My Mother's Brush with McCarthyism

My mother was an extremely intelligent woman. She was the first to go to college, and she didn't just go to any college, she got a free ride to Rice University in Houston. My grandparents were well read, but they were poverty-stricken. She always wanted to become a teacher, and she majored in history at Rice.

While she was at Rice, she encountered a woman/professor there whose first name was Julia. This woman had a profound effect on my mother. She was a very radical woman for her time, and she eventually from what I understand, got into a lot of trouble during the roundup of communists/sympathizers or so-called communists during the McCarthy era, and in fact my mother even got called into a meeting with college authorities and government officials, probably HUAC (House Un-American Activities Committee) where she was grilled about this woman. They were trying to determine whether this woman was influencing students to be communist or anti-American. For those of you who slept through Civics and History in college and/or highschool, the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), committee of the U.S. House of Representatives, established in 1938 under Martin Dies as chairman, that conducted investigations through the 1940s and ’50s into alleged communist activities. Those investigated included many artists and entertainers, including the Hollywood Ten, Elia Kazan, Pete Seeger, Bertolt Brecht, and Arthur Miller. Richard Nixon was an active member in the late 1940s, and the committee’s most celebrated case was perhaps that of Alger Hiss. It is often viewed through the same lens as McCarthyism, Joseph McCarthy was not on this committe.

In April 1948 the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) sent to the floor for a vote a bill coauthored by Nixon and Rep. Karl Mundt that sought to proscribe many activities of the Communist Party though not to outlaw it altogether; the bill was passed by the House but failed in the Senate.

IT was a very frightening time for intellectuals, and I think this event pushed my mother into identifying as a Republican even though many of her thoughts were strongly progressive. I personally can't imagine how terrifying this "meeting" must have been. My mother always had a tremendous fear of governmental authority, and getting into "trouble", and I'm sure the meeting exacerbated her fear because of the horrible things that happened during McCarthyism. This teacher of my mother's probably wasn't communist; she probably was just radical and progressive for her time. Anyway, she influenced my mother so strongly that my mother said she would name her daughter Julia. At one point when my mother was being more open about her College years she told me that this woman just disappeared one day, which happened to people that were considered communist sympathizers. Blacklisted, jailed and sometimes murdered. During this time my mother was also in a very serious relationship with the son of a Chilean ambassador. I think she actually wanted to marry him but his parents were against it and he went back to Chile. But this relationship kind of put my mom in the crosshairs during this turbulent time. Chile is not communist, but you know how it is in our country that anything that is foreign is "communist" and to be feared in so many people's thoughts and beliefs. Things have not changed that much have they? When she met my father, it just so happened that his mother's name was Julia, so it gave her another reason to name me Julia but the original impetus for my name was the professor who influenced her. I've tried to find out who this woman was to no avail. She would have taught at Rice University in the 1950s. I never understood why my mother got together with my father because she was so far ahead of him intellectually and she was so beautiful, but she was afraid of her own power. She was beautiful and she was smart but looking back I think she felt he was safe, although he was so far from being safe. He was just a country / redneck boy/ high school drop out, prejudiced bigot and didn't represent any sort of threat. She could have done so much better. The picture of mom in college above reminded me...

- Julie O'Hara 2023

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