Since When Did Liberals Start Loving the FBI?

My mother and father were both born in 1921. They met for the first time at a mass meeting of the Young Communist League at Madison Square Garden in 1939. Neither were members of the Communist Party, but they came to this rally to protest America’s refusal to support the 2nd Republic against the uprising of Francisco Franco’s Fascist movement in Spain.

If you were a college student in New York City in the late 1930’s and you weren’t a liberal or a leftist, you were probably blind, dumb or both. That’s what the world was like in the late 1930’s, primarily because memories of the Great Depression were still fresh and around.

Plus, in a country which had actually suffered in some places from famine, the 1930’s just wasn’t a time when you could get very far politically by touting the free enterprise system as the way we had to go. In fact, when Alf Landon, the Governor of Kansas headed the GOP ticket in 1936 but refused to campaign because the Republicans refused to support the New Deal, Roosevelt ended up carrying every state except Vermont and Maine.

Things really changed after World War II came to an end. What was supposed to be a quick and easy ‘police action’ in Korea turned into a military mess. The Soviets now occupied all of Eastern Europe and had exploded their first atom bomb. When Eisenhower ran for President…