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My Fellow Citizens, My Fellow Americans,
As I stand in this room I address you as the esteemed actors, writers, producers, directors that you are. I know the fear that is in your minds at the moment, the fear of the House of Un-American Activities Committee. Rest assured if you make me your next President you will no longer have to endure the humiliation and persecution of this “witch hunt” institution. It is a disgrace that you should be forced to stand in front of a HUAC congressional meeting and take a loyalty oath when you are already loyal, to inform that your friends and your colleagues are not loyal when the opposite is, in fact, the truth, to divulge information that will leave them ruined, to betray your very principles as an American. We spent years fighting the fascists of Europe; we do not wish turn into them ourselves. This is American soil. America should be a model of democracy, a beacon to the rest of the world. Not an example of how democracy can be spoiled and manipulated by those on the inside.
The first principle of a free society is an untrammelled flow of words in an open forum. If we value the pursuit of knowledge, we must be free to follow wherever that search may lead us. The free mind is not a barking dog, to be tethered on a ten-foot chain. Your profession is one where you depend on this free mind. You should be allowed to work as you want, to express yourselves as you wish.
In many minds criticism has become an ugly word. It conjures up pictures of insidious radicals hacking away at the very foundation of the American way of life. It suggests nonconformity and nonconformity suggests disloyalty and disloyalty suggests treason, and before we know where we are, this process has all but identified the critic with the saboteur and turned political criticism into an un-American activity instead of democracy's greatest safeguard. Because we believe in a free mind we are also fighting those who, in the name of communism, would assail the community of freedom itself.
McCarthy and his henchmen, David Schine and Roy Cohn have attacked me as being soft on communism. He has claimed that he would like to spend sometime with him me so that "he might be able to make a good American out of me."
Well, for his information, I am a good American! There is such a danger of being a "phoney patriot", an "ill-informed censor" and "self-appointed thought police". Most of us favour free enterprise for business. Let us also favour free enterprise for the mind.
The whole notion of loyalty inquisitions is a national characteristic of the police state, not of democracy. The history of Soviet Russia is a modern example of this ancient practice. I must, in good conscience, protest against any unnecessary suppression of our rights as free men. We must not burn down the house to kill the rats.
God Bless America, the land of the Free!
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· American Studies UWA ·