The Red Scare

Fear is a powerful motivator. Personal fears can lead individuals to do some unsavory things. Look at Bernie Madoff, the headgefund manager who misled people out of billions of dollars by running a Ponzi scheme. Sure, greed was the overlying motivation for this tragic criminal series of acts, which left thousands of individuals, not to mention institutions like Brandeis University, teetering on the brink of financial ruin. Madoff violated the trust of his clients in the worst possible way, doing so in a heartless, cowardly manner with no remorse or regard for the devastation that his scheme would cause. He willfully ruined lives, stuffing away billions of dollars in the process. Investigators still have very little idea where that money has been hidden. What Madoff did was arguably more destructive than murder; he should be sentenced to death.

But what would cause a person to lie and cheat innocent people out of their life savings to line his own pockets? I believe it was fear: a misguided and perverse fear by a sick man believing that he could never amass enough wealth to eliminate the fear that he might not have enough. He feared being poor in the way that an individual with severe anorexia fears being obese, even when they are teetering on the brink of starvation. He squirreled away money like an opiate addict who stores a cache of pills in the medicine cabinet that could last a non-addict an entire lifetime. He let his fear rule his judgment like a paranoid dictator who executes his entire staff based on the belief that his closest advisors are conspiring to poison his food in order to gain power. To say cite greed as the primary motivation for Madoff's actions is to grossly underestimate the power of fear as a prime motivator for human behavior. There have been many dispicable acts committed by human beings throughout history: human sacrifices by the Mayas and the Aztecs, the mass genocide of Native Americans by European settlers, the extermination of 11 million people during the Holocaust, the Killing Fields of the Khmer Rouge, the massacres in Rwanda, the genocide in Darfur, the institution of slavery...and the list goes on. Examine each of these and I have no doubt that you would find that fear is the prime motivation behind all of these dispicable acts.

The Salem Witch Trials of 1692 and the Red Scare of the 1950's are both examples of the evil that can emerge from fear gone rampant. The Witch Trials, which led to the execution of twenty innocent individuals, was a mockery of institutional justice; the sanctity of the judicial process cloaked the ugliest of human motivations like a cheap Halloween costume. The judges who presided over the Trials brought their own fears and personal feelings into the courtroom. Personal vendettas caused neighbors to baselessly accuse other neighbors of witchcraft. And when all was said and done, the judges had painted themselves into a corner: even after it became clear that the entire process was a mockery of justice, they were unwilling to stop the executions for fear that their historical legacies would be tainted if they admitted mistakenly condemning innocent people to death.

The Red Scare took place at the early height of the Cold War when the United States and the Soviet Union each feared nuclear annihilation by the other. There were rumors of covert communist spy rings convening in secret with members who masqueraded by day as regular Americans. A United States Senator, Joseph McCarthy from Wisconsin, led a public campaign to root out the secret communist spies that were assumed to be living in America. People were interviewed to testify about suspicious, "un-American" behaviors and attitudes exhibited by their friends, neighbors, family members and colleagues. The House UnAmerican Activities Committee (HUAC) search for anti-American sentiment amongst the arts and entertainment community, leading to a "Black List" of writers, actors and producers whose names were connected with Communism. A friend of Miller's was forced to testify before the HUAC and subsequently accuse several other people from the theater community of being communists. This modern-day witch hunt was the inspiration for Miller's writing The Crucible. Arthur Miller was later considered to be a person of interest by the HUAC, which ultimately revoked Miller's passport and prevented him from travelling to London to see the opening of The Crucible.

College?

The pursuit of the American Dream places a great deal of emphasis on a person's job or profession. In some cases, someone's entire dream can consist of attaining a certain title or position. How many of us have ever dreamed of becoming a doctor? A professional athlete? An actress? A musician? We tend to think of our jobs as defining large chunks of our identities. What you do for work, in large part, defines who you are in America. There are, of course, exceptions to this rule. You may know an auto mechanic with only a high school diploma who happens to be far more intelligent and interesting than many people you know who might have fancy graduate degrees from prestigious colleges and universities.

My father-in-law is such a person. He emigrated to the United States from Israel at the age of 12 and graduated from high school the mid-1960's. By that time, the Vietnam War was on and he volunteered to serve in the United States Marine Corp when many young men of that time were either drafted involuntarily into the service, or found loop holes to get out of serving in the war. Although he would never say this, I believe that his incredible sense of duty and honor compelled him to sign up for the Marines in the 1960s. Also, he grew up in Israel for the first 12 years of his life, a country where all men and women are required by law to serve in the military for a set number of years. Regardless of the reason, he proudly and bravely served in the military, and in doing so, he acquired a sought-after skillset in learning how to fix and maintain vehicles. When he returned from the war, he began working in an auto garage in Dorchester, and since he was making enough money to provide for his family, he did not end up going to college. He didn't need to. To this day, he still works at the same garage he began working at forty years ago. And he is not only one of the smartest people I know, he is also someone for whom I have the utmost respect. But there are many in America who might automatically look down their noses at anybody who has not finished college. After all, we are programmed in America to believe that going to college is always better than not going to college, and that somebody who attends college is necessarily better off than somebody who has not.

But we should perhaps conduct a cost/benefit analysis of going to college; after all, eduation is not cheap. In fact, it is highly expensive and, according to some, not worth the money. First of all, there are student loans to think about. Survey a random selection of adult professionals (people who work in jobs that required them to complete some sort of graduate or professional degree- doctors, lawyers, accountants, scientists, nurses, teachers, among others), and you will most likely talk to many people who carry around a certain amount of student loan debt. Student loans are funds provided to individuals who would otherwise be unable to pay for all or some of their college expenses, and with private college tuition often approaching or even exceeding $50,000 per year nowadays, there are many people who must borrow money to attend college. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, 65% of all undergraduates require some sort of financial support in order to achieve the goal of attending college. And while student loans are free while you attend college, you soon find out that they are quite costly in the long run. You had better hope that the extra money your college degree entitles you to earn is enough to offset the monthly payment of several hundred dollars.

So why do we teachers (and your parents) harp so much on the importance of going to college, especially when college is expensive, and often prohibitively so? The answer lies in one of the fundamental tenets of the American Dream: the notion of upward mobility. The Puritans viewed themselves as being upwardly mobile; in their eyes, they were building a new society free from corruption and excess fat. They set the trend for upward mobility in America, paving the way for countless rags-to-riches stories of poor imigrants like Andrew Carnegie who arrived from Scotland with little more than the shirt on his back, and who eventually became one of the wealthiest men in the history of our country. No matter where one starts out, the expectation in America is that a person will be able to rise up (usually in the economic sense) through hard work and determination. And while it is possible for a person to become wildly successful without the completion of a college degree (look at Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Lebron James and Will Smith), the amount of raw talent required to achieve such success without higher education is extremely rare.

Education allows us to fill in the gaps in the areas where our raw talent might be lacking, and it allows us to hone and perfect the skills that we might naturally possess. Education makes a person whole, and provides the foundation for personal growth. Without the options that education opens up, it becomes much more difficult to achieve the upward mobility that is part of every American Dream.

The American Dream, Part 1

For the past few years, I have been teaching American Literature and asking students to view the works of literature through the lens of the American Dream. Cullen, in the article that we read, describes the American Dream as "a kind of lingua franca, an idiom that everyone- from corporate exectuives to hip-hop artists- can presumably understand" (6), and I fully agree with this assessment. For proof that the idea of the American Dream is as much alive today as it has been at any point throughout history, we need only look to the fact that, when I asked both of my American Literature Honors classes to discuss the American Dream, every student in the class seemed to know immediately and instinctively what was meant by such an idea.

That being said, as we explore the American Dream in greater depth, I expect that it will become very clear that this idea is certainly one that is not easy to define- at least on any simple level. It seems to be an idea that is different for each individual, and that one of the central elements of this complex and elusive abstraction is that each person is free to identify his or her own version of the American Dream. Your American Dream might be different from mine, at least in terms of the specific details, and if you brought a thousand individuals into a room, each one might have his or her own ideas of what the American Dream means to them. For this reason, defining the American Dream is no simple task: Cullen even suggests that "the American Dream would have no drama or mystique if it were a self-evident falsehood or a scientifically demonstrable principle" (7). In other words, perhaps the most powerful aspect of the American Dream is its elusive nature and lack of simple definition.

As we read our literature this year, I expect that we will meet a fascinating cast of characters in each work, each with his or her own version of the dream. Each character will have his or her own ideas about whether or not the Dream is achievable, which begs us to question the veracity of the Dream. As we interact with John Proctor, Hester Prynne, Nick Carroway, Jay Gatsby, Tim O'Brien, Janie Starks, Walter Lee Younger, Willy Loman, and a host of other unforgettable characters, we will constantly be assessing our own ideas of the Dream and bouncing the ideas we hold sacred about the American Dream off of them. Expect your ideas of the meaning of success, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness to be placed into question and redefined many times this year. It should be fun.