McCARTHYISM: MYTH & MENACE

In mid-1953, the coincidence of new administrations in Washington and Moscow creates a host of urgent questions. The Korean truce crisis opens ill-defined opportunities and painful threats in the struggle for Asia; the European alliance creaks with strain; riots and strikes in East Germany call for a sharper U.S. policy toward West Germany; at home, a new defense budget is tossed about in fuzzy controversy; new Government policies toward taxes, business, farming, labor are on the national agenda.

Amid this immense pressure for decision, public discussion in the U.S. is dominated by one issue: McCarthyism. Abroad, among its strongest allies, public discussion of the U.S. is almost monopolized by McCarthyism.

The Flattering Obsession. The American who reads newspapers, listens to the radio or talks public affairs with his friends does not need to be told how all-pervasive the McCarthy topic has become. McCarthy-in-Europe may be more surprising. There, Senator Joseph McCarthy is the second-best known of living Americans and regarded by many as the most powerful. McCarthyism has cost the U.S. billions spent to promote international cooperation and trust and to advance U.S. leadership.

With the British, especially, McCarthyism is an obsession--& delightful, self-flattering obsession that salves the bruised British ego with the balm of moral supertority to the upstart Americans. The more McCarthyism can be exaggerated in its evil or its power, the more it fascinates the British.

A former Prime Minister can indulge himself by wondering out loud whether McCarthy or Eisenhower is the more powerful. The anti-American New Statesman & Nation finds in McCarthyism the thickest stick it ever brandished. Hardly anyone in Britain laughs when the New Statesman says: "The Hitler-McCarthy analogy is disturbingly apt." It goes on with a typical distortion of McCarthy's power, finding him in alliance with "powerful interests in contemporary America," including "a substantial part of American Roman Catholicism" and "many American industrialists." The New Statesman smugly concludes: "It is anti-Communism that binds these social forces together. It is a deep social malaise that finds the same outlet in anti-Communism as that which so many Germans found in anti-Semitism."

At the other end of the spectrum of British opinion stands a passage in the Queen's coronation speech (composed presumably by the greatest living ghostwriter, Sir Winston), which plays to British emotions on McCarthyism by heavily emphasizing British liberties. Said the Queen: "There has . . . sprung from our island home a theme of social and political thought which constitutes our message to the world . . . Parliamentary institutions with their free speech and respect for the rights of minorities and the inspiration of a broad tolerance in thought and its expression --all this we conceive to be a precious part of our way of life and outlook." While there will never be a bad season for praise of Britain's contribution to the history of liberty, this passage was taken as another criticism of McCarthyism in America--and was meant to be so taken.

The specter of the U.S. in the grip of a hysterical witch hunt, of the President cowering before McCarthy's power, bears only a specter's relation to reality. But it is the specter that flashes instantly to the British mind (and less vividly to the French and German) when America is mentioned. Americans can recognize the runaway inflation in the European myth of McCarthyism. But the myth itself was first pumped up in the U.S., and in the U.S. today McCarthyism is more myth than man--but not the less dangerous for that. The reputation of power, even an originally false reputation, begets power.

A Dubious Service. The aura of invincibility that now surrounds McCarthy owes something to Senator McCarthy himself, not a man to discourage reports of his own prowess. But the McCarthy myth was not created by parthenogenesis. It was busily fertilized not only by McCarthy, but by one notable group of McCarthy's enemies: the apologists for the New and Fair Deals.

Long before McCarthy was a national figure, evidence began to accumulate of how deeply the U.S. Government in the 1930s and '40s had been penetrated by Communists and their sympathizers. The scornful cartoons of the '30s, showing nervous "reactionaries" looking under the bed for Reds, lost their humor as one ex-Communist after another told his shocking story. There were, in sober truth, Reds under the bed--and not only under it. Emerging and increasing evidence of this was politically embarrassing to the liberal wing of the Democratic Party.

When the McCarthy evangel began in 1950, the liberals saw in his distortions and exaggerations a chance to divert attention from the bedroom scene. They began to construct the myth of McCarthy's great power and his menace to liberty.

It was not easy to inflate McCarthy to his present proportions of a national and international figure. Unlike most demagogues, he has no glittering, positive program; he does not deal in promises. He is conspicuously devoid of organizing ability or any flair for latching on to existing organizations. It is still hard to find any significant McCarthy following, either in the Senate, or among political or business leaders, or among the people. A recent Gallup poll indicates that less than 22% of the U.S. public think that McCarthy does more good than harm. The rest either have no opinion or think that he does more harm than good.

The 22% who think he does more good than harm are indebted to McCarthy for helping them to keep up with the news. The evidence of Communist influence (95% of which was drawn out by investigators other than McCarthy) was not very difficult to understand. But apparently millions did not understand it until McCarthy restated it (and often misstated it) for them.

McCarthy's dubious service to the 22% who needed his tutelage accounts for less than half the McCarthy myth. The rest of it was supplied by the New and Fair Dealers who set out to prove that this cunning opportunist was the reincarnation of Torquemada, Huey Long and Hitler.

Origin of a Myth. His cooperative enemies concentrated their efforts to prove McCarthy's power in the Maryland senatorial election of 1950. Senator Millard Tydings had criticized McCarthy: Tydings, after 24 years in the Senate, was beaten; ergo, McCarthy the Mighty beat Tydings the Good.

This was the key syllogism of the McCarthy myth. In 1951, the Fair Dealing New York Post, in a series on McCarthy, said: "Joe McCarthy hasn't caught any spies. But he can claim credit for the political death of at least one man . . . It is clear that McCarthy defeated Tydings." This line came to be accepted far outside the originating circle of McCarthy's Fair Deal enemies. Later, liberal commentators expanded this to say that McCarthy eliminated six other Senators who opposed him. A man who can defeat seven U.S. Senators is a power, and thus McCarthy's aura of invincibility began. By the end of 1951, the myth of McCarthy's power had reached the point where even journalists with no ax to grind had to cover McCarthy closely and seriously.

Now signs appear that even some liberals look askance at the myth they helped to create. A recent issue of the Nation warns: "It is a mistake . . . to keep the spotlight focused on McCarthy; this is what he wants his opposition to do." In the New York Post, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., co-chairman of Americans for Democratic Action, tried to deflate the myth at the point of origin. Wrote Schlesinger: "The record shows . . . that the notion of McCarthy's invincibility is largely legendary. He certainly cannot be credited with the defeat of seven Senators . . . McCarthy conducted a vigorous campaign against Tydings in 1950. But the strong probability is that Tydings would have been beaten anyway . . . The Connecticut case is even clearer. In 1950, McCarthy campaigned against [William] Benton, and Benton won in what was a generally tough year for the Democrats. In 1952, McCarthy made Benton almost his chief campaign target, [and] Benton ran a considerable margin ahead of Stevenson."

The Deadly Parallel. So a start has been made toward cutting the McCarthy myth down to size. Before that job is finished, it will need more than rueful second-thoughts of liberals. President Eisenhower will have to deal again and again with McCarthyism, which is a major liability to Eisenhower's foreign policy, his domestic policy and his party. Only an exaggerated fear of McCarthy's power could account for such disgraceful episodes as the delay in the appointments of Mildred McAfee Horton and David Shillinglaw on the ground that they had belonged to organizations that McCarthy may consider subversive. Eisenhower will have to eliminate that kind of paralyzing fear from his Administration.

McCarthyism has a parallel in modern history, and it is neither Hitlerism nor Huey Longism. In the late '20s and early '30s, Prohibition monopolized public discussion in the U.S. and luridly colored the European view of American life. An overwhelming majority of the U.S. people came to recognize that Prohibition was a mistake--but before Repeal in 1933, the opponents of Prohibition had exaggerated its evil effects as widely as the most fanatic Drys had exaggerated the evils of drink.

Prohibition was such an all-pervasive issue that it shut off discussion of problems that turned out to be far more important. Prohibition polarized Congress, dominated the 1928 election, absorbed the White House, obsessed the press and smothered discussion of other grave questions of the Coolidge-Hoover period. The yatter over Prohibition died with Repeal. In 1953, the responsible leaders of the U.S. will not get public discussion back on the most important issues until they extinguish the McCarthyism debate by an equivalent of Repeal. Since serious people can hardly believe that Communism influences the present Administration, much ground is already cut from under McCarthy's feet.

The U.S. had traitors and conspirators in the 1930s and '40s, and previously it had Benedict Arnold and Aaron Burr, too. Public debate has long since passed over A for Arnold and B for Burr. The time seems to have come when C for Communist Infiltration may also be considered a lesson mastered. If so, the U.S. may be able to pass on to D for Defense and E for Enterprise.

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