A Revisionist View of McCarthyism
TONELSON, ALAN H.
A Revisionist View of McCarthyism Men Against McCarthy By Richard Fried Columbia. 376 pp. $12.95. Reviewed by Alan H. Tonelson Senator Joseph McCarthy continues to sow discord 20 years...
...On one side are the pluralists, whose works first appeared even as power and life were ebbing from McCarthy in the mid-1950s...
...This leads to the fantastic conclusion that he was neither a very powerful nor a very influential historical figure, and that domestic subversion was not a widespread concern of his day...
...If McCarthy was neither cause nor catalyst, then what was...
...Korea, the Cold War, anti-New Deal sentiment, morality and corruption —miraculously none of these had anything to do with the Wisconsin Senator...
...no one wants polemical history, yet Fried's writing is laced with so many "but"s, "then again"s and "nevertheless"s it is often hard to see precisely where he stands...
...Fried disagrees, albeit in a muddled and unconvincing way...
...Documenting GOP weakness is crucial to his argument...
...What Fried and his fellow revisionists fail to perceive is something they can learn from their academic rivals: The GOP in the late '40s and early '50s was less a conventional political party than a woefully weak fringe group, displaying all the frustrations, all the fear and all the paranoia—all the psychological status anxieties—described by the pluralists...
...But today, instead of rampaging through the Senate, he is wreaking havoc in the historical community, where scholars trying to understand exactly what happened to this country in the Wisconsinite's heyday have split into two quarreling factions...
...Recently a group of New Left revisionist historians has charged that the Truman Administration tried to drum up support for its containment policy with an anti-Soviet fear campaign that created the kind of atmosphere McCarthy could thrive in...
...In fact, while Republicans had practiced redbaiting throughout the Roosevelt years, they were not counting at all heavily on it at the start of the 1950 campaign, as the party's "Statement of Principles and Objectives," released just six days before Wheeling, showed...
...Throughout early 1950, political cartoonists showed the flustered GOP elephant frantically fishing for something—anything...
...Fried stresses the explicitly anti-Communist portions of the document, but its main emphasis was on the party's timeworn theme of "liberty against socialism...
...Fried's inability to trace McCarthyism's origins underscores the weakness of his case and results in a virtually unrecognizable picture of the era...
...Fried seeks to illuminate the boundaries of national politics during the postwar years, yet he seems to have used a pocket flashlight...
...The great bulk of Men Against McCarthy is a complete, rather tedious narrative tracing the fortunes of the Truman Administration and its Congressional allies, who had the thankless task of dealing with McCarthy...
...Men Against McCarthy could still be valuable if it did not display so prominently the root problem of revisionism: narrowly denning McCarthyism and rigidly categorizing the many intertwined elements of its appeal to the point of seriously underestimating its impact...
...Still larger, however, are the flaws in the revisionists' arguments, and Richard Fried's new study of McCarthy's Democratic opposition faithfully displays every one...
...that domestic subversion was not much of an issue in 1948...
...His State of the Union message in January was a model of magnanimity, and at a fundraiser that same month, House Speaker Sam Rayburn jocularly implored the Republicans to pick up a few seats in Congress and "give us a two-party system...
...Something other than just partisanship had to be at work...
...Moreover, their conclusions tend to let the period's politicians off the hook for their timid, groveling behavior...
...But since its underlying thesis does rest on the premise that McCarthy was exclusively political, the book must stand or fall on those pages where it asserts that the rise of McCarthy and the issues he exploited reflected nothing more than the Republican party's escape from its electoral feebleness of the '30s and '40s...
...Fried is no more successful in advancing the revisionist cause in the broader scholarly debate...
...They claim that the Truman loyalty programs of the late '40s and the Democrats' hounding of Henry Wallace legitimized McCarthy's later redbaiting...
...He speaks of Truman's deteriorating position and rising partisanship in early 1950, seemingly unaware that despite clouds gathering in the form of the Hiss verdict and other spy news, the President was riding higher than ever until late February and knew it...
...nonetheless, he overestimates the party's strength on the eve of the February 12, 1950, speech in Wheeling, West Virginia, that brought McCarthy to national prominence...
...Unfortunately, he fails to make the case either on its own limited terms or on those set by the larger pluralist-revisionist controversy...
...Moreover, he argues that far from making a landmark address, McCarthy merely served up old Republican fare...
...He argues at various turns that the Truman spokesmen cared far more for civil liberties than these historians grant...
...Although each school aids our understanding of the McCarthy years, each also leaves vital questions unanswered...
...Reviewed by Alan H. Tonelson Senator Joseph McCarthy continues to sow discord 20 years after his death, and wherever he is he probably loves every minute of it...
...that even if they did not, people don't pay much attention to the President anyway...
...Clearly, the new pressures of the Cold War are of central importance, but the way they combined with domestic issues is left hanging...
...A chorus of yawns greeted this condemnation of nearly every domestic reform achieved since the turn of the century...
...At first glance it seems unfair to judge Fried's work on this basis...
...Many of them dispute his prominence, claiming that he mobilized support only among political elites and within activist circles...
...Throughout the book McCarthyism is equated with the Communism-ingovernment issue and that alone...
...The great gaping hole in their argument—failure to account for McCarthy's eventual assault on Eisenhower—is never addressed...
...They see their subject as a creature inhabiting the realms of fire and dragons far beyond the conventional political sphere—a roguish, disruptive radical possessing an appeal that related less to the standard issues of the time than to the psychological "status" concerns of millions unable to cope with the strains and rootlessness of modern American life...
...The pluralists, for their part, seem to have been too hasty in dismissing the partisan political side of McCarthyism...
...Years later there arose a school of revisionist historians who contend that McCarthy was essentially political and classically conservative...
...If both sides could abandon their preconceptions and probe the consequences of these anxieties, historians might yet unlock the secrets of McCarthy and his era...
...to use against the Democrats...
...One noteworthy aspect of Democratic behavior that Fried examines concerns the party's responsibility for McCarthy's ascent...
...that Truman's scare tactics probably reflected rather than shaped public opinion...
...This last point is particularly galling...
...and that maybe the Democrats "let the genie out of the bottle after all...
...If that was the case, why did 185 of 221 Republican Congressmen request assignment to the House Unamerican Activities Committee in 1952, as Fried himself notes...
...Similarly, Fried's depiction of the Democrats seems off base...
...If McCarthy and his ism came from within the GOP, why did he turn so quickly and furiously against the first Republican President in 20 years...
...Fried simply never explains why redbaiting caught on so suddenly and meshed so neatly with the mounting tide of conservative feeling...
Vol. 59 • September 1976 • No. 19
