“FAR RIGHT” IS SHORT FOR “FAR RIGHTEOUSNESS”: UNAMERICANISM AS A THREAT POSTURE And yet — in fact you need only draw a single thread at any point you choose out of the fabric of life and the run will make a pathway across the whole, and down that wider pathway each of the other threads will become successively visible, one by one. — Heimito von Doderer, DIE DÂIMONEN 1908 November 14: Emperor Kuang-hsü of China died. After the dust settled he would be succeeded by Hsüan-T’ung (Pu- yi), aged two years, under regency. In the presence of Kaiser Wilhelm at a dinner in Donaueschingen, Count Dietrich Hülsen-Haeseler, head of the German Imperial Military Cabinet, collapsed and died. On a farm in Wisconsin near Grand Chute (which is near Appleton), Joseph Raymond McCarthy was born into an Irish Catholic family. As a cradle Catholic, one might suppose that one of the things little Joe would learn early on was that his Savior had warned him not to build his life around resisting evil. Matthew 5:39: “Do not resist an evil person. If someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also.” Well, no, little Joe would not learn that. MCCARTHYISM HDT WHAT? INDEX UNAMERICANISM UNAMERICANISM 1917 June 15: Móric, Count Esterházy de Galantha replaced István, Count Tisza de Borosjenö et Szeged as Prime Minister of Hungary. Siegfried Sassoon sends a letter to his commanding officer with several copies to writers, journalists and politicians. He claims that the war was being deliberately prolonged by those who could stop it. “I believe that this war, upon which I entered as a war of defence and liberation, has now become a war of aggression and conquest.” 2:30 a.m. Austro-Hungarian forces counterattack in Trentino, successfully countered by the Italians. The day ends in stalemate. All Irish veterans of the Easter Rebellion still in custody were freed by the British government. The Espionage Act was signed by President Wilson. Among the provisions was one to empower the Postmaster-General to refuse to mail publications considered detrimental to the war effort. Many socialist and German language magazines would be banned from the US Mail. The act criminalized such interference with the draft as any attempt to discourage loyalty by explaining to a young man the possibility of conscientious objection. This was to be enforced by the federal Bureau of Investigation. UNAMERICANISM WORLD WAR I FBI 2 Copyright 2013 Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX UNAMERICANISM UNAMERICANISM 1930 During the ’30s and ’40s Harvard literature Professor F.O. Matthiessen would carry on a long-term romantic relationship with the painter Russell Cheney. In planning to spend his life with Cheney, Matthiessen would go so far as to ask his cohort in the Yale University secret society “Skull and Bones” to recognize their partnership. Although the couple shared a cottage in Kittery, Maine, he would elect to remain generally in the closet while on the job at Harvard University (this would not save him from a persecution-by-investigation by the House of Representatives’s Un-American Activities Committee, which would abuse every gay man with a decent job as a potential Commie spy). Caving in to the Catholic-led Legion for Decency, Hollywood revised its Motion Picture Production Code to forbid any reference to homosexuality in any motion picture. All film characters were to be presumed straight. MCCARTHYISM “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 3 HDT WHAT? INDEX UNAMERICANISM UNAMERICANISM 1935 George Smith Patton, Jr. was promoted to permanent rank of Lieutenant Colonel. He studied the feasibility of a Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.1 WORLD WAR II Joseph R. McCarthy received a degree in law at Marquette University (a Jesuit school) and was admitted to the Wisconsin bar. In college he had boxed as a heavyweight. During his years as a practicing attorney, he would make money on the side like Richard Nixon, in all-night poker games. 1. He concluded that “During a period of profound peace,” shielded by darkness and preceded by submarines, a sneak air attack would be a distinct possibility, that this would be entirely in accordance not only with Japan’s capabilities but also with its likely objectives, and commented that “It is the duty of the military to foresee and prepare against the worst possible eventuality.” 4 Copyright 2013 Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX UNAMERICANISM UNAMERICANISM 1938 May 26: Führer Adolf Hitler opened the first Volkswagen factory, in Wolfsburg, Germany. WORLD WAR II The United States House of Representatives established an Un-American Activities Committee, to investigate American citizens and others holding political beliefs that it would consider objectionable. UNAMERICANISM William Elden Bolcom was born in Seattle, son of Robert Samuel Bolcom and Virginia Lauermann. August 12: In New York City, Overture no.1 for orchestra by David Diamond was performed for the initial time. The initial hearings of the US House of Representatives’s Un-American Activities Committee took place in Washington DC. The concern of this committee would not be with Fascism (usually then considered as the problem du jour), but instead with Communism — instead of the Nazis of the right, was it the Commies of the left, behind the scenes in American labor unions and labor unrest, who were the ones causing all these problems? Führer Adolf Hitler ordered the mobilization of the German military. Oh-oh, no more Mr. Nice Guy. WORLD WAR II GERMANY “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 5 HDT WHAT? INDEX UNAMERICANISM UNAMERICANISM “I would like to thank Providence and the Almighty for choosing me of all people to be allowed to wage this battle for Germany.” — Adolf Hitler, March 1936 WORLD WAR II GERMANY August 13: The US House of Representatives’s Un-American Activities Committee began an investigation into alleged Communists in the C.I.O. August 19: As part of their campaign against the New Deal, the US House of Representatives’s Un-American Activities Committee began 4 days of testimony from disgruntled members of the Federal Theater Project about the Communists within the project and their influence. 1939 Joseph Raymond McCarthy was elected as a circuit judge in Wisconsin, in part by visiting farms and businesses and persuading voters to suppose that his opponent, who did not campaign at all, was a rich old man (he had no more respect for truthfulness than did, for instance, Richard Nixon). MCCARTHYISM UNAMERICANISM E.B. White2 drove out Route 62 from Boston to Concord to visit Walden Pond, staying overnight at the Concord Inn for $4.25 (including meals), and then early the next morning walked out Main Street and Thoreau Street and out Route 126 to Walden Pond. 2. Elwyn Brooks White (1899-1985) was the guy who had defined the style for the opening “The Talk of the Town” section of The New Yorker, so beloved by persons awaiting dental attention. At this point in his life, however, he was writing for Harper’s. Eventually he would write a classic children’s story entitled CHARLOTTE’S WEB, which does not take place at a farm near Concord and in which Henry Thoreau is not a character. 6 Copyright 2013 Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX UNAMERICANISM UNAMERICANISM He wrote about this experience, in the form of a letter to Henry Thoreau, in a book of essays titled ONE MAN’S MEAT. I have always wanted to see Walden Pond. The account which you left of your sojourn there is, you will be amused to learn, a document of increasing pertinence; each year it seems to gain a little headway, as the world loses ground. We may all be transcendental yet, whether we like it or not. As our common complexities increase, any tale of individual simplicity (and yours is the best written and the cockiest) acquires a new fascination; as our goods accumulate, but not our well-being, your report of an existence without material adornment takes on a certain awkward credibility. “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 7 HDT WHAT? INDEX UNAMERICANISM UNAMERICANISM In this essay he played with various of Thoreau’s lines, as when he echoed the opening of the chapter “Solitude” by saying “It was a delicious evening, Henry, when the whole body is one sense, and imbibes delight through every pore, if I may coin a phrase.” The pines felled by the hurricane of the previous year were still lying around, and it was from the roots of one of these that he extracted a stone to place upon the growing cairn. In all likelihood, in moving this stone White was unintentionally tampering with the cabin site, for when the archeologist Roland Wells Robbins inspected this eroded root system on November 11, 1945, he realized that some of the stones pulled out of the ground by this ball of roots were in that spot because they had been utilized by Thoreau as the foundation for his chimney: Driving through town, White noticed that Concordians seemed to be as much the victims of their own machinery and their own livelihoods during the first half of the 20th Century as Thoreau had reported them to be during the first half of the 19th. October 25: Germany decreed that all Jews in Poland aged 14-60 were required to work on government labor projects. ANTISEMITISM The initial performance in the newly built State Theater in Athens was Giacomo Puccini’s Madama Butterfly. In attendance on this night were King George and, at the special invitation of the Greek government, the son and daughter-in-law of the composer.