Hord, Hailey
210-317-9154
Hello, my name is Hailey Hord and I’m an intern with Senator Segerblom. I am here in support of Senate
Bill 174. Pat McCarran has left a legacy of xenophobia and racism. Whether or not you change the name
to Harry Reid International Airport, the name McCarran should be removed. I do think that with the all of
the things that Harry Reid has done for Nevada and our country over the last four decades, he should be
honored and this is a good way to do that. I have submitted some of the comments that Pat McCarran has
made. If you have any questions, please let me know. Thank you very much.
In 1941, when Franklin Roosevelt nominated Gregory Hankin, an attorney for the Federal Power
Commission who had worked for the federal government since the Coolidge administration (1923-29),
to serve on the District of Columbia Public Utilities Commission, McCarran chaired the subcommittee
that vetted the nominees, concluded that Hankin was unqualified, and delayed matters until the
nomination expired. McCarran then became chair of the District of Columbia committee in the Senate,
effectively running the federal enclave. He told the Roosevelt administration that Hankin was a
communist because he and his in-laws had been born in Russia, which was not communist at the time of
their birth. Roosevelt aide James Rowe looked at the files of McCarran, the FBI, and other agencies on
Hankin and wrote to the president, “I am absolutely convinced in my own mind that Hankin is not a
Communist. McCarran has actively opposed only three of your nominations. They were Felix Frankfurter
[for the U.S. Supreme Court], Jerome Frank [for the Court of Appeals] and Gregory Hankin. These three
have nothing in common except they are Jews. There is no question of McCarran’s anti-Semitism. As you
may remember he tried to make out Frankfurter to be a Communist.” Roosevelt stuck to his guns and
Hankin eventually received the appointment, with McCarran voting against it.
Rowe, Memo, July 10, 1941, Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library, Hyde Park, New York, Michael
Ybarra, Washington Gone Crazy: Senator Pat McCarran and the Great American Communist
Hunt (Hanover: Steerforth Press, 2004), 285-87
According to investigative reporter Jack Anderson, “McCarran once summoned [Secretary of the
Interior] Oscar Chapman to his office. McCarran then ordered Chapman to fire the Jewish solicitorgeneral; otherwise McCarran threatened to cut the Interior Department’s budget …. Chapman warned
that he would deny it if it ever leaked out.”
Jack Anderson to Drew Pearson, December 28, 1950, Pearson Papers, Lyndon B. Johnson Library, in
Ybarra, America Gone Crazy, 464, note.
When Roosevelt nominated Jerome Frank, who had served in his administration and then chaired the
Securities and Exchange Commission, for the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, McCarran delayed the
nomination. Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes and Attorney General Robert Jackson spoke about it.
Ickes wrote in his diary, “Bob told me that Jerome Frank’s nomination as a member of the Circuit Court
of Appeals of the New York district, was being held up by McCarran because Frank is a Jew.”
Ickes diary, March 8, 1941, Library of Congress, in Ybarra, Washington Gone Crazy, 286, Note.
EXHIBIT L Senate Committee on Government
Affairs
Date: 3-17-2017
Total pages: 4
Exhibit begins with: L1
thru: L4
Hord, Hailey
210-317-9154
In the wake of World War II, a refugee crisis affected Europe. There were about 400,000 “displaced
persons.” Harry Truman sent Earl Harrison, a former immigration commissioner and law school dean, to
report on it; Harrison came back saying, “We appear to be treating the Jews as the Nazis treated them,
except that we do not exterminate them.” Truman sought to increase the number of people the United
States would accept. A significant number of senators preferred not to do that, or even to reduce the
number. The bill that emerged from the Senate, which McCarran’s biographer Michael Ybarra described
as having his “fingerprints … all over” it, would admit only 100,000, and limit the number to those who
had been in a refugee camp before December 22, 1945, thereby excluding most of the Jewish refugees.
Truman signed the bill in 1948, and called on Congress to improve and expand the provisions the next
year. When a new bill came up, McCarran formed a subcommittee of opponents of admitting Displaced
Persons to take the teeth out of the bill further. He requested a leave of absence to investigate the
problem and traveled through Europe, finding occasional examples of corruption or dishonesty to
bolster his claims, which even the National Catholic Welfare Conference dismissed as lies. McCarran told
his administrative assistant, Eva Adams, “They are displeased persons rather than displaced persons.
Eighty-seven percent are of one blood, one race, one religion. You know what that is without my telling
you.” The bill for displaced persons eventually passed, although McCarran delayed it for more than a
year and amended it several times, and then cut the agency’s budget and the number of Jews permitted
to enter the U.S.
McCarran to Adams, October 26, 1949, Adams Papers, UNR, in Ybarra, Washington Gone Crazy, 45984, at 477.
McCarran told his daughter Mary, a nun who later left the sisterhood, “You say you want to go to Holy
Land. The Jews and Arabs are at war over there. And you can’t see the barn where He was born any way.
They tore it down and the Jews sold it for firewood and made one hundred percent profit on it a long
time ago …. And the sheep that the shepherds were tending are all old bucks and made into baloney
long ago, and they don’t herd sheep there any more. Under the Taylor Grazing Act all grazing rights have
been allotted to the Jews and all the Arabs can do is tend camp for the kikes so what’s the use.”
McCarran to Mary McCarran, January 29, 1954, McCarran Papers, Nevada Historical Society, in
Ybarra, America Gone Crazy, 464.
In 1945, McCarran blocked the nomination of Nathan Margold as a U.S. District Court judge. Margold’s
friend, Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes, wrote in his diary, “McCarran is going to find it difficult to
defeat him. They have nothing to fall back upon except prejudice and anti-Semitism.” He later wrote in a
newspaper column, “Pat McCarran of Nevada, whom I do not regard as an admirable member of the
United States Senate, was allowed, without protest from the newspapers, to smear and crucify a man
who had honored the Municipal Court and who would have more greatly honored the District Court ….
Anti-Semitism raised its ugly head …. Here was a great judge and outstanding citizen, who was cruelly
punished because he had had the misfortune of being born as a member of the wrong race. He had not
humiliated himself by bowing and scraping before the chairman of the Judiciary Committee.” Margold
had written a report in 1930 for the NAACP in which he laid out the plan for how the organization’s
attorneys could fight segregation by focusing on public funding of education; that report formed the
basis for how Charles Hamilton Houston and his protégé, Thurgood Marshall, ultimately argued the
cases that led to Brown v. Board of Education.
Ickes Diary, March 4, 1945, and Washington Post, December 29, 1947, in Ybarra, Washington Gone
Crazy, 378-81.
L2
Hord, Hailey
210-317-9154
In 1950, McCarran ran for what proved to be his final term. One of his closest political allies, Pete
Petersen, who as Reno postmaster ran his own private spying ring for the senator, wrote to McCarran in
preparation for the 1950 Democratic Senate primary against George Franklin, “My idea of the thing was
to emphasize the fact that the Jews were after you. I don’t think that particular race is too well thought
of in this State …. It may not be a bad idea to create the impression that there are certain Jews after you
for their own selfish purposes.” McCarran replied that he doubt much “Jew money” was coming into the
state, but, “What we want them to do is to send the money on and get it into the hands of our own
friends, and we’ll use the money for my election. I think we should get the work started on this plan.”
Petersen later informed McCarran, “There are rumors in Winnemucca that Mr. Franklin is a Jew and a
sort of shady character. You can be sure that neither Ted nor I contradicted those statements.”
Pete Petersen to Pat McCarran, January 6, 1950, and August 1, 1950, and McCarran to Petersen,
January 19, 1950, in Petersen Papers, University of Nevada, Reno, Library, in Ybarra, Washington
Gone Crazy, 496-97, and Edwards, McCarran, 139
When Senator Herbert Lehman of New York objected to the McCarran-Walter Immigration Act, the
Nevadan replied that the only people concerned about it were the “cloak-and-suit” element from New
York.
Hank Greenspun with Alex Pelle, Where I Stand: The Record of a Reckless Man (New York: David
McKay, 1966), 197.
Deposed for Hank Greenspun’s conspiracy lawsuit against the senator and local casino owners,
McCarran stated “that Moritz Zenoff, editor of the Boulder City News, also was printing a newspaper at
the Air Force Base at Las Vegas which contained political criticism. McCarran said he protested to the Air
Force. Zenoff ultimately lost the contract. McCarran said Zenoff later told him ‘he was sorry about the
attitude he had taken about me.’”
Washington Post, December 30, 1952, in Jerome E. Edwards, Pat McCarran: Political Boss of
Nevada (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1982), 165
Late in the 1952 campaign, McCarran wrote to his wife:
It seems both Stevenson and Isenhour are dumb as to law. They show gross ignorance as to my bill. They
dont even read the bill. The Jews are misleading both of them. The fellow who has the democratic
nomination here—Mechling is going wild with his lies about me, and/I’m going to answer him on the
radio. He too is being led by eastern Jews, and “Commies.”
McCarran to Birdie McCarran, October 20, 1952, McCarran Papers, Nevada Historical Society, in
Edwards, McCarran, 179-80
McCarran’s biographer Jerome Edwards, a longtime history professor at UNR wrote,
“On balance, the senator’s contributions to Nevada politics were mixed. He gained much in the way of
material rewards for his state, but politically, because of his temperament, his influence was divisive ….
Since McCarran’s organization had only one goal—his own political aggrandizement—it did not outlast
his death. The benefits of his extraordinary career for Nevada were far less than they should have
been.”
Edwards, McCarran, 200-01.
L3
Hord, Hailey
210-317-9154
McCarran’s attitude toward freedom of the press was that the press was free to agree with him and
would suffer accordingly if it did not. When the Nevada State Labor News criticized his positions,
suddenly and mysteriously, American Federation of Labor leader William Green wrote to Nevada labor
leaders and threatened to withdraw the AFL’s financial support for “one of the staunchest friends of the
AFL.” When Hank Greenspun of the Las Vegas Sun criticized McCarran’s views and actions, suddenly and
mysteriously, almost every casino in Las Vegas canceled its advertising in the Sun in one morning;
according to Greenspun, Moe Dalitz told him that he and his colleagues had to do this because “You’ve
put us in a terrible position. You know as well as I that we have to do what he tells us. Youknow he got
us our licenses. If we don’t go along, you know what will happen to us.” Greenspun sued and won a
settlement, not only because the evidence supported him, but because the federal judge trying the case,
Roger T. Foley, was scrupulously fair despite owing his appointment to McCarran, who never forgave
Foley and did his best to make his life miserable.
Edwards 158-63 on freedom of the press
Senator Herbert Lehman said that “the McCarran-Walter Act directly and cruelly denies all that America
is and stands for. That act bristles with hostility against the alien and the foreign-born. It is a law
conceived in suspicion and brought forth in fear—fear of the stranger, suspicion of every alien. The
underlying assumption of the McCarran-Walter Act is that every alien is a potential saboteur and
criminal, and every potential immigrant must remain so branded unless and until he can prove
otherwise. The period of proof does not end with his admission to the United States or even with the
time he becomes a citizen by naturalization. If he is foreign-born, the McCarran-Walter Act regards him
as suspect until he dies.
“Senator Lehman on the McCarran-Walter Act, Social Service Review, 27:1 (March 1953), 102-04.
L4