McCarthy Unmasked
Pollak, Roger
McCarthy Unmasked How The Progressive helped ground Tailgunner Joe BY ROGER POLLAK Wisconsin's Senator Robert M. LaFollette Jr. (son of Fighting Bob) was profoundly discouraged in 1946. At the...
...The CIO, which still had pro-communist and pro-Soviet elements in its leadership, attacked LaFollette and threw its weight behind a young Wisconsin judge named Joseph R. McCarthy...
...He was absolutely unafraid of him, and would tell McCarthy to his face he thought he was 'a goddamned liar.'" Building on the evidence in The McCarthy Record, Rubin and McMillin spent all their free time for months researching and writing The Progressive's special issue...
...News stories appeared everywhere, sometimes on the front page, and were followed up by editorials, features, and, in many cases, column treatment," Rubin wrote...
...It was really tremendously exciting," recalls Mary Sheridan...
...But not all the letters were laudatory...
...And although we did not know what the public reaction would be, we invested quite a bit of our very slim resources in extra copies," she recalls...
...In the May 1954 issue, Rubin wrote, "There are several score from admirers of McCarthy who denounce us in language that is sometimes picturesque but more often profane or obscene...
...The Progressive's financial commitment was so large that Rubin tried to take out a life insurance policy on McCarthy...
...One Chicago distributor wrote that sales of the issue "have been greater than anything I have seen in my thirty years of handling retail publications...
...During his campaign for reelection to the Senate that year, LaFollette's strident anti-Soviet rhetoric alienated many of his labor supporters...
...We'd known him from way back and we weren't afraid of him," remembers Gordon Sinykin, then The Progressive's business manager...
...It is a dangerous error, we are convinced, for the forces of decency in America to fail to regard the man and his 'ism' with deep seriousness...
...As it turned out, the McCarthy issue did extremely well—so well, in fact, that it made 1954 the only profitable year in the The Progressive's history...
...I congratulate you on this excellent and timely contribution to the cause of civil liberties and human decency," wrote Walter Reuther, president of the United Auto Workers...
...Government...
...The Editor has received more than a dozen letters urging him to 'go back to Jerusalem where you came from,' while a few contented themselves with writing the word 'Jew' on a sheet of toilet tissue...
...Four years later, the freshman Senator from Wisconsin began his infamous anticommunist crusade...
...William F. Buckley Jr., then the foremost champion of McCarthy, complained, "That it should be greeted, as it has in so many quarters, as a responsible document is evidence of the intellectual and moral deterioration of our intelligentsia and our press...
...People were scared of McCarthy and up until then nobody had really been writing against him," says Sidney Lens, Senior Editor of The Progressive...
...James A. Wechsler, editor of the New York Post and himself a McCarthy target, called The Progressive's special issue "a memorable piece of journalism and an invaluable service to democracy...
...The evidence is overwhelming that McCarthyism cannot long survive where the people are given the truth about the character of his 'crusade.' " The response to The Progressive's special McCarthy issue broke every record in the magazine's history...
...The Progressive sent him an advance copy of the issue by registered mail with a note that read, "We shall be glad to carry any comment you make in our very next issue...
...In April 1954, at the height of McCarthyism, The Progressive published a ninety-two-page issue exposing the fraudulent charges of Tailgunner Joe...
...Letters—an average of 1,000 a daypoured into The Progressive's office, swamping the small staff...
...McCarthy Unmasked How The Progressive helped ground Tailgunner Joe BY ROGER POLLAK Wisconsin's Senator Robert M. LaFollette Jr...
...Five years later we were still calling it our finest hour, and I suppose it was...
...But no reply was ever received and McCarthy never made any effort to refute the evidence presented...
...In minute and painstaking detail, the magazine showed that McCarthy's power was based on a series of lies and smears, and proved that his extended witchhunt had not uncovered a single new case of communist infiltration of the U.S...
...McCarthy himself remained silent about the whole affair...
...Their position, we suspect, will be based on their genuine conviction that we are aiding and abetting him by 'giving him more publicity' and 'building him up by taking him so seriously.' "We can respect and sympathize with this point of view because we held it once ourselves...
...McMillin had tangled a lot with McCarthy...
...At the dawn of the Cold War, he deeply feared the Soviet Union but found little public support for his views...
...The Progressive's expose prompted a reappraisal of Joseph R. McCarthy and his witchhunt...
...CIO backing gave McCarthy the strength he needed to take the primary and go on to win the general election...
...In the first three weeks, almost 140,000 copies were sold (at a time when the regular circulation was less than 30,000), and a second printing of 60,000 was commissioned...
...In the first four weeks following publication, 5,000 new readers subscribed...
...This was the first important piece in any major publication...
...Many Americans, particularly those in labor's ranks, still respected this nation's World War II ally...
...We abandoned it, however, when the facts proved us wrong...
...We were enormously concerned that every fact be double-checked, so that there would be no chance of libel," Mary Sheridan says...
...His power today comes in great measure from our failure to fight back earlier...
...In publishing this special issue of The Progressive on McCarthy's record," Editor Morris Rubin wrote in the introduction, "we are mindful of the fact that we shall be criticized by sincere and thoughtful Americans who share our repugnance for McCarthy...
...He would follow McCarthy when he was speaking in the state, and badger the hell out of him...
...Morris Rubin and his friend Miles McMillin, an editor of the Madison Capital Times, had followed McCarthy's career for many years and had organized and researched The McCarthy Record, an earlier expose produced in an unsuccessful attempt to defeat McCarthy in his 1952 reelection bid...
...Roger Pollak is an editorial intern at The Progressive...
...We were so flooded with orders that our printer couldn't keep up," relates Mary Sheridan, then Associate Editor of the magazine and currently Book Editor...
...Most of the coverage was supportive, but the rightwing media lashed out at The Progressive...
...It was a colossal amount of work with such a small staff...
...that way, if the Senator died before publication, the magazine could recoup some of its losses...
...The national press picked up the story and gave it extensive coverage...
Vol. 48 • July 1984 • No. 7
