In early 1954, after several years of unsuccessfully finding Communists in every corner of the State Department, Sen. Joe McCarthy turned his attention to the Department of the Army. Much like his previous efforts, when McCarthy was asked for specific names, he could only come-up with one or two names that he had actual “evidence” on. McCarthy relied on hearsay and alleged ties to organizations that had left-wing social and labor agendas. While indeed a dozen of the names on his various lists would eventually turn out to be low-level Soviet agents, he was never able to provide proof that any of the hundreds that he charged was a security risk; in fact he padded his lists by including people who had already been removed from their positions for failing “loyalty” tests, such as belonging to “subversive” organizations or refusing to name political associations. Nearly everyone accused and interrogated before his hearings were guilty of nothing more than questioning the status quo.
McCarthy ran into trouble when he tried to force the Army to court martial an Army dentist named Irving Peress, who had refused to indicate his political affiliations on a loyalty answer form, and subsequently took the Fifth when summoned before McCarthy’s committee. Instead, his commanding officer, Gen. Ralph Zwicker, gave him an honorable discharge. Zwicker, having been called before McCarthy to explain himself, ran circles around the questioning, prompting McCarthy to call into question his IQ and fitness to wear a uniform. The Army then decided to go on the offensive, forcing McCarthy’s investigatory committee to hold a hearing on his own unethical activities regarding the attempt to block an aide’s induction in the service. McCarthy attempted to sidestep the accusations by attacking a lawyer in Army counsel Joseph Welch’s Boston law office, after which Welch famously stated
“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?”
After McCarthy was determined not to have acted “unethically” by his own committee, he went on to target the likes Annie Lee Moss, an African-American clerk in the employ of the Army; she had come to McCarthy’s attention after having been subjected to several “loyalty” investigations, and was obviously viewed as an easy mark. Moss was no fool; she made McCarthy—with the “help” of his chief counsel Roy Cohn and the reporting of Edward R. Murrow on his TV show “See It Now”—look even more the unprincipled, thuggish bully. After an attempt by Cohn to insert references to “evidence” that he did not have was ordered struck, Sen. John McClellan would observe that
"You can't strike these statements made by counsel here as to evidence that we're having and withholding. You cannot strike that from the press nor from the public mind once it's planted there. That's the - that is the - evil of it. It is not sworn testimony. It is convicting people by rumor and hearsay and innuendo."
Moss did, in fact, have associations with civil and labor rights outfits—and Communist groups did see the African-American community as fertile ground for their propaganda, but for domestic political consumption, not espionage or subversion of the state. But the reality is that racial equality in the minds of racialist whites was then equated with Communism and “subversion,” as it is today in most far-right circles, and some white people plainly see the President Obama as inferior to themselves, or “uppity” because of his Harvard education.
We can see the same dynamic being played out here in the Shirley Sherrod case, with Andrew Briebart, Rush Limbaugh, Mark Williams, Ann Coulter, Glenn Beck and the rest of the Fox News gang playing the part of McCarthy, Cohn and the rest of the paranoid far-right of the time. Now as then, accusations of “subversion” by the left was used as a partisan attack; then as now, the right used code words like “Communist” and “socialist” to attack the “enemy” on the political left. Then as now there is audience for these paranoid diversions, and it can be seen most clearly through the Tea Party Movement, and the use of deliberately falsified and misleading “evidence” such as that used against Sherrod by Breitbart—and continues to be defended by the utterly shameless and contemptible Limbaugh; both are unapologetic in their racism and nauseating self-victimization (Limbaugh, by the way, owes much of his “luck” to the job-hunting by his well-connected father). Not to be outdone, Coulter ludicrously claims that there was a “conspiracy” by the left to “plant” the “evidence” on Breitbart to make him and the right look like racist fools; but the fact is that the right has never shown any interest in “facts” when it comes to planting the seeds of race hatred and paranoia in the minds of their “constituency.”
Meanwhile, Anderson Cooper on CNN claimed that the left was just as guilty of these kind of shenanigans as the right; unfortunately, he cannot come-up with anything even remotely similar. We may find the occasional tasteless satire from the left, but not the deliberately dehumanizing falsification passed-off as “fact” that the right is repeatedly involved in. Not only that, so-called “mainstream” news media like CNN almost every day allows known racial bigots, hate-mongers and paranoid fantasizers from the right to spread their poison. A year after Cooper “outed” Williams concerning the racist fantasias on his website, Williams was still a frequent “guest” on CNN; there is simply no one comparable from the left who dwells in that sewer.
By late 1954, the majority of the public were on to McCarthy’s game, and he was such an embarrassment and political liability that the Republican majority at the time that he was censured and isolated. There had been bi-partisanship on the “Red Menace” issue, but by making it a partisan issue to attack the left, McCarthy left a legacy of bitterness that the right today seems to have learned nothing from; now, it seems as if most Republicans in the U.S. Senate have a bit of Joe McCarthy in them, and not for nothing did Harry Truman call the Republicans, when they were not engaged in “the evil of it,” the “do-nothing party.” There were Soviet agents operating in the U.S. as now, but to McCarthy, everyone who didn’t adhere to his own right-wing philosophy was potentially a “Communist.” The question now is if a majority of the public today will recognize the malevolence of the right and censure it in the polling booth. That may be a long-shot, since there are no Murrows willing to expose either the radical right or the Tea Party movement that encompasses all of its excesses. It refuses to expose the radical right as the true subversive element in the country, that exists only to vent its hate. But we ought to at least have the astuteness ourselves to ask “Rush Limbaugh, have you no sense of decency?”
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