[lbo-talk] "All Socialism Is Bad"

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

 From Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, _Outlaw Woman: A Memoir of the War Years, 
1960-1975_ (San Francisco: City Lights, 2001):

*****   The Communist Party had emerged in the United States in the 
wake of the Russian Revolution, and in 1938 the House Un-American 
Activities Committee (HUAC) was created to rout them out.  J. Edgar 
Hoover and his FBI were busy tracking communists and fellow 
travelers, and in early 1941, the Oklahoma Communist Party bookstore 
and homes of CP members were raided and trashed, followed by trials 
under the Criminal Syndicalism Act.  Some brave souls remained in 
Oklahoma, working clandestinely in the party, though most communists 
fled the state.

My father and mother and all my relatives, my schoolteachers, all the 
townspeople -- everyone in my universe -- were fiercely 
anti-communist.  When I was growing up, one billboard at the edge of 
Oklahoma City read, "All Socialism Is Bad."  Another screamed 
"Impeach Earl Warren," announcing that the U.S. Supreme Court was 
communist.  This movement gathered momentum after the Supreme Court's 
1954 desegregation decision in _Brown v. Board of Education_.  School 
integration was considered communist, and the White Citizen's Council 
never slept; among the unsolicited materials I received from them was 
a document that argued that the Metropolitan Opera  (which I listened 
to on the radio every Saturday) was communist.  This assertion 
derived from the fact that some of the performers were black.  I 
realized then that the definition of "reds" had transmogrified from 
the rebellious workers of my grandfather's generation to anyone who 
opposed white supremacy and racial segregation.

(p. xx)   *****
-- 
Yoshie

* Bring Them Home Now! <http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/>
* Calendars of Events in Columbus: 
<http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/calendar.html>, 
<http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/>
* Student International Forum: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/>
* Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/>
* Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio>
* Solidarity: <http://www.solidarity-us.org/>