Patriot Acts

In September 1950, four months into the Korean War, Congress passed the draconian Internal Security Act (ISA), known as the McCarran Act, after its sponsor, the Nevada Democratic Senator Pat McCarran, a son of immigrants who hated immigrants. The act required all members of the Communist Party and all Communist "front" organizations to register with the government, deprived "subversives" of their right to passports and to government employment and subjected aliens deemed "subversive" to exclusion or deportation. Most notoriously, it granted the President emergency powers to intern "potential subversives" in concentration camps.

This "preventive detention" provision, which remained on the statute books for twenty years, had not featured in McCarran's original bill. Its authors were, in fact, McCarran's liberal opponents--including Hubert Humphrey--who had hoped to sabotage the bill by offering an alternative that was even tougher on Communism. Alas, the alternative ended up as an addition. After Truman vetoed the bill, Humphrey found himself arguing in the Senate in support of the veto on the grounds that the bill was wrong to guarantee the right of habeas corpus to the "despicable traitors" who would be interned in the camps.

The ISA was perhaps the worst legislative excrescence of McCarthyism, though Senator Joe McCarthy had nothing to do with it. The wave of domestic repression of the late 1940s and early '50s that bears his name--also referred to as the Red Scare, the blacklist, the witch hunt, the cold war purge--was, of course, the work of an array of social forces, not a single individual. Nonetheless, if it is to be called after an individual, McCarran's claim is stronger than McCarthy's.

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