Clarence Manion Vs The Socialist World Order

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Despite Milwaukee’s string of Socialist mayors, socialism hasn’t been widely accepted as an ideology that belongs in American politics. During the Cold War, resistance to what some perceived to be socialist policies and government overreach cascaded into the airwaves of conservative radio. Some conservative commentators believed socialism was lurking on the horizon in the 1950s thanks to New Deal policies like social security, which they thought enforced an unfair dependence on the government.
Scholar Nicole Hemmer is an expert on the history of conservative media. She says back in the 50s, as American fears of socialism and communism stoked the fires of the Cold War, the right-leaning radio world looked a lot different than it does today.

Nicole Hemmer: It was a tiny, tiny universe. Most of the people who got involved in conservative media in the 1950s and 1960s were die-hard conservatives looking for a way to get their message out. So, they weren’t people who were rooted in the media. They weren’t radio shock jocks the way that Glenn Beck was or Rush Limbaugh was. They were people who had these really strong political beliefs that they wanted to find a way to get out to the American people.

Brian Balogh: And, at the center of this was a man Nicole says in many ways is the godfather of modern, conservative radio, a guy name Clarence Manion.

Clarence Manion: On this program last Sunday, I talked very frankly about the prospects for violent, bloody revolution here and in Russia. This is a subject which must be reviewed soon and often because one or the other of these revolutions is high on the agenda of probabilities.

Nicole Hemmer: Clarence Manion’s was one of the first radio programs from a conservative bent. He would join a handful of other, mostly men, who would host these weekly, 15-minute radio shows that really ran all across the country. He had been the Dean of Notre Dame Law School, so he is very well-credentialed. He was very much rooted in higher education and the law, so somebody like Clarence Manion, who does not have your normal radio host profile, was sort of forced, in a way, to take to the airwaves because he really wanted to get his message out and be believed that’s the best way to do it.

Brian Balogh: In 1954, Manion started his weekly radio show called the Manion Forum of Opinion. The program ultimately ran for 25 years and throughout all that time, Manion’s message stayed pretty consistent.

Clarence Manion: This we do know beyond doubt. The sure way to defeat communism is to preserve American liberty. To preserve American liberty we must drain off this deep pool of federal power now. This is the truth. Let us face it.

Nicole Hemmer: Socialism took up a very important place in arguments against communism for conservatives because conservatives painted the road to communism as one that passed through socialism. So, a society would first embrace liberalism, something like what the Democrats were doing back in the 1930s and 1940s.

Clarence Manion: Tonight, I wish to discuss a revolution that has already taken place. The one that happened in the United States in 1933. The revolution that has proceeded from then until now without interruption. The 1933 revolution has produced an entirely new set of American governmental principles. Basic presuppositions that were universally accepted in 1930 have since been thrown into the political ashcan. Ideas that were then politically abhorrent have now been embraced by both major political parties.
There is a long list of such items. Here are just a few of them. Compulsory federal old age insurance, foreign giveaway programs, federal regulation of labor …

Nicole Hemmer: So, they would embrace something like New Deal liberalism and inevitably after that as the people got softer and got more used to getting things from the government, then a society would pass into socialism and from there, it inevitably slid into communism. Communism was the overall control of everyone’s lives and that, for conservatives, was the inevitable end result of the embrace of liberalism.

Brian Balogh: From the documents I’ve read in the middle of the 50s, wasn’t there a kind of you’re with us or against us attitude? How does that square with this pathway and continuum notion?

Nicole Hemmer: Well, the idea that there was a slippery slope from liberalism to communism meant that you had to draw a firm line right from the start, that you had to be with conservatives or you were setting the nation on the path toward communism. So, it seems strange. If politics is a spectrum, then it doesn’t really support a black and white world view. But, in fact, what they’re arguing is that it is a black and white world where you’re either communist or anti-communist, but they just draw the line in a very different spot. If you’re conservative, you’re anti-communist. If you’re anything else, you’re committing the nation to communism.

Brian Balogh: So that liberalism was the gateway drug straight to communism.

Nicole Hemmer: Absolutely. That there was no turning back once you started injecting liberalism into a society.

Brian Balogh: What was unAmerican about liberalism as Manion saw it?

Nicole Hemmer: So, Manion saw liberalism as a ceding of individual freedom, which is to say liberalism forced you to give up freedoms in order to get things from the government. If the government was going to give you medical care, they were taking away your freedoms to choose. Manion believed that in taking care of people in their old age, there’s something like social security, people were becoming dependent on the government. And, if you became dependent on the government, then the government could take more and more control over your lives.
It was really for him a choice between dependence or independence and any sort of government program encouraged dependence.

Clarence Manion: What is the great potential menace to human liberty? It is the giant corporation, the big labor union, Wall Street, or syndicated crime? No. The great potential enemy of human liberty is the menacing power of government. In its proper place, at the service of man’s liberty, government, through its courts, legislators, and executive agents, can protect the rights of man against every conceivable combination of private power that may assail man’s rights. It is only against the power of government itself that liberty is helpless.

Brian Balogh: To what extent did Manion’s concern about the path to socialism begin to define what was American in the first place?

Nicole Hemmer: Oh, it very much did. Manion’s concerns over socialism, which really blossomed in the early 1950s as the Cold War’s really beginning to heat up. He defined Americanism, which was the word that he used before he started using the word conservatism, Americanism was defined in opposition to socialism. So, in many ways, as Manion focused more and more on these fears of government entrenchment in people’s lives, his conservatism took on more and more of a kind of libertarian tone, this idea that government couldn’t have any role in anyone’s lives.
Which I have to say, was actually a real reversal for Manion, who in the 1930s, was a New Deal liberal. But, his turn towards conservatism and his fears, in many ways, of communism during the Cold War really did change his politics and change the way that he defined his own sense of what conservatism was and what Americanism was.

Brian Balogh: Well, let’s talk a little bit about the radio side of all of this. Some of Manion’s views, I’m assuming, were reflected in the main conservative print outlet, the National Review. How did Manion’s style on radio and how did reaching people on radio, how was that different than reaching people through a really pretty intellectual journal like the National Review?

Nicole Hemmer: Radio, as your listeners can probably tell since they’re listening to our voices, is a very intimate medium, right? Somebody’s voice nestling right there in your ear does create a kind of intimacy.

Brian Balogh: Look no farther than our president, FDR, right?

Nicole Hemmer: Absolutely. FDR is reaching out to Americans and trying to forge relationships with them over radio and it does create a real affection for FDR. In Manion’s case, he’s relying on the trust that that intimacy builds, but he’s not trying to calm people in the way that Franklin Roosevelt was. He’s trying to stir them up. He’s using radio and the urgency of the medium to create this kind of necessity for action. He’s trying to rile them up. He’s trying to convince them that they have to act now.
Radio is a much better medium for that for two reasons. One, the intimacy and the urgency I’m talking about, but two, it doesn’t cost you anything. It costs you something to go out and find an issue of National Review, to subscribe or buy it on the newsstand. But, with radio, all you have to do is turn a dial. The buy-in is so low that he’s able to reach a lot more people.

Brian Balogh: Can you give us some examples of how he was able to stir up fear, his use of tactics on radio?

Nicole Hemmer: One of his main tactics was a kind of an apocalyptic warning that he used frequently, especially in the early years of his program. That the hour is now. You must act. We’re in our closing days to turn this country around and save America from communism. There was this real sense that it was all about to end.

Clarence Manion: After 20 delirious years of communist injected anesthetic, when will the American people wake up? Will the awakening come before or after it is too late? That is the life or death question. Let us face it.

Brian Balogh: I know this is a difficult question, Nicki, but what would you attribute to Manion and his radio show that added to American fears of socialism? What is Manion responsible for if you can separate out his contribution from everything else?

Nicole Hemmer: Well, I think you can’t separate out his contribution, and I think that’s actually important because all of these voices warning about impending socialism and communism coming from the Senate and Joe McCarthy, coming from all of these different parts of American culture and politics, are all reinforcing one another. Manion has a role in helping put that fear of communism at the heart of the conservative movement as it’s developing in the early 1950s, and I do think that that core fear, the fear of the other, the fear of a country in danger, the fear of America moving in the wrong direction, that is still very much there.
That idea that you can’t trust the media. We’re the only ones that are going to be able to tell you the truth. That’s still there as well. Actually, if you turn on conservative talk radio or Fox News today, those same kind of cries about socialism have, in many ways, returned to the center of the conversation. In that way, when you hear on Fox News discussions of creeping socialism, there is a way in which they are, without really knowing it, looking back to Manion and repeating the very things that got him into radio in the first place.

Clarence Manion: The Communists are really the sharp troops for the Socialists. The Communists, like the Socialists, are seeking to establish a socialist world order.

Rush Limbaugh: It never can work because socialism is in direct violation of human nature. Capitalism is not. Capitalism embodies human nature from freedom to ambition on down the line.

Sean Hannity: Ice is melting in Antarctica. It’s a crisis they say and the only solution is full-on American socialism, government control of every aspect of your life, the antithesis of freedom and liberty and our constitutional republic.

Speaker 10: If Democrats want to bring socialism to America, it makes me wonder did they want to destroy America?

Brian Balogh: Nicole Hemmer is an Assistant Professor in Presidential Studies at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center. She’s also author of the book, Messengers of the Right: Conservative Media and the Transformation of American Politics.