Abstract
When in the spring of 1950 Governor Mennen Williams convened a special session of the legislature, he had hoped to find a harmless way of diverting or channelling the mounting anticommunist passions. ‘Ideas cannot be suppressed by force or killed with a club’, he insisted, and in keeping with the advice he had given Mayor Van Antwerp, he proposed a ‘blue-ribbon’ study commission to ‘explore the whole question’ of legal curbs on Communist activity and asked for $15000 to pay for it.
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Notes and References
William W. Keller, The Liberals and J. Edgar Hoover: Rise and Fall of a Domestic Intelligence State (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), pp. 33, 49.
On liberal anticommunism see also Mary Sperling McAuliffe, Crisis on the Left: Cold War Politics and American Liberals (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1978).
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© 1998 M. J. Heale
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Heale, M.J. (1998). The Triumph of Liberalism? 1950–1954. In: McCarthy’s Americans. American History in Depth. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-14546-1_6
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