Fear rules American politics and history, and it has done so for the last 100 years, according to former Senate Foreign Relations Committee Special Counsel Jack Blum.
Blum spoke Thursday evening in Pearson Hall as part of the Education in Public Inquiry and International Citizenship (EPIIC) program's INSPIRE Lecture Series. Blum and journalist Mort Rosenblum gave several speeches together and separately for EPIIC this week.
"Fear is a motivator," Blum said in his speech, "The Politics of Fear in America." He said from the birth of the United States to today, fear has been used by politicians to make policy on issues ranging from immigration to nuclear weapons.
During World War I, Americans lived in fear of German spies living in the U.S. This led to the fear of those who were of German descent, Blum said. People who were German wanted to change their last names and did not want to be associated with anything related to German culture. Politicians were quick to bring up the threat of anything German, and as a result were able to create a unified nation that agreed with policy decisions, Blum said.
The politics of fear were also demonstrated during the Cold War with the fear of communism. Blum spoke about the "fear of the other." He mentioned a 1933 attempted coup against President Franklin Delano Roosevelt by business leaders opposed to the New Deal.
The fear of the other also influenced the fear of speaking out, Blum said. People were afraid of being accused of being communist and called before Senator Joseph McCarthy's House Un-American Activities Committee. McCarthy's fellow Republicans, Blum said, did not stop his accusations because it was good for politics and created fear in the average American.
Blum also talked about fear in the South before the 1960s Civil Rights Movement. There was a fear that African-Americans were going to take all the jobs and try to have relationships with white women, he said.
In the 1960s, though, communism eclipsed race again as the thing to fear. Politicians framed the fear, Blum said, as one less of the ideology than as one of the nuclear capabilities of the Soviet Union.
Lyndon Johnson's famous "Daisy" campaign commercial during the 1964 presidential election against Barry Goldwater increased Americans' fear of an unexpected nuclear attack. In the commercial, aired only once, a girl is shown picking flowers in a field. As she counts off the flowers' pedals, a nuclear bomb explodes on the field. A 2001 Atlantic Monthly article said the "Daisy" commercial was the most common reason voters gave for electing Johnson over Goldwater, who had boasted of launching nuclear attacks against the Soviet Union.
Fear in America is now caused by terrorism, Blum said, and the fear that the country could be attacked at any time. Terrorism even had big role in the 2004 Presidential Election, in which both candidates, especially President George W. Bush's, emphasized safety from terrorism.
The decades of fear did not address the "real problems" of society, though, Blum said. "If we remain in fear, there are life and death issues that cannot be talked about or addressed," he said. "We must stop driving American politics by fear, petty stuff. Real problems need to be addressed."
Freshman Padden Murphy, a student in EPIIC, said he was impressed by Blum and Rosenblum. "Together they offer an incredible amount of insight on the topic," he said.
This year's EPIIC theme is The Politics of Fear. Murphy said the programs addressed the topic well. "They are realists and recognize shortcomings," he said. "I like that they stressed the idea of politicians having the courage not to use fear politics."
Freshman Janelle Barragan said she could apply the topics from her international relations course to the speech. "There are many parallels in what we've read and what he said tonight," she said. "[Stephen] Van Evera talks about fear in his essays, and it is interesting to see how the two overlap."
