Stand Fast in Liberty

In March, 1954, after spending the autumn of 1953 in England and seeing the strong reactions both there and in America to the actions of Senator Joseph McCarthy, I wrote a Pendle Hill pamphlet called McCarthyism--The Seed Is In Us. During the seven years since then, in concert with many other Americans, I have been happy much of the time to agree that the excesses of McCarthyism are a thing of the past, though I have never been persuaded that it was more than the "excesses" which lay behind us.

McCarthyism is grounded in a conviction that in the face of exceptional threats to our way of life we cannot be squeamish about the measures we employ to defend ourselves; that if we must practice lying or treachery or cause innocent people to suffer, this is the price to pay for self-preservation; and that once the crisis has been successfully dealt with, we can and will return to "normalcy," and to the practice of the freedoms in which we believe. Obviously, the insecurities and tensions, the exceptional threats, with which we have lived yet another seven years have not led us away from McCarthyism. The phenomenon itself, though conveniently named after one man, is rooted in basic human fears.