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ENGLISH II HONORS HOMEEnglish II
Honors
A Survey of American Fiction and Nonfiction
Mrs.Crawford
The
Crucible and the McCarthy Era
The late Joseph R. McCarthy, a
United States Senater from Wisconsin, was in many ways the most gifted demagogue
ever bred on these shores. No bolder seditionist ever moved among us--nor any
politician with a surer, swifter access to the dark places of the American mind.
The major phase of McCanhy's career was mercifully short. It began in 1950,
three years after he had taken his seat in the Senate, where he had seemed a dim
and inconsiderable figure. It ended in 1954, when the Senate passed a resolution
of censure against him. That was three years before his death at the age of
forty-eight. Both his rise and his fall were accomplished with breath-taking
speed. At the start of 1950, he was a jackstraw in Washington. Then he uncovered
Communism--almost inadvertantly. By
the spring of the year, he was a towering figure, and from then on, except for a
few brief weeks early in that summer, no man was closer than he to the center of
American consciousness or more central to the world's consciousness of America.
McCarthy had five years on stage,
and he was at stage center almost all of that time. He walked, then, with a
heavy tread over large parts of the Constitution of the United States, and he
cloaked his own gross figure in the sovereignty it asserts and the powers it
distributes. He usurped executive and judicial authority whenever the fancy
struck him. It struck him often. He held two Presidents captive--or as nearly
captive as any Presidents of the United States have ever been held; in their
conduct of the nation's affairs, Harry S Truman and Dwight D. Eisenhower, from
early 1950 through late 1954, could never act without weighing the effect of
their plans upon McCarthy and the forces he led, and in consequence there were
times when, because of this man, they could not act at all. He had enormous
impact on American foreign policy at a time when that policy bore heavily on the
course of world history, and American diplomacy might bear a different aspect
today if McCarthy had never lived. In the Senate, his headquarters and his
hiding place, he assumed the functions of the Committee of the Whole; he lived
in thoroughgoing contempt of the Congress of which he was a member, of the rules
it had made for itself, and--whenever they ran contrary to his purposes--of the
laws it had enacted for the general welfare.
At the start of 1950, McCarthy
was an empty vessel to the general public outside Wisconsin. There he was known
as a cheap politician of vulgar, Samboyant ways and a casual approach to the
public interest. It is unlikely that one in a hundred Americans knew of his
existence. He was a voice making no sound in the wilderness. Then, on February
9, 1950, he made a speech in Wheeling, West Virginia, in the course of which he
said that the Department of State was full of Communists and that he and the
Secretary of State knew their names. Later there was some dispute (there was
always dispute whenever he said anything) as to whether he had stated that there
were 205, 81, 57, or "a lot" of Communists, but the number was of
slight importance alongside what he insisted was the fact that Communists
"known to the Secretary of State" were "still working and making
policy."
A Senate committee was
immediately appointed to look into his startling assertions. It was the first of
five investigations, held by four different committees, to be concerned
exclusively with the problem of whether Senator McCarthy was telling the t-ruth,
about others or, mutatis mutandis,
others were telling the truth about Senator McCarthy. In the spring of 1950,
only the first question was considered. Through March and April and May, when
Communist power in the Far East was being mobilized for the war in Korea, life
in Washington, political life in the United States, seemed largely a matter of
determining whether American diplomacy was in the hands of traitors. Little of
importance was learned except that McCarthy had little of importance to say. He
had been talking through his hat; if there were Communists in the State
Department, he did not know who they were. Nevertheless, he had cued himself in.
The lights played over him. Eyes were upon him. The show was his. Within a
matter of weeks, his name was known and heard everywhere, and his heavy,
menacing countenance was familiar to newspaper readers, to moviegoers, to
television viewers everywhere. Henceforth it would be hard to find anyone who
was unaware of him. And he became, quickly, an eponym. Barely a month after
Wheeling, "McCarthyism" was coined by Herbert Block, a cartoonist in
the Washington Post. The word was an oath at first--a synonym for the
hatefulness of baseless defamation, or mudslinging. (In the Herblock cartoon,
"McCarthyism" was crudely lettered on a barrd of mud, which teetered
on a tower of ten buckets of the stuff.) Later it became, for some, an
affirmation.
Today “McCarthyism” is
evocative of an almost undifferetiated evil to a large number of Americans and
of a positive good to a somewhat smaller number. To the one, whatever is
illiberal, repressive, reactionary, obscurantist, anti-intellectual,
totalitarian, or merely swinish will for some time to come be McCarthyism, while
to the other it means nothing more or less than a militant patriotism.
A list of Internet sites for the
writers blacklisted by McCarthy are below:
http://lib.berkeley.edu/MRC/blacklist.html
http://lib.berkeley.edu/MRC/blacklist.html