McCarthyism and the Red Scare, Part 2: Attacking “Communists”, and Anyone Else Who Got In His Way
If you're coming in late to the party, you may want to read the previous post. Here's the short version: in 1948 Joseph McCarthy won a seat in the US Senate with a dirty campaign and began his senatorial career with a press conference calling for striking miners to be drafted, court-martialed, and then shot. Here's what happened next:
Joseph Nye Welch, chief counsel for the US Army, being questioned by Joseph McCarthy
By 1950, McCarthy's Senate career was in trouble. The fact that he had lied about his war record during the election campaign had become public. Moreover, he was under investigation for tax offenses and for accepting bribes from Pepsi-Cola to vote in favor of removing wartime restrictions on sugar.
McCarthy directed public attention from his own problems by going on the attack. On February 9, 1950, while speaking to a group of Republican women in Wheeling, West Virginia, McCarthy announced that he had a list of 205 State Department employees who were "card-carrying" members of the American Communist Party,* some of whom were busy passing classified information to the Soviet Union.
When the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations asked McCarthy to testify, he was unable to provide the name of a single "card-carrying communist" in any government department. Undeterred by the absence of facts, McCarthy began an anti-communist campaign in the national media. He began by claiming communist subversives had infiltrated President Truman's administration. When the Democrats accused McCarthy of using smear tactics, he claimed that their accusations were part of the communist conspiracy.
As a result of McCarthy's tactics, the Republicans swept the 1950 elections. Having watched him use scare tactics to discredit his opponents during the election, the remaining Democrats in Congress were reluctant to criticize him. McCarthy, whom the Washington press corps once voted "the worst US senator", was now one of the most powerful men in Congress.
After being re-elected in 1952, McCarthy became the chairman of the Senate's Committee on Government Operations, and more importantly of its permanent investigation subcommittee. In an ironic mirror image of Stalin's trials of alleged counter-revolutionaries,** McCarthy used his position to hold hearings against individuals whom he accused of being communists and government agencies that he claimed harbored them. He attacked journalists who criticized his hearings. He campaigned to have "anti-American" books removed from libraries. He accused newly elected Republican president Dwight Eisenhower of being soft on communism.
McCarthy ran into trouble in April, 1954, when he turned his attention to supposed communist infiltration of the United States Army. The army fought back by providing information to journalists known to oppose McCarthy, including evidence that McCarthy had tried to use his influence to get preferential treatment for his aides when they were drafted. The end came with the decision to broadcast the "Army-McCarthy" hearings on national television. For thirty-six days Americans watched from their living rooms as McCarthy bullied witnesses and offered evasive answers to questions. At one point, after McCarthy attacked a young Army lawyer, the Army's chief counsel, Joseph Nye Welch, demanded "Have you no sense of decency, sir?"
By the end of the hearings, McCarthy had lost most of his allies and the trust of the American people. Later that year, with a vote of sixty-seven to twenty-two,** the Senate officially censured McCarthy for conduct "contrary to Senate traditions." He remained in office, but had no power beyond his senatorial vote. (Which is not nothing.) He died before the end of his second term, leaving as his legacy a cautionary political tale of popular fear, demagoguery, abuse of power, and the value of a democratic system of checks and balances.
*Personally, I doubt that the American Communist Party issued membership cards at the time. It was a disorganized group prone to fracturing along theological lines.
**Ironic from an historical perspective. It is unlikely that McCarthy intended the irony.
***Alaska and Hawaii were not yet states. But unless I'm doing the math wrong that still means some senators must have abstained or taken a convenient bathroom break.
McCarthyism and the Red Scare, Part I: Dirty Tactics
Senator Joe McCarthy* and the Red Scare of the 1950s have been on my mind a lot lately. McCarthy took the very real fear many Americans felt about the spread of communism** and turned them into an official witch-hunt for his personal political benefit.
Born to a Wisconsin farm family in 1908, McCarthy left school at fourteen. He worked as a chicken farmer and a grocery store manager before he went back to high school at the age of twenty. He went on to get a law degree from Marquette University. Up to this point, McCarthy's career looks like a textbook example of the American dream.
In 1948, McCarthy was elected to the United States Senate in an upset victory over the incumbent senator, Robert LaFollette, Jr. LaFollette was a second generation progressive Republican senator.*** His seat in the senate seemed so secure that people said if "Little Bob" could be unseated anyone could be unseated.
McCarthy fought a dirty campaign. He lied about his war record, claiming to have flown thirty-two missions during World War II when he actually worked a desk job and only flew in training exercises. LaFollette was too old for military service when Pearl Harbor was bombed, but McCarthy attacked him for not enlisting and accused him of war profiteering. Ad hominem attacks make for sexy headlines. Fact checking does not. McCarthy won the election.
On his first day as a senator, McCarthy called a little-noticed press conference that was a dress rehearsal for his later performance as a demagogue. He had a modest proposal for ending a coal strike that was in progress: draft union leader John L. Lewis and the striking miners into the army. If they still continued to strike, he argued that they should be court-martialed for insubordination and then shot.
It was an ugly start to a career that would get even uglier.
*Not to be confused with Minnesota senator Eugene McCarthy (1916-2005), who was the opposite of the early Senator McCarthy in pretty much every way possible.
**Whether those fears were legitimate is another question all together.
***Yes, you read that correctly. A progressive Republican. So progressive that he was accused of being a fellow-traveler with communists. The world has changed.
Rejected Princesses
I've been following Jason Porath's Tumblr Rejected Princesses (and the blog that followed it and the Facebook page) for two years and a bit. The project began in a discussion with his Dreamworks' co-workers over what historical woman was least likely to be the heroine of a children's animated movie. He discovered that few of his co-workers had heard of historical figures like 17th century Angolan queen Nzinga,* who successfully defended her country from the Portuguese, or World War II Soviet tank driver Mariya Oktyabrskaya. He set out to change that.
Don't you love the fractured crown?
Porath's Tumblr has spun off a book: Rejected Princesses: Tales of History's Boldest Heroines, Hellions and Heretics. It is a collection of carefully researched, smart-mouthed essays about women who exemplify the idea that well-behaved women seldom make history.** The essays are illustrated in a style that nods toward Disney princesses without sexualizing their subjects--except in the cases of women whose stories depend on their sexuality. ** Some, such as Harriet Tubman and Joan of Arc, will be recognizable to everyone—though details of their stories may surprise readers. Many are virtually unknown. Few are actual princesses.
Rejected Princesses pushes the boundaries of the genre of collective biographies of groundbreaking historical women, often designed to provide female role models for girls. Porath includes stories that may not be suitable for children, or for adults looking for heroines—his historical figures are after all chosen because they'd never be the subject of a children's movie. ( He's colored-coded stories by level of moral ambiguity.) In the end, he urges girls to glory in the fact that they come from "a long line of bold, strong, unbroken women"—princesses or otherwise.
*One of my personal favorites.
**If you love the asterisks here in the Margins, you'll enjoy Porath's style.
***Such as the aforementioned Queen Nzinga, who followed the lead of many male rulers throughout history and kept a 60-man male harem.
Most of this review previously appeared in Shelf Awareness for Readers