JUMPIN' JOE' MCCARTHY--HIS MOTIVES AND METHODS
Chase, Stuart
'Jumpin' Joe' McCarthy--His Motives and Methods By STUART CHASE AFTER reading some millions of words about the various angles of Sen. Joseph McCarthy's drive on the State Department, I feel a...
...It is not a pretty pattern...
...Democracy, as a workable political system in crisis, is seriously discredited...
...6. He blurred the distinction between Communists and liberals, implying that any reformer, like Dorothy Kenyon, was a Communist, or sympathetic to Communism...
...But this blunderbuss can easily explode in one's hands: Good Communists speak Russian...
...It must also be remembered that in the depression of the 1930's, people were joining all kinds of organizations, some of them pretty weird, seeking a way out of a condition where 10,000,000 Americans were unemployed...
...7. He used guilt-by-association in recklessly attacking people who had once belonged to "subversive" organizations...
...policy would have occurred long before Acheson became Secretary of State...
...The State Department is against Chiang...
...5. He has helped to make Government service too dangerous for good men to enter—at a time when the country desperately needs good men...
...Robert Taft...
...c) Months or years later—note the date—Communists, using their famous bore-from-within tactics, capture the organization...
...9. McCarthy presents his case as if the elaborate machinery of the Loyalty Board, headed by a Republican, Seth Richardson, which screens all Government employes, was nonexistent...
...So I have prepared a categorical list of what seem to me to be (1) the Senator's motives, (2) his methods, and (3) the results of the campaign to mid-May...
...It must be remembered that McCarthy's methods produce obloquy by mass communication—headlines, syndicated commentators, radio, news reels, television—a Niagara of words and symbols unparalleled in history...
...McCarthy studied Russian...
...A summary of his work appears in his latest book, "The Proper Study of Mankind...
...Known Motives 1. The straight political motive— outs trying to embarrass the ins...
...His books include "The Economy of Abundance" and "The Tyranny of Words...
...2. Innocent people have had their reputations damaged for all time...
...b) Well-meaning citizens get up an organization to remedy the condition—raise funds, protest, pass a law...
...I have joined plenty of liberal organizations in my time, and the sequence from my personal experience is roughly like this: (a) A condition at a certain date is bad, and needs correction—maybe a civil liberties case, a sharecropper outrage, a miscarriage of justice in a race riot, displaced persons, a foreign tyrant on the loose, Chinese famine sufferers, what you will...
...4. People in high government positions can do very little work...
...The whole China lobby went into action...
...9. The bipartisan foreign policy is made more difficult to carry forward because of the bitterness engendered, especially in the Senate...
...We have no defense if they want to kick over the rules...
...Take the case of Owen Lattimore...
...Therefore, Lattimore is in the State Department...
...Nothing was too good for the Russians during the interval...
...You can prove the Pope a Communist, or anything else, with this fowling piece...
...As Arthur Krock of the New York Times has pointed out, there are plenty of loyal persons who, because of their temperament, or other personal reasons, are bad security risks in government...
...Even if he had been, his architectural activities concerning Chinese STUART CHASE, the well-known social and economic analyst, has done special research in recent years on the application of the scientific method to human behavior...
...Therefore the State Department is run by Communists...
...3. A personal political motive, in that the Senator wants an issue for his next campaign in Wisconsin...
...McCarthy has proved nothing in three months, but he has planted his charges so deeply in the public consciousness that his long treatises on treason in the State Department will remain a rich mine of source material upon which critics can draw for years to come...
...He never used dates, without which it is impossible to arrive at the facts...
...Anyone equipped with proper mental tools can immediately see its absurdity, irresponsibility, and downright cruelty from the standpoint of both the national interest and human decency...
...The series can be repeated over and over again, because the public cannot possibly remember what has been disproved and what has not...
...This list may help us find our way...
...But perhaps these 24 categorical statements are enough to give the pattern...
...No machinery for clearing them can compensate for the obloquy already endured...
...Their morale has been dealt a stunning blow by McCarthy...
...Take the case of Haldore Hanson...
...This list may also prove helpful when, in due and melancholy course, McCarthy's successor hits the headlines...
...No society which values its survival can tolerate indefinitely such reckless and irresponsible internal attacks, while under great international pressure...
...If one link is refuted, then the others are by implication irrefutable...
...4. A psychological motive...
...We have not been trained to deal with the McCarthy mechanism...
...How can an innocent person hope to clear himself...
...Liberals believe in Government housing...
...Others sponsor the cause...
...This follows the primitive syllogism again: Communists believe in Government housing...
...He implies that but for him, Secretary Acheson could fill the Department with candidates hot from Union Square...
...d) The well-meaning citizens usually get out fast...
...This is not an argument for Communists in government, but it does give us pause when McCarthy implies that the Red termites have undermined the whole structure...
...Therefore McCarthy is a Communist...
...The State Department is against Chiang...
...A young veteran told the reporter that Hanson "ought to be killed...
...Methods 1. Friends of nationalist China— such as Alfred Kohlberg—are said to have supplied the Senator with much of his ammunition...
...He was never employed by the State Department, according to Mr...
...They must spend most of their time preparing defenses...
...Results To Date 1. McCarthy has not located a single card-carrying Communist in the State Department up to the time The Progressive was going to press —nearly three months after he promised to produce up to 205 of them...
...3. As a result of the furors, the U. S. is split wide open at a time in the cold war when unity is bitterly needed...
...His method blacks out the fact that Russia was our valued war ally from the time Winston Churchill extended his hand to Stalin in June 1941, to the time President Truman cut off Lend-Lease to Russia in the fall of 1945...
...As a matter of fact, our political democracy cannot cope with egoists like Huey Long and Joe McCarthy...
...Ache-son...
...He has dealt another stunning blow to the united front of the democracies...
...3. In attacking individuals McCarthy used old charges, most of them already discredited, as if they were new material, on the principle that newspapers and the public have no memory...
...The average human mind is not geared to deal with this semantic monster...
...Therefore liberals are Communists...
...McCarthy lumped them all together...
...6. Our Allies in the cold war, Britain, France, and the rest, are confused and upset by the charges...
...The pattern is becoming standardized...
...8. A sensible Asiatic policy against the further spread of Communism is slowed down, if not stopped cold...
...In fact, it makes it pretty clear that Communists are not the object of his attack, but a couple of other people...
...This does not make McCarthy a Communist...
...But leading U. S. citizens, including towering Republican tycoons, such as Thomas Lamont and Owen D. Young, were prominent in Russian Relief from 1941 to 1945...
...The McCarthy method implies that any syfflB pathy toward Russia ar any time ft treason...
...Chase has served as a special consultant to the TV A, the Amalgamated Clothing Workers, and Standard Oil of New Jersey, among others...
...8. Historical sequence is blissfully ignored by the Senator...
...He ignores the fact that, to date, no actual damage to the national interest has been proved by the subversive operations of any American, Communist or otherwise, in any Government department...
...Possibly I have overlooked a point or two...
...2. McCarthy identified anti-Chiang policy with Communism, on the primitive syllogism: Communists are against Chiang...
...In the event that Lattimore is found to be really tied up with the Communists (which I doubt) Acheson will probably have to walk the plank...
...The real estate lobby actually used that one on Sen...
...The Senator has, it is said, an overriding ambition to make his mark in the world and is not greatly concerned about the methods used...
...As long as the hearing goes on, the press and nation in effect solemnly accept the syllogism...
...Sometimes, too, Communists deliberately set up organizations designed to snare "innocents...
...These facts count for nothing, as the syllogism becomes: Lattimore is against Chiang...
...A neighbor in his home town of Areola, Va., told a new York Post reporter that Hanson was guilty until proved innocent, and "I don't see how that man is going to prove himself innocent...
...This may be careless, but not by the wildest stretch of the imagination can it make the well-meaning citizen a Communist, or a Communist sympathizer...
...It consists of a series of loosely related untruths too long to be refuted all at once...
...But if for some reason they are unaware of what has happened, their names may be used by the new control indefinitely...
...7. The Kremlin, we can rest assured, is delighted with the whole thing...
...2. A special political motive, in that a group of Republicans want to oust Secretary of State Acheson as responsible for the downfall of Chiang in China...
...Joseph McCarthy's drive on the State Department, I feel a strong need for a summary to bring the angles together...
...more than possibly, other points will turn up later...
...4. Hitler invented the "Big Lie," but McCarthy has invented what Richard Rovere has called the "Multiple Untruth," perhaps an even more devastating weapon in the hands of a demagogue...
...5. McCarthy failed to distinguish between "loyalty" and "security...
...The punctures are thus self-sealing...
...But many of us, while there is nothing the matter with our minds, lack the tools...
...The neighbor was circulating a petition to run Hanson out of town...
Vol. 14 • June 1950 • No. 6
