During the last years of Woodrow Wilson's administration, a red scare developed in our country.
Many Americans reacted irrationally to the challenge of Russia and turned to the repression of ideas by force.
Postmaster General Burleson set about to protect the American people against radical propaganda that might be spread through the mails.
Attorney General Palmer made a series of raids that sent more than 4,000 so-called radicals to the jails, in direct violation of their constitutional rights.
Then, not many years later, the Un-American Activities Committee, under the leadership of Martin Dies, pilloried hundreds of decent, patriotic citizens.
Anyone who tried to remedy some of the most glaring defects in our form of democracy was denounced as a traitorous red whose real purpose was the destruction of our government.
This hysteria reached its height under the leadership of Senator Joseph McCarthy.
Demagogues of this sort found communist bogeys lurking behind any new idea that would run counter to stereotyped notions.
New ideas were dangerous and must be repressed, no matter how.

Those who would suppress dangerous thoughts, credit ideas with high potency.
They give strict interpretation to William James' statement that "Every idea that enters the mind tends to express itself".
They seem to believe that a person will act automatically as soon as he contacts something new.
Hence, the only defensible procedure is to repress any and every notion, unless it gives evidence that it is perfectly safe.

Despite this danger, however, we are informed on every hand that ideas, not machines, are our finest tools;
they are priceless even though they cannot be recorded on a ledger page;
they are the most valuable of commodities -- and the most salable, for their demand far exceeds supply.
So all-important are ideas, we are told, that persons successful in business and happy in social life usually fall into two classes: those who invent new ideas of their own, and those who borrow, beg, or steal from others.

Seemingly, with an unrestricted flow of ideas, all will be well, and we are even assured that "an idea a day will keep the sheriff away".
That, however, may also bring the police, if the thinking does not meet with social approval.
Criminals, as well as model citizens, exercise their minds.
Merely having a mental image of some sort is not the all-important consideration.

Of course, there must be clarity: a single distinct impression is more valuable than many fuzzy ones.
But clarity is not enough.
The writer took a class of college students to the state hospital for the mentally ill in St. Joseph, Missouri.
An inmate, a former university professor, expounded to us, logically and clearly, that someone was pilfering his thoughts.
He appealed to us to bring his case to the attention of the authorities that justice might be done.
Despite the clarity of his presentation, his idea was not of Einsteinian calibre.

True, ideas are important, perhaps life's most precious treasures.
But have we not gone overboard in stressing their significance?
Have we not actually developed idea worship?

Ideas we must have, and we seek them everywhere.
We scour literature for them;
here we find stored the wisdom of great minds.
But are all these works worthy of consideration?
Can they stand rigid scrutiny?

Shakespeare's wit and wisdom, his profound insight into human nature, have stood the test of centuries.
But was he infallible in all things?
What of his treatment of the Jew in The Merchant Of Venice?

Shakespeare gives us a vivid picture of Shylock, but probably he never saw a Jew, unless in some of his travels.
The Jews had been banished from England in 1290 and were not permitted to return before 1655, when Shakespeare had been dead for thirty-nine years.
If any had escaped expulsion by hiding, they certainly would not frequent the market-place.

Shakespeare did not usually invent the incidents in his plays, but borrowed them from old stories, ballads, and plays, wove them together, and then breathed into them his spark of life.
Rather than from a first-hand study of Jewish people, his delineation of Shylock stems from a collection of Italian stories, Il Pecorone, published in 1558, although written almost two centuries earlier.
He could learn at second hand from books, but could not thus capture the real Jewish spirit.
Harris J. Griston, in Shaking The Dust From Shakespeare (216), writes: "There is not a word spoken by Shylock which one would expect from a real Jew".

He took the story of the pound of flesh and had to fasten it on someone.
The Jew was the safest victim.
No Jew was on hand to boycott his financially struggling theater.
It would have been unwise policy, for instance, to apply the pound-of-flesh characterization to the thrifty Scotchman.
Just as now anyone may hurl insults at a citizen of Mars, or even of Tikopia, and no senatorial investigation will result.
Who cares about them!

Shakespeare does not tell us that Shylock was an aberrant individual.
He sets him forth as being typical of the group.
He tells of his "Jewish heart" -- not a Shylockian heart;
but a Jewish heart.
This would make anyone crafty and cruel, capable of fiendish revenge.

There is no justification for such misrepresentation.
If living Jews were unavailable for study, the Bible was at hand.
Reading the Old Testament would have shown the dramatist that the ideas attributed to Shylock were abhorrent to the Jews.

Are we better off for having Shakespeare's idea of Shylock?
Studying The Merchant Of Venice in high school and college has given many young people their notions about Jews.
Does this help the non-Jew to understand this group?

Thomas De Torquemada, Inquisitor-General of the Spanish Inquisition, put many persons to death.
His name became synonymous with cold-blooded cruelty.
Would we gain by keeping alive his memory and besmirching today's Roman Catholics by saying he had a Catholic heart?
Let his bones and his memory rest in the fifteenth century where they belong;
he is out of place in our times.
Shakespeare's Shylock, too, is of dubious value in the modern world.

Ideas, in and of themselves, are not necessarily the greatest good.
A successful businessman recently prefaced his address to a luncheon group with the statement that all economists should be sent to the hospitals for the mentally deranged where they and their theories might rot together.
Will his words come to be treasured and quoted through the years?

Frequently we are given assurance that automatically all ideas will be sifted and resifted and in the end only the good ones will survive.
But is that not like going to a chemistry laboratory and blindly pouring out liquids and powders from an array of bottles and then, after stirring, expecting a new wonder drug inevitably to result?

What of the efficiency of this natural instrument of free discussion?
Is there some magic in it that assures results?

When Peter B. Kyne (Pride Of Palomar, 43) informed us in 1921 that we had an instinctive dislike for the Japanese, did the heated debates of the Californians settle the truth or falsity of the proposition?

The Leopard's Spots came from the pen of Thomas Dixon in 1902, and in this he announced an "unchangeable" law.
If a child had a single drop of Negro blood, he would revert to the ancestral line which, except as slaves under a superior race, had not made one step of progress in 3,000 years.
That doctrine has been accepted by many, but has it produced good results?

In the same vein, a certain short-story plot has been overworked.
The son and heir of a prominent family marries a girl who has tell-tale shadows on the half-moons of her finger nails.
In time she presents her aristocratic husband with a coal-black child.
Is the world better for having this idea thrust upon it?
Will argument and debate decide its truth or falsity?

For answers to such questions we must turn to the anthropologists, the biologists, the historians, the psychologists, and the sociologists.
Long ago they consigned the notions of Kyne and Dixon to the scrap heap.

False ideas surfeit another sector of our life.
For several generations much fiction has appeared dealing with the steprelationship.
The stepmother, almost without exception, has been presented as a cruel ogress.
Children, conditioned by this mistaken notion, have feared stepmothers, while adults, by their antagonistic attitudes, have made the role of the substitute parents a difficult one.
Debate is not likely to resolve the tensions and make the lot of the stepchild a happier one.
Research, on the other hand, has shown many stepmothers to be eminently successful, some far better than the real mothers.

Helen Deutsch informed us (The Psychology Of Women, Vol. 2,, 434) that in all cultures "the term 'stepmother' automatically evokes deprecatory implications", a conclusion accepted by many.
Will mere debate on that proposition, even though it be free and untrammeled, remove the dross and leave a residue of refined gold?
That is questionable, to say the least.
Research into several cultures has proven her position to be a mistaken one.

Most assuredly ideas are invaluable.
But ideas, just for the sake of having them, are not enough.
In the 1930's, cures for the depression literally flooded Washington.
For a time the President received hundreds of them every day, most of them worthless.

Ideas need to be tested, and not merely by argument and debate.
When some question arises in the medical field concerning cancer, for instance, we do not turn to free and open discussion as in a political campaign.
We have recourse to the scientifically-trained specialist in the laboratory.
The merits of the Salk anti-polio vaccine were not established on the forensic platform or in newspaper editorials, but in the laboratory and by tests in the field on thousands of children.

Our presidential campaigns provide much debate and argument.
But is the result new barnsful of tested knowledge on the basis of which we can with confidence solve our domestic and international problems?
Man, we are told, is endowed with reason and is capable of distinguishing good from bad.
But what a super-Herculean task it is to winnow anything of value from the mud-beplastered arguments used so freely, particularly since such common use is made of cliches and stereotypes, in themselves declarations of intellectual bankruptcy.

We are reminded, however, that freedom of thought and discussion, the unfettered exchange of ideas, is basic under our form of government.

Assuredly in our political campaigns there is freedom to think, to examine any and all issues, and to speak without restraint.
No holds are barred.
But have the results been heartening?
May we state with confidence that in such an exhibition a republic will find its greatest security?

We must not forget, to be sure, that free discussion and debate have produced beneficial results.
In truth, we can say that this broke the power of Senator Joseph McCarthy, who was finally exposed in full light to the American people.
If he had been "liquidated" in some way, he would have become a martyr, a rallying point for people who shared his ideas.
Debate in the political arena can be productive of good.
But it is a clumsy and wasteful process: it can produce negative results but not much that is positive.
Debate rid us of McCarthy but did not give us much that is positive.
It did something to clear the ground, but it erected no striking new structure;
it did not even provide the architect's plan for anything new.

In the field of the natural sciences, scientifically verified data are quite readily available and any discussion can be shortened with good results.
In the field of the social sciences a considerable fund of tested knowledge has been accumulated that can be used to good advantage.

By no means would we discourage the production of ideas: they provide raw materials with which to work;
they provide stimulations that lead to further production.
We would establish no censorship.