You Dirty Commie!

Younger readers might not have heard of the days when everyone was running around claiming that other people were Communists. It got to be such a thing that Congress wasted many valuable hours having sham trials and investigations of "suspected Communists," led by insane Senator Joseph McCarthy (R, Wisconsinsane.)

This whole thing had its genesis after World War II, when the hot war was replaced with a cold war and we fretted about whether Russia would turn to a Socialist form of government. The answer became fairly obvious when someone noticed that, since 1922, 8,649,500 sq mi of Eurasia had been known as the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics. But just because Russia had "gone communist" didn't mean that some county councilman in Baking Powder, West Virginia had done the same.

But just as people attract audiences (and their money) by claiming that no one died in a schoolhouse massacre in Connecticut, McCarthy and others made hay off their claims, and also ruined many lives, such as those of people who were accused of being communists and were thereafter not able to find work in their fields any longer. Friendships were lost when accused people sold out former friends in order to get off the McCarthy list of dirty red rats. It was awful.

But as with almost anything awful, there was a macabre humor to aspects of communist-fearing. Why, they even mentioned Lucille Ball as being a supporter of communist causes, and the "I Love Lucy" star was defended by her husband, Desi Arnaz, who said, "The only thing red about Lucy is her hair - and that's not even real anyway!"

The Cincinnati Reds, the oldest baseball team in the big leagues, changed their name to the Redlegs for several years.

But the funniest one to me was what happened to the Decatur Commodores, a minor league team in Decatur, Illinois. Formed in 1900, the Commodores also were known to fans, broadcasters, and the people who tried to squeeze "COMMODORES" into newspaper headlines, as the"Commies."

Whoops.

The Commies 1928 home white jersey

The Commodores (not the ones with Lionel Richie) played in Decatur, Illinois, a city named for Commodore Stephen Decatur, who, as any Marylander knows, was born nowhere near Illinois in Worcester County, Maryland. During the Red Scare years, as they were a farm team of the New York Giants (and wore their old hand-me-down uniforms) the Commies were known as the Commodore Giants.

So maybe being a "Commie" is not the worst thing a person could be!