McCarran-Walter Act
The McCarran-Walter Act was an embarrassment to our democracy, but it is also an intellectual and legislative forefather to the current attempts to create laws ostensibly against terrorism. Some of the most offensive and dangerous principles contained in the current legislation can be traced back to this bit of McCarthy-era repression.
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During the early 1950s, Senator Paul McCarran (D-Nevada) led the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee. This group was the one which investigated the administrations of both Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman to search for alleged communist influence. McCarran's anti-communist credentials were nothing if not impeccable.
In 1950, he sponsored a bill that became known as the McCarran Internal Security Act, which required all members of the American Communist Party, among other groups, to register with the Attorney General. It did not matter if these individuals had ever engaged in violent actions or had ever advocated the use of violence - their association with certain suspect groups was deemed sufficient to place them under suspicion and surveillance.
The idea was to register, fingerprint, and monitor them for the sake of the safety and security of the United States. There was a Cold War going on, and the threat of world communism was regarded as more than enough reason to engage in otherwise unconstitutional political intimidation.
Even more frightening was a provision which set the stage to authorize the creation of concentration camps "for emergency situations," using the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II as a legal precedent. The intention was to set the stage for rounding up suspected political dissenters and subversives and place them all in large camps, should the government ever find it prudent. This particular provision was not repealed until the 1970s, after a lot of hard work by civil libertarians and Japanese-American groups.
Even though President Truman had himself imposed a Loyalty Order for government employees in 1947, he recognized the dangers of McCarran's bill and vetoed it. His message to legislators was that:
The basic error of this bill is that it moves in the direction of suppressing opinion and belief. This would be a very dangerous course to take, not because we have sympathy for Communist opinions, because any governmental stifling of the free expression of opinion is a long step toward totalitarianism. ...The course proposed by this bill would delight the Communists, for it would make a mockery of the Bill of Rights and of our claims to stand for freedom in the world.
Unfortunately, the Congress did not heed his warnings and passed the bill over his veto, with 89% voting in favor of it. McCarran's Senate Internal Security Subcommittee began to work closely with Hoover's FBI, conducting hearings on political subversives for the next twenty-seven years. Millions of Americans lost their jobs or even had careers destroyed because of rumors that they were a "security risk" due to their political opinions.
In 1952, McCarran joined Congressman Francis Walter (D-PA), also a crusader in the fight against world communism, in creating and passing the McCarran-Walter Act. That, too, was eventually passed over Truman's veto. This was largely an immigration bill, assigning strict quotas to the immigration of anyone wishing to enter the United States from an "undesirable" part of the world, like Asia.
But one interesting part of the bill was that anyone accused of voicing the wrong political opinions, for example in favor of communism, could be denied entry to the United States. Or, if they were already here - working, visiting, or seeking citizenship - they could be deported without hesitation.
The use of these provisions continued for a long time, proving to be a useful tool for the political aims of whichever administration was in power. The Reagan presidency, for example, found it particularly expedient for dealing with foreign dissenters, using it to bar entry to Nobel laureates like Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and even the widow of Salvador Allende.
When Columbian journalist Patricia Lara was in the United States to receive an award from Columbia University for excellence in journalism, she was detained and held without charges and then deported. All of that was apparently due to her critical articles about U.S. policies in Central America.
The McCarran-Walter Act was not abolished until 1994, but many of its provisions were reborn in the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA), signed in 1996. This time those provisions are aimed against the ambiguously defined concept of "terrorism" and "supporters of terrorism," yet the unconstitutional premises and effects are basically the same.