History & Hysteria

The President, in his weekly press conference, had another label to stick on the investigations of Communist activities, which he once called a red herring. This time it was "hysteria."

"Are you confident that no part of your executive branch is gripped by this hysteria?" one reporter wanted to know. Harry

Truman replied firmly that he was; he would clear the hysteria out if he knew of any. He was pretty relaxed about the whole thing.

In his best schoolmasterly manner, he advised the newsmen to bone up on the history of the Alien and Sedition laws of the 1790s. They would be surprised, he said, at the parallel. If they would begin reading about the administration of John Adams and go on through Thomas Jefferson's they would find out all about it.

Not to Hell. The hysteria of those days, the President went on, had subsided soon after Jefferson took office, and the country had not gone to hell after all. It was not going to hell today. The present hysteria, as he called it, was the kind of thing which happened after every great crisis and every great war.

Well, where did this hysteria come from? It was true that Harry Truman could hardly be blamed for Senator Bourke Hickenlooper's wild journey through the Atomic Energy Commission files with blunderbuss and loaded innuendo. Nor could he be blamed for the House Un-American Activities Committee's crass demand for a list of textbooks from 107 colleges (which Mr. Truman dismissed with an approving reference to a Washington Post cartoon--see cut).

Whose Headlines? But the fact was that the executive departments were busier than any other agencies, and quite properly, in the investigation and prosecution of Communist agents. It was the Department of Justice which staged the comic-opera search of the ship on which Stowaway Gerhart Eisler made his escape. It was also still holding his wife on Ellis Island. It was Justice which was responsible for most of the headlines with its trials of Alger Hiss, Judith Coplon and the eleven Communist leaders. It was Harry Truman who by executive order had set up a loyalty investigation of 2,500,000 Government employees. And it was Attorney General Tom Clark who boasted a fortnight ago that "under President Truman more topnotch Communists have been convicted than during our entire history."

Was the U.S. actually in the grip of a Red hysteria? New York Times correspondents across the U.S. reported on the state of the public mind. Most people seemed to want Communist espionage and infiltration searched out and exposed. But they also wanted it done by due process, and without some of the loudmouthed and irresponsible accusations that had gone with it.

*The parallel wasn't quite parallel. The restrictive Alien and Sedition acts, sponsored by Alexander Hamilton's Federalists, were passed by the party in power and signed by the President at a time when the U.S. feared a war with France that never happened. The Federalists feared the subversive influence of French revolutionaries, and also wanted to muzzle the Jeffersonian Republican (i.e., Democratic) press.

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