A Thinking Reed

The specter of Joe McCarthy

Written by

Lee M.

in

While the Oscars are still a relatively fresh topic, here’s a question: Why is it that for so many people Joe McCarthy remains the symbol of the suppression of civil liberties in America when there have been far worse offenders in U.S. history? I even heard one of the announcers during the Oscar pre-show refer to Good Night, and Good Luck as a story about a “struggle against tyranny”!

Now, I am by no means defending Tailgunner Joe, but when compared to the actions of, say, the Wilson or Roosevelt administrations, he comes off as a piker. (And, for what it’s worth, there actually were at least some Soviet spies who’d infiltrated the U.S. government.)

So, why the continued anti-McCarthy hysteria?

Comments

10 responses to “The specter of Joe McCarthy”

  1. jack perry

    Hysteria isn’t rational. Its origins aren’t rational. Self-congratulation when attacking windmills is easier and more rewarding than attacking real giants, and in Hollywood’s insular world, there’s a lot of self-congratulation, and very little rational thought.

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  2. Thomas Adams

    I think our fixation with Joe McCarthy arises not from his suppression of civil liberties, but from the climate of fear that he created. McCarthy went after particular individuals in a very personal and aggressive manner, and for a time, he looked like an unstoppable demagogue. So the name McCarthy has come to mean “tyranny through intimidation.” By contrast, FDR’s internment of the Japanese during WWII was carried out by a faceless bureaucracy against an easily-identified ethnic group. So it didn’t require the hysteria and fear-mongering of McCarthy’s crusade, although it caused far more harm in the long run.

    While I haven’t seen “Good Night and Good Luck”, I think it’s commendable that this movie is trying to remind us that fear can cost us our liberty. That’s a message that deserves to be heard at the moment. Clooney made the movie, not to heap more criticism on old Joe, but to teach the nation a valuable civics lesson. So I don’t think he (or Hollywood for that matter) are being either hysterical or self-congratulatory. They’re simply using their platform to promote the greater good, which is a refreshing change. It’s easy to beat-up on Hollywood, but we should commend them when they make a quality movie that addresses weighty issues. By the way, Jack, what about Hollywood is irrational? If anything, movie making is too rational these days, since it’s driven completely by the bottom line and every movie is focus-grouped to the max. I would welcome more creativity and more irrationality. And what “real giants” do you want them to attack, if McCarthyism is not acceptable to you? This year’s Best Picture nominees addressed terrorism, racism, homosexuality, and journalism. Sounds to me like they’re willing to deal with real issues.

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  3. Lee

    Actually, to partly answer my own question, I wonder if Hollywood in particular still bears a particularly strong grudge against McCarthy b/c HUAC specifically targeted people in Hollywood.

    While I haven’t seen GN&GL either, I still think it would be interesting to see a movie with similar themes without such an obvious villain.

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  4. Kevin Jones

    Having seen the movie, I think it touches upon the clash between a polished and professional media and a rough-around-the-edges populist, prone to the hectoring and bluster of certain blue-collar ethnic types. Mark Stricherz’s essay “Who Killed Archie Bunker?” is quite relevant. McCarthy was incredibly popular among the working class even after his fall from power.

    I thought Clooney made the movie more ambiguous than he thought it was. He inserts a cigarette commercial which flatters Murrow’s audience for their sophistication and intelligence, which sophisticated moderns can see right through. But then that just raises the question: wasn’t Murrow’s sophistication itself as much a pose as McCarthy’s? For an encomium to Murrow, it’s quite the flaw.

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  5. Eric Lee

    Lee, my short answer to your question about the continued anti-McCarthy stuff is because there are some nutjob conservatives on the right-wing who are trying to revive him as somebody who was a ‘good guy.’ Specifically: Ann Coulter. I still read David Neiwert’s excellent Orcinus blog to know that she is still attempting this. And if Neiwert is right about Coulter, Limbaugh, et. al. just being ‘transmitters’ of the super extreme kinds of fascism on the fringes to the mainstream, then it could be argued that there are a lot of people who think he was ‘a-okay.’

    Peace,

    Eric

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  6. Gaius

    Because he specifically went after Communists who had been so welcome and widely tolerated during the New Deal and WW2, the war to save Churchill and Stalin.

    And because there really were lots of Communists who were penalized or deprived of position or influence by the post war Red Scare of which he was a small part, and which was used to enlist the support of the masses for the Cold War.

    And because a lot of liberals, and even some conservatives, were not much interested in a Cold War, and even less interested in the climate of hysteria created to support it.

    Recall that Bill Buckley founded the National Revue in large part to give voice to a new and stridently pro-Cold War variant of post WW2 conservatism around this time.

    WFB, family friend of the Senator (who was also a family friend of the Kennedys), famously wrote at this time a book called “McCarthy and His Enemies” in defense of McCarthy and of the crankup of the national security apparatus he helped to provoke.

    Loyalty oaths, the Attorney General’s list of subversive organizations, and all that.

    And because the very talented Communist playwright, Arthur Miller, wrote “The Crucible.”

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  7. Gaius

    PS. So maybe what we need is a film to remind us not so much how hysteria can lead to loss of domestic liberty as how hysteria was used to enlist America in support of the MIC and panicky capitalist engineered 50 year long Cold War, with all its little hot wars and huge expense in blood and treasure.

    That was the real tragedy of the Red Scare. Compared to the damage that was the Cold War, the harm to domestic liberties involved in the Red Scare were slight, almost trivial.

    Just as today with the “war on terror,” the bogus Anthrax scare, color-coded threat levels, and the repeated uses of the argument from the bomb, we need to ask which is worse, the domestic infringements on liberty, checks and balances, and the like, or the cold and hot overseas killing and dying, along with the huge waste of treasure for the MIC?

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  8. Joshie

    Actually Gaius the term “Red Scare” is usually reserved for the anti-anarchist and anti-communist (and anti-immigrant for that matter) hysteria from 1918-1921following the First World war.

    Reply
  9. Lee

    If Wikipedia is to be believed – and I’m not saying it is, just throwing it out there – the term “Red Scare” can be used to refer both to the post-WWI and McCarthy eras:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Scare

    Reply
  10. Joshie

    That’s why I said “usually”. It was actually a running joke in a history class of mine in HS, we would frequently refer to the McCarthy era as the Red Scare and our teacher would correct us. It got to ther point where he finally told us to just forget that the Red Scare ever happened.

    But the larger issue is that I was, again, trying to be an ass, so I can get mentioned on more blogs.

    http://notbillable.blogspot.com/2006/03/joshie-mystery-man-genius.html

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