What a gutsy lady and what an uneasy reminder of the “Red Scare” of 1950s America.
So here’s Miriam Moskowitz, 98 years old, bringing a federal lawsuit “after recently unsealed court papers showed the government hid evidence that would have cleared her.”
“I want to clear my good name,” Miriam Moskowitz told the Daily News.” Damn right.
“Moskowitz served two years in prison and paid a $10,000 fine − and found herself shunned as a traitor when she got out.”
Here’s the full linked story: Woman, 98, wants her McCarthy-era Red Scare criminal conviction tossed. – NY Daily News.
It caused me to remember having had a vague sense of my mother’s uneasiness during that time. As I learned when I grew up enough to grasp the reality, many of my parents’ friends had belonged to one left wing sect or another, and my father had been a Trotskyist. (Why not my mother, too? Because she was way too independent.)
They didn’t talk to us about it, but it was in the air: fear. What happened to Miriam Moskowitz could have happened to anybody in those days. All it took was some crazy congressman flinging out accusations, flinging out names. That was all it took.
In the ugly parlance of that time, my parents “associated” with people about whom paranoids could have been suspicious. Of course, paranoids − particularly ambitious, self-aggrandizing paranoids − are officially suspicious of anyone whom they can use to grab media and political attention.
Of course, nothing like that happens today. Thank heavens.