In a time when hatred, ignorance, and bigotry are all regularly promoted by major candidates as "patriotic," this letter to the Editor is worth reposting.
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A local paper in my little beach town recently printed
a letter from a reader who extolled the virtues of Senator Joseph McCarthy and
his extraordinary Americanism, devoted to ridding the free world (or all of it,
for that matter) from the Red Peril of Communism. And since The Donald has also devoted his
campaign to ridding the United States of immigrants, legal or not, here’s a
story that bears telling.
In the early 1950s I was a young child, concerned more
with learning to ride my first bicycle than with the state of the Nation, or
Senator McCarthy’s campaign to eradicate anyone he believed to be “subversive”
and more specifically, allied with the Communist Party in America. My grandfather, Spero Evanoff, was an
immigrant from the old Yugoslavia, and his wife Anna, was from the
Ukraine. He came here at a young age,
along with his elder brother, and carried all his worldly belongings in a rye market
basket. (I still have that basket to this
day.) He went to barber school in Western
Pennsylvania where he met and married Anna, and became a barber for the rest of
his life. He left the Homestead, PA area
soon after his graduation and, green card in hand, with his young family
(daughter Eleanor, daughter Margaret, son Harry) moved back to Eastern Pennsylvania
to the Harrisburg area. He had, I
believe, cousins and fellow immigrants in Steelton, PA, which had a large
population of folks from the Balkans in Central Europe. After the death of Eleanor from a burst
appendix at age 10, and the subsequent total mental breakdown of his wife Anna,
and her institutionalization in the State Hospital in Harrisburg, he moved with
his two remaining children to Palmyra, a small town East of Harrisburg. He had friends there, a married couple who
ran a tailoring business, as they had in Europe. Life, as it does, moved on.
When Senator McCarthy began seeing pink things under
his bed and began sweeping with his vicious broom, the good people of Palmyra,
fundamentalist Christians of Brethren and Mennonite ancestry, decided that they
didn’t want a man with a strange accent from an even stranger country cutting
their hair. His business evaporated, and
he was virtually driven out of town. His
son, Harry, could not deal with being ostracized and left home. His daughter Margaret (my mother) married a
local boy and began a lifetime of denial regarding her father. To me, he was my
grandpa, and I loved him, and he loved me.
My grandfather relocated further West and closer to
Steelton to another small town, Hummelstown, where there was a greater mix of
immigrants and where, frankly, people did not care so much about Senator
McCarthy. They just wanted good haircuts
and my grandfather, being one of two barbers, was the only other game in
town.
So, my grandfather had lost his business, his wife, and
all three of his children because he was “a foreigner” from a suspected
Communist-affiliated country and highly suspect. But it didn’t stop there. He saw friends deported for no clear reason
other than the Government saw fit to do it.
He saw other friends lose businesses.
He saw other children alienated from their families. And through it all, he paid his taxes, and
pledged allegiance to this country, the same country who would never grant him
citizenship because of his “suspicious” colleagues. The tailor from Austria. The Italian businessman. My grandfather died when I was fourteen, on
the Fourth of July, freedom for all, fairness to none.
When I was 19, I applied for a position at the former
Olmsted Air Force Base in nearby Middletown, PA. The position required a “Secret” clearance,
which usually took 4 to 6 weeks to complete.
Eighteen weeks into the clearance process, I was called by an officer of
the OSI (Office of Special Investigation) of the Air Force, who told me that a
car would be sent for me at 8:00 the following morning and that I would be
“interviewed” regarding my job application.
The “interview” was, in fact, an interrogation, and the only people
present in that hot, unvented room on that summer day were a stenographer,
three men in dark suits, and me. The
“interview” took over 7 hours, and I was given a bathroom break and a drink of
water. The questions were all regarding
my grandfather and his suspected affiliation with an organization called the
IWO, or International Workers Order, a Communist Party-affiliated insurance,
mutual benefit and fraternal organization.
I had no knowledge of whether or not he was a member, but he had
apparently taken out an insurance policy to protect me, his only grandchild,
from accident and/or illness. Not only
did they not believe my testimony, they caused my clearance to be “suspended”
which is, in actuality, worse than a denial.
So I lost the job before I got it.
Some 20 years later, in Dayton, OH, I was a temporary worker in a very
large chemical plant with massive government contracts. When I was offered permanent employment, I
was told I would have to have an AEC (Atomic Energy Clearance) check run. I told the head of security that I would
never get the clearance, and told him why.
They proceeded anyway, and for the second time I had a clearance
suspended. I didn’t get that job,
either. I’ve done a lot of waitressing
and barmaid jobs, because no one in those industries cared who my grandfather
was. Now I am a very old lady, on
borrowed time, and I cannot let Mr. Foertsch’s letter stand without a rebuttal.
I
would like to address one other matter, that being so-called security risks in
higher government.
Even after McCarthy’s “cleansing,” we were subjected to
Richard Nixon, Robert McNamara, George H. W. and George W. Bush, Donald
Rumsfeld and perhaps the worst of all, Richard Cheney, who invented a war which bankrupted our nation and killed and maimed our soldiers in order to
profit from it. So much for security
risks.
The
defense rests.
~~~ Orb Weaver
