Politics & Power Quote by Emanuel Celler

Celler’s line is a neat act of political jujitsu: he takes the language of honor and turns it into an indictment. “Given the distinction” sounds like the bland ceremony of party life, the velvet-rope credentialing that’s supposed to signal respectability. Then he yanks the rug out. If the “author of McCarthyism” is being elevated, the party isn’t merely tolerating a paranoid style of politics; it’s rewarding it.

The subtext is less about one man than about institutional complicity. McCarthyism wasn’t just Joe McCarthy’s talent for accusation; it was a whole ecosystem of careerism, fear, and moral outsourcing. By calling someone its “author,” Celler implies intention and design, not accidental excess. That word choice denies the convenient alibi that the Red Scare was just a panicky moment everyone got swept into. Someone wrote it. Others published it. A convention platform, in this framing, becomes an editorial page.

“Strikes terror in the hearts of honest men” is Celler’s most strategic move. He reframes “terror” away from communists and toward the decent citizen now threatened by a politics that punishes integrity. The phrase also quietly flatters his audience: if you’re frightened, you’re honest. If you’re not, you might be part of the problem.

Context matters: Celler was a long-serving Democratic congressman watching the GOP flirt with, and often capitalize on, anti-communist hysteria in the early 1950s. His warning isn’t that demagogues exist; it’s that the party apparatus is legitimizing them on its biggest stage, converting fear into a credential.