Sen. Johns speaks on the Senate floor, 1953. (Florida Photographic Collection)

In William Faulkner's "Absalom, Absalom!" Quentin Compson wonders, "Maybe nothing ever happens once and is finished. Maybe happen is never once but like ripples maybe on water after the pebble sinks ... "

When Congress published the 50-year-old secret transcripts from the investigations of U.S. Sen. Joseph McCarthy last week, I wondered why Florida's version of McCarthyism has received so little attention. McCarthy's paranoid persistence allowed him to use a grip of terror to intimidate and harass witnesses nationwide --- until, of course, he started pointing fingers at the Army in 1954.

That was the end for McCarthy. But here in Florida, we still had Charley Johns.

McCarthy's rise and fall created ripples of fanaticism that were felt in Florida for many years. Johns, who served as acting governor upon the death of Gov. Dan McCarty in 1953, brought a Deep South twist to McCarthy's witch-hunt. And he was more a threat to liberty than McCarthy. Johns created financial and legal hurdles for civil-rights advocates. He had teachers' certificates revoked and ruined the lives and professional reputations of an unknown number of university professors. His witch-hunts went on for nine years while McCarthy's lasted only four.

McCarthy called witnesses to be privately and publicly harassed, and the recent congressional release will allow historians to learn more about his executive sessions. There's no telling how many writers weren't published, how many job applicants weren't hired or how many actors were blacklisted because of McCarthy's desperate antics.

Johns, on the other hand, has a more specific body count. The distinction between McCarthy's brand of McCarthyism and Johns' brand is one of degree: While McCarthy was interested only in communists, Johns was interested in harassing communists, civil-rights activists, blacks and homosexuals. While McCarthy merely intimidated, Johns conducted massive purges in which scores of teachers and professors were fired upon mere speculation. While McCarthy was trying to prevent a communist takeover of the United States, Johns was defending the Old South against the New South.

The Johns committee released lists of professors to universities, which would fire everyone listed. As one University of Florida professor recalled in the 1980s, "It became more and more obvious because every week they fired an additional teacher on the list and the firings happened in alphabetical order."

Johns did much more than hold hearings. He also wielded tremendous powers, which had been granted by the Legislature, to act as prosecutor, judge and jury. Anyone who stood in his way feared Johns' power in the Florida Senate, where appropriations could evaporate.

Florida's McCarthyism --- the Johns era --- was a dark time, a time many people would just as soon forget. But it's important to remember how this all came about: The Tallahassee bus boycott of 1956 was the single most important factor in the creation of the Johns committee.

When Gov. LeRoy Collins called a special session in 1956 to find ways to prevent school desegregation, legislators arrived in Tallahassee during the height of a bus boycott. Johns' long-standing argument that Florida needed an investigation committee suddenly held weight in the Senate.

Johns had wanted an investigation committee since the early 1950s. When he returned to the Senate after acting as governor until 1955, he didn't let McCarthy's ignominious plunge from the public stage deter him. Johns saw the Tallahassee bus boycott as an ideal opportunity to persuade his Senate colleagues to uncover the "truth" about Florida's civil-rights movement --- that it was a communist plot.

Seeking to model his committee on the Tallahassee Police Department's 1956 investigation of the Tallahassee bus boycott, Johns hired Remus J. Strickland and Mark Hawes, both of whom had worked for the city during the inquisition of civil-rights advocates. Strickland and Hawes had brought the boycotters financial hardship, emotional turmoil and social disgrace by making a carpool operated by boycotters seem like a communist plot.

Strickland and Hawes used the information they amassed during the bus boycott to point a finger at the NAACP, which Johns wanted to banish from the state. After a protracted legal battle involving the committee's failed attempt to obtain the NAACP membership list, Johns turned his attention to attacking homosexuals, whom he considered a threat to Florida's children.

Strickland spent much of the late 1950s and early 1960s traveling around Florida, harshly interrogating teachers and professors who were suspected of being homosexual. College professors in Gainesville and Tampa were called into hotel rooms in the middle of the night to be questioned, often intimidated and threatened with arrest and public humiliation. Johns used the information to have teachers' licenses revoked and pressure university presidents to fire selected employees.

The committee was shown for what it was in 1964, when it released "Homosexuality and Citizenship in Florida." The report became known as the "purple pamphlet" because of its abstract purple cover. Imagine the Starr Report with pictures. The document contained so many photos that it quickly became sought after on the black market and was sold as pornography in many areas of the country.

The resulting controversy brought down the Johns committee --- an entire decade after the Army-McCarthy hearings. But the intolerance of Johns and McCarthy lives on. Witness the asinine statement of U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum equating consensual homosexual behavior with bigamy, polygamy, incest, adultery and "anything," subtle code for equating homosexuality with rape, murder and terrorism. Anyone who doubts that McCarthyism lives on isn't aware of what the U.S. Justice Department has been doing since Sept. 11, 2001.

I suspect we are still haunted by the ghosts of Joe McCarthy and Charley Johns. We are still feeling the ripples of McCarthyism, which we must reject. We must not allow the McCarthys and the Johnses to shape the contours of our public life. We must not lead lives half lived, fashioned by conformity, ruled by fear and controlled by shame.

Mike Pope is letters editor of the Tallahassee Democrat. Contact him at (850) 599-2173 or mpope@tallahassee.com.