Starting Out in the Fifties

Volume I, Number 1 of Dissent showed up in mailboxes of charter subscribers in early 1954, as inauspicious an occasion for the debut issue of a socialist magazine in the United States as can be imagined. Republicans controlled both the White House and Congress. Senator Joseph McCarthy and Vice President Richard Nixon were waging a no-holds-barred political war to stigmatize Democratic opponents as soft on communism—or worse. Demoralized and divided, Democrats feebly defended themselves against charges that their party had presided over “twenty years of treason,” while some panicked liberal leaders abandoned any commitment to basic civil liberties to burnish their anti-communist credentials.