1950 USA Dissident Detention Centers (Concentration Camps)

from [http://www.hunterbear.org/fightback_minemill.htm]:

As the Red Scare mounted in the U.S. of the latter 1940s, reactionaries and their Congressional allies moved to enact blatantly repressive legislation. An early example was the viciously anti-labor Taft-Hartley Act of 1947. Witch-hunting Federal and state anti-radical "hearings" mushroomed.   The Attorney General's "Subversive List"  -- summarily and arbitrarily outlawing hundreds of organizations -- was quickly initiated.  Criminal prosecution for simple beliefs multiplied rapidly.

In 1950, the Internal Security Act -- named the McCarran Act after Senator Pat McCarran of Nevada [who was also known as the "Senator from Spain" for his undying admiration of the Fascist Franco] -- was enacted with much flag-waving and drum-beating.  Among its many provisions was the infamous Subversive Activities Control Board -- and another provision provided for the concentration camp incarceration of radicals or suspected radicals during any one of several President-decreed states of "national emergency." Old concentration camps -- i.e., those used to hold Japanese-Americans during World War II -- were reactivated; new camps were built.  Full rosters of camp personnel were hired. The FBI quickly began to feather out its existent radical lists -- and to develop a variety of new ones.

Many, many thousands of Americans were placed on these lists.

All of these -- and other poisonous fruits of this hideous epoch -- constituted blatant and massive violations of the U.S. Bill of Rights   at every point.

Under U.S. pressure, the Canadian government moved in a similar witch-hunting direction.

In early October, 1952, the U.S. Senate Internal Security Subcommittee which worked very closely with J. Edgar Hoover et al. -- and which included Pat McCarran and racist U.S. Senator Jim Eastland of Mississippi and others of that ilk -- came to Salt Lake City to conduct "hearings" designed to attack the radical, militant,  democratic, equalitarian International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers [formerly the Western Federation of Miners] and its leadership.

The Union, fighting hard as always, courageously put, among other places, the following advertisement. 

The Internal Security Act was finally repealed in 1971.

Hard To Believe But . . .There Are Concentration Camps In America:  SPEAK UP, AMERICA!
published 1952-10-06 in the Salt Lake City Tribune