The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
The land of the free, the home of the brave
On the night of Saturday, Feb. 4, 1950, the Captain L.C. Fuessenich Post, VFW of Torrington conducted its 19th annual dinner dance at St. Peter’s Hall in that city. In the following day’s edition of the Hartford Courant, the main speaker of the evening was quoted as follows:
“People who should know better are engaged in promoting disunity among Americans by dividing our people along racial and religious lines, thereby creating an opening through which Communists hope to walk in establishing a totalitarian state. Protestants, Catholics and Jews served together, fought together and died together in all our wars, to preserve the ideals of liberty, equality and freedom which have made our country the greatest nation on earth.”
He urged the Veterans of Foreign Wars to lead the fight in stamping out bigotry in the United States.
Five days later, U.S. Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy, Republican of Wisconsin, declared in a speech in Wheeling, W.Va., that there were 57 individuals who “would appear to be either card carrying members or certainly loyal to the Communist Party” in the State Department “still helping to shape our foreign policy.” On various dates, McCarthy was understood to use the numbers 205, 81 or 10, in lieu of 57, in quantifying his charge (The 1950 version of “alternative facts”).
Four months later, on June 25, 1950, the Korean War started. In five short years, Americans were again confronted with war, which they had hoped they had put behind them in the summer of 1945.
As the Korean War progressed, so did loyalty investigations in Washington, championed in part by Sen. McCarthy, damaging the careers and lives of many loyal citizens, all of which has been amply documented elsewhere. In 1952, a year of our quadrennial election for the White House, statements similar to those heard on that night in Torrington in 1950 were heard on a national level. In a campaign stop at New York’s Madison Square Garden on Aug. 27, 1952, Democratic presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson addressed a convention of The American Legion as follows:
“True patriotism … is based on tolerance and a large measure of humility. There are men among us who use “patriotism” as a club for attacking other Americans. What can we say for the self-styled patriot who thinks that a Negro, a Jew, a Catholic or a Japanese-American is less an American than he? That betrays the deepest article of our faith, the belief in individual liberty and equality which has always been the heart and soul of the American idea.”
Continuing, Stevenson said: “To strike freedom of the mind with the fist of patriotism is an old and ugly subtlety.” And, “
We are American citizens first, not hyphenated, not splinter groups for the political parties to pander to, not participants in an oral wrestling match.
Most all of us favor free enterprise for business. Let us also favor free enterprise for the mind.” Like the speaker in Torrington two years earlier, Stevenson urged the American Legion to be vigilant in protecting the American birthright.
On March 9, 1954, on CBS’ “See It Now,” Edward R. Murrow challenged Sen. McCarthy on national television. He concluded with the following: “We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. … We will not walk in fear, one of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason … and remember that we are not descended from fearful men — not from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate and to defend causes that were, for the moment, unpopular.”
And, “We can deny our heritage and our history, but we cannot escape responsibility for the result.”
Is it not ironic that it was the Russian novelist, Leo Tolstoy, who challenged: “How, then, shall we live?”
Ten years after the Torrington speaker called for an end to bigotry along racial and religious lines, then-candidate John F. Kennedy, speaking against religious bigotry in Houston, reminded his audience that there was no religious test at the Alamo. When president on June 11, 1963, Kennedy added that there was no racial test for soldiers in Berlin or Vietnam. As Murrow said, “…we cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home.”
The foregoing quotes recognize that fundamentally we are American citizens first, not hyphenated, not splinter groups for the political parties to pander to, not participants in an oral wrestling match. The authors of those quotes cautioned against disunity, distrust, religious prejudice, racial prejudice, a denial of our heritage, pejorative condemnation without proof, ad hominen attacks.
The preamble to the Constitution begins: “We the People,” and speaks toward goals of “common defence,” “general welfare.” Those goals are intended for all, not simply to those who are adherents of a particular party, or to those who were here first, or to those whose vocal chords are the loudest. The Constitution “is ordained and established” for the United States, not the trivial blue or red states. The architects of Matthew’s (5:14) and Winthrop’s “city on a hill” are not politicians, but those “people” who sought and continue to seek “the blessings of liberty” for themselves, guided hopefully in Lincoln’s words, “by the better angels of our nature.”
The speaker on that wintry night in 1950 was Frank Hogan of Torrington. He was my father.