Hindsight on McCarthyism

...In Seeds of Repression Theoharis shows how Attorneys General Tom Clark and J. Howard McGrath contributed to the great fear of Communism, how the Justice Department often placed hunting subversion before protection of civil liberties, and how the President himself contributed to these developments...

...It is to Theoharis's credit that he has built upon this useful notion a more sophisticated interpretation: the Truman Administration, by its actions and rhetoric, planted some of the "seeds of repression," thus helping to prepare the soil for McCarthyism...

...Until recently, there were two leading, potentially complementary, ways of explaining the rise of McCarthyism in the 1950s—in terms of innocence or of status politics...

...the disproportionate role of Catholics in supporting McCarthy and the "ism" he represented...

...The first theory explained the triumph of McCarthyism as the troubled response of innocence: the American people relied upon their nation's omnipotence, expected American victories over Communism, and therefore were unprepared for the "loss" of China or stalemate in Korea...

...the response of local elites to McCarthyism...

...Put simply, McCarthyism existed in fact before it was so labeled, but with the appearance of the Senator the earlier crusades swelled in power and the earlier efforts by the GOP to condemn the Roosevelt and Truman administrations grew in virulence and strength...

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...This theory was criticized in an essay by Nelson Polsby (1960) for its looseness and its discrepancies from the available survey data, and then by Michael Rogin in McCarthy and the Intellectuals (1967) for, among other defects, its conservative assumptions and its dubious use of categories...

...Even then it took the joint efforts of a small anti-McCarthy lobby (the National Committee for an Effective Congress) and of Republican Senators like Ralph Flanders of Vermont, who brought the charges, and Arthur Wat-kins of Utah, who chaired the investigating committee, to bring McCarthy to public condemnation in the very "club" (the Senate) whose rights and privileges he had long abused...

...Bold efforts by Democratic Senators William Benton of Connecticut and Herbert Lehman of New York to restrain McCarthy were sidetracked and thwarted—by GOP leaders, by the many Republican legislators who backed McCarthy, by conservative Southern Democrats who did not wish to defend the Truman Administration, and by others who were also afraid of (and exaggerated) the Senator's political power...

...Others will undoubtedly soften some of their harsh analyses and move on to investigate neglected problems: local assaults upon dissent in the 1940s...

...A national problem was treated as a Senate problem...

...General Eisenhower, reluctantly embracing the Senator in the 1952 campaign, tried thereafter to remain aloof...

...Army, including a hapless general...

...Moreover, the Administration had also promised absolute security at home, implied that it could be achieved by an act of will, and therefore opened the way for attacks upon its will or integrity when spies were discovered...

...A group of liberal social scientists (including Richard Hofstadter, Daniel Bell, and Seymour M. Lipset) investigating these questions in the mid-fifties sought in the New American Right (1955) to explain McCarthy's support largely in terms of status politics: groups uneasy about their Americanism or their place in the society sought to resolve their anxieties and to affirm their patriotism and status by lashing out at established leaders—for example, Dean Acheson, WASP of Groton, Yale, and Harvard —and therefore supported McCarthy...

...By exaggerating the danger of Communism at home and by unleashing an assault upon traditional liberties, the Truman Administration encouraged even greater demands for security and less concern about civil liberties...

...Among the groups that they found supporting McCarthy, in what Hofstadter called the "pseudo-conservative revolt," were the new rich, Texans, Irish, Germans, the middle class, Catholics, mid westerners, "cankered intellectuals," and Protestant "shabby genteel...

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...the support of McCarthy by GOP leaders (particularly mid western politicians and businessmen) ; the troubled liberal press which finally removed the Senator from the front pages in 1954 when he was still "news...

...In the next four years, McCarthy brazenly attacked the Truman and Eisenhower Administrations, accused such patriotic anti-Communists as General George C. Marshall and Secretary of State Dean Acheson of disloyalty, scrapped with his fellow Senators, bullied legislators and government bureaucrats, stymied Congressional investigating committees, and assailed the U.S...

...It viewed McCarthyism wrongly as a dangerous mass politics threatening established authority, when it was primarily a movement supported by Republicans and often used by Republicans...

...It failed also to account for two groups that were disproportionately pro-McCarthy (farmers and New Engenders) and indicated also some groups as McCarthyite that were not...

...Hindsight on McCarthyism by BARTON J. BERNSTEIN Twenty-one years ago, an obscure junior Senator from Wisconsin told a women's club in Wheeling, West Virginia, that he had the names of 205 Communist Party members in the State Department...

...In summary, President Truman and his associates weakened civil liberties before McCarthy, and their later efforts were inadequate to roll back the tide of McCarthyism...

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...McCarthy became the champion of many other Americans who believed he would save their nation from Communism and treason...

...Moreover, if McCarthyism is defined in a broad way—as the red-baiting of liberal thought and actions—it can be found often on the state and local level as a serious problem well before McCarthy's dramatic rise...

...Not until McCarthy fought the Army—after the Eisenhower Administration had tried to make peace with the Senator—and revealed himself as a bully in the televised hearings, did his support begin to decline...

...Rogin, concentrating on the "new conservative" thought ("pluralism") of the New American Right, with its distrust of the masses and popular democracy, its respect for elites and established authority, its appreciation of order and stability, and its faulty attempt to link Populism to McCarthyism, has shown the Structural defects of this social theory...

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...Because they did not understand the limits of American power, they had to search for other explanations for "failure" and blamed the Administration for bungling...

...Rogin and Theoharis have contributed significantly to our understanding of McCarthyism and to the failures of postwar liberalism...

...Prentice-Hall...

...And, finally, scholars will have to stress the readiness of some "liberals" to condemn the "left...

...On the Senate floor two weeks later he presented about eighty-one cases, breathlessly offering as new information tired charges made by other Republicans in the past, rejected by Congressional investigations, and successfully refuted by the Administration...

...To establish the anti-Communist virtue of the Administration, the President permitted or encouraged the firing of officials who had or might come under McCarthy's guns...

...So fearsome was McCarthy that only one Senator, J. William Fulbright, voted against the appropriation for his investigating committee one year...

...What of the support for McCarthy and McCarthyism...

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...and the responses of powerful eastern corporate leaders to that threat...

...The Administration had actually encouraged innocence and the belief in omnipotence: it promised that American will and resources could defeat Communism and block revolutions...

...A reckless crusader, he terrorized segments of the government, provoked bitter responses from many liberals who feared for the safety of the republic, gave his name (McCarthyism) to one of the uglier periods in American history, and prompted many analyses of his motives and aims, as well as of the sources and reasons for the support he received...

...I won't get into the gutter with him," he confided...

...What remains to be explained is McCarthy ism...

...But we still should be surprised that McCarthy, who began by crusading against the Democrats, could flourish so long even when attacking the Eisenhower Administration...

...Focusing primarily on McCarthy's relations with the Senate, Griffith stresses familiar points: that the Senator was accepted by such a staunch conservative as Robert Taft...

...In 1951, for example, under assault from the McCarthyites, the Administration redefined the standards of loyalty and then finally dismissed John Stuart Service, who had been cleared earlier after McCarthy's attack on him as one of the "81...

...Griffith views it not as a "passing aberration" but as "a natural expression of America's political culture and a logical though extreme product of the political machinery"— of popular fears of radicalism, of the postwar antagonism between Russia and America, and of earlier charges of Communism in government...

...Except for the courage and will of a handful of Senators, the "club," which had also tolerated the racist Theodore Bilbo of Mississippi and his ilk, would probably have continued to protect McCarthy as a member...

...McCarthy bragged of the so-called "Loyal American Underground," of FBI agents, agency officials, and other bureaucrats and investigators, who provided him with security-classified materials and thereby assisted him in promoting distrust and suspicion of two Administations...

...And in the Eisenhower years most Senate Democrats, under Majority Leader Lyndon B. Johnson, treated McCarthy, Griffith notes, as a Republican—not a national or Senate —problem...

...University of Kentucky Press...

...Quadrangle Books...

...it failed to explain, for example, why some, rather than all, Catholics supported McCarthy...

...In retrospect, McCarthy's condemnation may seem inevitable, but it was not, Griffith rightly concludes...

...Truman periodically condemned McCarthy, though the President's lack of political skill, Griffith suggests, contributed to the Senator's early success: the President, perhaps by acting promptly after the Wheeling speech, might have been able to squelch the man who made "Communism in Government" his own crusade...

...McCarthy was chastized, Griffith stresses, not for his mendacity, nor for his ruthless, unprincipled onslaught on civil liberties, but on the narrow grounds of improper conduct in the Senate...

...Hence, according to this theory, the politics of the 1930s, economic-oriented and focused on specific programs and issues, had given way to an irrational, excessively moralistic politics—without clear programs and without respect for established authority or constitutional order...

...Even some of the six other Republican signatories of Margaret Chase Smith's "Declaration of Conscience," a denunciation of McCarthy in 1950, wavered in later years and backed the Senator in some of his vicious ventures...

...This is a dimension of the problem that has never been satisfactorily explained— by Griffith, by the essays reprinted in the fine anthology prepared by Allen J. Matusow, an historian at Rice University, or in the important volume by Athan Theoharis, who teaches history at Marquette University...

...Their actions and sentiments underline the responsibility that American liberalism must bear for the erosion of civil liberties in the Truman and Eisenhower years...

...and that the Senate long lacked the will and the courage to curtail his activities...

...That was the beginning of Joseph R. McCarthy's whirlwind flirtation with fame and deceit...

...Seeds of Repression: Harry S. Truman and the Origins of MgCar-thyism, by Athan Theoharis...

...The theory, according to Polsby, was "much too inclusive to have much explanatory power...

...Joseph R. McCarthy, edited by Allen J. Matusow...

...Snaring some headlines by his charges, he rushed west, reduced the number to fifty-seven "card-carrying Communists," promised to give eager reporters the list of names, but claimed that, to his surprise, the paper was packed in his luggage...

...that McCarthy was an effective weapon in the GOP's assault on the Truman Administration and the New Deal-Fair Deal reform tradition...

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...In a well-writ ten, sharply critical volume, Robert Griffith, an historian at the University of Georgia who leans often on Richard Rovere's clever polemic, Senator Joe McCarthy (1959), has examined the meteoric rise and the speedy collapse of the Senator's career...

...In his brilliant book, part of which Matusow reprints, Rogin contributed to the destruction of a portion of the "pluralist" social theory that dominated the late 1950s and early 1960s and often distorted the analysis of the American experience...

...The Politics of Fear: Joseph R. McCarthy and the Senate, by Robert Griffith...