Anti-communist Efforts
Eastland served on a subcommittee investigating the Communist Party. As chairman of the Internal Security Subcommittee, he subpoenaed some employees of The New York Times, which was at the time taking a strong position on its editorial page that Mississippi should adhere to the Brown decision. The Times countered in its January 5, 1956 editorial:
Our faith is strong that long after Senator Eastland and his present subcommittee are gone, long after segregation has lost its final battle in the South, long after all that was known as McCarthyism is a dim, unwelcome memory, long after the last Congressional committee has learned that it cannot tamper successfully with a free press, The New York Times will be speaking for who make it, and only for who make it, and speaking, without fear or favor, the truth as it sees it.
Eastland subsequently allowed the subcommittee to become dormant as issues such as the threat of Communism receded.
Read more about this topic: James Eastland
Famous quotes containing the word efforts:
“Fanny was not there! How she would have enjoyed the scene.... I could not but think of her, and in spite of my efforts to prevent, the unbidden tear would flow. Alas! I cannot feel the satisfaction some appear to do in the reflection that her eyes beheld the scene from the other world.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)