I'd completely forgotten the American Legion and the Roman Catholic Church, two nationwide anti-Communist groups with their own, probably interlocking, propaganda networks. Those networks are the ancestors of the right-wing propaganda we see today -- often directly, since today's propaganda mills often recycle Oldies but Goodies from the Fifties. And I've been ruminating again on accusations I've seen about the supposed McCarthyism of the "left" by right-wing writers, often the very same people who are trying to rehabilitate Joe McCarthy as a martyr of the anti-Red struggle. Coming from them, shouldn't "McCarthyism" be a compliment? (When I asked RWA1, who'd been calling for an end to the use of "Nazi" and "fascist" in political discourse, if he also favored retiring "Red," "pinko," and "socialist," he mused that hedidn't know, he had a weakness for those terms. Of course.)

I've also started rereading Mary Lasswell's series of novels that began with Suds in Your Eye (Houghton Mifflin, 1942). They're a guilty pleasure of mine, and it's my third turn through the books. They're about three elderly ladies in San Diego who become fast friends, bonding over beer, good cooking, and war fever, though the series continued after World War II was over. Except for predictable hostility to "Japs" in the wartime books, the books are less racist than most popular fiction of their period, though a couple of gay male interior decorators are the villains of the last book, Let's Go for Broke (1962), which is an annoyance but not enough to turn me off to Lasswell's