Trump's "Outrageous Attacks against American Freedom of Speech and Academic Freedom"
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:
- 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 suppression 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…
In March 1936 he began publishing a weekly political newspaper called Social Justice and it reportedly reached a peak circulation of about a million subscribers in the late 1930s, making it one of the most widely read publications in America, having more than ten times the combined circulation of the Nation and the New Republic, the leading liberal weeklies.
In 1955 Daniel Bell published The New American Right, a collection of essays by leading mainstream American academics, and in 1963 he reissued that same work in much expanded form as The Radical Right. McCarthyism was a major part of the analysis and the last two essays by sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset totaled more than 140 pages with both of these focused upon that subject. Lipset demonstrated that the political campaign of the Wisconsin senator shared many of its ideological roots and much of its social base with the earlier 1930s movement of Father Charles Coughlin, a hugely popular anti-Communist radio priest from neighboring Michigan.
Indeed, McCarthyism heavily drew its support from Midwesterners, Catholics, and particular ethnic groups such as Irish-Americans and German-Americans, with McCarthy himself falling into all these categories. But less than a decade earlier, these exact same groups had also been the strongest supporters of Coughlin and his own anti-Communist movement.
Liberals, leftists, and Communists had led the sweeping political purges that began in the early 1940s, with much of America’s Anglophile East Coast WASP establishment also heavily involved in such attacks. Millions of Coughlin’s erstwhile followers enlisted in McCarthy’s anti-Communist crusade when it began a few years later, and these exact same groups were his primary targets. So surely many of the ordinary Americans who supported the senator must have regarded his campaigns as political payback.
Not long before Coughlin was suppressed and eventually purged by the legal actions of the Roosevelt Administration, he had probably been America’s most powerful and influential media figure. His regular radio audience may have been the largest in the world when he was gradually driven from the airwaves, while his weekly political newspaper had one of our country’s largest circulations when it was banned.
Obviously none of the victims purged by the later anti-Communist campaigns of McCarthy or his political allies ever had a media presence even remotely on that scale.
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A theoretical physicist by training, Mr. Unz serves as founder and chairman of UNZ.org, a content-archiving website providing free access to many hundreds of thousands of articles from prominent periodicals of the last hundred and fifty years. From 2007 to 2013, he also served as publisher of The American Conservative, a small opinion magazine, and had previously served as chairman of Wall Street Analytics, Inc., a financial services software company which he founded in New York City in 1987. He holds undergraduate and graduate degrees from Harvard University, Cambridge University, and Stanford University, and is a past first-place winner in the Intel/Westinghouse Science Talent Search. He was born in Los Angeles in 1961.
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