A Closed Door Won’t Keep Us Safe

When I saw that Cat Stevens, or Yusuf Islam, as he is now known, had been refused entry into the United States last week, I was reminded of a cartoon by the Washington Post’s great Herb Block from half a century ago. It showed the Statue of Liberty, bent over backward, kicking one leg out in a gesture of hostility to the world. “Keep Out,” was scrawled on Lady Liberty’s pedestal. “This Means You!” Behind the statue stood a white-haired man, gleefully rubbing his hands together.

Block drew the cartoon in response to the 1952 McCarran-Walter Act, a major overhaul of immigration law that gave the government vast powers to ban people from the United States if they were accused of being communists or fascists, to deport them if they were already here and even to revoke their citizenship if they had become naturalized Americans.

The act was the brainchild of Sen. Pat McCarran, the man in the cartoon. The son of Irish immigrants, McCarran was a Nevada Democrat often mistaken for a Republican because of his thunderous opposition to almost anything President Truman was in favor of -- especially if it involved letting more people into the country.

McCarran and Truman had been fighting for years over immigration, ever since the end of World War II, when the president was moved by the plight of European refugees, many but not all of them Jewish. Truman asked Congress for legislation to let the “displaced persons,” or DPs, come to the U.S.; McCarran suggested relocating them to the territory of Alaska.

As chairman of the powerful Judiciary Committee, McCarran was able to single-handedly stall the DP bill for 18 months. When Congress finally approved it in 1950, McCarran engineered the passage, over Truman’s veto, of the Internal Security Act -- a precursor to the McCarran-Walter Act that brought the resettlement program to a standstill by subjecting refugees to almost endless security screenings.

The law, which also forced the American Communist Party to register with the government as a subversive organization and set up detention camps for use in case of a national emergency, was essentially the Patriot Act of its day -- a panicked response that ultimately hurt the United States more than it helped.

Before the year was out, Ellis Island was packed with detainees: visitors denied entry to the U.S. as well as deportees, neither of whom were privy to the specific charges against them. Some -- such as Friedrich Gulda, a 20-year-old Austrian pianist on his way to give a recital at Carnegie Hall who was pulled off a plane upon arrival in New York -- had been involuntary members of fascist youth groups during the war; others, such as 38 German war brides and their seven children who were yanked off a cruise ship, never found out why they were barred.

Two years later, the Internal Security Act was largely superseded by the McCarran-Walter Act, passed once again over Truman’s veto. Even decades after McCarran’s death on Sept. 28, 1954, the U.S. continued to enforce the act vigorously, using the ideological exclusion provisions that were written to bar “subversives” to keep luminaries such as Graham Greene, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Pablo Neruda from visiting the U.S.

Not all the act’s victims were innocent, of course. Left-wing British journalist Cedric Belfrage, for example, was deported and made something of a career out of writing books denouncing the McCarran-Walter Act. Years later, however, it would be disclosed that Belfrage had been a source for the Soviets while working for British intelligence in New York during World War II.

In 1990, most of the ideological exclusion provisions of the McCarran-Walter Act were finally repealed, and today it remains dubious what real measure of security such overly protective restrictions brought or why we appear to be resuscitating them now.

Of course, the government should stop any known terrorist from entering the country, but by placing the threshold so low that an entire plane is diverted to prevent Cat Stevens from entering the Boston-New York air corridor, the U.S. risks doing more harm than good. As Truman said when he vetoed the McCarran-Walter Act in 1952: “Seldom has a bill exhibited the distrust evidenced here for citizens and aliens alike -- at a time when we need unity at home and the confidence of our friends abroad.”

Truman and McCarran represented alternative visions of how to deal with the challenge of communism: One believed in a proportionate response to real threats while never losing sight of the essential freedoms that differentiated us from our enemies; the other quested after an elusive absolute security that sacrificed much of what it ostensibly guarded, bullied friends and -- by blurring the distinctions between us and our ideological antagonists -- made the greatest power in the world look like a frightened child.

The danger facing the United States in this age is different. But what we’re trying to protect remains the same.