The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid_ A Memoir - Bill Bryson [55]
Not to be outdone, Walt Disney claimed in testimony to HUAC that the cartoonists’ guild in Hollywood—run by committed Reds and their fellow travelers, he reported—tried to take over his studio during a strike in 1941 with the intention of making Mickey Mouse a Communist. He never produced any evidence either, though he did identify one of his former employees as a Communist because he didn’t go to church and had once studied art in Moscow.
It was an especially wonderful time to be a noisy moron. Billy James Hargis, a chubby, kick-ass evangelist from Sapulpa, Oklahoma, warned the nation in weekly sweat-spattered sermons that Communists had insinuated themselves into, and effectively taken over, the Federal Reserve, the Department of Education, the National Council of Churches, and nearly every other organization of national standing one could name. His pronouncements were carried on five hundred radio stations and two hundred and fifty television stations and attracted a huge following, as did his many books, which had titles like Communism: The Total Lie and Is the School House the Proper Place to Teach Raw Sex?
Although he had no qualifications (he had flunked out of Ozark Bible College—a rare distinction, one would suppose), Hargis founded several educational establishments, including the Christian Crusade Anti-Communist Youth University. (I would love to have heard the school song.) When asked what was taught at his schools, he replied “anti-Communism, anti-Socialism, anti–welfare state, anti-Russia, anti-China, a literal interpretation of the Bible and states’ rights.” Hargis eventually came undone when it was revealed that he had had sex with several of his students, male and female alike, during moments of lordly fervor. One couple, according to The Economist, made the discovery when they blushingly confessed the misdeed to each other on their wedding night.
At the peak of the Red Scare, thirty-two of the forty-eight states had loyalty oaths of one kind or another. In New York, Oakley notes, it was necessary to swear a loyalty oath to gain a fishing permit. In Indiana loyalty oaths were administered to professional wrestlers. The Communist Control Act of 1954 made it a federal offense to communicate any Communist thoughts by any means, including by semaphore. In Connecticut it became illegal to criticize the government, or to speak ill of the army or the American flag. In Texas you could be sent to prison for twenty years for being a Communist. In Birmingham, Alabama, it was illegal merely to be seen conversing with a Communist.
HUAC issued millions of leaflets entitled “One Hundred Things You Should Know About Communism,” detailing what to look out for in the behavior of neighbors, friends, and family. Billy Graham, the esteemed evangelist, declared that more than one thousand decent-sounding American organizations were in fact fronts for Communist enterprises. Rudolf Flesch, author of the best-selling Why Johnny Can’t Read, insisted that a failure to teach phonics in schools was undermining democracy and paving the way for Communism. Westbrook Pegler, a syndicated columnist, suggested that anyone found to have been a Communist at any time in his life should simply be put to death. Such was the sensitivity, according to David Halberstam, that when General Motors hired a Russian automotive designer named Zora Arkus-Duntov, it described him in press releases, wholly fictitiously, as being “of Belgian extraction.”
No one exploited the fear to better effect than Joseph R. McCarthy, Republican senator from Wisconsin. In 1950, in a speech