Four Great Myths of the McCarthy Era

Sixty years ago today, the ABC and
DuMont television networks began their live broadcasts of the
Army-McCarthy
hearings, a Senate soap opera that marked the final stage of
the Wisconsin Republican Joseph McCarthy’s period of power. The
hearings are most famous today for what happened when the senator
tried to make hay of the fact that Army attorney Joseph Welch’s law
firm employed a man who had once been a member of an organization
with links to the Communist Party. The
guilt-by-loose-chain-of-association charge was a showcase for
McCarthy’s sleazy style, allowing Welch to let loose a line that is
constantly quoted to this day: “Have you no sense of decency, sir,
at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?”

The hearings would go on for another week, and McCarthy would
remain in office until his death three years later. But it was that
exchange—which wrapped up with McCarthy blustering, Welch cutting
him off, and the gallery bursting into applause—that effectively
ended the senator’s career.

Today McCarthy has come to symbolize the entire postwar Red
Scare, allowing the hearings to serve as a tidy end to a tidy story
about a demagogue who attained outsized influence and then was cut
down to size. But the crusade against Communist subversion that
marked the late 1940s and the ’50s began before McCarthy seized the
issue; and if his downfall was a sign that those fears were fading,
it
did not bring them to an end. The biggest myth of the McCarthy
era is that it was a McCarthy era, rather than an episode
in which McCarthy was merely one of the most noisy and
irresponsible figures.

There are other myths of the period too. The
great radical myth of the Red Scare is that it was nothing
but a scare—that the Americans accused of being Russian
agents were virtually all innocent. (It’s hard to maintain that
position now that the Venona files have
been released and some of the left’s biggest causes
célèbres of the era have come crumbling down—at this point
even Julius Rosenberg’s children have
acknowledged that he was a spy—but some folks still hold onto the dream.) The great
conservative myth of the period, meanwhile, is that the espionage
justified the witch-hunts. People like Ann Coulter and M. Stanton
Evans have taken to declaring that McCarthy was right without
acknowledging that the bulk of his accusations were
false, and that this was true of many other red-hunters too.
And then there’s the great liberal myth of the period: the idea
that the libs of the day managed to plot a course between the
Soviet apologists and the paranoid hysterics, striking a delicate
balance between protecting the country’s liberties and protecting
its security. In fact, the Red Scare, like the Cold War itself, had
liberal fingerprints all over it.

Some of those fingerprints were left before the Red Scare
actually began, as Democrats eager to ferret out fascist
subversives in the ’30s and early ’40s lent their support to tools
that would later be turned against the left. The Smith Act, which made
it illegal to advocate the overthrow of the U.S. government, was a
potent weapon during the Red Scare. But it was passed with liberal
backing in 1940 and then used against alleged fascists, most
infamously in the great sedition
trial of 1944. Similarly, when Congress rechartered the House
Committee on Un-American Activities in 1938, many liberals voted
with the ayes because they wanted to investigate the right.

When the Cold War got underway and the threat of
communism replaced the threat of fascism, liberals often found
themselves in the red-hunters’ crosshairs. But liberals also went
on the hunt themselves. “It was the Truman administration,” Richard
Freeland notes in
The Truman Doctrine & the Origins of McCarthyism,
“that developed the association of dissent with disloyalty and
communism, which became a central element of McCarthyism. It was
the Truman administration that adopted the peacetime loyalty
program, which provided a model for state and local governments and
a wide variety of private institutions. It was the Truman
administration, in the criteria for loyalty used in its loyalty
program, that legitimized the concept of guilt by association.” To
his credit, Truman vetoed the McCarran
Act of 1950, which went well beyond chasing spies to limit
Communists’ civil liberties. (Congress overrode the veto and the
bill became law anyway, though the courts eventually struck down
many of its provisions.) But the Democrats who broke with Truman
and voted for the measure included both Lyndon
Johnson and John F.
Kennedy. Speaking of Kennedy: His brother Bobby, later a
liberal heartthrob, was a counsel for the McCarthy committee, and
McCarthy was godfather to Bobby’s first child.

It may be tempting to put all the madness of the early Cold War
on the shoulders of one Wisconsin senator, and then to cheer as
Joseph Welch ritually exorcised him on the floor of the Senate and
the TV screens of America. The truth, alas, is much messier and
uglier than that. When it comes to the Red Scare, there’s plenty of
shame to go around.