The Newsmagazine of the North Carolina Center for Voter Education | Friday September 10, 2010

The Ugly 'Un-American'
Both sides of the political aisle should stop questioning the 'American-ness' of their opponents

By Bryan Warner
Published: Aug. 20, 2009

RALEIGH - English author Samuel Johnson once wrote, “Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.” In the rough and tumble world of modern politics, it seems the last refuge of a politico under fire is to question not just the patriotism of his rivals, but their very “American-ness.”

Faced with mounting opposition to their health-care reform proposals -- generated either by grassroots organizing or Astroturf manipulation -- Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer recently wrote in a USA Today column that disruptive protesters at town hall meetings were “un-American.”  Their word choice is jarring for its historical tone-deafness.

The term “un-American” first came to prominence in the 1940s, when Congress launched the House Committee on Un-American Activities.  The committee was originally designed to combat suspected Nazi activity on U.S. soil during World War II, but after the end of hostilities the committee shifted its sights to alleged communist sympathizers and covert Soviet agents mingling among American citizens.

The efforts of the committee to root out communist infiltration in the United States soon turned into a modern-day witch hunt, leading to the blacklisting of some 300 Americans working in Hollywood.  By 1959, former President Harry Truman denounced the committee as “the most un-American thing in the country today.”

Attacking political opponents and private citizens as somehow “un-American” well pre-dates the House committee, and may be as old as the Republic itself. In the mid 19th century, the Know Nothing movement took root in the Northeast with so-called “nativists” attacking the “un-American” qualities of Irish Catholic immigrants.  (Apparently lost on these “natives” was the irony that they themselves still carried the briny scent of the Atlantic crossed by their ancestors just a few decades before.)

It is one thing to question the patriotism of political opponents.  There is something comically quaint about politicians trying to out-Yankee-Doodle-Dandy each other by adorning themselves with flag pins and robes made of star-spangled bunting.  It is quite another thing to smear an opponent, especially a private citizen, as “un-American.” 

The label is at once imprecise and menacing, Orwellian even. Aside from citizenship, what -- or who -- determines what constitutes “American-ness?” (Indeed, our neighbors on the North and South American continents might contend that they are just as “American” as the inhabitants of these 50 states.)  But while the term is nebulous, it casts an ominous pall over those tarred by the epithet, relegating them to the status of outcasts at odds with “American values.”

It is understandable that Pelosi and Hoyer, along with their congressional colleagues, are vexed by the hostile reception they have received from sometimes-boorish attendees at their usually staid town hall meetings. 

What’s not understandable is that Pelosi and Hoyer, present-day leaders of the same body that once ruined the lives of hundreds of Americans through a warped quest to sniff out allegedly “un-American” tendencies of private citizens, would use such a lazy slur against people noisily -- even rudely and obnoxiously -- exercising the quintessentially American right of free speech and political dissent.

To be sure, Pelosi and Hoyer are far from the first politicians to carelessly appoint themselves arbiters of “American-ness.” And the term “un-American” often has been a rhetorical weapon wielded by their political opponents on the other end of the political spectrum (Gov. Sarah Palin’s remark about “real America” comes to mind.)  But they, along with elected officials, political pundits and partisan flacks on both sides of the aisle, could do the political lexicon a great service and elevate the level of public discourse by banishing from their vocabulary this ignoble, ugly word.

That would be quite American of them.