James M. Mead is a name virtually forgotten. He was a New Deal Senator who represented New York from 1938 until 1947. During those years Herbert Lehman was Governor of New York, and in 1946 Mead switched with Lehman who in turn ran for Mead's Senate seat. Lehman won but Mead lost out to Thomas Dewey. By all appearances it was a gamble that lost.

But on September 9, 1946, Mead was riding high and delivered a high-energy acceptance speech at the State Democratic Convention to kick off the campaign.

James M. Mead: “I accept this heavy responsibility because I am convinced that the time has come in this state when the people must choose between the principles for which those three great men stood (FDR, Alfred Smith, Herbert Lehman), and the unsound principles that have been advanced, financed and fostered by a group of faithless and visionless reactionaries. Men who look backward and not forward. Men who seek to befuddle the public in order to obtain their own selfish end. They make bold to speak for the many, while they act for the few.”

After his defeat, Mead served on the Federal Trade Commission from 1949-1955 before quietly fading from politics

("Give Me Your Tired, Your Poor, Your . . . .never mind")

Since debate on the issue of our current Immigration laws should be heating up soon, this may be jumping the gun. But it's never too early to start getting some historic perspective on issues. So this post is about the debate over the McCarran/Walter Immigration Bill of 1952.

The program, American Forum Of The Air, hosted a debate on the bill with Senator Herbert Lehman (D-New York) and Congressman J. Frank Wilson (D-Texas)on May 17, 1953.

Sen. Herbert Lehman: “Aliens already in this country can be apprehended and placed in custody. In some cases they can be deported without even the benefit of a hearing. Mister Blair, the McCarran -Walter Act took over all the worst features of all the immigration laws which have been enacted over the last thirty or forty years. But it added many new provisions that were equally bad and combined the whole structure into a legal code which is anti-humanitarian, anti-foreign and, in the profoundest meaning of the word Un-American. It is a complex law and very difficult to summarize in all of its details. But if we are to keep faith with our American traditions, this law, in my opinion must be completely revised and rewritten.”

Then, as now the subject of our Immigration Laws was the object of much heated debate. In the 1950s, with the Red Scare in full bloom, the fear was mass migration of Communist subversives and assassins - however, then as now there was the racial/ethnic overtone which seems to be really what the debate is always about.

Some of it isn't so subtle.