In my latest reading of The Contender: Richard Nixon, The Congress Years, 1946-1952,
Irwin Gellman talked about the Subversive Activities Control bill of
1948, which was introduced by representatives Karl Mundt of South Dakota
and Richard Nixon of California and thus was called the Mundt-Nixon
bill.
I said a couple of posts ago that Nixon was against
outlawing the Communist Party that was in the United States because he
did not want to push it underground but rather keep it in broad
daylight. Nixon initially was rather open-minded on this question, as
when he noted to American Civil Liberties attorney Arthur Garfield Hays
the irony that the ACLU was against outlawing the Communist Party that
was in the U.S., even though the ACLU's own board of directors "had
taken action against Communists on its board" (Gellman's words on page
156)! But the Mundt-Nixon bill itself would not have outlawed the
Communist Party that was in the United States, but rather it
criminalized seeking to overthrow the U.S. government to replace it with
a totalitarian government, as well as required the Communist Party and
"related organizations...to register with the U.S. Attorney General",
prohibited federal employees from belonging to the Communist Party and
hiring its members knowingly, and denied passports to Communist Party
members (Gellman's words on page 160). Nixon said to his constituents
that individual rights would be protected by judicial review.
There
was concern that the Mundt-Nixon bill would legally stigmatize leftist
organizations that happened to hold positions that were similar to what
the Communist Party held, on such issues as housing. But Nixon denied
that such would be the case. Moreover, I should note that, within the
discussion over whether or not the Communist Party should be outlawed,
John Foster Dulles, who later became President Dwight Eisenhower's
anti-Communist Secretary of State, said that outlawing the Communist
Party would be difficult because the Communist Party was "nebulous"
(Dulles' word): there were members who "served under 'iron discipline'
and were foreign agents, while others viewed the party as an agent of
reform and held that this group acted as an outlet for grievances"
(Gellman's words on page 155). I found Dulles' insight to be important:
Granted, there probably were Communists who were subversive and desired
a Soviet America, but I doubt that every single Communist was like
that, for some may have simply been seeking reform or airing
grievances. Lumping together every Communist as a sinister conspirator
would be misguided, in my opinion.
Bundt-Nixon passed the House
but failed in the Senate, then a similar bill emerged as
Mundt-Ferguson. It, too, passed the House but failed in the Senate.
But its provisions became part of the McCarran Internal Security Act,
which passed in both houses (see here).