Words Worth Remembering: Edward R. Murrow’s Talk
It was the early American fifties, an age of unprecedented growth and prosperity. It was also, in another all-too-real sense, the age of Joseph McCarthy. Fears of Communism hung over the nation like a menacing dark cloud, ready at any moment to unleash a mighty, self-destructive storm.
Even before McCarthy rose to national prominence, policies and expectations stemming largely from post-war fears and Harry Truman’s Executive Order 9835—which, in 1947, established loyalty oaths for federal employees—had created an atmosphere primed for demagoguery.
The cartoonist Herb Block captured the essence of this atmosphere well. In a June 17, 1949, drawing published in the Washington Post, a fearful man described as “hysteria” carries a bucket of water up a ladder to the torch of the Statue of Liberty. “Fire!” the cartoon was titled.
Across the nation, teachers were investigated by anti-communist groups (also called anti-subversive committees). In an April 1949 cartoon, Block depicted one such group of eight men questioning a schoolteacher.
One man held a pencil and notebook and, with a stern face, inspected a portrait of Thomas Jefferson on the wall. Another man rummaged through the garbage can and, finding equations written on wrinkled paper, signaled for another to join in his potentially subversive discovery. Behind the teacher’s desk hung a map of Europe; one man pointed to the USSR in horror, holding scissors in his other hand, while another peeked intriguingly behind the map.
“You read books, eh?” Block titled his cartoon. There were others too, many depicting the fanatic witch hunts McCarthy himself would soon spawn and lead in Congress.
Both Truman and Eisenhower—along with congressional figures like Margaret Chase Smith—took firm, commendable positions against the rise of fear, hysteria, and assaults on the basic principles of what Truman called “true Americanism.”
But perhaps it was in the media, of all places, where the most eloquent rebuke of what came to be known as the Second Red Scare was spoken.
It was ten-thirty on the evening of Tuesday, March 9, 1954, when CBS aired an episode of Edward R. Murrow’s See It Now. After criticizing McCarthy’s use of congressional committees, Murrow told his audience, “We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. We must remember always that accusation is not proof and that conviction depends upon evidence and due process of law.”
Murrow continued. “We will not walk in fear, one of another,” he said. “We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason, if we dig deep in our history and our doctrine, and remember that we are not descended from fearful men—not from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate and to defend causes that were, for the moment, unpopular.”
After all, the American Revolution had rested on—and was driven by—a spirit that, in another time, could be decried as subversive. The Declaration of Independence, for which the fifty-six delegates of the Second Continental Congress pledged to each other their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor, was, and remains, a remarkable act of self-determination—but to London, it was an act of treason punishable by death.
Seneca Falls, abolition, Reconstruction, women’s suffrage—all, and more, could, under the influence of the anti-communist craze, be labeled subversive, dangerous, and deserving of a pre-twenty-first-century cultural cancellation.
“This is no time for men who oppose Senator McCarthy’s methods to keep silent, or for those who approve,” Murrow told his audience.
“We can deny our heritage and our history, but we cannot escape responsibility for the result. There is no way for a citizen of a republic to abdicate his responsibilities. As a nation we have come into our full inheritance at a tender age. We proclaim ourselves, as indeed we are, the defenders of freedom, wherever it continues to exist in the world, but we cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home.”
People like McCarthy, driven by a misguided patriotism, were damaging rather than preserving Americanism. It was a tragic, but not unprecedented, thing to behold: the ruin of a great thing by supposedly preservative methods. The Kremlin, it seemed, did not need to destroy America after all; Americans, driven by the “nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes,” as FDR had said in 1933, were doing the work themselves.
McCarthy’s actions “have caused alarm and dismay amongst our allies abroad and given considerable comfort to our enemies,” Murrow said. “And whose fault is that? Not really his. He didn’t really create this situation of fear; he merely exploited it—and rather successfully.”
Concluding with a line from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, Murrow said, “Cassius was right. ‘The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.’ Good night and good luck.”
The specter of the Second Red Scare continues to haunt us. Old ghosts take on different, newer shapes. But perhaps Edward R.Murrow’s words, spoken almost in a bedside manner, can still summon within us the courage to press onward—and the will to push back.