Overzealous 1950s American Demagogues

Post World War II United States was an interesting era, with the space race and missile gap taking over the foreign policy headlines, television and movies entering the entertainment forefront, and family values in the suburbs making America one of the most desired places to live. Yet among post-war prosperity and family comfort, two ideas terrified America from coast to coast - communist infiltration and nuclear fallout. Many feared that 1- Soviet sleepers peered into American homes with impunity, and 2- doomsday would arrive with massive amounts of nuclear weapons bring dropped wiping out all American and Russian cities, and, eventually, the whole world (and the only people able to stop it were the incompetent Peter Sellers, George C. Scott, and Slim Pickens).

These fears were not unwarranted. In January 1950, State Department official Alger Hiss was found guilty for passing classified documents on to Communist Whittaker Chambers. Later that month, British physicist Klaus Fuchs was arrested for giving atomic secrets to the Soviet Union during the Second World War. Soon afterwards, U.S. citizens Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were revealed as atomic spies. The National Security Council declared that the public was not as safe as they thought. The average American family was becoming increasingly suspicious, with good reason. Communist dictator Fidel Castro's rise to power in Cuba (90 miles from the coast of FL) caused increased vigilance on the borders.

Elsewhere during the early 1950s, the United Nations, in a coalition led by the United States was fighting back North Korean communists in an attempt to defeat East Asian Communism, as China had already fallen and the domino effect was threatening the impressionable rural nations such as Korea, Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. Cuba's fall to Castro's communism was also cause for nuclear concern as the Soviets were probably supplying the island nation with arms, easily in range of the American South. (But honestly, southern man better keep his head and don't forget what the good book said, southern change gonna come at last, now your crosses are burning fast. It was a political thing anyway, if they blew up the hicks it would have been worldwide bedlam.)

With all this trouble, it would be sufficient to say that the country was in desperate need for something or someone to rise above the rest of the political atmosphere to take charge of the Cold War situation. Senator Joseph McCarthy from Wisconsin became that demagogue. The Republican provided acerbic probes into the lives of public figures in the United States government which began in 1950 in Wheeling, West Virginia. Senator McCarthy revealed that 205 members of the State Department were shaping communist policy. McCarthy was the watchdog who revealed the fore-mentioned Hiss, Fuchs, and Rosenbergs. The Americans were seeing concrete evidence of an American Hero uprooting these traitors and foreign spies, giving the country the feeling of safety that was desperately needed during a time of homeland insecurity. Many thought that McCarthy's accusations were unfairly exorbitant. More found him to be the safety respite he really is; a savior for frightened American families hiding in their bomb shelters.

In the meantime, a hawk was prancing around the Pacific, a raging bull overstepping UN bounds in an attempt to arouse a third world war, devastating the planet and human race. Some oriental men who fought back (that's what people do in wars) against their capitalist transgressors were pinned as Chinese (apparently certain army generals think they all look the same), then pinned as Communists (not everyone marched across the country with Mao), then pinned as worthy of nuclear annihilation. Then the Gomer Pyle of the Army in the Pacific General Douglas MacArthur (well he probably didn't have the soothing vocal talent of Jim Nabors, but he was the local fool) raged forth with insubordinary plans to bomb China back to the Qing dynasty, atomically. With the dry cool sense of a western rustic haberdasher, President Harry Truman removed the petulant General from his post. One Army corporal claimed to have seen him literally kicking and screaming while dragged off of the USS whatever. He may have returned to the Phillipines, where he failed in his first attempt, but he never returned to Korea, where he failed in his only attempt. President Truman, a liberal, knew the proper time and place to drop the bomb. It won the Second World War for the Allies. Apparently General Pyle did not have the sense of a Missouri liberal. He wanted to drop nuclear arms on the nation with the largest human population on earth. Had Leonard Lawrence made it off the island without killing himself, he may have made a better insane general than that insane general.