It is a great pleasure to have an opportunity to be with you this morning. I am most appreciative for the generous words of your President Gray, and also for the generous words of Mr. George Meany yesterday. Nevertheless, I don't come before you this morning in any spirit of satisfaction or jubilation. I am not here to report on a job which was either completely finished or satisfactorily finished. We can be grateful for many of the items which were finally included in the Bill which recently passed the House and Senate, and we can be thankful that many other items in the final version weren't as harsh with restrictive and arbitrary rules as they were in the original Landrum-Griffin Bill that passed the House of Representatives by a vote of three to one. But the final Bill is not the Bill that I wanted, or you wanted, or more importantly, the Bill that the facts of the situation called for. It contains several unfair, unsound and one-sided provisions that bear little or no resemblance to the recommendations of the Senate Labor Committee. It contains features inserted by the enemies of organized labor as a means of reducing honest labor strength at the bargaining table, slowing down the organization of many of the unorganized areas of this country, and burdening small locals with unnecessary paper work. But I think that the basic story of this Bill is not written in the story of any great success in any great victories. It is written on the contrary on the story of three major defeats. Let us recall these three battles. The first defeat was the defeat of the Kennedy-Ives Bill in the closing days of the 85th Congress. Had that bill been passed at that time, all of us would have been spared a great deal of the grief and headache, would have been spared an intensive build-up for more restrictive legislation during the current year, and wou My Journey Through the Best Presidential Biographies
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