Useful Notes / Joseph McCarthy

"McCarthyism is Americanism with its sleeves rolled."

"We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. We must remember always that accusation is not proof and that conviction depends upon evidence and due process of law. We will not walk in fear, one of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason, if we dig deep in our history and our doctrine, and remember that we are not descended from fearful men — not from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate and to defend causes that were, for the moment, unpopular."

— Edward R. Murrow's attack on McCarthyism

Joseph Raymond "Tail Gunner Joe"^note  He acquired that nickname after it came out he had exaggerated the degree of his service in World War II — see later in this article. McCarthy (November 14, 1908 – May 2, 1957) was an American judge and Republican politician from Wisconsin. He is remembered by history for serving as a United States Senator from 1947 to 1957 and for inspiring the term "McCarthyism". Said term became (and still is) a byword for political demagoguery which uses the rhetoric of Witch Hunt, Red Scare, and Patriotic Fervor to undermine the demagogue's opponents by questioning their unconditional loyalty to their country and their personal convictions without offering proof (and not caring much whether proof even exists). During his lifetime, he tried unsuccessfully to reclaim the label. McCarthy was an extremely anticommunist U.S. senator during the 1950s, and the term derives from his methods. Due to his status as the icon of the greatest Red Scare in American history, McCarthy is often Mis-blamed for all the excesses of the period.

To be clear, McCarthy had nothing to do with the investigations into Alger Hiss, the Rosenbergs,^note  Though his close collaborator and chief counsel, lawyer Roy Cohn, is seen as the one of the main people responsible for having Ethel Rosenberg charged alongside her husband, despite the case against her being flimsy at best, and for pushing for Ethel and Julius to get the electric chair together. the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), or The Hollywood Blacklist. HUAC and the blacklist were certainly in the spirit of McCarthyism, but McCarthy wasn't actually involved in those things. The big clue is that whereas HUAC (as its full name suggests) was a committee of the House of Representatives, McCarthy was never a member of the House, but only ever a senator; that is, a member of the Senate, a discrete chamber of Congress. What makes him representative of this era is the fact that these pre-McCarthy investigations were far less controversial and more popular than Tailgunner Joe's antics, at least in their own time. McCarthyism represented the point where elite and public opinion turned solidly against the Red Scare, with McCarthy alienating other anticommunists from the hardline platform that they had once advocated but which, after McCarthy had co-opted it, became unacceptable. McCarthyism is largely a disagreement about means rather than ends (anticommunism remains mainstream, both of America's major parties advocate it), and the means McCarthy advocated, i.e., militant anticommunist advocacy of political consistency and paranoid overreaction of the same, were not original to him. He simply took it up to eleven and discredited it in American mainstream politics.

McCarthy first rose to prominence in 1950, three years after he became the junior senator from Wisconsin.^note Believe it or not, in the 1946 Republican Senate primary election that got him nominated to compete for the Senate seat, he was supported by a Communist-controlled union, as they were hell-bent on a vendetta against Robert M. La Follette, Jr., an incumbent who was a known anticommunist. Prior to that he had been a relatively undistinguished senator, having incurred criticism for supporting corporate subsidies^note Due to his especially close relationship with the Pepsi company, he was called "The Pepsi-Cola Kid" before the "Tailgunner" moniker caught on. and, rather more bizarrely, accusing American military prosecutors of torturing Nazi SS officers accused of the Malmedy Massacre into false confessions.^note In fairness, McCarthy was responding in part to real, credible accusations of forced confessions, beatings and other abuse against German prisoners of war. However, these specific charges were invented or at least exaggerated, and McCarthy became a target for snark for harping on the topic for so long after it was disproved. Making a speech to the Republican women's club in Wheeling, West Virginia, he declared that the U.S. State Department was infested with known communists. The press took notice and launched McCarthy into the national spotlight. McCarthy came to be treated as a major campaigning asset for his party beginning with the 1950 Senate elections, when he helped stump for several successful Republican challengers to leading Democratic senators (though how much credit he personally merited for it is uncertain; even in his own party he was regarded as a Small Name, Big Ego type). Still, by 1952, the Democratic Party had been in control of the federal government for twenty years,^note Congress had been controlled by Democrats since 1931 (except for the 1947–49 session), the White House since 1933. under the administrations of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman, and they had implemented many reforms inspired by social democracy in that time. McCarthy accused the Democratic administrations of perpetrating "twenty years of treason" and, of course, supported Republican candidate Dwight D. Eisenhower in the 1952 presidential election, which he won.^note McCarthy himself handily won his bid for re-election to the Senate that year, though by only 8¾ percentage points. He ran behind every other GOP candidate in Wisconsin in 1952: for example, Eisenhower carried the state by 22 points in the presidential race. In office, Eisenhower pursued a strongly anticommunist foreign policy, but it wasn't quite anticommunist enough for McCarthy. A year into Eisenhower's presidency, McCarthy didn't like Ike anymore and had updated his Catchphrase to "twenty-one years of treason."

During Eisenhower's presidency, McCarthy served on the Senate Committee on Government Operations and chaired the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. During this time he investigated The Voice of America, the U.S. government's radio program, where he ruined many careers via televised interviews that included highly personal and aggressive interrogation.^note Although Robert Taft, the then Republican Senate leader, was also a firm anticommunist, he was suspicious of the Tailgunner's loose-cannon ways even then and so assigned him there because he thought "he [couldn't] do any harm" to the anticommunist cause there. However, McCarthy exploited Investigations' capacious mandate to do what he did. He, alongside Roy Cohn (who worked as his chief counsel), also monitored the libraries in American embassies overseas and began crusading against books and authors that were considered communist, which eventually led to book burnings by McCarthy supporters at home (though McCarthy did not personally call for such). McCarthy attacked government employees, librarians, and other state officials, codifying the anti-intellectual climate of the time. It became clear that McCarthy was burning his bridges when his staff director, J. B. Matthews, wrote an article entitled "Reds and Our Churches." It began with this claim: "The largest single group supporting the Communist apparatus in the United States is composed of Protestant clergymen." Even McCarthy was reluctant to support a potential breach into the First Amendment and many other senators were taken aback by this attack on the American clergy.

While McCarthy is best known for his crusade against communists, he also led a similar contemporaneous crusade against homosexuals. He argued by the "logic" that, since homosexuals were vulnerable to blackmail, the USSR could easily use them to spy on the United States, so government workers whose homosexuality was known or suspected had to be ferreted out to gauge their loyalty better. Some historians argue that this "Lavender scare," as it is called, did much more damage than the Red one, as it marked the birth of the first real homophobic policies at a state level. Naturally, the fact that McCarthy's own staffer Roy Cohn turned out to be a closeted homosexual himself only served to tarnish his crusade and reputation posthumously (though Cohn always denied this). A fair few of McCarthy's peers suspected him of being a "confirmed bachelor", too, especially given how often he was in Cohn's company, to the point it was an Open Secret on Capitol Hill that several of his colleagues would often tell homophobic jokes about him and Cohn behind their backs.

Ultimately, an emerging new medium called television brought McCarthy down. In early 1954, Edward R. Murrow's series See It Now broadcast an episode condemning McCarthy, a risky move at the time. McCarthy appeared on a later episode to respond, predictably not addressing a single point made against him and instead accusing Murrow of being a communist. That same year, the Army–McCarthy hearings investigated the U.S. Army for potential communist subversion. The television coverage of the hearings, especially the one of the young lawyer Fred Fisher, gave the American public a good, long look at McCarthy, and they didn't like what they saw.^note Some historians and journalists claim that it was down to McCarthy having finally picked the wrong victim to bully. In the climate of 1950s America, it had been easy for McCarthy and his staff to scaremonger about perceived outsiders with relatively little social power, such as communists, black people, and homosexuals, but Fred Fisher was a friendly-looking young white man who worked for the Army, one of the US' most popular institutions, so trying to paint him as a scary "other" was sure to backfire spectacularly. The Wisconsin senator came off as a huge bully, and the hearings have become known for a Real Life Shut Up, Hannibal! moment when Joseph Welch said, "Let us not assassinate this lad further, Senator, you've done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?" Welch's words were met with applause from the rest of the room.

Public opinion began to turn against McCarthy after this, as even some of the most anticommunist Republicans now saw him as a liability and wanted him to Stop Being Stereotypical. That December 2, the Senate voted to censure McCarthy by a 67–22 margin, with six abstentions. The censure received unanimous support from the Democrats present, while the Republicans were split evenly.^note Fun fact: the only senator not present for the vote was none other than future president John F. Kennedy, who was recuperating from back surgery at the time. The Kennedy family was generally friendly to McCarthy, partly because they were also Irish Catholics, most of whom opposed Communism more strongly than the median American; he was godfather to Robert F. Kennedy's oldest daughter, Kathleen, and he even dated Patricia and Eunice Kennedy. Out of family loyalty, JFK tended to avoid speaking about him, refused to denounce him publicly, and once even said, "Half my voters in Massachusetts think McCarthy is a hero." McCarthy dismissed the censure as inconsequential and blamed it on (you guessed it) communist subversion. He continued to rail against the red menace, but he had permanently lost his nationwide fame and political clout.^note Eisenhower quipped that McCarthyism was now "McCarthywasm". McCarthy had already been noted to be somewhat of a heavy drinker in private, but the stress from the situation removed any inhibitions toward his alcoholism he might have had before, and his health quickly deteriorated as a result. In 1957, he died at the age of forty-eight, officially from hepatitis, which his alcoholism caused, exacerbated, or both. As McCarthy was still a sitting senator at the time of his death, a special election was held to fill the vacancy in the Senate. Ironically, his seat was taken by William Proxmire, a liberal Democrat and future opponent of The Vietnam War.

History, of course, remembers McCarthy as a wild, paranoid demagogue. A few years after the end of the Cold War, some American conservatives tried to rehabilitate his reputation when the Venona papers, released in 1995, revealed that there were more Soviet agents in the U.S. government than previously believed — though not nearly as many as McCarthy or HUAC argued. The general view is that, if anything, McCarthy's antics damaged legitimate efforts to locate Soviet agents by making the cause look irrational. Even in his own time, Presidents Truman and Eisenhower thought so, separately snarking that the Kremlin might as well put McCarthy on its payroll. (For instance, the only confirmed Soviet agent whom McCarthy ever named was Mary Jane Keeney, an American librarian who worked for the United Nations, and even then McCarthy only accused her of being a Communist Party member, rather than an actual spy, making this a case of him being Right for the Wrong Reasons.) The release of the Mitrokhin documents showed that the KGB shared a similar opinion. McCarthy had a history of mendacity, having doctored his military record to appear more heroic than he was and using that as a cudgel to attack his opponents,^note His nickname "Tailgunner Joe" comes from the fact that he had flown on bombing missions as an "observer" but exaggerated that to claim he served as a tailgunner, which he used when he first ran for the Senate in 1946. During that campaign, he also accused his opponents, first Bob La Follette Jr. and then Howard McMurray, of war profiteering with no evidence. and when in office, he exploited preexisting anticommunist fervor more than he tried to deal with actual communists or their activities competently.

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Joseph McCarthy in fiction:

• Most works of fiction dealing with McCarthyism depict a No Celebrities Were Harmed version of McCarthy rather than actually naming him. A notable example of this is The Manchurian Candidate, in which the McCarthy analogue turns out to be a Soviet agent sowing discord on purpose, perhaps building from Truman's and Eisenhower's comments.
• Stock Footage of McCarthy is used in Good Night, and Good Luck.. Not realizing they were seeing footage of the real McCarthy, test audiences thought the actor playing McCarthy was hamming it up too much.
• In an episode of M*A*S*H, Frank Burns complains that Hawkeye and Trapper drew fangs on his picture of Senator McCarthy.
• The Front opens with a montage of old newsreel footage from the early 1950s. Footage of McCarthy is prominently featured.
• Pogo satirized McCarthy as Simple J. Malarkey, a trigger-happy bobcat who joins the Jack Acid Society, the strip’s version of HUAC (doubtless the fervently anti-communist John Birch Society inspired the name).
• Played by Peter Boyle in the 1977 made for TV biopic Tail Gunner Joe.
• In the play That Championship Season, the character Coach keeps a framed photograph of McCarthy on his wall – in the 1970s.
• Parodied on Mystery Science Theater 3000, with famous ventriloquist dummy Charlie McCarthy accusing fellow puppets of un-American activities.
• Footage of McCarthy is also shown on the television in the movie Clue to help set the time period and set the stage for the plot (fear of communists/possible collusion with them motivating many of the blackmail victims and, supposedly, Mr. Boddy) — though in the end communism turned out to be a red herring.
• A rabid anticommunist Senator Gallo (a rooster) appears in Blacksad, secretly leading a project to ensure the American government is safe in the event of an all-out Russian nuclear attack. When Blacksad gets mixed up in this, he blackmails Gallo into releasing him, but ends up painted as having sold out others to save his skin.
• Pink Floyd's 1983 song "The Fletcher Memorial Home" mentions "the ghost of McCarthy" among the various politicians interred at the titular asylum.
• Comparisons between 1950s McCarthyism and the sociopolitical climate of America under Ronald Reagan is a key tenet of the 1987 R.E.M. song "Exhuming McCarthy", which includes a sample of Joseph Welch's famous "no sense of decency" tirade.
• The game SIGMATA: This Signal Kills Fascists has as its Point of Divergence McCarthy becoming President of the United States, his single term leading to a lasting foundation of xenophobia, hate and repressive politics that ultimately leads to the homegrown fascist government known as the Regime in 1986.
• Fellow Travelers: McCarthy is a supporting character, and Tim Laughlin initially works for him.
• McCarthy never appears in person in Oppenheimer, but the Witch Hunt Robert Oppenheimer goes through is straight application of his policies, which Lewis Strauss weaponizes against the scientist upon feeling slighted.

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