FIGHT BACK! MINE MILL VIGOROUSLY ATTACKS THE RED SCARE [HUNTER GRAY/HUNTER BEAR FEBRUARY 1 2004]
[The historic, 1952 Mine-Mill leaflet, "Speak
Up, America !" is reproduced
at the lower portion of this page -- as published in the Salt Lake City
Tribune on October 6, '52.]
As the Red Scare mounted in the U.S. of the
latter 1940s, reactionaries and
their Congressional allies moved to enact blatantly repressive legislation.
An early example was the viciously anti-labor Taft-Hartley Act of 1947.
Witch-hunting Federal and state anti-radical "hearings" mushroomed. The
Attorney General's "Subversive List" -- summarily and arbitrarily outlawing
hundreds of organizations -- was quickly initiated. Criminal prosecution
for simple beliefs multiplied rapidly.
In 1950, the Internal Security Act -- named the McCarran Act after Senator
Pat McCarran of Nevada [who was also known as the "Senator from Spain" for
his undying admiration of the Fascist Franco] -- was enacted with much
flag-waving and drum-beating. Among its many provisions was the infamous
Subversive Activities Control Board -- and another provision provided for
the concentration camp incarceration of radicals or suspected radicals
during any one of several President-decreed states of "national emergency."
Old concentration camps -- i.e., those used to hold Japanese-Americans
during World War II -- were reactivated; new camps were built. Full
rosters of camp personnel were hired.
The FBI quickly began to feather out its existent radical lists -- and to
develop a variety of new ones.
Many, many thousands of Americans were placed on
these lists.
All of these -- and other poisonous fruits of this hideous epoch --
constituted blatant and massive violations of the U.S. Bill of Rights at
every point.
Under U.S. pressure, the Canadian government moved in a similar
witch-hunting direction.
In early October, 1952, the U.S. Senate Internal Security Subcommittee which
worked very closely with J. Edgar Hoover et al. -- and which included Pat
McCarran and racist U.S. Senator Jim Eastland of Mississippi and others of
that ilk -- came to Salt Lake City to conduct "hearings" designed to attack
the radical, militant, democratic, equalitarian International Union of
Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers [formerly the Western Federation of Miners]
and its leadership.
The Union, fighting hard as always, courageously put, among other places,
the following advertisement in the Salt Lake City Tribune of October 6, 1952
[reproduced at the bottom of this page] -- Hard To Believe But . . .There
Are Concentration Camps In America: SPEAK UP, AMERICA!
The Internal Security Act was finally repealed in 1971.
