Erasing the Brown Scare: Referential Afterlife and the Power of Memory Templates
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Erasing the Brown Scare: Referential Afterlife and the Power of Memory Templates
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Erasing the Brown Scare:
Referential Afterlife and
the Power of Memory Templates
GARY ALAN FINE, Northwestern University
TERENCE MCDONNELL, Northwestern University
Perhaps paradoxically, events can have effects despite having been “forgotten.” Events have, in Erving
Goffman’s (1981:46) phrase, a referential afterlife, the period in which events can be referred to with the
expectation that audiences will understand their relevance and symbolic meaning. When an event has passed
this period of shared recollection it still may leave traces, especially if responses to the event have been institution-
alized. We examine the dynamics by which events serve as memory templates for subsequent events. We distin-
guish templates into two subtypes: interpretative templates and action templates, those that contribute to how the
public recalls the past and those that provide strategies for action. To examine the power of templates, we analyze
the forgetting of the brown scare of the early 1940s, and specifically the largest sedition case in American history,
United States v. McWilliams. Attacks on the right contributed to the development of the national security
state and courtroom tactics in political trials, but the public rarely remembers them. Keywords: collective
memory, reputation, memory, sedition, political sociology.
On April 17, 1944, the largest sedition trial in American history opened in a federal
courthouse in Washington, DC. This trial, United States v. McWilliams (1944), was two years in
preparation, and brought charges against 30 alleged Nazi sympathizers. These 30 defendants,
the prosecution claimed, conspired with each other and with the German regime to under-
mine the United States’ war effort, weakening military effectiveness. This trial, which charged
the defendants with violating the 1940 Smith Act, served as a model for the subsequent
prosecutions of the pro-Soviet Communist left in the later years of the decade.1 The Smith
Act, formally known as the Alien Registration Act, outlawed acts of sedition and advocating
the overthrow of the government by force or violence (Belknap 1977:25). The McWilliams
indictment and trial received extensive media coverage. Eventually in December 1944, with
only one-third of the prosecution’s evidence presented, a mistrial was declared after the fatal
heart attack of the trial judge, Edward Eicher. By the time of the mistrial, the Allies were on
the verge of victory in the European theater and organizations on the far right were mori-
bund. The end of the war swept away the rationale for the trial, setting the stage for public
The authors thank Aaron Beim, Glen Jeansonne, Philip Jenkins, Jeffrey Olick, Leo Ribuffo, Roger Roots, Barry
Schwartz, and Michael Sherry for their comments on an earlier draft. Direct correspondence to: Gary Alan Fine, Depart-
ment of Sociology, Northwestern University, 1810 Chicago Ave., Evanston, IL 60208. E-mail: g-fine@northwestern.edu.
1. United States v. McWilliams was not the first Smith Act prosecution. That honor belonged to the “Minneapolis
Sedition Trial,” a case that was successfully brought against 23 members of a Minnesota branch of the Socialist Workers’
Party (another five were acquitted by the judge after the conclusion of the prosecution’s case). That trial, successful as it
was, was not well-publicized and was not disrupted, although it may have convinced the Department of Justice that
large trials could be effective. The Communist Party supported the charges and the convictions of this splinter Trotskyite
group.
Social Problems, Vol. 54, Issue 2, pp. 170–187, ISSN 0037-7791, electronic ISSN 1533-8533.
© 2007 by Society for the Study of Social Problems, Inc. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photo-
copy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Rights and Permissions website at http://www.
ucpressjournals.com/reprintinfo/asp. DOI: 10.1525/sp.2007.54.2.170.
SP540202 Page 171 Thursday, April 19, 2007 3:49 PM
Referential Afterlife and the Power of Memory Templates 171
forgetting—the absence of any future harm meant no further need existed to incapacitate the
targeted group. The country had moved on; the concerns of the war years were displaced
with a new set of concerns involving the threat of communism. A retrial was never held.
After two years of government inaction, charges were dropped.
Despite its significance in the creation of the national security state and the institutional-
ization of sedition prosecutions (Berlat and Lyons 2000:149; Keller 1989; MacDonnell
1995:155; Ribuffo 1983:215; Schmidt 2000),2 the McWilliams trial and other attacks on the
isolationist right wing in the United States during the late 1930s and early 1940s (“the brown
scare”) are little referred to and are largely forgotten.
We ask why some events reverberate and become institutionalized in collective memory,
while others have little impact. In the phrase of Robin Wagner-Pacifici (2000:91–95), what
are the “genealogical dimensions” of historical events? Put another way, what happens when
collective memories are displaced by other events of seemingly greater significance (Irwin-
Zarecka 1994)? Can the effects of events remain, while their memory dissipates? We suggest
that it is important to understand that memory operates both on the level of self and on the
level of institution. Memory is not merely social psychological detritus, but has effects as
organizational practice. To understand this process we examine the role of templates of mem-
ory that are used to structure events. Templates are schemata—cognitive, rhetorical, behav-
ioral, and institutional—developed by individuals, groups, and organizations with specific
reference to what memory entrepreneurs define as notable events. In other words, templates
colonize cognition in a socially ordered fashion. For them to have effects, they need the spon-
sorship of individuals, groups, and organizations, and need to be spread through forms of
media or institutional diffusion.
This article addresses two conceptual issues by means of the brown scare and the
McWilliams trial. First, what processes cause this episode to be largely forgotten? Second,
how do events such as the McWilliams trial serve as templates for subsequent events that
are defined as within the same domain or genre? These questions underline the sponsorship
of memory and the institutionalization of forgetting and silence (Zerubavel 2006), what
McLaughlin (1998), medicalizing the absence of memory, terms collective amnesia. Memory
and its absence are not merely a matter of individual choice, but are central to understand-
ing political interests and institutional practices. To engage with these issues, we present
three concepts central for understanding these processes: referential afterlives, interpretative
templates, and action templates.
Collective forgetting occurs when: (1) a dearth of institutionally positioned social actors
have an interest in keeping the memory of an event alive, and (2) those actors in such a posi-
tion decide against using the event as an interpretive template, enabling the decay of that
event in collective memory, even if its outcomes remain. Memory does not merely result
from the possibility of collective representations, but from the deliberate actions of memory
entrepreneurs to establish these representations (Fine 1996; Lang and Lang 1990). When col-
lective representations do not appear for cognitive or behavioral reasons, apathy or ignorance
results (Eliasoph 1998).
Memories of events have, in Erving Goffman’s (1981:46) phrase, a referential afterlife.
Goffman uses the concept of referential afterlife to refer to discourse grounded in ongoing
interactions; here we expand the term to apply to communal recall. The point remains: for
what period can an event be referred to with the assumption that an audience will understand
2. The attacks on the right wing had precedents in American history (Bennett 1988; Fine 2006; Stone 2004). The
attacks on anarchists in the years after World War I—the Palmer raids—served as an example, although because they
entered collective memory as an instance of government excess and because attacks were now being aimed at citizens,
the precedent had to be reconceptualized. However, the passage of the Smith Act in 1940 was designed to provide the
government with a strategy for response to “subversion.” The government was given a hammer and it went searching
for nails.
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172 FINE AND MCDONNELL
its relevance? What begins as a form of collective attention may or may not become sedi-
mented into collective memory. Collective memory refers to events that are not immediate
concerns, but past events that can be referred to with the assumption of shared understand-
ing. In this sense, collective memory is historical and rhetorical (Shotter 1990). Referential
afterlife emphasizes that as other issues emerge to displace what had seemed important, pre-
viously salient references are pushed aside, no longer considered “notable” (Irwin-Zarecka
1994). Recall and forgetting are dynamic and are situated within mnemonic communities
(Fleck 1979; Zerubavel 1997). In these networks one must be able to refer to certain events
in order to be considered competent. Those demonstrating a lack of such knowledge are
likely to be considered culturally illiterate (Hirsch 1987).
Templates have different characteristics depending on whether they are interpretative
templates or action templates, those that contribute to how the public thinks about the past or
those that justify action. While these templates overlap, they are analytically distinct. Events
used as an action template may have effects independent of how that event is used as an
interpretive template. Once a response has become an institutional strategy, forms of action
that are seen as effective may continue long after their origins have been forgotten.
How are events excluded from institutionalized historical accounts, denying them
retrievability (Schudson 1989)? To endure, memories must resonate with institutionally sup-
ported templates (Shotter 1990) and be backed by interpretive communities (Schudson
1992). Events, through their cognitive genealogy, can become models that structure how we
think about similar occurrences. Hence, the extension of the referential afterlife of an event
depends on its establishment as a means by which interpretation is achieved. As Jeffrey Olick
(1999) argues in describing the dialogic, path-dependent features of memory, one event pro-
vides the basis for thinking about later incidents in a similar genre.
To explore these issues of collective memory we gathered data on the McWilliams trial from
multiple sources. We examined the trial record itself (United States v. Joseph E. McWilliams et al.
1944), available in the National Archives in Suitland, Maryland, and reviewed media coverage,
notably reportage by the pro-prosecution Washington Post, the pro-defense Chicago Tribune and
Washington Times, and the more balanced New York Times (from 1942 through 1945). In addition,
several figures associated with the prosecution and the defense have written accounts (Baxter
1986; Biddle 1962; Rogge, 1961; St. George and Dennis 1946), as have historians and journalists
on the left and right (Reilly 1985; Ribuffo 1983; Warden 1952). Given the social placement of
the defendants, some of this material derives from far-right publications, such as The Barnes
Review, that describe how those sympathetic to the defense conceived the trial and its aftermath.
In dealing with forgetting, we confront the lack of evidence: missing data are data, if
imperfectly so. While we rely on statements about this absence, theorizing this absence
requires inference of what might be termed the presence of absence: how does the
absence of potential (or even expected) claims affect the course of collective memory? We
also must recognize the uncertainty of who has forgotten. Given the lack of data on public
knowledge (only for major public figures and events do surveys test public beliefs
[Schwartz and Schuman 2005]), we argue that news reports are an adequate stand-in for
collective memory (Schudson 1992). While we recognize that a full correspondence does
not exist between journalistic discourse and the knowledge of citizens, media both reflect
and generate public memory. When media do not reference events, we can treat these
events as marginal in public recall.
“The Brown Scare”
The years prior to the Second World War were a moment of intense political struggle, part
of the questioning of established political structures brought on by the Depression. The strug-
gles related to both domestic policies and international involvement. In terms of foreign policy,
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Referential Afterlife and the Power of Memory Templates 173
the nation was split between those who wished to intervene in the emerging struggle in
Europe and those who felt America should avoid becoming entangled in European disputes.
In domestic policy, the debate centered on the appropriate government involvement in the
economy. These dimensions did not correspond perfectly as is evident in the fact that social-
ists like Norman Thomas were isolationists and that some leading business executives sup-
ported aid to Britain. Further, early populist Roosevelt supporters such as Father Charles
Coughlin, the Reverand Gerald Winrod, Gerald L. K. Smith, and Montana Senator Burton
Wheeler turned bitterly against the president. Winrod, Smith and Coughlin became leaders of
the “far right” (Jeansonne 1988); Wheeler, a potential Democratic candidate for President in
1940, provided some measure of political legitimacy for such critics.
In both world wars, America came late to battle, and many Americans passionately
believed that the quarrels of Europe were no business of the U.S. military. The memories of
the deaths of American soldiers on the fields of France died hard. In the late 1930s, as storm
clouds broke over Europe, a pitched battle occurred over whether and how the U.S. govern-
ment should aid the nations of Western Europe, particularly Great Britain. The Roosevelt
administration tried various strategies to increase American involvement, such as the Lend-Lease
program and the repeal of the Neutrality Act. Those who opposed European intervention
were attacked by Roosevelt who called the America First Committee, the leading isolationist
organization, a “Trojan horse.” Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes labeled members of the
organization “unwitting aids of the agents of Nazism” (Ribuffo 1983:185).3 While isolationists
were a foil for the Roosevelt administration, they held political influence and were largely,
but not exclusively, linked to conservative politicians (Cole 1953; Coogan 1999:241; Jonas
1966:21–23). However, after the Nazi-Soviet Pact in 1939 (until the Nazi attack on Russia in
June 1941), Communists shared the desire for American non-involvement.
Within the Roosevelt administration dislike for the right ran deep (Biddle 1962). Roosevelt
complained that the FBI spent too much time investigating domestic Communists and not
enough investigating domestic Fascists (Schmidt 2000:349). Charles Lindbergh was a particu-
lar target of the Roosevelt administration—the President called him a “copperhead,” referring
to a northern supporter of the South during the Civil War, and Secretary Ickes labeled Lind-
bergh a “Nazi mouthpiece” (Powers 1998:170). The administration attempted to create an
emotive frame of disgust among the American public for their opponents, a strategy that
worked in some regions (the cities of the East) better than others.
As early as 1935, President Roosevelt asked FBI Chief J. Edgar Hoover to gather informa-
tion on “pro-Nazi” organizations and individuals, a request with which Hoover was only too
happy to comply (Jeansonne 1996:152; Berlet and Lyons 2000:155; MacDonnell 1995:163).
These investigations continued for the next decade (Bernstein 1976), and targeted members
of Congress such as Senator Wheeler, North Dakota Senator Gerald Nye, Texas Representa-
tive Martin Dies, and New York Representative Hamilton Fish (Schmidt 2000:348–52).
Leftists, such as the Friends of Democracy (Ribuffo 1983:186), supported the prewar
attacks on the right (Berlat and Lyons 2000; Seldes 1938), but even the House Un-American
Activities Committee investigated fascists and isolationists. Hollywood produced films warn-
ing of the dangers of domestic fascism, notably Warner Brothers’ “Murder in the Air,” starring
Ronald Reagan, and the earlier “Black Legion,” films that cautioned about “Nazi saboteurs.”
Even prior to the outbreak of war, some on the left wished to use the Smith Act to charge the
right with sedition (Ribuffo 1983:183). Fears were rife among the left about a domestic “fifth
column” (Vaughn 1987:366–67). One account (Britt 1940:2) suggested the Axis fifth column
in the United States was one million strong (Higham 1985).
In the months after Pearl Harbor, attacks on the “fascist right” increased in intensity
(Sayers and Kahn 1942). German and Italian offices, shops, and social clubs were raided
3. Columnist and radio commentator Walter Winchell went one step further, calling America Firsters “Assolationists”
(Dean 1994:60), or perhaps in auditory form “Asshole-lationists.”
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174 FINE AND MCDONNELL
(Jenkins 1997:214). The week after Pearl Harbor some 3,000 German Americans and German
agents were arrested and detained, including members of the proto-fascist Silver Shirts.
Father Coughlin’s magazine Social Justice was barred from the mail (Jenkins 1997:215), and in
1942 Coughlin was forced to remove himself from politics because of an order from his bishop,
who had been pressured by the Roosevelt administration (Biddle 1962). The radical right col-
lapsed in the year after Pearl Harbor, and most non-interventionists supported the war.
This patriotic effervescence led the left to hope that the aftermath of Pearl Harbor would
cleanse the right from American politics. Jenkins (1997:215) notes: “Sensitivity to rightist plot-
ting raised hopes among liberals and leftists that finally there would be a real purge of powerful
fascist sympathizers.” Bestselling books such as Michael Sayers and Albert Kahn’s Sabotage!
(1942) and John Roy Carlson’s Under Cover (1943) graphically detailed, however imperfectly,
fascist subversion. Roosevelt, never a strong defender of civil liberties, wanted to use the war
“to clean up . . . vile publications” (Ribuffo 1983:188; see Belknap 1977:40; Stone 2004:252).
The president referred to his far right opponents as members of the “lunatic fringe” (Washington
Post 1944:1) in what Powers (1998:164) terms a “brown-smear stereotype.”
Brown scare has not had the same prominence as the analogous term “red scare.” The
attacks of the American government on leftist radicals and anarchists are remembered and
taught, typically as an illegitimate overreach of American state power. However, governmen-
tal attacks on rightists and fascist sympathizers are neither learned nor taught. With the
exception of a few historians, marginal political actors are the primary groups to keep the
memory of the government attacks on the right alive.4 The label brown scare, and the period
it references, are little known.5 Brown scare was first proposed by progressive historian Leo
Ribuffo6 (1983), forty years after the McWilliams trial, as an analogy to attacks on the left.
The term is now used both by historians (Bennett 1988:268) and by some linked to Holocaust
revisionism (Peel 1986; Piper and Hoop 1999), but is not part of public discourse.7
United States v. McWilliams
As early as July 1941, a grand jury was impaneled in the District of Columbia by the
Department of Justice to probe foreign espionage and propaganda. Yet, by Pearl Harbor no
indictments had been forthcoming, in part because of the reluctance of Roosevelt’s attorney
4. Factual claims in this article depend upon the writings by historians and mainstream media sources. However,
these marginal political sources are instrumental for assessing attitudes towards memory.
5. Labels do not just appear, they are strategically created by social actors, publicized, and then can either become
sedimented or forgotten. Reputational entrepreneurs may become invested in their perpetuation. In turn, these labels
can be contested, and depending on the cultural resonance of the claims (Schudson 1989) and on the resources of insti-
tutional actors, certain images stick in collective memory (Stamatov 2002) and are adopted as media templates (Kitzinger
2000:61). Labels can be “good to think,” helping to classify people, events, and ideologies, and place them within a
moral framework. Functioning as an interpretive template, a label can subsequently be used as an analogy for other
events (Kitzinger 2000:75; Olick 1999).
6. Unlike the label red scare, whose creation by Frederick Lewis Allen (1931) is no longer cited as the term has
been naturalized as a transparent description of events, the term brown scare is still “owned” by Ribuffo, and when
referred to, his work is cited. It hasn’t fully entered political discourse.
7. While precise measures of recall are impossible to attain, one indication of this divide is that a review of general
news items in Lexis-Nexis reveals 827 references to “red scare” in a recent five year period, and three to “brown scare,”
none of them relevant to attacks on isolationists or rightists. Reviewing Sociological Abstracts from 1980 to 2002 there are
fifteen references to red scare and one to brown scare as a reaction to an alleged increase in fascism in right-wing European
movements (Berlet 1997). In the American History and Life abstracts, there are 140 references to red scare, and one to
brown scare. It is not only that the two labels are not used equally, but that the two sets of attacks on radicals have
entered into historical memory differently. Our argument is not that the two bodies of events—brown and red scares—
are necessarily equivalent in weight or meaning. However, an argument could be made that attacks on rightists are his-
torically significant and that the attacks could be recalled if there were memory entrepreneurs with cultural resources
who saw it in their interest to push the issue, creating a place for memory work (Fine 1996; Schudson 1989).
SP540202 Page 175 Thursday, April 19, 2007 3:49 PM
Referential Afterlife and the Power of Memory Templates 175
general, Francis Biddle, who was wary of a repetition of the abuses during and after World
War I.
By early 1942 Roosevelt began to pressure Biddle (Jeansonne, 1996:152; Pearson and
Allen 1942; Radosh 1975:290; Washburn 1985); similar demands were forthcoming from the
Anti-Defamation League and the Washington Post (Henning 1944b). Biddle (1962) reveals in
his memoirs:
[Roosevelt] began to go for me in the Cabinet. His technique was always the same. When my turn
came, as he went around the table, his habitual affability dropped. He did not ask me as usual, if I
had anything to report. He looked at me, his face pulled tightly together. ‘When are you going to
indict the seditionists?’ he would ask; and the next week, and every week after that, until the
indictment was found, he would repeat the same question (p. 238).
Through his insistence Roosevelt obtained an indictment and political trial. On July 29, 1942,
26 “Fascists” were indicted under the Espionage Act of 1917 and the Alien Registration Act
(“Smith Act”) of 1940, creating a frame of disloyalty (Noakes 2000). However, the first two
indictments were weak and it was not until January 3, 1944 that a third indictment was filed
against 30 defendants. Joseph McWilliams, a New York agitator, was the first named defen-
dant in the final indictment, and so the case is known as United States v. McWilliams. O. John
Rogge, a successful prosecutor of the Huey Long machine, was the government attorney.
The judge, Edward Eicher, a former New Deal congressman from Iowa and former head of
the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), had been a close associate of Roosevelt. The
defense alleged that he was handpicked by the president and had been offered a seat on the
Supreme Court (Jeansonne 1996:158; Warden 1944).
The defendants were a motley mix of extremists; many were anti-Semites, most with
small followings (Ribuffo 1983; MacDonnell 1995:185). Best known were Lawrence Dennis,
a former diplomat, independent economist, and author of The Coming American Fascism
(1936), and Reverend Gerald Winrod, a Kansas rightist, who had made a serious, if unsuc-
cessful, bid for the U.S. Senate. The inclusion of five German Americans were said by one
defense attorney to give the trial a “sauerkraut flavor” (Reilly 1985:64), suggesting guilt by
association. Major names on the right, such as Father Coughlin, Gerald L. K. Smith, General
George Von Horn Moseley, and Charles Lindbergh, were absent, perhaps because of their
ability to generate support or resources. Despite the desire of Rogge to indict political figures
(Jenkins 1997:217), such as Senator Wheeler, no politicians were included. Viewing the trial
at a distance of sixty years, these figures seem no threat to the American war effort even had
they not been suppressed. The trial was an example of “American political justice” (Belknap
1977:x), and because of the burden of expenses, destroyed the defendants’ capacity for activ-
ism (Jeansonne 1996:164).
Congressional critics, such as Senators Nye, Wheeler, and Taft, felt that the indictments
were designed to produce a chilling effect on those who might be tempted to criticize the war
effort and the administration (Jeansonne 1996:152). James Laughlin, the court-appointed
attorney for defendant Edward Smythe, asserted:
This indictment is a mere subterfuge and is used by the Roosevelt Administration as a ruse to
besmirch and smear the good names of certain patriotic Americans such as General Macarthur,
Governor Bricker, Senator Vandenberg, Senator Nye, Senator Wheeler, Representative Fish, Repre-
sentative Hoffman, Representative Rankin, and Colonel Lindbergh (Henning 1944a).
Attorney General Biddle (1962:243) admitted that the trial achieved its primary purpose by
curtailing far right propaganda during the war.
Many on the left were pleased by the indictment (Ribuffo 1983:194). Heinz Eulau
(1944), writing in The New Republic, predicted that the case would be “one of the most sensa-
tional, but salutary, trials in the history of American civil liberties” (p. 338). Despite the use of
the sedition act to silence public debate, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), after
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176 FINE AND MCDONNELL
extensive internal debate, refused to become involved, believing that the accused “were
cooperating with or acting on behalf of” the enemy (Ribuffo 1983:194). A few prominent
civil libertarians vigorously dissented: Roger Baldwin, the ACLU executive director, described
the indictments as “monstrous,” but he was unable to persuade his colleagues.
With 30 defendants, nearly as many defense attorneys, and an ineffectual presiding
judge, the trial became alternatively chaotic and plodding. The charges were vague and
much of the evidence insubstantial in demonstrating conspiracy or sedition. Attorneys and
defendants attempted to mock the trial with some giving the Nazi salute, wearing signs
such as “I am a spy” or grotesque false faces (Time 1944:15). After half a dozen attorneys
had been cited for contempt, the attorneys started wearing buttons reading ECC (Eicher
Contempt Club).
The Chicago Tribune described the scene in the courtroom as “indescribable confusion,
bordering on the riotous” (Henning 1944c). Attorney General Biddle referred to the trial as a
“farce” and as “a shockingly dreary and degrading experience,” adding that “nothing like the
trial ever happened in an American court of law” (Biddle 1962:241–42). Biddle’s wife felt
that “it was like a great schoolroom with unruly children pounding on their desks, shouting
imprecations, jumping up and down, the teacher’s efforts to quiet them drowned in the hubbub”
(Biddle 1962:243).
On November 30, 1944, after seven months, Judge Eicher had a fatal heart attack,
caused, some claim, by the stress of the trial. By the time of the mistrial the trial record con-
sisted of 17,879 pages, with 39 of 100 government witnesses heard and with about 1,000 of
4,000 exhibits entered into evidence (Newsweek 1944:44). Charges were dismissed against all
defendants on November 22, 1946.
Collective Forgetting
How we think and how we recall are grounded in social processes (DiMaggio 1997; Olick
and Robbins 1998; Zerubavel 1997). Thought is socially situated. What has been less empha-
sized is that “forgetting”—the absence of institutionalized memory8—is socially situated as
well (McLaughlin 1998). While there is a literature on collective forgetting (e.g., Douglas
1995; Mazrui 2000; Vaughan 2000:256), much of that analysis concerns things that nations
must “erase” in order to preserve communal harmony (e.g., Baumeister and Hastings 1997;
Cole 1998; Geyer 2001; Putra 2001). As French philosopher and historian Ernest Renan
noted: “To forget and—I will venture to say—to get one’s history wrong are essential factors
in the making of a nation” (quoted in Mazrui 2000:87).
The assumption is that forgetting is something that nations or people actively do, func-
tionally suppressing an unwanted past rather than treating forgetting as a memory that lacks
a sponsor. Yet, what are forgotten are events without backers or constituencies and events
that cannot be described using accepted genres for ongoing memory work. Like the construc-
tion of social problems, forgetting is a function of interests and resources. For instance, in
contrast to memory of the violence against American Indians by white settlers, which lives
on, the absence of recalled instances of American Indian brutality against white settlers does
not result only from the desire of society writ large to forget, but also because well-placed
sponsors, attentive audiences, and effective storylines are absent. Such events were empha-
sized at the time (and were recalled for awhile), but today lack the sponsorship and institu-
tionalization to be brought to continuing public attention. This constitutes referential decay,
8. Memory and forgetting are relative concepts. Events that are “forgotten” are known by some; whereas recalled
events are not known by all. Memory and forgetting operate on both the institutional and personal plane, with the pres-
ence or absence of one affecting the other. The absence of institutional support for recall is a key fact in the absence of a
referential afterlife.
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Referential Afterlife and the Power of Memory Templates 177
the rate at which events fade from collective memory without the rejuvenating activities of
social actors. Without institutional mnemonic support, the referential afterlife of memory
events can be brief.
Further, as we describe later, erasure of the memory of events does not necessarily mean
that the events will not have effects. An interpretive frame, part of active recall, can be lost
while the action frame, producing responses to events, continues to reverberate. Recall is not
the same as consequences. To forget historical moments is not identical to forgetting strategies
that were originally developed in response to those now neglected events. Groups can have an
interest to continue strategies of political response, while erasing memory of the original tar-
gets of that response.
Governmental attacks on the right lacked institutional support to justify recall, either
positively or negatively. Even during the McWilliams trial, those who had once defined the
prosecution as a major event came to see it as no longer serving their rhetorical purposes. The
trial began with extensive press coverage (St. George and Dennis 1946). From its opening in
April through August, the New York Times published 85 articles on the trial, while the Chicago
Tribune published 84 articles in the same period. However, by August most editors had
removed reporters from the courtroom. The right was treated as a spent force, of little current
relevance, in American politics. Despite heavy coverage of the indictment and trial at its start,
(University of Chicago Law Review 1948:692) as newspapers around the country sent reporters,
interest faded, and at its conclusion, the trial, lacking institutional supporters, was ignored
(Ribuffo 1983; University of Chicago Law Review 1948:699). By the end, coverage of the trial
was minimal with only three reporters regularly in court, down from over two dozen in the
early weeks. Eventually, even the Washington Post, an instigator of the trial, became disgusted,
withdrawing their reporter in early August and describing the trial as a “farce” and “travesty.”
Even those papers that sent reporters did not frequently publish articles for the remaining
three months (14 articles in the Times and 15 in the Tribune). After the trial ended, it was as if
it had never been part of public attention. A search of the Chicago Tribune and New York Times
databases reveals only nine references to the trial after its conclusion in the Tribune (only four
after 1944) and three in the Times (and none after 1944).9 The trial had been a major event at
its start, but vanished as a topic of media interest and as a result, public knowledge.10
Potential supporters of the defendants (such as prewar non-interventionists) lacked
interest in rising to their defense. In part, this was a function of the fringe placement of these
defendants, but it was also a result of the position of anti-Roosevelt non-interventionists and
their attempts to maintain their legitimacy. Mainstream supporters of non-intervention sup-
ported the war effort, silenced by fears of further prosecutions, persuaded by the attack on
Pearl Harbor, and horrified by claims of Nazi brutality. The “Old Christian Right” (Ribuffo
1983) was marginalized, and eventually replaced by a new generation of conservatives who
were less willing to engage in divisive identity politics grounded on race and religion. Justify-
ing the older rightists was not strategic for the postwar conservative movement (Hodgson
1996; Nash 1976).
Those who wish to keep alive the memory of the persecution of the right are ineffec-
tively placed in terms of public discourse. Much current recall of the trial is sponsored by
Holocaust revisionist or denier magazines such as The Barnes Review or the Journal of Historical
9. We examined references to the trial through references to “McWilliams” and “sedition” up through 2000. In
the Tribune, there was a single reference to the trial in 1945, two in 1947, and one in 1949.
10. This stands in sharp contrast to the memory of the Smith Act trial, United States v. Dennis et al. This 1949 trial
that convicted leaders of the Communist party was still being referred to during the 1990s. Admittedly, there is consid-
erable difference between the inconclusive brown scare trial and the red scare trial that was upheld by the U.S. Supreme
Court in 1951. From 1952 until 2000, there were 183 articles in the New York Times on the trial and 65 in the Chicago
Tribune (checking for “Eugene Dennis” and “Judge Medina.”) Our argument is not that the two trials deserved to be
remembered equally, but the extensive references to the Dennis trial provides an indicator of just how completely the
McWilliams trial was forgotten.
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178 FINE AND MCDONNELL
Review (Lipstadt 1993:203–05). A review of high school history textbooks, one effective
means of determining what is being taught and learned (Loewen 1996), suggests the absence
of attention to these attacks on political action. Of 42 textbooks published over the past three
decades, not a single one referred to the brown scare or the McWilliams trial and only two
noted that sedition laws were aimed at the right.11 Despite claims among the right that the
trail was historically significant as a show trial (St. George and Dennis 1946:16), most rightists
recognize the absence of memory and one refers to it as “this crucial trial that most Americans
either never knew about or have forgotten” (Rhome 2000:68). Another rightist commentator
notes, referring to this as a “historical blackout”; “the Sedition Trial of 1944 has been con-
signed to an Orwellian memory hole by American’s post-World-War-Two political, economic,
intellectual, cultural, academic, and media establishments” (Rollins 1986:123). The referen-
tial decay of memory is generational, both through experience (Schuman and Scott 1989),
linked to the social location of actors (Griffin 2004), and through what is taught. Forgetting in
one generation, without a decision on the part of institutional actors that the events need to
be learned, leads to ignorance in the next. It is through institutions of social transmission that
personal memory—having learned of the events as they occurred—is transformed into “his-
tory” or “commemoration.” Unlike the red scare, which was presented in numerous media
and popular cultural portrayals, the brown scare never reached those generations that were
not aware of it firsthand.
Few now see the trial and the brown scare that stood behind it as holding significant les-
sons for America. Anti-Semites have been silenced (Lipset 1964; Westin 1964) and sedition
laws were overturned through the efforts of attorneys for members of the Communist party
(Morgan 2003). Of course, should the tactics in the domestic war on terror change, the
McWilliams trial, suitably redefined and shaped as narrative, could be a resource for political
actors (Stone 2004), just as Pearl Harbor was newly recalled after the attack on the World
Trade Center. Likewise, contemporary attacks upon Israel and claims of Zionist aggression can
potentially be linked to other instances in which the power of Jews was attacked.
The Power of Templates
Templates—common cognitive structures or collective representations of social domains—
serve several purposes. They provide for collective socialization of individual cognition,
encouraging citizens to think about persons and events utilizing common images and then
using these images to apply beyond the immediate case (Kitzinger 2000). Templates are a
means by which cognition—and its associated emotions—can be packaged for easy interpre-
tation. The past, suitably reconstructed, can either be a model of society or a model for society.
As Schwartz (2000) emphasized:
The past is matched to the present as a model of society and model for society. As a model of society,
collective memory reflects past events in terms of the needs, interests, fears, and aspirations of the
present. As a model for society, collective memory performs two functions: it embodies a template
that organizes and animates behavior and a frame within which people locate and find meaning to
their present experience (p. 18; emphasis in original).
Schwartz’s distinction of functions of memory is both provocative and useful, but it down-
plays the importance of action as a consequence of events. In the case of “forgotten events,”
even after the decay of a referential afterlife, events may continue to have effects. Schwartz’s
distinction suggests that an explicit recognition serves to model society. In contrast, we sug-
gest that even if such recall is no longer evident, templates can shape action by establishing
11. From authors’ survey of textbooks. In contrast, seven textbooks note that the Smith Act was used against the
left, with five mentioning the trial of Communist Party leaders.
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Referential Afterlife and the Power of Memory Templates 179
institutional strategies of response. Put another way, events produce two frames that guide
their effects: an interpretative template, following Schwartz, and an action template. We distin-
guish between memory as displayed in cognitive schema and memory as institutionalized in
action schema. Institutions may adopt strategies based on events that subsequently become
forgotten. Responses continue while references disappear. Some events provide guides for
action, but are cognitively problematic: they do not easily connect to collective memory
frameworks and have but a brief referential afterlife. Action templates emphasize the impor-
tance of genealogies of action. Even if the causes have been lost, the consequences are felt.
The McWilliams sedition trial falls in this later category.
Although the McWilliams case isn’t recalled, this doesn’t mean that it lacked effects. The
trial served as a template for action among certain institutional specialists, both in the politi-
cal choices of the government in responding to security threats and in the strategies of
defense attorneys in political trials. A small legal literature (e.g., University of Chicago Law
Review 1948), along with occupational and institutional memory, allowed the strategies of the
government and defendants to be recalled at least until other trials replaced it in institutional
memory. As a template the trial provided images for what responses are appropriate in
answer to fears of subversion (Kitzinger 2000). This permitted the trial to have effects even in
the absence of wide public memory.
Strategies of action can become generalized beyond their original conditions. Defendant
Lawrence Dennis recognized ruefully the irony of the support on the right for the Smith Act,
increasing penalties for sedition: “Laws intended to get one crowd may well be used . . . to get
the author and backer of the law” (St. George and Dennis 1946:83; e.g. Stone 2004:46).
Strategies to discredit non-interventionists as foreign agents were later used to discredit the
Communists and internationalists (Cole 1962:209; Hanks 1971; Kauffman 1995:19). Witch-
hunters became the hunted (Dean 1994:62). The trial provided a template for strategies in
later years and was used to neutralize the threat to political consensus.
The recognition of the importance of unanticipated consequences reminds us of the
importance of counterfactuals as providing alternatives for how history can be recalled.12 In a
universe in which access to counter-factual realities are unavailable, it is impossible to know
whether the legal attacks on Communist sedition would have taken the same form in the
absence of the brown scare, but the fact that memory of the McWilliams trial was easily
accessible meant that relying again on the Smith Act was the default option. Creating new
strategies of action entails cognitive and institutional costs, and avoiding those costs is organi-
zationally efficient. However, once this Smith Act strategy proved faulty, as had the Palmer
Raids before it, new strategies had to be created, such as the Department of Justice’s COIN-
TELPRO (counter intelligence program) disruption of protest in the 1960s (Fine 2006).
Social actors rely on action templates to direct responses to future events. In examining
the reverberations of the brown scare, we focus on two ways in which the McWilliams trial
operated as an action template: (1) as a model for government control of “radicals,” and (2) as a
model for disruptive tactics by which defense attorneys could undermine the legitimacy of a
political trial. That the events of the McWilliams trial created dramatically different action
templates in two communities emphasize the existence of subcultures of memory, as commu-
nities situate recall in light of their own needs and interests. In each case, in order to serve
their interests, actors shaped the trajectory of future events based on the results of the
McWilliams trial, even if references to the trial were not incorporated in public discourse.
12. Policy should be understood in light of plausible counterfactuals (Rosenfeld 2005; Tetlock and Lebow 2001). A
policy-maker needs to consider the range of ways that a policy might be used, depending on the way that history
unfolds. How would the attack on isolationists be recalled had Pearl Harbor not occurred, had an strong anti-war move-
ment continued during the war, had the United States been defeated, or had the Roosevelt administration attacked the
left during the Nazi-Soviet pact.
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180 FINE AND MCDONNELL
Government Control
Attacks against the right were encouraged by the left and authorized by the Roosevelt
administration long before indictments were first announced. The goal was to set boundaries
on legitimate political discourse that excluded those defined as dangerous, even without
strong evidence of illegality (Keller 1989; Stone 2004). Yet, this case reverberated throughout
the decade, setting what a leading historian of the period termed “an important political pre-
cedent for prosecuting unpopular dissidents and thus foreshadowed Smith Act cases of the
cold war era” (Ribuffo 1983:215). Jenkins (1997) notes:
the ultra-rightists contributed indirectly and unwillingly to later developments, in that the fifth
column scare of 1939–40 contributed to shaping perception of the likely Communist menace a
decade later. When Governor Fine’s administration [in Pennsylvania] clamped down on potential
red plotting in 1951, it was taking precisely the actions that had been so urgently demanded against
the alleged Nazi agents a decade earlier. The brown scare left a legacy for the mid-century red scare,
not least in legitimating and glamorizing the role of the defector and infiltrator. In institutional
terms the FBI that led the internal security purge of the Truman years was the body trained and
socially licensed by the politically popular hunt for Nazi spies and seditionists (p. 237).
Chip Berlet and Matthew Lyons (2000) reach the identical conclusion in their analysis of right-
wing populism, seeing in the brown scare strategies that led directly to attacks on the left:
The most dangerous part of the brown scare was that many liberal anti-fascists, together with the
Popular Front [Communist Party], placed their faith in the U.S. government’s repressive powers.
They urged the government to ban hard rightists’ organizations, silence their propaganda, and
throw them in jail. This demand unwittingly helped to establish new government instruments—the
Un-American Activities Committee, the Smith Act, the FBI—which, all too soon, were turned with
much greater force against radicals and even liberals themselves . . . The Cold War red scare built
directly on the foundation laid by the brown scare . . . The laws, congressional probes, and political
police powers that liberal anti-fascists hoped would be used against the hard right boomeranged
forcefully (pp. 156, 173).
With the exception of a trial aimed at local Trotskyite unionists in Minnesota, the
McWilliams trial was the first attempt by the American government to utilize the Smith Act
to silence and imprison their critics, the so-called “fifth column”—first, allies of the Nazis, and
then allies of the Soviets (whom the government perceived as similarly totalitarian). Despite
fading public recall, the memory of the trial as a “dry run” had not faded at the Department
of Justice between 1946, when the case was finally dismissed, and 1948 when the Dennis
case charged leaders of the Communist Party with sedition under the same law and using
similar forms of evidence, and in that case led to convictions and imprisonment.
The series of Smith Act trials13 and harassment of the left by the FBI and other federal
agencies during the mid-century was a consequence of the government’s success in neutraliz-
ing the far right and Axis supporters (Bernstein 1976:65). As Schmidt (2000:340–55; Keller
1989) demonstrates, the FBI’s loyalty programs, so prominent in the late 1940s and early
1950s, were developed in the earlier investigations of the right from the mid-1930s through
World War II. J. Edgar Hoover himself recognized the parallels, comparing the threat of a
Communist fifth column to that of the Nazis and concluding that the former was more dan-
gerous (MacDonnell 1995:187).
The McWilliams trial exemplified state power in limiting political protest. Even if the
defendants were not convicted, the trial broke them and destroyed their organizations
(Jeansonne 1996:164), extinguishing their political influence. Because of this success, the
linkage between anti-Semites and Nazism could easily be transformed into a linkage between
13. There were numerous “Smith Act” cases on the state level in those states in which “little Smith Acts” were
passed (National Archives Regional Archives System 1991:244) and other federal cases charging sedition.
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Referential Afterlife and the Power of Memory Templates 181
socialists and Stalinism—an equivalence of red Fascism and brown Bolshevism (Haynes and
Klehr 2003:30). As Stone (2004) emphasizes:
The Great Sedition Trial left no legal precedent . . . but it did curtail right-wing propaganda during
the war, compel thirty American fascists to defend themselves in court for four years, and set an impor-
tant political precedent for the Smith Act prosecutions of Communists during the Cold War (p. 275).
The assumption that seditious behavior was reflected in unacceptable values had become
well established, as had the strategies of the government to disrupt these movements.
Political Resistance
It was not only the government that learned lessons from the McWilliams trial, so did
potential defendants. By the time the trial ended, the government had expended consider-
able resources, and there remained a potential to transform the trial into a propaganda vehi-
cle to delegitimate government authority (even if the right was not properly situated to do so).
However, what the right couldn’t do, the left, because of its stronger infrastructure and closer
ties to cultural elites (e.g., Ceplair and Englund 1983; Powers 1998:207–08), was in a better
position to attempt.
During the trial, political commentators explicitly recognized that the defense tactics
might be replicated in subsequent trials, emphasizing the utility of these strategies. Eugene
Meyer (1944) of the Washington Post wrote:
Almost all accounts agree that Wednesday’s antics in the Federal District Court by the defendants
accused of sedition, by their attorneys, and by the spectators were probably the weirdest and most
outrageous ever attempted in any courtroom in the United States in the course of a trial. Should the
tactics of obstruction attempted in this case prove successful, they will almost certainly be imitated in
other trials, and trial procedure, as we now understand it, will become virtually impossible (p. 14).
Similarly, Edwin Lahey (1944) wrote in The New Republic:
there is free and open discussion by reporters and lawyers while in the District of Columbia court-
house whether a United States court will be able to stand the strain of the unprecedented type of
mass disorder that has marked the first stage of the trial (p. 759).
During the trial, these tactics were recognized in both the legal and activist community as a
plausible strategy in the case of political trials.
While the antics of the defense attorneys may have been aberrant, they were subse-
quently duplicated in spirit, if not in detail, in the Dennis case, the government’s successful
attempt to apply the Smith Act to leaders of the Communist party (Belknap 1977; Kutler
1982:152–57). Although their origins were no longer recalled, similar tactics were later used
in the 1969 Chicago Conspiracy (Chicago Seven) trial (Danelski 1971:152, 176–79; Epstein
1970:162–70; Lukas 1970). The McWilliams case, with its array of defendants and attorneys,
provided a tactical model to be used by a defense willing to undercut the legitimacy of a polit-
ical trial. William Kunstler, a defense attorney for several of the Chicago Seven, whose roots
were in the radical politics of the period, argued that it is impossible to try a political case
“within the strictures that apply to ordinary criminal trials” (Belknap 1977:5). Richard Gladstein,
a defense attorney in the Dennis case, suggests that in such trials defendants should defend
themselves, since lawyers cannot control their clients’ behaviors (Kutler 1982:156).
Because of their temporal proximity, legal analysts commented on the similarity of the
McWilliams and Dennis cases (Kutler 1982:155; Rogge 1961). J. H. Leek (1951) emphasized
that the Dennis “defendants used tactics very similar to those of their fascist-sympathizing
counterparts in the Washington trial” (p. 620). Attorney General Biddle also noted explicit
parallels, with the Communists attempting to wear down Judge Medina, just as the rightists
had done to Judge Eicher:
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182 FINE AND MCDONNELL
As Judge Learned Hand noted of the Dennis case, in his opinion upholding the guilty verdict, that
the judge was sorely tried for many months of turmoil constantly provoked by useless bickering,
exposed to offensive slights and insults, harried with interminable repetition (Biddle 1962:243; see
Klein 1970:xviii).
The parallel was so compelling that Judge Medina felt that the Communist party attorneys
wished to kill him through their harassment (Kutler 1982:155; Schrecker 1998:198), just as
Eicher was harassed to his death. Medina carefully studied the McWilliams case; his harsh
treatment of the defendants and their attorneys was a response to concerns over his health
and attributions of their motives (Belknap 1977:69, 101).
The McWilliams trial served as an action template for both government and defense in
the post-war period. Whether the McWilliams trial itself continued to reverberate in memory
into the late 1960s is less certain because of the prominence of and displacement from the
cases that came after—cases better to think and better to refer to. But its role in the genealogy
of political trials is clear. The strategies derived from the McWilliams case became part of the
strategic arsenal of defense attorneys. Even if the trial and the brown scare that stood behind
it was not an interpretive template that was incorporated into history texts, public discourse,
and popular memory, the action template for political trials remained, both in directing gov-
ernment action and in directing activist responses.
Referential Afterlives
Recall derives from the interests and resources of those who are in the position to pro-
mote collective memory and forgetting. If events are to continue to be referred to—to have a
substantial referential afterlife—they must be sponsored and must have narrative resonance
and be linked to larger cultural themes. Interpretative templates facilitate this narrative reso-
nance. Some events (e.g., Pearl Harbor after 9/11; the presidential election of 1876 after the
2000 Florida recount) can regain mnemonic significance if templates are seen as relevant and
influential actors are positioned to make the case. The continuous production of popular cul-
ture productions (such as film, drama, novels, and non-fiction) provides a basis by which
interested parties can rummage through history to find events that are linked to current con-
cerns. Should they find supportive gatekeepers, their claims can reach public attention.
Events are resources that memory entrepreneurs use to persuade and to create genealogies of
meaning (Wagner-Pacifici 2000).
Events have effects on several levels, leading to understandings of history or to strategies
for action (Swidler 1986): a distinction between interpretive templates and action templates.
Some events that are subsequently forgotten by the public have effects through the strategies
of institutional specialists (Schudson 1997), providing models for responses to other events.
The McWilliams trial could be used as a model for later political trials, both by government
and defense, even if it lacked well-placed sponsors and a suitable framework for public memory
as reflected in the media.
Further, this case reveals the existence of “subcultures of memory.” Different population
segments have different amounts and frequency of recall or forgetting. The rapid forgetting of
the brown scare by the media and by the public stands in contrast to the more salient lessons
learned by the government and the community of political attorneys. Remembrance differs
in different subpopulations. The existence of an institutional strategy of response suggests
that certain groups of well-placed social actors had learned these lessons, even if the general
public did not. In the case of the brown scare, in contrast to the later concern of communism,
public memory was left to decay, and in time among specialists in social control and move-
ment activism as well, particularly when other strategies for action against subversion were
developed. For the public, the cost of memory storage outweighed any use to which this
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Referential Afterlife and the Power of Memory Templates 183
memory could be put. Although attacks on the right were once known, they were never
cemented into cultural literacy, and thus never benefited from the inertia of memory by
which events once entering a curriculum are only slowly excised. For institutional specialists,
without activism on the right little seemed to be at stake in the recall of government repres-
sion, even while the strategies served as a model for greater repression, especially in the insti-
tutional domain of law in which precedent was crucial. Thus, the brown scare could have its
effects absent active recall.
Recognizing the difficulties of demonstrating the presence of absence—the dog that
doesn’t bark—understanding forgetting requires creativity. Forgetting can happen either
because of a lack of sponsorship or because of an affirmative desire to forget by sponsors of an
alternative vision (Cole 1998; Zerubavel 1998). In contrast to forgotten events that directly
undercut our beliefs, the forgetting of the brown scare seems more of the former. What is
seen as not worth discussing is not taught and becomes lost.
How long are events remembered? How long are they seen as relevant to current events,
as teaching a historical lesson, thus preventing “cultural illiteracy”? Events once publicized
can remain embedded in institutions of memory or may erode through the choices of these
institutions (Schudson 1992); they have a referential afterlife (Goffman 1981). We recall the
local and evanescent events of this week, this month, and this year, but soon these become
hazy, and then forgotten except by a few specialists. In time, references draw puzzled expres-
sions, and these indifferent reactions diminish the likelihood and the interactional value of
further reference. The references lack discursive utility. How long will individuals or groups
see it in their interest to keep events in active recall? Different social and institutional genres
(legal precedents, political rhetoric, commemorative events, textbooks, popular culture pro-
ductions) offer alternative mechanisms that extend referential afterlives, a topic for future
research.
However, the absence of interpretation is not the absence of effects (Schudson 1997).
Social systems can be organized without the rationale for that arrangement being recalled.
We take for granted that things should be a particular way without knowing why. This is part
of our tacit understanding of the stability of the institutional order. We distinguish between
the effects of events (and associated specialized institutional memories) and the public mem-
ories of those events. The brown scare had important consequences in the creation of the
national security state, both in providing a template for subsequent sedition prosecutions and
in providing a template for resistance by defendants in political trials. While part of the decay
of memory was due to the inconclusive ending of the trial, some inconclusive events (e.g.,
wars, crimes without prosecutions) are recalled vividly, if memory entrepreneurs see a lesson
to be learned in the origins or even in the inconclusive ending. In the case of the brown scare
neither the right, the left, nor the government itself was invested in promoting the memory
of the trial, even while the implications continued to reverberate. There was no cognitive
grounding by which the brown scare could fit into what Maurice Halbwachs (1992) speaks of
as the framework of memory. As Halbwachs recognizes, the grounding of collective memory
is through the cognitive organization by which information is retrieved.
This case raises critical questions about collective memory. The analyses of Ron Eyerman
(2001) and Jeffrey Alexander (2004) properly direct our attention to instances in which
events are constructed as cataclysmic for societies, and become seen—and performed in com-
memoration—as traumatic, and thus, central to collective identity. However, although what
constitutes trauma is not inevitable, the content of events matter. After the war, little seemed
at stake in recalling the excesses of the right or the attempt to control them. The legal and
rhetorical attacks on Roosevelt’s political opponents became defined as normal politics, even
justifiable strategy in a time of national crisis.
Why do some events gather memory entrepreneurs while others repel them? Social rela-
tions are both shaped by and shape the meaning of events. Events are situated in social and
cultural fields, and as a result, embracing certain claims strengthens some social relations and
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184 FINE AND MCDONNELL
weakens others. The closeness of associations to power centers, whether governmental, eco-
nomic, cultural, or tied to well-established movements of institutional critique, surely affect
these memory allegiances. Political struggles are not the only location in which a divide
between interpretative templates and action templates exists; however, the guiding patterns
of this model (Shils 1982:xvi) needs to be further specified.
Political life is shaped by what we recall and what we neglect. Both the frameworks of
memory and the frameworks of forgetting contribute to institutional action. Societies choose
to ignore certain things, but these events leave a trace often in unintended organizational and
institutional practices (Fine 2006). What becomes a form of collective trauma is not inevita-
ble, but a result of strategic needs and desires. The brown scare was unneeded for collective
memory, but created the conditions for later repression. Will we say the same for color-coded
threat levels that constitute contemporary scares?
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