Joe's still on the air
Reading the attached obit prompted the observation that the only places I run into people who behave like and espouse thoughts like Joe McCarthy's are on FOX news (what I've seen travelling in the States and on clips), talk radio here in Canada and the States, and this board.
In our small town, people do not - in the main - shout out their political and ethical views larded with vituperative epithets like the loud mouthed bullies you find in these media places.
How is that they have such a prominent place in the media? Why is it that some media are publicly licensed to behave in such a manner? Don't we know that the "airwaves" are owned by the public? How de we allow them in the living rooms and cars of the public as if they have any credibility whatsoever?
Sure I can turn them off as I do but the phenom just keeps growing. They are abusing my public airwaves shouting at and abusing my thoughts in a manner which would not be acceptable in my living room or in the local coffee shop if they were doing it in person. Are they not akin to nazis and skinheads and other groups that would lead us into dictatorial hell?
Write to your legislator. Get them off the air waves. Return the publicly owned channels to moderate, thoughtful and helpful discourse.
The alternative is scary.
Apr. 26, 2004. 08:49 AM
U.S.-born Al Shadowitz took advantage of the shunning he received in the wake of the infamous McCarthy witchhunt to go back to school and earn the Ph.D. in physics he'd always wanted.
Physicist Al Shadowitz stood tall
In the McCarthy hearings, he was first to plead the First
Hero Einstein inspired his brave stand — and his career
CATHERINE DUNPHY
OBITUARY WRITER
In every life, it is hoped, there occurs at least one brave and dangerous moment during which a man will take a stand for everything he believes in and thereby risk everything he has.
For Al Shadowitz, then a New Jersey electrical engineer, that moment occurred on Dec. 16, 1953, when Senator Joe McCarthy asked him if he was or ever had been a member of the Communist Party — and Mr. Shadowitz refused to take the Fifth.
Many, if not most, of those facing accusations of being a Communist sympathizer or even a spy in those ignominious Cold War red-baiting years defended themselves by pleading the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which protects people from having to testify against themselves.
Mr. Shadowitz was the first to tell the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations that he was refusing to answer the question because it was in violation of the First Amendment, the guarantee to freedom of speech and association.
And that this was on the personal advice of Dr. Albert Einstein.
The next day, his photo and story hit the front page of the New York Times. The headline: "Witness, on Einstein advice, Refuses to Say if He was Red."
He lost his job; relatives stopped speaking to him. His young family survived on the wages his wife, Edith, could earn as a supply teacher. Neighbours raised enough money to attempt to buy the house in which they were living, to oust them from the neighbourhood. His three daughters were openly hated in school hallways and suddenly not welcome at the homes of former friends.
Later he was charged with contempt of Congress, a charge dismissed in 1955 after McCarthy himself had been censured by the Select Senate Subcommittee. Mr. Shadowitz had been hoping to take his case to the Supreme Court to test the right to freedom of thought.
"I was always proud of Dad. He stood up to bullies. And he was always very proud of what he had done," says his daughter, Sarah Shadowitz. In 2000, she moved her father to Toronto to live near her family. He became a landed immigrant Jan. 3, 2001.
Mr. Shadowitz died here on March 26, just shy of his 89th birthday. On his birthday last year — May 5 — his daughter privately published 10 copies of her father's memoirs. By coincidence, the U.S. Senate released all of the secret McCarthy testimonies that same day.
Two framed letters to her father hang in the hall of Sarah Shadowitz's home, both written and signed by Albert Einstein. In one, the Nobel-winning physicist states in a postscript that "I am glad I could be of some moral assistance in your case. I believe your testimony to be allright (sic) in every way."
`I was always proud of Dad. He stood up to bullies. And he was always very proud of what he had done'
Sarah Shadowitz
In his memoirs, Mr. Shadowitz says he has no idea what motivated him to drive to Princeton to call on Einstein. A letter from the scientist published in July that year in the New York Times urged anyone facing the McCarthy hearings to plead the First Amendment, which guarantees free speech and, by implication, Einstein reasoned, freedom of thought.
Having grown up in a progressive pro-Zionist home in a family of successful Jewish immigrants, Mr. Shadowitz regularly read six or seven daily newspapers and certainly had read Einstein's widely publicized letter. He remembered it when he was subpoenaed to appear before the subcommittee months later.
Like many young people during the war years, he had joined the Communist Party as a way to protest Hitler's treatment of the Jews. Born with two clubfeet and deformed calves, he had tried to enlist for war duty three times and been rejected each time. He became a Communist to fight Hitler. After the war, he lost interest and left the party in 1950, when he and the rest of the Western world learned of the atrocities committed by Stalin.
While still a party member, however, Mr. Shadowitz had worked for the U.S. army in Maryland as a junior engineer, testing the trajectory of bullets and missiles. Later he had started the Federation of Architects, Engineers, Chemists and Technicians, a left-leaning union, at his workplace at the International Telephone & Telegraph Company. The family believes it was the combination that brought him to the attention of the Wisconsin senator.
What led him to Einstein was another combination: chutzpah and hero worship. Mr. Shadowitz had been thwarted in his ambition to be a physicist. His practical father encouraged him to take the subway to the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn rather than enrol in MIT, and later, after he'd worked as an engineer to earn the money to enrol at Harvard, he dropped out when he was told he would never be hired there because he was Jewish.
He tried again to study at Berkeley under the aegis of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the "father of the atom bomb," but failed to pass a required exam. It was as an engineer that he drove the Princeton streets asking strangers where Einstein lived.
The great man was at home, in corduroys, old slippers and a baggy sweatshirt. He led Mr. Shadowitz up to his spartan study and told him, "I am prepared to let you use my name, in any way you see fit, if only you will justify your failure to answer McCarthy's questions only on the basis of the First Amendment to the Constitution."
Einstein died in 1955, but Mr. Shadowitz and his wife stayed friends with his secretary, Helen Dukas. Perhaps because of that link to Einstein, as well his joblessness, Mr. Shadowitz went back to school and earned his doctorate in physics in 1958 from New York University. He taught physics at Fairleigh Dickinson University for 28 years.
Physics consumed him. He wrote seven books, including two textbooks still in print; he scribbled complex formulae on restaurant placemats during family outings. At the same time, he was a rebel, smoking marijuana in the '60s, urging his granddaughters to drop out of school and experience life, and, after finally earning his Ph.D., adopting as his signature an X.
His son-in-law, Ted Grosberg, believes he was fearless. "I don't think the thought `what if' ever crossed his mind," he says.
And Sarah Shadowitz acknowledges that she grew up in a very unconventional home, in which her father could muse over theoretical aspects of low-temperature physics for five silent hours at a time. They joked that their father had "a lot of problems," as he was always retreating into his preferred world of abstract problem-solving.
For five months each year, he would go to his Vermont cabin to write books and think about physics — after putting in four hours of manual labour. To compensate for his crippled legs, he developed a strong upper body by working with nature.
Sarah Shadowitz was closing the deal on her own cottage-country shack an hour before her father died. She wants to scatter his ashes over the lake there to celebrate his love of nature, and acknowledge the strength of a father who was born with painful physical deformity yet firmly stood up for what he believed.
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(end sarcasm)
