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except Hanoi in the first real democratic election those little yellow people of Indochina have ever known. Not far away, the fifth year of the Red War in Malaya ends symbolically with the extermination of five guerrillas, British High Commissioner General Sir Gerald Templer expressing “satisfaction” over the kill and declaring: “The struggle goes on and it will go on until we have eliminated all traces of militant Communism from this country!”
    No less a struggle is being waged in America. Police juvenile officers warn teen-age clubs in Columbus, Ohio, to be suspicious of “any new member of a group whose background is not an open book,” and in Birmingham, Alabama, the city fathers push through an ordinance banishing from the city “anyone caught talking to a Communist in a ‘non-public place,’ or anyone who passed out literature that could be traced, even remotely, to a Communist hand.” The home of the State Secretary of the Communist Party in Houston, Texas, is stoned, and outside a plant in Los Angeles, surprised workers get the piss beat out of them by a gang of aroused patriots calling themselves “Crusade Against Communism.” There’s been an abortive effort to muzzle Senator Joe McCarthy, but the Fighting Marine has hit back, seeing to it that the worst of his enemies are kicked out of Congress by the people and, if possible, ruined for life, and now his metaphors grip the national imagination utterly. Rare is that politician who fails to pay at least passing homage to the “crimson clique,” “left-wing bleeding hearts of the press,” “front men for traitors,” and “stained with the blood of our boys in Korea.” Joe launches a whole series of new investigations into heresy in high places, becoming one of the most celebrated orators in the nation. Some people believe he might even be the secret Incarnation of Uncle Sam—a heresy in itself perhaps, but one long tolerated in the democratic tradition. He is hailed by J. Edgar Hoover for his “Americanism,” cheered on by his colleagues, and awarded a “National Americanism Award” by the Marine Corps League for his heroic actions in “rousing the nation to the menace of bad security risks in our government.” The American Civil Liberties Union reports that twenty-six of the forty-eight states now have laws designed to bar Reds from running for public office, twenty-eight have laws denying them state or local civil-service jobs, thirty-two require loyalty oaths from their teachers, and across the country, suspected Comsymps are prevented from living in federally aided low-income housing projects, getting passports, holding office in labor unions, or in some states, drawing unemployment compensation. Congressman James Van Zandt of Pennsylvania asks for swift deportation to the Soviet Union of all alien Communists and fellow travelers, in or out of government. Private travel into Phantom-land is simultaneously banned and infiltration from abroad is blocked, J. Edgar Hoover’s budget is increased, and Senator Harley Kilgore of West Virginia drafts a bill to “grant the FBI war emergency powers to throw all Communists into concentration camps!”
    And so it goes, from one end of the world to the other, because, as Dr. Norman Vincent Peale has written in his book of Yankee Peddler’s proverbs, The Power of Positive Thinking , America’s runaway number one best seller for the thirty-second week running: “This is the one lesson history teaches… The good never loses!” Fulgencio Batista regains control of Cuba and General Rojas Pinilla, who fought with Uncle Sam as a staff officer with the first contingent of Colombian troops to Korea in 1951, pulls a quick coup in his country and ousts Laureano Gomez, who as T IME say: “slid like a wilted leaf down / history’s drainpipe.” From the Dominican Republic Generalissimo