McCarran-Walter Act repealed

I believe it was in an early Marx Brothers film that one of the brothers – and I should guess it would have to be Groucho – was entering the United States on a ship coming into the harbour and was being routinely questioned by an immigration inspector. The man put what in those days was the key question, the wrong answer to which could have you bundled out of the country faster than you came in. 'Do you believe in the overthrow of the United States government by force?' Groucho, or whoever, replied snappily, 'Yes, preferably tonight.'

I don't know who thought up this sublimely useless challenge, since any anarchist, terrorist – anybody – who really did want to overthrow the government by force would be the last one to say so. Still, it was legal formula and it did imply that the wish to overthrow the government by argument, by speechifying, by other peaceful means was not punishable by deportation.

And the constitution itself says, in the very first article of the Bill of Rights, 'Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech or of the press or the right of the people peaceably to assemble and to petition the government for a redress of grievances'. Begging for a redress of grievances may not be quite the same as overthrowing the government, but it is a permissible device for curing something that is rotten in the state of Denmark.

Anyway, from time to time in the history of this country, and especially at times when there is a new flood of immigrants, there's been usually a quickening of the impulse to watch out for troublemakers, in particular for anarchists coming in under the guise of honest immigrants escaping from the usual affliction – persecution, poverty, military service.

In jittery times, the Congress has passed laws that go far beyond questioning new arrivals about their forceful intentions towards the United States government. Such a time was the early 1950s when a high State Department official, Alger Hiss, was found guilty of perjury in denying he had passed State Department documents to an American Communist. It was called the trial of the century and it fuelled enough popular alarm and indignation to propel a House Un-American Activities Committee and then the late Senator Joseph McCarthy into a furious hunt for domestic traitors and an almost pathological suspicion of leftist liberals and many harmless people that some neighbour thought was harmful.

When these inquisitors were riding high, two senators, McCarran and Walter, turned their baleful eyes on newcomers to the country, not only immigrants, but visitors, especially writers and other traffickers in ideas. McCarran and Walter, in the feverish mood of the time, managed to get through Congress a new law which gave the government unprecedented wide powers to keep out of the country all declared Communists, suspected Communists and, beyond them, anyone else known to hold beliefs either of the extreme right or the extreme left that some member of the government – an inspector, a congressman – believed would lead such people to engage in activities prejudicial to the public interest. That's a pretty broad definition of possible public danger.

The president, Harry Truman at the time, thought this was a monstrous act, which, he said, would have established an inhumane policy towards eligible foreign persons. The president vetoed the bill but, under the Constitution, a vetoed bill goes back to both Houses and to override the president's veto, they must then vote for it again with a two-thirds majority in each House. And so they did and the McCarran-Walter bill became law.

It has remained law ever since, but so quietly, so unobtrusively applied in many cases that I believe most Americans over 50 who remember the uproar over the passage of the bill will be astonished to know that the McCarran-Walter Act is still in force. There are, however, distinguished foreigners who are all too aware of it. When they have routinely applied for a visitor's visa, they've been turned down. The former Bernadette Devlin is one of the better-known cases because, as a militant Irish nationalist, some even liberal-minded Americans feared she might, to put it in the dull language of the act, 'engage in activities prejudicial to the public interest'.

For the same reason the Reverend Ian Paisley was denied a visa and El Salvador's bristling rightist, Roberto D'Aubuisson, but so also were two of Central America's most brilliant authors, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Carlos Fuentes. I ought to say that brilliance, of course, is no qualification for entry. Lenin was brilliant, and so, in his malodorous fashion was Dr Joseph Goebbels. Neither of them would have made it.

But I think that most literate Americans would be shocked to know that Carlos Fuentes and Garcia Marquez and Graham Greene have regularly been denied the right of entry. The pretext for excluding these novelists has not been that their novels which, of course, have always been published here, contain inflammatory material, but that at some time in the past, they'd been members of a party of the extreme left or right. The excuse in Graham Greene's case was that in his youth he had very briefly been a card-carrying Communist.

However, as I say, I'm sure that most avid book readers are only dimly aware that the odious McCarran-Walter Act is still on the books. After all, this is a country which as much as – indeed, more than any other – proclaims all the time the right of free speech, the right of opinions to make their way in a free marketplace of ideas. Public speeches, in and out of Congress, resound all the time with brave quotations from Jefferson and Lincoln and Roosevelt, from Mr Justice Holmes about the right of free speech to include the utterance of ideas which you may find loathsome.

William Randolph Hearst, whose newspapers in the Forties and Fifties were practically torch-bearers of the hunt to find Communists in every foxhole, nevertheless printed every day in the top corner of his front pages Voltaire's line, 'I disapprove of what you say but I will defend, to the death, your right to say it'.

In this uplifting atmosphere, very few of us look down to notice how many foreigners with provocative ideas were being marked for exclusion as contagious newcomers. Well, shockingly late in the day, I'm happy to tell you the McCarran-Walter Act is no longer valid. In December, in the closing days of the last Congress, a senator from New York, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, got up to sponsor its repeal. A law, he said, that was stupid, that made us look sub-literate, fearful, repressive. Very quietly, in almost furtive shame, Congress voted for repeal.

I don't know where the momentum for repeal came from. Quite possibly from none other than a full-blown, bare-faced active Communist who was let into the country in December without a murmur of protest or an immigration inspector's question. His name is Mikhail Gorbachev and when President Reagan kept his promise to lecture Mr Gorbachev about Soviet violations of human rights, the general secretary replied, 'Yes, we keep some certain people in the Soviet Union, but look at you. You keep some people out!'.

Anyway, as a news magazine's headline trumpets, 'Good Riddance to an Odious Law'. The truly embarrassing thing about the whole affair is that none of us has noticed the odious smell for the past 35 years.

Do you remember, it must be ten years or more, a doctor in California who planned, indeed wrote, a book on how to avoid a heart attack? The publication of the book was delayed because between the writing of the manuscript and the correction of the proofs, the doctor had a heart attack. This embarrassment was quietly hurdled and the book came out and was widely reviewed and remarked on. I believe it became a bestseller. It certainly had the most dependable ingredient for a bestseller. It had a thesis.

The thesis was that human beings fall into two types – all the easier to remember because they were/are opposing types, Type A and Type B. A is outgoing, high-strung, on the hop, always a little behind the work that has to be done. A is more subject to heart attacks, whereas B – easygoing, placid, orderly, is, as you'd expect, less subject. The thesis only confirmed, I felt at the time, yet another glimpse of the obvious. Of course, the rest of the book intended to show the impatient, high-strung As how to overcome their nature and avoid a heart attack.

The item I remember best was the author's answer, when he was approached about the healthy practice of jogging. 'Well,' he said, 'I really hate to have a jogger for a patient because a jogger is, by definition a Type A.'

Well now, the authoritative, the greatly respected, New England Journal of Medicine has published the results of a study of 257 men observed over a period of a dozen years, all of whom had had heart attacks in the beginning and they were labelled, at the beginning, either Type A or B. The study was done to see which type, if either, died sooner after the attack. Twenty-six patients who died within 24 hours of their attack were not differentiated as between Types A and B, but of the other 231, over the following 12 years, it was found that the high-strung type As lasted much longer, were less likely to die, than the placid Bs.

I don't know, but I hope this has put paid to the A and B labels. It would stop placid wives from scolding or cautioning high-strung husbands. Way back in my youth, we divided humankind into extrovert and introvert and then it was outgoing and withdrawn.

On the whole, I don't think we've come very far in 2,000 years in classifying human beings according to temperament. In fact, I think we've gone back. Looking around at my friends and acquaintances, I find it is shrewder, more accurate, to divide them off into four types, the four humours invented by the old Greek physician, Galen, who died nearly 1800 years ago.

He said humans came in four assortments – choleric, sanguine, phlegmatic and melancholy. It covers many more of us than jumpy A and sleepy B.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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