Families who resisted McCarthyism warn: 'It can happen here'

Children of people who were targeted during the 1950s McCarthy-era Red Scare say they remember the constant sense of surveillance they felt, even as they tried to live normal lives.

- By KAREN JUANITA CARRILLO Amsterdam News Staff

Confronting McCarthyism panel, Molly Jong-Fast, Beverly Gage, MaryLouise Patterson, and Michael Meeropol. (Diane Bondareff photo)

(Diane Bondareff photo)

On March 3, Michael Meeropol (son of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg), MaryLouise Patterson (daughter of civil rights activists Louise and William Patterson), and Molly Jong-Fast (granddaughter of blacklisted novelist Howard Fast) came together at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine to talk about their experiences during the Red Scare, a time when the government made their ordinary lives feel unsafe.

The event, moderated by historian Beverly Gage, was part of the Columbia University Department of History program titled “Confronting McCarthyism: Generational Lessons from Families who Resisted the Red Scare.” It looked back on the surveillance climate of the 1950s and related it to what we're living through today

Meeropol remembers that his parents —Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were charged with and executed for espionage — were not simply talked about in the news, but turned into national symbols. As a child, he said, this was a frightening time: “It was scary, we were isolated. The media was against us.” At one point, he remembered discovering “one wonderful newspaper” that supported his parents and then trying to share it with the people around him. “One mother was very nice to me, and another mother threw me out of the house because she thought I, an eight-year-old, would contaminate her son,” he told the Amsterdam News. “That was a pretty scary thing for an eight-year-old.”