The Loud Silence of Francine Green (21 page)

My legs shook. Graduation was in five days. Would I still graduate? Would I be able to march? What would Sister do to me? She would never understand. I was pretty sure my father wouldn't, either. My mother? Maybe. I kept walking.

I hoped Sister had gone home, but the light in her office still glowed. I walked slowly into the school and down the hallway to her door. I opened the door with my sweaty hands.

Sister was writing in a notebook. I stood there watching her, my heart pounding noisily in my chest. 1 was Joan of Arc facing the French soldiers, Ensign Pulver confronting the captain. Oh, I knew Sister Basil wasn't evil, that she cared about us in her own way, but still, what she did and how she did it was not right. Even if Sister Basil did not change one bit, even if I got into trouble, I had to speak up.

"Sister," I said from the doorway, "Sister ... I mean ... I want to—"

"Francine," she said, looking up at me, "what on earth are you trying to say?"

I swallowed hard. "Well, Sister," I said, "I'll tell you."

And I did. This time I really did.

As the 1950s began, Americans were frightened. Communist parties had gained control in Eastern Europe, China, North Korea, and Southeast Asia. Would America be next? Were there spies and secret agents working in this country to make that happen? Who was a communist agent? How could we tell?

In the early years of the twentieth century, thousands of Americans had joined the Communist Party or other organizations later called communist or subversive. Many joined because they saw the party as a way to take a stand against the excesses of capitalism, the oppression of workers, racism, anti-immigrant feelings, and, later, the poverty and massive unemployment of the Depression. As more became known about the destructive aspects of the Soviet government, the increasingly authoritarian nature of the party, and the brutality of some of its leaders, a number of party members resigned, but in the minds of many they remained "Reds," so called because of the color of the Soviet flag.

Some American politicians took advantage of the "Red scare" of the late 1940s-early 1950s to further their political ends. The most notorious of these was Joseph McCarthy, a Republican senator from Wisconsin from 1947 to 1957. As chairman of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, he claimed to be using his congressional power to uncover a communist conspiracy. In fact, although he ruined many people's lives and livelihoods by subjecting them to unfounded and unfair accusations, he never proved that one single person was a communist. The use of investigation and public accusation, innuendo, and guilt by association to discredit people came to be known as McCarthyism.

The paranoid hunt for communists and spies lasted for many years, long after Senator McCarthy was censured by the Senate and died in disgrace. More than six hundred college professors were fired because of unsubstantiated rumors about their political affiliations. Public libraries were forced to remove books by or about communists, socialists, liberals, and in some cases African Americans and Jews. It is estimated that by 1956, 13.5 million Americans had been required to pass some sort of loyalty test in order to be hired for a job.

Critics saw McCarthyism as an attack on freedom of speech and freedom of association, which they thought more dangerous than the threat of communism itself. The Constitution, they said, gave Americans the right to free speech, to join together in protest. But those who spoke out found themselves called suspicious and subversive.
Like those named "communists," they endured enormous pressure. Victims faced harassment by the FBI, loss of a job, name-calling in the press, estrangement from friends or family, physical attacks, and, many times, imprisonment. Fearful of becoming victims, Americans became increasingly conformist and conservative in manners, dress, and politics.

McCarthyism was especially harmful to writers and entertainers. In 1947 the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) began an investigation into the motion picture industry McCarthy later claimed that more than two thousand actors, writers, directors, and producers were communists, although he was never able to identify them. And in June 1950, three former FBI agents and a television producer published "Red Channels," a pamphlet listing the names of writers, directors, and performers they claimed were members of subversive organizations. A free copy was sent to everyone involved in hiring people in the entertainment industry. All the people listed in the pamphlet were blacklisted—denied employment—unless they proved they had "reformed," which meant naming other supposed "communists."

Many of those accused could no longer find work. Some had their passports taken away. Others were jailed for refusing to give the names of people who might be communists. Ultimately over three hundred twenty Hollywood actors, screenwriters, and technicians were blacklisted. At least two of them committed suicide, and three others died as a direct result of their harassment. Jacob Mandelbaum is a fictional
victim of the anticommunist "witch hunt" and a symbol of those who lost their livelihoods or their lives because of McCarthyism.

At the end of 1949 the Soviet Union announced the successful testing of an atomic bomb. The fact that their communist enemy now possessed a nuclear weapon, followed by the invasion of South Korea by communist North Korea in June 1950, left the American people even more frightened and began an era of fear and covert warfare that became known as the Cold War. A Gallup poll taken in 1950 found that 70 percent of the American people believed the Soviet Union wanted to take over the world, 75 percent thought American cities would be bombed in the next war, and 19 percent thought the next war would wipe out the human race.

The newly formed Federal Civil Defense Administration (FCDA) and the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) acted to calm the fears of the public and disseminate information on how to prepare for and survive the expected nuclear attack. Both agencies published materials to educate the public, in which the catastrophic results of a nuclear attack—such as burns, radiation sickness, and death—were played down.

"Surviving Under Atomic Attack," from the FCDA, sold for ten cents and began with this cheerful statement: "You can live through an atom bomb raid and you won't have to have a Geiger counter, protective clothing, or special training in order to do it." Nonetheless, sales of Geiger counters and so-called "radiation-proof" suits soared.

The FCDA also distributed information on building your
own bomb or fallout shelter or preparing your basement to serve as a shelter. There were serious debates over whether people had the right to shoot outsiders who tried to get into their shelters.

Air-raid sirens were set up across the country and tested monthly. Cities made plans for the evacuation of their residents, based on the assumption that there would be some minutes of warning before an attack. Air-raid drills were held regularly in thousands of American cities.

Schoolchildren were taught to "duck and cover." I was one of them. At a shout of "Drop!" from the teacher, we crawled under our desks and covered our heads with our hands. This sounds ridiculous today, given what we now know about the destructive power of nuclear weapons, but at the time we did what we were told and hoped for the best. Walking home from school, I used to scan the skies in fear, cringing at the sound of airplanes and looking for a handy ditch to jump into in case of an attack.

Catholic schools in the 1950s, when I attended, practiced more humiliation and corporal punishment than they do now. I didn't know any nuns who made students stand in a wastebasket, but I attended schools where nuns beat boys' hands with a ruler, where girls and boys were punished by being made to change into each other's clothes, where faces with a hint of makeup were scrubbed with Ajax cleanser. I knew students who were told that their divorced parents were going to Hell. My school had nuns who spent their days red faced with anger, but there was also a sweet young novice with red hair peeping from beneath her veil
who was warm and kind, and there were dedicated nuns who sacrificed their time and themselves for "their" girls. Not all nuns were, or are, Sister Basils.

There actually was a baseball team named the Hollywood Stars, and they did wear shorts for a few games. And by the way, Jacob Mandelbaum was right. In 1950 Frankie Kelleher of the Hollywood Stars led the Pacific Coast League with 40 home runs. Such a slugger, that boy, as Jacob would say.

If you wish to know more about the early 1950s, here are some places to start:

Michael Barson.
Better Dead Than Red! A Nostalgic Look at the Golden Years of Russiaphobia, Red-Baiting, and Other Commie Madness.

Sally Belfrage.
Un-American Activities: A Memoir of the Fifties.

JoAnn Brown. '"A Is for Atom, B Is for Bomb': Civil Defense in American Public Education,"
The Journal of American History,
June 1988.

Civil Defense Office. National Security Resources Board Document 130, "Survival Under Atomic Attack." At
www.schouwer-online.de
.

Dan Epstein.
20th Century Top Culture.

Eric E Goldman.
The Crucial Decade—and After: America, 1945–1960.

Lois G. Gordon.
The Columbia Chronicles of American Life, 1910–1992.

Joy Hakim.
A History of Us: All the People,
Book 10.

Stuart A. Kallen. A
Cultural History of the United States Through the Decades.

Milton Meltzer.
Witches and Witch-Hunts: A History of Persecution.

Howard Zinn.
Postwar America: 1945–1971.