Myths after McCarthy

...The stifling of dissent, the mindless attacks on rationality, the equation of thought with disloyalty, the arousing of vicious visceral hatreds—these and other aspects of McCarthyism significantly altered the tone of American political dialogue and profoundly affected the position of the intellectual vis-a-vis society...

...And that "Ten Million Americans for McCarthy" Committee...

...The Senator's rise and fall occurred strictly within the boundaries of the American political tradition, not beyond it...

...McCarthyism, wrote Peter Viereck, was only "the same old isolationist, Anglophile, Germanophile, revolt of Populist-radical lunatic-fringers against the eastern, educated, Anglicized elite...

...He even located the link between Ignatius Donnelly and McCarthy in Father Coughlin...

...Seeing in McCarthy a way back to power, conservative leaders used him as long as they could and gave him up reluctantly when he went beyond their boundaries...

...Parsons thought that "the elements of continuity between Western agrarian populism and McCarthy are not by any means purely fortuitous...

...Rogin, a political scientist at the University of California in Berkeley, pretty well finishes off the theory and in the process provides the best and sanest study of McCarthy and his ism yet to appear...

...My interest is in that social theory, as it explains McCarthy, as it reinterprets the reform tradition, as it refracts American history...

...All this did not go unchallenged...

...but he gained greater support by embracing the specific traumas of conservatives—internal subversion, the New Deal, left-wing social ideas, hatred of intellectuals, the corrupting influences of an urbanized, cosmopolitan society...

...Remember the Texas oilmen...

...Myths after McCarthy by RUSSEL B. NYE " A loosely coherent social theory/' writes Michael Paul Rogin, "substantially concerned with comprehending McCarthyism, emerged in the 1950s...

...He used concern over Korea, foreign policy, and Communism...

...But the idea, like other folklore, refused to die...

...Viereck, the most violent of the revisionists, described Populism as "a mania of xenophobia, Jew-baiting, intellectual-baiting, and thought-controlling lynch-spirit," the same spirit that "underlay Robespierre's Committee of Public Safety...

...McCarthyism became the product of a tradition gone wrong, a mass movement derived from the agrarian-radical tradition of the Populists and Progressives...

...But his qualifications, in the hands of others, quickly disappeared...

...His study shows that ideas which seem to threaten established institutions do not necessarily endanger either constitutional democracy or social stability...

...Therefore, it all suddenly became clear...

...The Hofstadter thesis, added to pluralistic social theory, was simply too attractive...

...At about this time social scientists developed a "pluralistic" theory which emphasized the importance in political life of competing groups...

...With the uneasy feeling that there might be some relation between the Midwestern reform tradition and the Know-Nothingism of the Fifties, Hof-stadter suggested that contemporary reactionary politics might be "only a development of certain tendencies that had existed all along, particularly in the Middle West and South...

...Rarely did one man cast so dark a shadow over American life...

...Somewhere along the way," he wrote, "a large part of the Populist-Progressive tradition has turned sour, become illiberal and ill-tempered," a foreshadowing, he thought, of "some aspects of the pseudo-conservatism of our time...

...Historians like C. Vann Woodward, David Shannon, David Noble, and Norman Pollack, among others, gradually knocked out the main props supporting the theory, justifying Hof-stadter's hope that his suggestion might encourage another look at the reform tradition...

...The Intellectuals and McCarthy is a book of major importance to social scientists, historians, and, in its political implications, to the general public as well...

...The irony of the thesis appealed to a generation touched by Reinhold Nie-buhr, and to accept it helped to exorcise McCarthy from the present by shifting responsibility for him to the past...

...Only when he attacked those institutions which conservatives held dear—the Army, the Senate, the Republican Party—did they withdraw support, Rogin reminds us...

...Third, it is a critique of pluralistic social theory as a method of political analysis and a critique of its view of American democracy...

...Meanwhile Richard Hofstadter's Age of Reform, which won Pulitzer and Bancroft history awards for 1955, introduced a provocative reinterpreta-tion of the American reform tradition...

...Like Adam Smith's invisible economic hand, bargaining, compromise, and reconciliation of diverse values and interests brought, the pluralist reasoned, social stability and group equilibrium to politics...

...As historian Eric Goldman later remarked, the fact that "the political succession in Wisconsin has been La Follette, the La Follette sons, and then, of all people, Joseph R. McCarthy," was too tempting for many to resist (as Goldman did) making the obvious connection...

...In the new view, Populism and Progressivism became "mass" politics, part of a popular (and therefore dangerous) rejection of "the traditional cultural and educational leadership of the enlightened upper and upper-middle classes" which led directly toward McCarthy...

...It still persists, but if anything can give it the final quietus, this book will...

...To quote Jimmy Durante, everybody got into the act—Seymour Lipset, Edward Shils, Talcott Parsons, David Riesman, Daniel Bell, Nathan Glazer, Will Herberg, to name a few...

...Far from being radical—and this is a crucial point—McCarthyism in Rogin's view was powerfully conservative...

...both were Midwestern and Southern in origin, provincial, anti-Eastern, anti-urban, anti-intellectual...

...McCarthy was no methodological maverick...

...he capitalized on party loyalties, Senate tradition, executive-legislative rivalry, popular prejudice, divisions of leadership, the disinclination of politicians to take stands, and the carelessness and irresponsibility of portions of the press...

...In the pluralist view, the ascendancy of Communism and Fascism furnished excellent examples of the ultimate destination of "mass" politics...

...Rogin's study leaves very little room for doubt...

...One could hardly ask for a better theory to explain Joseph McCarthy, for if McCarthyism were a mass movement, then it became understandable in terms of Fascism, Communism, and other monolithic movements...

...both glorified the popular will above the stability of established institutions and settled social values...

...Rogin has performed a valuable public service by cleaning away the historical and sociological rubble around McCarthyism and by giving us a clear, direct view of what it was, where it came from, and why it happened...

...He drew his support from conservative leaders in business, the church, the press, the military, and Congress...

...McCarthyism was not "mass politics," nor was it "a radical movement outside of normal American processes...

...it did not remove the concern...

...Victor Ferkiss found that American Fascism had its roots in Populism, and that it not only had the same ends but even used sorne of the same slogans...

...Although Rogin's book is about McCarthy, he is equally concerned with examining the pluralistic theory of politics, which, he believes, social scientists have used uncritically...

...Once the connection was assumed, it was easy to point out parallels...

...both were irrational, resentful, nativist movements among elements of society which had lost and hoped to regain status...

...In other words, McCarthy rose to power by using exactly the same devices and methods used since the beginning of politics...

...Aware of the dangers of "pushing an insight beyond the boundaries of its valid application," Hofstadter did not press his point unduly and expressed the hope that his book might encourage closer study of reform movements and their political contexts...

...To review this book one must begin in the early Fifties, with the Senator from Wisconsin at the height of his power...

...It was a simple, efficient way of explaining McCarthyism and a useful classroom exercise in "pluralistic" versus "mass" politics...

...Every thoughtful American wanted to understand McCarthy, in the hope that in understanding lay protection if he happened again...

...Rogin's exhaustive county-by-county analysis of a half-century of voting records "fails to uncover significant agrarian radical roots in McCarthyism," nor any evidence of "continuity from Populism to reaction...

...The antidote lay in the shared power and constant adjustment of a pluralistic political society...

...Hofstadter, in his introduction to The Progressive Movement in 1963, did not mention it...

...It was time somebody said what Rogin says, and he says it so convincingly that it should not need saying again...

...Second, it is a critique of the assumption that McCarthyism was "mass" politics in action...

...McCarthy's fall removed the immediate threat...

...The villain was "mass" politics, monolithic, irrational, emotional, moralistic, incapable of adjustment or compromise...

...Shils, for example, who discovered Populistic elements in Fascism, Bolshevism, and Stalinism, simply drew one straight line from Ben Tillman to Huey Long and Gene Talmage, and another from Bryan to La Follette to Gerald L. K. Smith and McCarthy...

...Charged with isolationism, anti-intel-lectualism, anti-Semitism, racism, paranoia, and anti-elitism, everybody from Sockless Jerry Simpson to La Follette came under scrutiny and was found wanting...

...He concludes his study, after noting how this social theory has been used to interpret McCarthyism, by suggesting that fear of radicalism has encouraged pluralists to separate the political analysis of popular movements from the specific issues which underlie them...

...It is, first, a reconsideration of the agrarian-Populist-Progressive tradition and a critique of attempts to link the tradition with McCarthyism...

...Both were revolts of the dispossessed against enlightened leadership...

...To reject mass politics by ignoring the issues beneath it leads, he believes, to a reliance on the status quo that is unhealthy in a democratic society...