Communists In America

Joseph McCarthy, Roy Cohn, and J Edgar Hoover all tried to prove that Martin Luther King Jr. was a communist but failed.  They couldn't openly destroy the man just for being black, so they found a way to disguise it.  Everybody hated communists, so they were determined to pin that label on him.

King knew people were coming for his neck from a fairly young age, so he made sure nobody could pin that tag on him.  In all honesty, while he did everything he could to improve the fate of the working man, I don't think he was a communist.  I think he was just a liberal, but he believed in private ownership and other capitalistic principles. 

There were communists in the movement, and everybody knew it.  I don't mean left-leaning socialists that the GOP now calls communists; I mean acolytes of Trotsky bent on an overthrow of the government.  I can't say that I blame them.  Communism offered to overthrow their oppressors and guarantee equality with their former masters.  For an African living in America in the twentieth century, I can see how that would be appealing.  

At the time, nobody really knew that Communism couldn't deliver on its promises.   George Orwell had an idea things might go bad for the communists in 1945 when he had the pigs say that some animals were more equal than others.  In China and the Soviet Union, that certainly proved to be true.  It might also have been a clue in 1940 when a fellow revolutionary put a pick into Trotsky's skull.  

Even with all these warning signs, I don't know that I could blame anyone living on the underside of Jim Crow America for clinging to that as some sort of last hope for a better life.  With a big faction of white America calling them communists just for demanding equal rights, I imagine quite a few thought to themselves, "Why not?"

In 1977 when a house painter planted a bomb in Beth Israel Synagog, the reason given was that Rabbi Nussbaum and his followers were communists.   Having known several members of Beth Israel in 1977, I can tell you they absolutely were not communists.  Some were more capitalist than I am.

I'm not sure how communism became the big bad in America.  Rosevelt had broken up the trusts ten years before the Russian Revolution, but I guess there were enough mega bankers left to turn the public tide against it.  A lot of what Huey Long proposed was technically communism, but nobody dared say it because he was so powerful.  

Communism didn't work for the Russians, so I'm pretty sure it wouldn't have worked here.  There weren't ever any real efforts to make America Communist, though, so I don't really get the fear.  Maybe people had called things communist that wasn't for so long that people began to see it as a threat everywhere.  

In the end, all the efforts to destroy King politically were pointless because somebody decided to destroy him mortally.  For a while, calling somebody a communist became something of a joke.  There weren't many real communists floating around America, and nobody cared about the ones that were.  Everything old is new again.  All of our ancient prejudices are bubbling to the surface again, and accusing somebody of being a communist is a serious threat again.  There are fifty-five years between 1968 when Martin Luther King was killed, and 2023.  Fifty-five is a good, round number.  I'd like to say we've made significant advances since then, but that wouldn't be true.