Guilt by Association Joseph McCarthy was not alone. He worked closely with a committee of the U.S. House of Representatives, called the “House Un-American Activities Committee”, which had the power to destroy reputations and careers. Politicians invited to testify before the Committee about alleged communists risked their futures if they refused to answer the Committee’s questions or name supposed communists. Some named innocent people out of self-protection. Of course, Soviet and Chinese communists did conduct espionage in the United States. The point however is that innocent people were ruined because McCarthyists made accusations of disloyalty unsupported by proof or based on dubious or irrelevant evidence. Just how seriously McCarthy’s allegations were taken is shown by an editorial from the Wall Street Journal entitled, “Light in Dark Places.” Soon after McCarthy raised the spectre of communist infiltration in the U.S. government, the Journal wrote, “It would be a pity if Senator’s McCarthy’s charges of Communist infiltration in the State Department were allowed to evaporate indecisively in an atmosphere of name calling and partisan bitterness... the Senator from Wisconsin has thrown some light on dark places and has asked some questions to which the American people are entitled to receive answers.” For the Committee on Un-American Activities to declare an investigation into a person or organization was enough to taint them. Interviewed by the national magazine U.S. News and World Report in 1953, the Committee’s incoming chairman, Congressman Velde, identified its target areas. After stating that “our primary responsibility is to assist the new Administration in weeding out the Communists and the subversive influences in the government at the present time,” he added that education, including “colleges and universities” and “privately supported schools” were all “fertile fields for investigation” despite “a lot of opposition from various educators, particularly from the ‘left wing’ educators.” And in France today? In December 1999, sixty school inspectors from the Ministry of Education raided fifteen Rudolf Steiner education centers suspected of imparting a “sectarian” pedagogy. Ministry literature in schools “alerts” schoolchildren to minority religions. One publication contains a cartoon depicting a sadistic priest beating a child with a Bible.