First of all, McCarthy was not simply some “fringe” figure that came and went out of the blue. McCarthy was a conservative Wisconsin Republican who rode the right-wing wave in the 1946 midterms to his Senate seat.
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The GOP won big that year campaigning on an anti-labor, anti-New Deal platform. It's the same election that gave us the Taft-Hartley Act, which McCarthy naturally supported.
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McCarthy *was* something of a backbencher before seizing the anti-communist issue, true, although he did generate some national headlines when he defended the Nazi criminals behind the Malmedy massacre in 1949.pic.twitter.com/mQMPoZfhjr
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I'm not going to recapitulate the entirety of McCarthy's career, because you probably already know it. He seized on the communist issue to beat the Truman administration over the head with, and before long was one of the widely recognized anti-communist leaders in Congress.
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I want to emphasize, though, that McCarthy was NOT the only anti-communist Republican leader in Washington. Richard Nixon, Robert Taft, William Jenner were also very prominent. McCarthy was, admittedly, the most theatrical. But this was good for the cause! Headlines!
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McCarthy was feted by the American right and was in fact a key figure in uniting the far right (generally referred to at the time as "nationalists") with more "mainstream" conservatives.
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In early 1953, McCarthy spoke at a black-tie gala at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York City. The gathering was a fete to honor JB Matthews, a former communist-turned-investigator for HUAC.pic.twitter.com/d6fvsnP9l3
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The guest list was impressive. It included William F. Buckley, Brent Bozell, Roy Cohn, George Sokolsky and Ayn Rand. It also included the publisher of "The American Gentile" and Merwin K. Hart, a lobbyist for the Franco regime.pic.twitter.com/LaVCoCyy4j
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McCarthy's appearance at the gala was rumored to mean that he was going to hire Matthews as the chief investigator for his committee. These rumors turned out to be true, but Matthews didn't last long. Why?
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Because in July 1953 Matthews published this article in the right-wing "American Mercury" magazine (owned by "nationalist" and notorious anti-Semite Russell Maguire, a billionaire who made his fortune making Thompson submachine guns for the Army during the war...)pic.twitter.com/MjB6GJcsYd
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In it, Matthews accused mainline Protestant churches of being infiltrated by the Communist Party. His opening sentence was... provocative.pic.twitter.com/BOlx0XgMRr
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There was a massive outcry. Matthews had targeted one of the pillars of "Americanism": Protestant Christianity. About the only person who came to Matthews' defense was--surprise, surprise--the Reverend Carl McIntire.pic.twitter.com/7mEYgj5rWd
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McCarthy was forced to cut a deal with his Republican allies to fire Matthews, in exchange for retaining his independence on his committee hirings.
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Matthews, for his part, blamed the Democrats for smearing him, saying this was to pre-emptively discredit a future article in which he explored the connections between communism and the New Deal.pic.twitter.com/auuhRYgy61
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This was McCarthy's first major political defeat, and it happened because he targeted an "in-group," maybe the biggest "in-group" in American life in the 1950s.
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But it's important to remember that despite McCarthy's overreaches, his conservative allies generally stuck with him.
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Sure, sure, they might say that some of his tactics went too far, but that they were largely necessary in the face of liberal malfeasance and communist duplicity. That was the general tone of William F. Buckley and Brent Bozell's 1954 book defending McCarthy.
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Fulton Lewis, one of the most prominent right-wing radio broadcasters of the decade, continued to defend McCarthy after his death, too. He does it in this 1958 interview with Mike Wallace. https://www.c-span.org/video/?288936-1/mike-wallace-interview-fulton-lewis-jr …
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Buckley was pretty consistent in defending McCarthy throughout his life. Just a taste: a 1966 "Firing Line" debate with Leo Cherne.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yiuvVk5LjYc …
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And let's not forget the John Birch Society, which catapulted to prominence in the late 1950s and early 1960s and was largely made up of McCarthyites.pic.twitter.com/3l74BFI40S
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So, to sum up: McCarthy was not some sui generis figure, he did not destroy himself on television but unraveled over a longer period of time because he attacked unimpeachably "American" institutions, and *still* enjoyed widespread support on the right despite his "excesses."
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This history is, I'm sure, totally irrelevant for our current political moment. /end
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Shameless plug for my latest in the current issue of the
@washmonthly, where I explore this issue in more detail. https://washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/july-august-2018/how-the-right-wing-convinces-itself-that-liberals-are-evil/ …Show this thread - End of conversation
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