The original
witch hunt—and one of the most notorious cases of mass hysteria in U.S. history—the Salem witch trials were a series of hearings to prosecute people suspected of witchcraft in the counties of Essex, Suffolk, and Middlesex in colonial Massachusetts. The trials occurred between February 1692 and May 1693, and resulted in more than 150 people being arrested and imprisoned. The best-known trials were conducted by both the Court of Oyer and Terminer in 1692 in Salem Town, and the Superior Court of Judicature in 1693 in Salem Village, which together convicted 29 people of the capital felony of
witchcraft, executing 19—14 women and five men—by hanging, and even crushing a man, Giles Corey, under heavy stones in an attempt to get him to accept a plea deal. The strange episode is one of the most compelling cautionary tales about the dangers of religious extremism and infringement upon personal liberties.
Immediately preceded by the Black Codes, a series of unofficial laws put in place during the Reconstruction period by Southern states to limit the rights of blacks following the
Civil War, the Jim Crow laws were state and local laws enacted between 1876 and 1965 that further infringed on the human and civil rights of African Americans. They instituted
de jure racial segregation in all public facilities, including schools and restaurants (providing a “separate but equal” status for black Americans that was anything but), and disenfranchised black people through poll taxes, literacy requirements, and the Grandfather Clause. Numerous instances of violence, including lynchings, were prevalent in the early Jim Crow years. The laws were gradually phased out, starting with President Truman’s Executive Order 9981 in 1948, desegregating the armed services, and followed by the landmark 1954 Supreme Court case
Brown v. Board of Education, that declared state-sponsored school segregation unconstitutional. The remaining Jim Crow laws were eradicated by the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
During World War I, President Woodrow Wilson issued two sets of regulations in 1917, and another in 1918, imposing heavy restrictions on all German-born residents of the United States over the age of 14. They were forced to register at their local post office, carry their registration card on them at all times, and report any change of address or employment. Approximately 6,300 such people were arrested, and 2,048 were even incarcerated in a pair of internment camps—Fort Douglas, Utah, and Fort Oglethorpe, Georgia—for the remainder of the war. Then, under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, the U.S. interned more than 11,000 German citizens at the start of World War II, and detained some 4,500 ethnic Germans who were brought to the U.S. from Latin America, even though very few of them were under any kind of suspicion. In 2001, Congress created an independent commission to review U.S. government policies against European ethnic enemy groups during WWII in the U.S. and Latin America.
After worrying about German spies during World War I, America became obsessed with rooting out political radicals, especially foreign ones. So the Overman Committee, created to investigate German subversion during World War I, was reassigned to investigate efforts to overthrow the government, and started holding hearings on Bolshevism. The threat wasn’t completely imaginary: Several bombs were mailed by anarchists to major political figures, including Attorney General Alexander Mitchell Palmer, who began a campaign, with the cooperation of the Labor Department, to round up and deport immigrants he claimed had radical ties. The warrantless arrests and deportation of thousands of supposed radicals in the Palmer Raids gave birth to the
American Civil Liberties Union.
The fact that the main champions of banning booze during
Prohibition were evangelical Protestants made the charge of witch hunting stick especially well. According to Professor Gretchen Adams, author of
The Specter of Salem, one columnist at The New York Times complained that the “drys” are “as bad as the Puritans who burned witches, poor, innocent victims of their brutal religion,” while another said they were descendants of the people who “carried flint and tinder at the witch-burning in Salem.” And because many of the beer brewers were of German descent, the teetotalers’ campaign dovetailed with the era’s other witch hunt.
In an oft-overlooked historical injustice, approximately 110,000 Japanese-Americans and Japanese citizens along the U.S. Pacific Coast were interned in “War Relocation Camps” thanks to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066, issued in 1942, which allowed the military to designate areas as “exclusion zones,” excluding people without trial. The War Relocation Authority, created by Roosevelt in 1942 with Executive Order 9102, interned the Japanese and Japanese-Americans in 10 relocation centers in California, Arizona, Colorado, Wyoming, Idaho, Utah, and Arkansas. The interned lived under harsh conditions in military-style barracks, with small food rations. Following a pair of Supreme Court decisions, the exclusion order was rescinded on January 2, 1945, and freed internees were given $25 and a train ticket to their former homes. The last relocation centers didn’t close until 1946, and in 1999, the U.S. Justice Department agreed to disburse $1.6 billion in reparations to ethnic Japanese interned in American camps during WWII.
During the 1930s and 1940s, coinciding with World War II, several U.S. states passed laws making it illegal for Jehovah’s Witnesses to distribute their literature or even attend state schools, thanks to their perceived anti-American beliefs (refusing to serve in the U.S. military and recite the Pledge of Allegiance). Violence against Jehovah’s Witnesses was quite common during this time of heightened alert, with the ACLU reporting that by end of 1940, more than 1,500 Jehovah’s Witnesses had been victimized in 335 separate attacks, which ranged from being tarred and feathered, to being castrated. The Witnesses’ refusal to salute the flag and recite the Pledge of Allegiance became known as the “Flag-Salute Cases,” and resulted in two landmark Supreme Court rulings. In
Minersville School District v. Gobitis, the court upheld the constitutionality of a Pennsylvania regulation permitting the expulsion of children for refusing to salute the flag or recite the Pledge of Allegiance, while in
West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette, the court reversed itself and overturned a West Virginia law that required public-school children to salute the flag and recite the pledge.
“McCarthyism” was part of a cultural wave of anti-communist paranoia in the mid-20th century that resulted in thousands of Americans being questioned and fired for suspected communist sympathies. Though Cold War anti-communism is often referred to as “McCarthyism,” after the crusading Sen.
Joseph McCarthy, there were several individuals and organizations involved in the movement. Anti-communist parties sprang up in local, state and federal government. In Congress, the House Un-American Activities Committee investigated many American public employees both at home and abroad, produced the infamous “
Hollywood blacklist,” and was the stage of the
famous showdown between accused Soviet spy Alger Hiss and spy-turned-conservative Whittaker Chambers. McCarthy himself was chairman of the Senate’s top investigative subcommittee, which conducted similar witch hunts. Many American authors, actors, and civil-rights activists were accused of being communist sympathizers, including Aaron Copland, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Dorothy Parker.
The “lavender scare”—a fear of homosexuals—coincided with
McCarthyism, partly because psychologists at that time believed homosexuality to be a mental illness, and gay men and lesbians were believed to be especially susceptible to blackmail. People who didn’t conform to gender stereotypes were suspected of being “queer” and thus of sympathizing—or being more
likely to sympathize—with communism. President Harry Truman’s administration dismissed 91 people for being “sexual deviants” in what became known as the “purge of the perverts.” Ironically, Roy Cohn, a lawyer who became famous for his targeting of perceived communists and gays during the McCarthy era, was a closeted homosexual who
later died of AIDS.
Rep. Peter King, Republican of New York, has a long
history of anti-Muslim sentiment, and now, he’s finally making it official by holding hearings on “home-grown” Muslim extremism in the United States. The hearings this week have been protested against by a variety of religious leaders, and
hundreds of demonstrators who flooded New York’s Times Square. But King
won’t be dissuaded. “I will not back down whatsoever,” he said. “These hearings are absolutely essential, and I don't care what they say or what they accuse me of, I'm going ahead with the hearings. These are necessary for the homeland security of our nation.”
