Six days a week, every week, from 1936 to 1962, Eleanor Roosevelt had a column called My Day published by United Feature Syndicate in New York. Here is a snippet from her April 19, 1952 column, during the height of the McCarthy craze.
NEW YORK, APRIL 19- I wonder if many of my readers noticed that an organization that seems to stem from the old American Firster group was formed the other day to prove that Dwight D. Eisenhower is closely associated with Communists. This type of thing is becoming so ludicrous that each time it happens we should point it out and say to ourselves: “How stupid can we be? Is hysterical fear turning us all into moron?”
On May 3rd, she wrote a lengthier column about how a school organization in Englewood, New Jersey had been intimidated into rescinding an invitation to Mary McLeod Bethune to speak with them because of her alleged ties to communists.
Back then, these groups were a fringe. After all, the Republican Party went on to nominate Eisenhower as their nominee in 1952, and then again in 1956.
Today, these people are a dominant force in the GOP.
You can peruse Eleanor’s columns here.
Fringe in 1952? Perhaps slightly more blatantly nutty, but hardly fringe. Sen. Joseph McCarthy shot to national fame in 1950 by claiming that the US State Dept was infested with communists.
Eleanor, however, was all too familiar with these nefarious folks. Silently stood up to some of them in 1939: Nobody Had to Ask Her. And more pointedly in a 1947 My Day column.
Eleanor Roosevelt was a great lady and a great progressive liberal.
And in 1951 McC gave a speech denouncing Gen George C Marshall, Ike’s boss in WW2, as a Stalin appeaser. When Ike, supposedly furious at Joe in private for questioning Marshall’s loyalty, campaigned the next year in Wis and McC was on the podium with him, he failed to utter a word of disapproval.
Fringe perhaps but a mighty powerful one, not dissimilar to the Tea Party of today.
Sure, there were many fringe groups on the far right. One of their rallying points in the late 40s was the American Mercury magazine in its decline.
In the early 1950s they strongly supported Gen. McArthur and Dewey, and they hated Truman.
From what I have been reading, it was the fall of their hero Joe McCarthy in 1953 that left a political vacuum in the GOP, and an anxiety to fill it.
It is important to understand that that from their very beginnings in 1958, the goal of the JBS was always to take over the Republican Party and from there, take over the country.
http://www.democratichub.com/posts/4850/default.aspx
Today, these people are a dominant force in the GOP.
More like THE dominant force if you ask me.
So Fox News can’t just appeal to white Southern culture anymore, they must appeal to white Southern racist homophobic culture, a slowly diminishing minority of white folks who actually live in the South (even of those who habitually vote Republican).
Fox News is grasping at stereotypes and hoping to hold on to an audience of national anti-gay and race-bigoted self-privileged white folk. Southern now is just a shtick for these folks.
If Fox wants southern stereotypes, maybe they should just acquire the rights to the Dikes of Hazzard and do a sequel. It was quite popular, as I recall.
Aaaaah-
DikesDukes, dammit! Freudian slip on my part, maybe.Holy Shit. Your slip was a much better idea.
I agree with BooMan. That would make a great contemporary sitcom. Either a sweet couple who have moved to Lynchburg VA or live in Hazard KY or Washington GA or Tuscumbia AL.
Could be fine church-going people—until they go out of state and come back married.
Being a sitcom, it all ends well with lots of respect all around.
So was Mayberry RFD, the longrunning syndication of the Andy Griffith show. And set in a romanticized version of Andy Griffith’s home town of Mount Airy, NC.
For fictionalized versions of the conflicts in the current South, read the mystery novels of Donna Andrews and Rita Mae Brown (for Virginia) and Margaret Maron (for North Carolina). Not that these are the only good Southern writers around.
Seems I have a compulsion to drag out Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil every now and then. Just watched the movie for the umpteenth time about a month ago. Have you ever spent any time around Blairsville, GA? My fire dept. shift commander used to vacation there back in the 70s and wound up retiring to that area. He used stop on the way there from south Florida to muck around in the Okefenokee with some of the locals and brought back some really interesting snake stories, among others.
Blairsville is not that far from where I grew up in South Carolina. I had friends in Young Harris forty years ago that we used to visit. Did not spend much time in Blairsville. Suches is a major trail stop on the Appalachian Trail; it has a store for restocking.
The closest to the Okefenokee that I’ve been was doing town meeting workshops in Statenville and Homerville in 1978. I missed an opportunity to canoe the Okefenokee in the 1980s.
I’m less familiar with Savannah than I am with Charleston.
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