When my meter pings FULL on terrorism, corruption of civil rights, and an America endangered by engineered mass stupidity, I pull out a book on old Hollywood and head for the bed or the bath. Ahh, respite.

Last night - not so much. I'd grabbed Stanley Kramer's reflections on his long directing and producing career. And by golly, look what I found: a template for manipulation of angry blue-collar people into organized protests - bankrolled by the rich and politically ambitious.

In 1951, Kramer brought forth a film version of Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman, the Broadway hit about an aging peddler wrestling the falsity of his life's ideals. With Fredric March as Willie Loman, Salesman opened to critical huzzahs and too many empty cinemas. Let's let Kramer take it from here.

Death of a Salesman never quite broke even. Perhaps, though, that can be chalked up to another of the picture's distinctions. It was the first major film to be picketed by Communist-hunting right-wingers. Death of a Salesman was attacked partly because it implied that the American free-enterprise system was in some measure responsible for the tragedy of people like Willy Loman. It suggested that American business more often than not was more interested in profits than people, tending to throw marginal or older employees on the scrap heap. You couldn't deal with a message like that on a placard, though, so the specific targets of the picketers were Arthur Miller, Fredric March, and me.

Fear of the boogeyman du jour (today, of course, it's "socialism") and oversimplified political concepts, wound into personal attacks. Alas, we'd all feel right at home. But there's more (emphasis and links mine).

John Cogley's report on blacklisting in Hollywood, sponsored by the Fund for the Republic, said a group called the Wage Earners Committee instigated the attack, and I think that was probably right. I well remember those people. Their spokesman claimed the organization arose out of the "humblest of origins ... In typical American fashion, a waiter, a telephone switchman, a small restaurant owner, and a retired salesman founded the group." Sometime after its activities became publicized, the National Labor Relations Board discovered that a substantial portion of the committee's financing came from an industrialist who "intended to establish and set up Wage Earners as an instrumentality to offset legitimate collective bargaining."   The group was super-patriotic, declaring its belief in "the inalienable rights of the individual as opposed to regimentation, communization, or dictatorship in any form."

Kramer notes that "One of Miller's earlier plays, All My Sons, had attacked Americans who profiteered during the war." Okay, now we're beyond coincidence. With that sentence, we're right through the looking glass. Social critic aims at corporations and the upper class. Social critic gets demonized as Communist. Distracted Americans go after the Communist.

As the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have ground on, Americans in greater numbers finally saw the shameless blood money showering Blackwater, Halliburton, and other profiteers. Meanwhile, their own employment and savings were gone, or going.

Republicans and the moneyed have capitalized on that angry fear. They neatly torqued demands for health care or fair treatment from banks into "socialism". They redefined the enemy: the government (conveniently enough, now headed by an "other"). Tea Partiers march against the government.

More from Kramer - why go after Fredric March?

March (expressed) a widely held view at the time that the anti-Red campaign wasn't really directed against Communists, which there were very few of in the country. It was directed against liberals, whom the ultraconservatives considered the real enemy. March himself was a political liberal who was far from being a Communist. He was in fact an anti-Communist, but he was also against super-patriots who could only tolerate their own views.

Nuance. If there's one thing mob mentality has no time for, it's a fine distinction. Communist, liberal - what's the difference? He's The Enemy.

The parallels to today's "superpatriots" (an incredibly generous term on Kramer's part) are dismaying but not surprising. Predators pick off the weak.  The 1951 predators included an industrialist out to gut the unions; the prey an American middle class, unsettled by change.

Post-WW2 America was crackling with the discord Arthur Miller portrayed. Minorities and women, suddenly elevated to almost-full human status with war production jobs, wouldn't resubmit to second-class citizenship. Adolescents chafed at the once-reassuring American dream, now wilted in the glare of nuclear bombs.

The world shifted under America's feet. Grasping for control, the public seized on a new, ginned-up enemy: an Other. The Communist; the Socialist. Their choice was to tackle that enemy, or to weigh core societal changes. Guess which is easier. Guess which is more reassuring. Guess which won.

Substitute Dick Armey and the Koch brothers for the unnamed industrialist, and here we are again.

Want the good news? Stanley Kramer bided his time until the "Wage Earners" overstepped into the realm of libel. He took them to court; he made the connection between the libel and the picketers. He reports with pleasure that he won, and the picketers disappeared from the movie houses.

Comparing yesterday's tale with today's quandary doesn't dictate a perfect solution. (Don't we wish.) But the clues are there:

• keep pushing for a decent, thorough, accurate education for every American - so that we all know our history.
• value rational discourse over mindless venting. Insist on the same from your brothers and sisters in this fight. (An unforgiving standard, but worth pursuing.) And,
• push, push, push to hold our court system to true American standards, not the dictates of the richest. It's the courts that rescued Kramer from the puppeteers. It's the courts that are endangered today with the same.  

Indeed - never give up. And thank you, Stanley Kramer, Arthur Miller, and Fredric March, wherever you are.