Source: spiritoftheholidays.org

Congress passes the Communist Control Act in response to the growing anticommunist hysteria in the United States. Though full of ominous language, many found the purpose of the act unclear.

In 1954, the Red Scare still raged in the United States. Although Senator Joseph McCarthy, the most famous of the “red hunters” in America, had been disgraced earlier in the summer of 1954 when he tried to prove that communists were in the U.S. Army, most Americans still believed that communists were at work in their country. Responding to this fear, Congress passed the Communist Control Act in August 1954. The act declared that, “The Communist Party of the United States, though purportedly a political party, is in fact an instrumentality of a conspiracy to overthrow the Government of the United States.” The act went on to charge that the party’s “role as the agency of a hostile foreign power renders its existence a clear and continuing danger to the security of the United States.” The conclusion seemed inescapable: “The Communist Party should be outlawed.” Indeed, that is what many people at the time believed the Communist Control Act accomplished.

A careful reading of the act, however, indicates that the reality was a bit fuzzier. In 1950, Congress passed the Internal Security Act. In many respects, it was merely a version of the Communist Control Act passed four years later. It used the same language to condemn communism and the Communist Party of the United States, and established penalties for anyone belonging to a group calling for the violent overthrow of the American government. However, it very specifically noted that mere membership in the Communist Party, or affiliated organizations, was not in and of itself sufficient cause for arrest or penalty. The 1954 act went one step further by removing the “rights, privileges, and immunities attendant upon legal bodies created under the jurisdiction of the laws of the United States” from the Communist Party. The Communist Control Act made it clear that “nothing in this section shall be construed as amending the Internal Security Act of 1950.” Thus, while the Communist Control Act may have declared that the Communist Party should be outlawed, the act itself did not take this decisive step.

Source: history.com for the complete article

0079 – Mount Vesuvius erupted killing approximately 20,000 people. The cities of Pompeii, Stabiae and Herculaneum were buried in volcanic ash.

0410 – The Visigoths overran Rome. This event symbolized the fall of the Western Roman Empire.

1456 – The printing of the Gutenberg Bible was completed.

1572 – The Catholics began their slaughter of the French Protestants in Paris. The killings claimed about 70,000 people. 

1814 – Washington, DC, was invaded by British forces that set fire to the White House and Capitol. 

1853 – The first convention of the American Pharmaceutical Association was held.

1869 – A patent for the waffle iron was received by Cornelius Swarthout.

1891 – Thomas Edison applied patents for the kinetoscope and kinetograph (U.S. Pats. 493,426 and 589,168).

1912 – A four-pound limit was set for parcels sent through the U.S. Post Office mail system.

1932 – Amelia Earhart became the first woman to fly across the U.S. non-stop. The trip from Los Angeles, CA to Newark, NJ, took about 19 hours.

1949 – The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) went into effect. The agreement was that an attack against on one of the parties would be considered “an attack against them all.” 

1954 – The Communist Party was virtually outlawed in the U.S. when the Communist Control Act went into effect. 

1959 – Three days after Hawaiian statehood, Hiram L. Fong was sworn in as the first Chinese-American U.S. senator while Daniel K. Inouye was sworn in as the first Japanese-American U.S. representative.

1963 – John Pennel pole-vaulted 17 feet and 3/4 inches becoming the first to break the 17-foot barrier.

1968 – France became the 5th thermonuclear power when they exploded a hydrogen bomb in the South Pacific.

1975 – Davey Lopes of the Los Angeles Dodgers set a major league baseball record when he stole his 38th consecutive base.

1985 – 27 anti-apartheid leaders were arrested in South Africa as racial violence rocked the country. 

1986 – Frontier Airlines shut down. Thousands of people were left stranded.

1989 – “Total war” was declared by Columbian drug lords on their government.

1989 – The U.S. space probe, Voyager 2, sent back photographs of Neptune. 

1990 – Iraqi troops surrounded foreign missions in Kuwait.

1991 – Russian President Mikhail Gorbachev resigned as the head of the Communist Party.

1992 – China and South Korea established diplomatic relations.

1995 – Microsoft’s “Windows 95” went on sale.

1998 – U.S. officials cited a soil sample as part of the evidence that a Sudan plant was producing precursors to the VX nerve gas. And, therefore made it a target for U.S. missiles on August 20, 1998. 

1998 – A donation of 24 beads was made, from three parties, to the Indian Museum of North America at the Crazy Horse Memorial. The beads are said to be those that were used in 1626 to buy Manhattan from the Indians.

2001 – In McAllen, TX, Bridgestone/Firestone agreed to settle out of court and pay a reported $7.5 million to a family in a rollover accident in their Ford Explorer.

2001 – The remains of nine American servicemen killed in the Korean War were returned to the U.S. The bodies were found about 60 miles north of Pyongyang. It was estimated that it would be a year before the identities of the soldiers would be known.

2001 – U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly was randomly picked to take over the Microsoft monopoly case. The judge was to decide how Microsoft should be punished for illegally trying to squelch its competitors.

2001 – NASA announced that operation of the Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite would end by September 30th due to budget restrictions. Though the satellite is best known for monitoring a hole in the ozone layer over Antarctica, it was designed to provide information about the upper atmosphere by measuring its winds, temperatures, chemistry and energy received from the sun.

2006 – The planet Pluto was reclassified as a “dwarf planet” by the International Astronomical Union (IAU). Pluto’s status was changed due to the IAU’s new rules for an object qualifying as a planet. Pluto met two of the three rules because it orbits the sun and is large enough to assume a nearly round shape. However, since Pluto has an oblong orbit and overlaps the orbit of Neptune it disqualified Pluto as a planet.