[On June 9th, 1954 laywer
Joseph Welch famously asked Senator Joseph McCarthy, “Have
you no sense of decency?” So this week I’ve AmericanStudied a handful of
contexts for McCarthyism, leading up to a weekend post on that moment and
historical turning points!]
On nuance,
clarity, and historical turning points.
At the start of
1954, Senator McCarthy was still riding high, seemingly dictating not only
Congressional hearings but the Eisenhower
administration, Hollywood blacklists, and the pulse of national
conversations about Communism, dissidents, and even the
concept of patriotism itself. But roughly half a year later, McCarthy’s
polling numbers were dropping precipitously (from 50% national approval in
January to 34% in June), a measure was introduced into the Senate in late July to
censure
him for “abuse of a Senate committee,” and the era of McCarthyism had begun
to decline. By December the Senate would vote overwhelmingly to censure
McCarthy, his hearings and public statements stopped or received no media
attention, and he became, according to biographer
Fred Cook, “a pale ghost of his former self.” While America’s anti-Communist
fervor would of course continue in many ways, over this year McCarthy went from
a vocal leader of that movement to a persona non grata inside and outside of
Washington; three years later, in May
1957, he was dead at the age of 48, from complications associated with
alcoholism.
Any historian or
AmericanStudier worth his or her salt would have to note that there were various
factors that contributed to this striking 1954 shift. As I wrote on Wednesday, Edward
R. Murrow’s March 1954 See It Now episode,
along with the follow-up April episode featuring an ineffective and indeed
counter-productive rebuttal from McCarthy himself, went a long way toward
changing public opinion and narratives. Also beginning in April, the new American Broadcasting Company
(ABC) televised the full Army-McCarthy
hearings live; this was the first time most Americans had the chance to
witness McCarthy’s tactics live and at length, and in this case they say him
targeting the military and impugning that institution’s integrity and
patriotism, not exactly a popular position to take. Yet those lengthy live broadcasts,
which aired from April 22nd through June 17th, also
featured the very singular
June 9th moment that was the origin point for this week’s
series: McCarthy arguing at length that one of Army lawyer Joseph Welch’s
employees was himself a Communist sympathizer if not an outright traitor; and Welch’s famous reply
(about the 1:30 mark of that video).
It’s possible
and even important to recognize the multiple, extended, nuanced factors that
contributed to McCarthy’s decline and downfall and still highlight that June 9th
exchange as a hugely significant historical turning point. Indeed, just as I
believe highlighting inspiring figures and stories (rather than just dark or
painful histories) is a key part of public scholarly writing, so too would I
argue that identifying and narrating such historical turning points should be
part of what public scholars do. For one thing, people (all of us) like and
need stories, and through them we can better and more productively make sense
of history, ideas, and the world. And for another, these singular historical
moments did and do occur, and highlighting them is not a matter of downplaying longer
trends but rather distilling those broader arcs into specific individual
examples that can help us understand and engage with them. When it comes to the
end of Joseph McCarthy and McCarthyism, Joseph Welch’s outraged response and
questions provide precisely such a distilling moment, and served as a vital
turning point for our collective conversations about this dark and divisive
era.
Next series
starts Monday,
Ben
PS. What do you
think?
No comments:
Post a Comment