Aaron Copland’s inquisition by Sen. McCarthy’s vigilantes
Aug 31st, 2007 by Paul Moor
Immediately after Japan’s “sneak” (ha!) attack against Pearl Harbor, Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt damned December 7th, 1941 as “a day that will live in infamy”.
I submit that his eloquent terminology also applies, for all time, to that entire abominable era in American history when the country’s administration totally forgot F.D.R.’s earlier assurance that “We have nothing to fear but fear itself.”
It’s just come to my attention that the entire declassified official transcript of Aaron Copland’s 1952 inquisition by Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s semiliterate Washington goons - Copland’s own summary in his diary: “My impression is that McCarthy had no idea who I was or what I did” - has become available, after a trifling half-century to let the primary villainous fools safely enjoy the protective cover provided by death, and anyone with the requisite resistance to nausea can now read (in PDF format), if you beat your way down to page 362 of the not too bureaucratically intimidating document you’ll find there. Whatever your own degree of such resistance, you might even so find it prudent to have some sort of vomit receptacle within reach….
As supplementary reading for any interested whippersnappers reading this, I’d recommend the book Scoundrel Time, the personal account by the playwright Lillian Hellman, one of Aaron’s appallingly numerous fellow victims, but most of all what I regard as the definitive reference work on what’s gone down in American history as “the McCarthy period”: Naming Names, by Victor Navasky, at that time Editor of The Nation.
