Flashback, April 1966: Ulster Unionist Bigot Ian Paisley Starts Political Ascent

Within a week of his 40^th birthday, Rev. Ian Paisley moved decisively from fire-and-brimstone pulpit pounding in Northern Ireland to incendiary political partisanship in April 1966.

The ostensible cause of his agitation was Ulster Prime Minister Terence O’Neill’s commemoration of the 50^th anniversary of the Easter Rising, a well-meaning but toothless gesture that Paisley interpreted as a dangerous concession to the province’s Roman Catholic minority.

Protests planned by Paisley led O’Neill to restrict the Easter rising commemoration parades on April 17^th. Those security measures, without equal countervailing measures against Protestant marchers, reduced Catholic support for a Prime Minister perceived as timorous and condescending while emboldening Paisley and his associates.

Through size and the passion of a true believer, Paisley dominated the groups he founded or transformed in adulthood. In 1951, at age 25—only five years after ordination—he set up his own fundamentalist Free Presbyterian Church of Ulster.

By 1966 he organized opposition more aggressively against O’Neill, by:

*founding the Ulster Constitutional Defence Committee;

*establishing the Ulster Protestant Volunteers, who would use the motto “For God and Ulster,” formerly associated with the notorious Ulster Defence Force;

*co-founding The Protestant Telegraph, an answer to the more mainstream unionist newspaper, the Belfast Telegraph (sample headline from late October 1966: “Were the Reformers Right in Separating From the Church of Rome at Reformation?”; and

*street protests and rallies, often proceeding through Catholic neighborhoods as provocative gestures.

What came to be known as “The Troubles”—the three-decade sectarian conflict that cost 3,000 lives in Ulster—did not arise in a vacuum, nor even solely through social, economic, or political differences. Their destructive heat derived from rhetorical tropes that gave currency to ancient grievances and prejudices.

Paisley was not the sole purveyor of this bombast, but as an increasingly visible minister—and, ultimately, the politician with the most formidable base—he bore the heaviest responsibility for its use.

In journalist Tim Pat Coogan’s memorable summary from The I.R.A., Paisley possessed “a doctorate from Bob Jones’s Bible Belt University, lungs like the Bull of Bashan and a theology from the Apocalypse…In terms of bigotry he would stand, were he a Muslim, 359 degrees to the right of the Ayatollah Khomeini.”

Kenneth Branagh’s Oscar-winning screenplay for Belfast includes a brief scene with a screaming Protestant minister who is more than a little reminiscent of Paisley. Many YouTube viewers reacted with amusement at the over-the-top deliver y of this bilious rhetoric, but there was nothing remotely humorous about it at the time.

Denunciations of Vatican II’s ecumenical statements, including on an October 1962 visit to Rome where he intended to distribute pamphlets, led to him being detained for questioning when he and other clerics arrived at the Eternal City. 

He viewed O’Neill’s outreach to the Catholic minority as a political counterpart to this, even having gone so far as to lead a 1965 march by 1,000 loyalists to Ulster’s government seat, Stormont, to protest the historic first official visit to Northern Ireland by an Irish taoiseach (prime minister), Sean Lemass.

(Two years later, when Lemass’s successor Jack Lynch arrived in Ulster, Paisley pelted his car with snowballs.)

With pressure groups that could quickly be turned into mobs at his disposal, Paisley ramped up his anti-O’Neill, anti-Catholic campaign. In June 1966, he led members of his Free Presbyterian Church to picket and harass delegates to the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church of Ireland for its openness to ecumenism.

Instead of curtailing his fanaticism, his arrest and subsequent three-month imprisonment only conferred martyrdom status on him within the loyalist movement. 

His vehement opposition to the Catholic civil-rights marches of 1968 and early 1969 lifted his visibility, and when he finally plunged into the political arena in the latter year, his better-than-expected polling results in O’Neill’s own Bannside constituency helped trigger the Prime Minister’s resignation.

At this point, he began the modus operandi to which he would adhere for most of the rest of his life: whip followers up into a murderous frenzy, while vanishing before violence inevitably occurred.

In 1971, Paisley formed the Democratic Unionist Party, with considerable overlap from adherents to his own Free Presbyterian church. He now held a seat in Westminster as a Member of Parliament and by decade’s end would also start a quarter-century stint in the European Parliament. 

Many of his colleagues may have grown chary of his antics (e.g., denouncing Pope John Paul II as the Antichrist when the pontiff visited the European Parliament in 1988). But there was seemingly little they could, or would, do about them.

Paisley continued to obstruct the peace process, including by opposing the 1998 Good Friday Agreement that effectively ended 30 years of The Troubles. When he assumed power in 2007, it was as part of a power-sharing agreement with Sinn Fein –the same kind of pace he had denounced and torpedoed in the 1973 Sunningdale Agreement.

Longtime Ulster observers couldn’t get over the jovial relationship he now enjoyed with the Deputy First Minister in the government, Sinn Fein’s Martin McGuinness. But the realities of power can only be denied for so long.

In the same sense that only Cold Warrior Richard Nixon could have gone to Red China, only an incendiary bigot like Paisley could have agreed to peace negotiations with the IRA.

Upon his death, many Paisley admirers hailed what he had done for peace. They overlooked the irony that he had, in effect, engaged in the same reconciliation process with Catholics that provoked his outrage against Captain O’Neill—and that he had to detoxify the very environment he had inflamed with his rhetoric three decades earlier.

Paisley’s damage to the province was not only heinous but also injurious to the Unionist cause he espoused.

When he took umbrage at Captain O’Neill’s tentative attempt to ameliorate tensions between Ulster’s two faith communities, the Irish Republican Army stood at its lowest point since the six Protestant-dominated counties of Ulster were partitioned from the 26 counties of the republic to the south. Its 1956-62 offensive was so disastrous that the paramilitary organization’s acronym was spelled out to spawn a derisive nickname: “I Ran Away.”

Though gerrymandering and discrimination raged on, growing educational opportunities and the generous social welfare programs of Great Britain led many Catholics to accept control by the crown.

This month’s centenary of Paisley’s birth should lead to reflection, but hardly celebration, about his legacy. His career holds implications beyond the British Isles, to an entire political world with similar personalities.

Like demagogues across the globe and ages, he stirred atavistic prejudices into current socioeconomic grievances to advance his political interests. With such people, decades of peace and civil rights advances are provisional, always vulnerable to bigotry and backlash.

Quote of the Day (Lars-Erik Cederman, on Economics and Ethnic Nationalism)

“[E]thnic nationalism tends to attract the most support from those who have been disadvantaged by globalization and laissez-faire capitalism. Populist demagogues have an easy time exploiting growing socioeconomic inequalities, especially those between states’ geographic centers and their peripheries, and they blame ethnically distinct immigrants or resident minorities. Part of the answer is to retool immigration policies so as to better integrate newcomers. Yet without policies that reduce inequality, populist appeals that depict out-groups as welfare sponges will only gain traction. So governments hoping to amp down ethnic nationalism should set up programs that offer job training to the unemployed in depressed regions, and they should prevent the further hallowing out of welfare programs.”— Swiss-Swedish political scientist Lars-Erik Cederman, “Blood for Soil: The Fatal Temptations of Ethnic Politics,” Foreign Affairs, March/April 2019

The image of Lars-Erik Cederman that accompanies this post was taken on Nov. 1, 2018, by AliceRuth11.

Quote of the Day (Aldous Huxley, on a Leader As ‘A Good Public Performer’)

“People do not follow a Leader because he has a demonstrably sound and workable political plan. They follow him because he is a good public performer and because he knows how to provide them with the psychological satisfactions they need. His programme may be self-contradictory and manifestly absurd; but that makes not the slightest difference. Few people are concerned with logic and not many care very much even about their own material interests. They ask for their daily bread, of course; but for very little more than their daily bread. The wealth they covet is not material, but psychological; they crave emotional satisfactions, they want, in the expressive American phrase, ‘to feel good.’” — English novelist/essayist Aldous Huxley (1894-1963), “The Prospects of Fascism in England,” March 3, 1934, in Aldous Huxley, Between the Wars: Essays and Letters, edited by David Bradshaw (1994)

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Thomas Merton, on the Christian Subject to Misinformation and Demagoguery)

“The Christian who is misinformed; who is subject to the demagoguery of extremists in the press, on the radio or on TV, and who is perhaps to some extent temperamentally inclined to associate himself with fanatical groups in politics, can do an enormous amount of harm to society, to the Church and to himself. With sincere intentions of serving the cause of Christ he may cooperate in follies and injustices of disastrous magnitude.” — American Trappist monk, theologian, memoirist and poet Thomas Merton (1915-1968), Life and Holiness (1963)

Quote of the Day (Phyllis McGinley, on the Lessons of ‘The Demagogue’)

“That trumpet tongue which taught a nation
Loud lessons in vituperation
Teaches it yet another, viz.:
How sweet the noise of silence is.”—Pulitzer Prize-winning American poet Phyllis McGinley (1905-1978), “The Demagogue,” in Times Three: Selected Verse From Three Decades (1960)

 “The Demagogue” is an unusual poem in the collective works of Phyllis McGinley. Her contemporary reputation as a master of light verse—not to mention her undisguised affection for her suburban lifestyle—resulted in her being slighted by more fashionable writers who appeared in The Paris Review, such as W. D. Snodgrass or, nearly 10 years ago, Dan Piepenbring.

But from time to time she took note of the events of the day, in ways that were not fundamentally humorous—and perhaps nowhere with such compressed, ironic force, as in the lines I’ve quoted above.

I was unable to locate the magazine in which “The Demagogue” first appeared, but the Table of Contents for Times Three indicates that it came out in “The Fifties.” 

My guess, then, is that it was written in reaction to the braying, bellicose, and bullying U.S. Senator from Wisconsin who wreaked so much damage in that decade, Joe McCarthy.

(Did “the noise of silence” represent the random moments when he caught his breath before exploiting the media’s appetite for bright, shiny, fact-free soundbites—or the Senate censure that led McCarthy to be ignored by colleagues and reporters at last?)

McCarthy’s psychological descendant remains in existence today. Amazingly, diehard supporters try to explain away the threats of this new demagogue as “just kidding,” even when he disclaims any intention to be a dictator except on the first day in office his second time around as President.

The wonder is not that he continues to advertise his transgressive intent, but that some people refuse to credit it, while others who should know better from past experience believe that somehow he will be stopped. Yet it’s a shorter distance than many apologists hope from whipping up frenzy as a demagogue to exercising ultimate power as a dictator.

Just remember: When it comes to seizing such opportunities, fortune favors the knave. 

Quote of the Day (Adlai Stevenson, on ‘Those Who Corrupt the Public Mind’)

“Those who corrupt the public mind are just as evil as those who steal from the public purse.”—Adlai Stevenson Jr. (1900-1965), Illinois governor, two-time Democratic Presidential candidate, and American ambassador to the United Nations, in the campaign speech, “On Communism,” delivered in Albuquerque, N.M., on Sept. 12, 1952, in Speeches (1952)

Gov. Stevenson could hardly have conceived that at least one corrupter of “the public mind”—i.e., a demagogue-- could do so precisely as a means of stealing from the public purse—through violating the emoluments clause of the U.S. Constitution, that is.

Quote of the Day (Lord Acton, on Liberty as ‘The Delicate Fruit of a Mature Civilization’)

“Liberty, next to religion has been the motive of good deeds and the common pretext of crime, from the sowing of the seed at Athens, 2,460 years ago, until the ripened harvest was gathered by men of our race. It is the delicate fruit of a mature civilization; and scarcely a century has passed since nations, that knew the meaning of the term, resolved to be free. In every age its progress has been beset by its natural enemies, by ignorance and superstition, by lust of conquest and by love of ease, by the strong man’s craving for power, and the poor man’s craving for food. During long intervals it has been utterly arrested, when nations were being rescued from barbarism and from the grasp of strangers, and when the perpetual struggle for existence, depriving men of all interest and understanding in politics, has made them eager to sell their birthright for a pottage, and ignorant of the treasure they resigned. At all times sincere friends of freedom have been rare, and its triumphs have been due to minorities, that have prevailed by associating themselves with auxiliaries whose objects often differed from their own; and this association, which is always dangerous, has been sometimes disastrous, by giving to opponents just ground of opposition, and by kindling dispute over the spoils in the hour of success. No obstacle has been so constant, or so difficult to overcome as uncertainty and confusion touching the nature of true liberty.”—English historian Lord John Acton (John Emerich Edward Dalberg) (1834-1902), “The History of Freedom in Antiquity,” delivered to the members of the Bridgnorth Institute, Feb. 26, 1877

Lord Acton is better known for the aphorism, “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely,” but this passage, though not as pithy, is equally resonant for our age. Its warning about the fragility of freedom, issued during a 19^th century still dominated by monarchs, gained additional relevance during the rise of dictators in the 20^th century.

Sadly, it remains all too applicable in the 21^st century, as economic unrest provides—to use Acton’s initial farming metaphor—all too fertile soil for the rise of demagogues, even in what was called (perhaps too optimistically) “the Free World” in the Cold War. First, those demagogues used covert means to secure power; now, they act openly, brazenly to retain it.

Just as they work every day to subvert freedom, they must be resisted every day to maintain it.

This Day in TV History (Murrow Assails McCarthy-Bred Fear and ‘Age of Unreason’)

March 9, 1954—In a hard-hitting takedown of unusual daring for television news at the time, CBS newsman Edward R. Murrow (pictured) spotlighted to a nationwide audience the dangers to American civil liberties posed by Senator Joseph McCarthy in the Red Scare engulfing America. 

The year before, Murrow had given over an entire episode of his show See It Now to Milo Radulovich, a 28-year-old lieutenant in the Air Force Reserve, who was discharged as a security risk because of allegedly communistic sympathies of his father and sister. 

But this time on See It Now, Murrow was going directly at the senator who, in just four years, had ridden the fear of Communism gripping the nation to a position where he had intimidated not just ordinary citizens and government bureaucrats, but even his own peers on Capitol Hill. Murrow employed no investigatory work, merely used McCarthy’s own words to demonstrate the grave damage he had done.

Murrow later acknowledged ruefully that he should have confronted McCarthy sooner. Nor was he responsible for bringing him down: that distinction belongs, in varying degrees, to President Dwight D. Eisenhower, so incensed that “Tail Gunner Joe” was going after the institution to which Ike had devoted himself the last four decades—the military—that he employed behind-the-scenes surrogates like Richard Nixon to undercut him; and then-Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson, who carefully marshalled the votes leading to the censure of McCarthy by his colleagues a half-year later.

But Murrow did bring the resources of the still-fledgling medium of television journalism to extremely controversial subject matter, and—for all his initial caution in finally taking on McCarthy—he never walked it back or stilled his voice thereafter, and survived the senator’s subsequent attempt to smear him on camera.

The broadcast aired despite deep concern shading into disapproval by CBS brass, including company head William S. Paley. Only two months before the broadcast, American public opinion still ran half in favor of McCarthy and only 29% against, according to a Gallup poll. Paley feared that he would lose the sponsor of See It Now, Alcoa--and, in fact, that company did not renew their contract with CBS.

Yet in the wake of that show, followed by an ineffectual rebuttal by the Senator and Murrow’s unflinching denial of McCarthy’s attempt to smear him, responses ran 15-1 in favor of Murrow, according to Jim Willis’ 100 Media Moments that Changed America.

That night, Murrow took on what had troubled his journalist colleagues: how to bring the American public face to face with a demagogue of unparalleled recklessness, cupidity and cruelty. That same dilemma has become an overriding concern of today’s journalists as well, as they try to report, news that Donald Trump would rather not hear. 

For a long time, I did not believe that the conditions were right in America for the appearance of another Joe McCarthy. But in the last few years, the conviction has hardened in me that Trump is not only McCarthy’s natural successor, but in certain ways is even worse. 

McCarthy, after all, had to content himself with the not-inconsiderable powers given to Senators to conduct hearings on matters that call for legislation. Trump, though, has the full power of the Presidency behind him. 

Moreover, alcoholism not only hastened McCarthy’s descent from influence and ensured he would not make a comeback, but sped him to an early death, at age 48, from cirrhosis of the liver. On the other hand, Trump—with older brother Fred as a warning example—has avoided substance abuse.

The greatest factor differentiating Trump from McCarthy, however, derives from Trump’s fortune. No other occupant of the Oval Office has ever combined the inherent powers of this position with the financial resources of a billionaire—commercial influence he has continued to wield even after entering the White House.

It is rich indeed that Trump has decried the Mueller investigation as a “Witch hunt” and an example of “McCarthyism” in his daily tweets, for reasons going back the oft-noted fact that his friend and attorney when he was just starting out was Roy Cohn, who in his youth had been McCarthy’s chief counsel. 

Trump hopes that the longtime understanding of “McCarthyism”—i.e., guilt by association—will work wonders with followers who see nothing wrong with hanging out with Russians. But the term  also represents charges sprayed out indiscriminately, without a shred of evidence, even contradictory at points. When proof is requested of the politician, he offers distraction rather than evidence. 

Thus, McCarthy, in the event bringing him to the world stage, saying he had “in my hands a list of 205 names that were made known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party,” kept changing the number. Thus Trump, having made a big splash with GOP voters by calling for Barack Obama to produce his birth certificate to prove he was a U.S. citizen, eventually not only admitted that Obama was, but ludicrously suggested that the falsehood had been spread by Hilary Clinton rather than himself. 

In other respects, the press in both cases found it difficult to pierce the veil of lies woven by the Senator and the President:

*Each had a strong right-wing media “amen corner.” The Hearst organization enjoyed a direct link to McCarthy through Cohn and the latter’s close young friend, David Schine; Trump enjoys the near-total support of Fox News.

*GOP colleagues on Capitol Hill started out believing they could use McCarthy and Trump for their own purposes, only to crumble spinelessly when he influenced the party faithful against anyone who spoke out against him. In 1950, "growing numbers of Republicans were convinced that McCarthyism was their ticket to political power," wrote Thomas C. Reeves in his 1982 biography, The Life and Times of Joe McCarthy. They were right in that assumption, but wrong in believing that they could simply use him with no danger to themselves. After seeing McCarthy help defeat a critic, conservative Democrat Millard Tydings, Republican senators were terrified of taking him on. Similarly, even Republicans who harshly criticized Trump during the primaries, such as Lindsay Graham and Ted Cruz, have fallen in line after witnessing the rank-and-file’s support of the President.

*The menace of physical assault hung in the air around journalists covering the demagogue. McCarthy’s assault on muckraker Drew Pearson was so shockingly brutal (a knee to the groin, followed by a slap) that it even met with disapproval by otherwise sympathetic conservative historian Arthur Herman; Trump merely excites crowds against journalists such as Katy Tur, or praises a congressman (Greg Gianforte, R-Mont.) for pummeling a reporter.

In dealing with McCarthy, Murrow had to depart from one of the tenets of journalism—objectivity. His “Report” would not be a “he said, they said,” point-counterpoint presentation of points of view. He was reporting in a way that left no doubt whatsoever how he felt about what he called the Senator’s “methods.” 

Contemporary journalists face a not-dissimilar problem with Trump. His relationship to the truth has been so casual that they have increasingly transitioned how they process his claims. Early in his White House, stories would say that Trump's claims were "without evidence." Now, they are increasingly calling these outright "falsehoods." But as this reporting becomes more aggressive, it leaves the media open to being called by the President "enemies of the people."

They would do well to go back to Murrow's original broadcast.  

Though most of his report used McCarthy’s words against him, the closing was in Murrow's own words. Unlike in much of today's journalism, whether from the right or left, a tone of sobriety infuses the message and raises it to a level of eloquence virtually unimaginable now. The words are as searing to read as to listen to and watch:

“We will not walk in fear, one of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason, if we dig deep in our history and our doctrine, and remember that we are not descended from fearful men — not from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate and to defend causes that were, for the moment, unpopular. 

“This is no time for men who oppose Senator [Joseph] McCarthy's methods to keep silent, or for those who approve. We can deny our heritage and our history, but we cannot escape responsibility for the result. There is no way for a citizen of a republic to abdicate his responsibilities. As a nation we have come into our full inheritance at a tender age. 

“We proclaim ourselves, as indeed we are, the defenders of freedom, wherever it continues to exist in the world, but we cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home. The actions of the junior Senator from Wisconsin have caused alarm and dismay amongst our allies abroad, and given considerable comfort to our enemies. 

“And whose fault is that? Not really his. He didn't create this situation of fear; he merely exploited it — and rather successfully. Cassius was right. ‘The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.’"