Beer Plays Down McCarthy Abroad

Samuel H. Beer, professor of Government, said over the vacation, in London, that fear of McCarthyism abroad out weighs its true importance.

Studying at Oxford on a Fulbright, Beer made his statement in a letter to the London Sunday Observer in reply to a report in a previous issue by Miss Virginia Cowles, a past news correspondent and member of the United States Embassy in London.

Miss Cowles stated on the basis of a recent trip to the United States that there was great fear of attack by Russia which "ambitious politicians had kept at fever pitch," and that "Congress was in the thought-control business." She added that the country might be divided "more bitterly and dangerously than at any time since the Civil War."

But Beer said that "the main immediate tension underlying McCarthyism has been the Korean war."

"In this respect," he said, "McCarthyism has been comparable with the usual anti-enemy and spy-hunt emotion which arises in any country that is seriously at war."

The reference to the Civil War, Beer explained, "was a wild misstatement." He stated that it was "acceptable only if one forgets the revival of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s, the presidential campaign of 1928, and the industrial strife not far short of class war which developed during the New Deal period."

He said he thought Miss Cowles was trying to read Fascism into the present American "social disturbance" and added that this "is simply grotesque."