Scare in Another Era

The biggest challenge of the day is: how to bring about a revolution of the heart, a revolution that has to start with each one of us. — Dorothy Day (1897-1980)

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Today’s mail brought the October-November issue of The Catholic Worker, an eight-page newspaper not available online. One of two page-1 articles, headlined “The CW’s Radical Associates,” is by Jim Reagan. It begins with this paragraph:

“The President of the United States claims to be the subject of a witch hunt and our Senate majority leader complains of being a victim of McCarthyism. At the same time they denounce members of Congress as socialists and communists. There is a twisted irony here for the most widely known witch hunt in US history (save perhaps the actual Salem witch trials of 1692-93) was the second Red Scare following World War II when socialists and communists were targeted. McCarthyism was only one part of the Red Scare but the term is often applied to the entire era. A brief look back at McCarthyism, the Red Scare it was a part of, and the response of Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker offers an informative and cautionary story.”