by Ron Unz, The Unz Review:
Over the last couple of months President Donald Trump and his administration have launched a series of outrageous attacks against American freedom of speech and academic freedom, and critics have often denounced these as examples of McCarthyism, the notorious anti-Communist political movement of the 1950s.
This prompted me to carefully investigate that important historical topic and publish a trilogy of long articles on the subject:
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- American Pravda: McCarthyism, Part I – The Man
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • April 28, 2025 • 12,700 Words - American Pravda: McCarthyism, Part II – Political Payback
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • May 5, 2025 • 7,100 Words - American Pravda: McCarthyism, Part III – The Jewish Angle
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • May 12, 2025 • 11,400 Words
One important aspect of my analysis was noting that the “Red Scare” of the late 1940s and 1950s may have partially represented a retaliatory campaign of political payback reacting to the “Brown Scare” of a few years earlier, with the roles of victims and victimizers having been switched.
During the late 1930s and early 1940s, the Roosevelt Administration and its leftist allies had orchestrated a sweeping ideological purge of conservatives and right-wingers. But those important events have generally been ignored or minimized in most of our later histories, so that the possible connection to the anti-Communist campaigns that followed a few years later has been lost.
Ironically enough, much of the repressive political machinery that was so widely employed against Communists and leftists in that latter campaign had originally been created to attack the opposite side of the political spectrum and was heavily used for that purpose. This included the notorious House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and the Smith Act.
As I explained in my article, that earlier campaign of censorship and political suppressive targeting right-wingers had actually been far more extreme and dramatic than what came afterwards at the hands of McCarthy and his ideological allies. But since that former history receives so little attention in our standard textbooks or mainstream media stories, few are aware of those important facts.
One of the leading figures driven from public life in that earlier purge had been Father Charles Coughlin of Michigan, the popular anti-Communist radio priest of the 1930s, who usually rated just a sentence or two in my standard history textbooks.
Although I’d certainly been aware of Coughlin, I realized that until last month his name had never once appeared in any of the many articles that I had published over the last couple of decades dealing with political or ideological matters. Furthermore, as I explored Coughlin’s story I discovered that he had actually been a vastly more popular and important figure in American political life that I had ever imagined. I drew most of this new information from the award-winning 1982 book Voices of Protest by the distinguished historian Alan Brinkley, along with Coughlin’s 7,500 word Wikipedia article.
As I explained:
Launched in the late 1920s, Coughlin’s syndicated weekly radio show eventually became political and grew tremendously popular. At his 1930s peak Coughlin had amassed an enormous national audience estimated at 30 million regular listeners, amounting to roughly one-quarter of the entire American population, probably making him the world’s most influential broadcaster. By 1934 the priest was receiving over 10,000 letters of support each day, considerably more than President Franklin Roosevelt or anyone else…
