Exhuming McCarthy

"Let us not assassinate this lad further, Senator. You have done enough. Have you no sense of decency sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?"

--Joseph Welch, special counsel to the US Army, to US Senator Joseph McCarthy

June 9, 1954

These words marked the beginning of the end of McCarthyism, a four-year reign of terror over reason and decency by Joseph McCarthy, a US Senator from Wisconsin. McCarthy reprehensibly and relentlessly exploited post-World War II worries about the spread of communism to fuel his unquenchable political ambition. 

Just as the Cold War was getting under way, McCarthy claimed he had proof that dozens, perhaps even hundreds, of communists had infiltrated the highest levels of the US government — the Truman White House, the State Department and even the Army. He never provided that proof, but he did use his Senate subpoena powers to call hundreds of witnesses to testify before his Senate subcommittee, accusing them of communist party membership, support or ties. Local and national newspapers gave widespread publicity to his unsubstantiated accusations. 

The frenzy climaxed in the spring of 1954, during three months of hearings convened to investigate a dispute between McCarthy and the Army. The Senator accused the Army of harboring communists. The Army fought back, charging that McCarthy and his chief counsel, Roy Cohn, had inappropriately pressured the Army for preferential treatment of G. David Schine, an army private who was a former McCarthy staffer and a close friend of Cohn's. 

The above quote from Welch, simply read on a page or a computer screen without the proper context, does not seem particularly devastating. But his words summoned the patriotic anger that had been building in millions of country-loving Americans throughout McCarthy's ugly rise. The Army-McCarthy hearings occurred just as television was being adopted, and was one of the first major political news events to be broadcast live into our living rooms. When citizens saw McCarthy in all his misanthropic, bullying yet impotent self-glory, they did not like what they saw. In defending a witness from further browbeating, Welch said to McCarthy's face what millions of Americans had been too afraid to say out loud for too long. Six months later the Senate voted by a 2/3 majority to censure McCarthy. Less than two and a half years later he died of complications from alcoholism, at the age of 48.

The real sin of all this, aside from the tragedy of his life, is that the beginning of the end of his "ism" took so long to arrive. Dozens of wrongfully accused citizens had careers and lives ruined by McCarthy's unsubstantiated accusations, and many more lived in fear of the same fate. 

What does this have to do with anything? Well, a member of Congress on Friday called for a return to McCarthy-era witch hunts and loyalty tests. In an interview with MSNBC's Chris Matthews, Michele Bachmann, a freshman congresswoman representing Minnesota's 6th district, said that she was "very concerned that [Obama] may have anti-American views" because "the people that Barack Obama has been associating with are anti-American, by and large." She even called on the news media to investigate other members of Congress "to find out if they are pro-America or anti-America." Here's the video:

The good news is that we appear to have learned a valuable lesson from the dark period in our history that was McCarthyism. In the 48 hours following Bachmann's appearance on Matthews' Hardball, nearly 13,000 patriotic Americans showered Bachmann's re-election opponent, Elwyn Tinklenberg, with $640,000 in campaign contributions. And at this writing more than 52,000 citizens have signed a petition calling on Congress to censure Bachmann. 

This comes on the heels of a series of polls showing that the McCain-Palin campaign's overwhelming focus on misleading and hatemongering attacks against Senator Obama in recent weeks has seriously damaged the ticket's standing with American voters. 

Often I am troubled by the extent of apathy and gullibility that I see in many of my fellow citizens. But episodes like these — Welch's knockout blow against McCarthy, the electorate's repudiation of McCain-Palin's Napalm attacks and the nipping in the bud of Bachmann's neo-McCarthyism — restore my faith in the ultimate wisdom of the American people. Sometimes it takes us too long to get there, but usually we wind up in the right place.