[On June 9th, 1954 laywer
Joseph Welch famously asked Senator Joseph McCarthy, “Have
you no sense of decency?” So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of
contexts for McCarthyism, leading up to a weekend post on that moment and
historical turning points!]
On three telling
falsehoods that foreshadowed McCarthy’s nasty public role.
1)
The Judge’s Age: In 1939, when McCarthy was only
30 years old and a practicing lawyer, he ran for the
position of Wisconsin’s 10th District circuit judge. His
opponent, the incumbent Edgar V. Werner, had been a judge for 24 years, and was
known as an ineffective and at times incompetent figure. Yet rather than simply
rely on such details, McCarthy
blatantly lied, claiming that the 66 year old Werner was 73 in order to
play up his elderly status. McCarthy won the election, not only becoming the
youngest circuit judge in Wisconsin history and taking a next step toward his 1946
successful campaign for the Senate, but also perhaps learning the value of
overtly and shamelessly lying about an opponent’s identity. He would put that lesson
to use once again in the 1946 Republican
primary campaign, using multiple lies about incumbent
Robert La Folette Jr. to help him to victory.
2)
Wartime Lies: In between his judicial and Senate
victories, McCarthy served in Marines during WWII. As a judge he was exempt
from military service, so his volunteering to serve was certainly an honorable
action. But when it came to how he later represented that military service,
McCarthy behaved with far less honor. He apparently took part in twelve aerial
combat missions with a dive bomber squadron, but when he applied for a
Distinguished Flying Cross and other awards, exaggerated
that number to thirty-two missions. He also repeatedly highlighted a commendation
letter supposedly signed by both his commanding officer and Admiral Chester
Nimitz, but the commander subsequently noted that McCarthy had written the
letter himself and forged the commander’s signature; Nimitz did sign it but without
any knowledge of those falsehoods. These lies to falsely inflate his own
importance could be paralleled to his fictitious attacks on others, as the two
types would work together to make McCarthy into an impressive critic of the
patriotism of his fellow Americans.
3)
The Wheeling Speech: McCarthy won that 1946
Senate campaign, and it was four years later that he truly began to make the
case that the U.S. government was overrun with communists and other dissidents.
He did so during a February 9th,
1950 Lincoln Day speech to the Wheeling, West Virginia Republican Women’s
Club. The speech was not recorded, so some details will always remain
ambiguous, but multiple witnesses reported that McCarthy argued, “The State
Department is infested with communists. I have here in my hand a list of 205—a
list of names that were made known to the Secretary of State as being members
of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping
policy in the State Department.” Over the next eleven days he would cite two completely
different numbers of names on this list—57 in a February 11th
telegram to President Truman, and 81 in a February 20th
speech on the Senate floor. These shifts don’t simply reflect one more
distant relation between McCarthy and basic facts—they had profound implications
for each and every potential official and employee named, Americans whose lives
and careers could be destroyed by being on this list. It is unfortunately no
surprise that McCarthyism was launched with such a blatant disregard for facts
and truth.
Next context
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think?
No comments:
Post a Comment