McCarthyism -- Anyone hurt by it? (Help debunk Ann Coulter)

[Whack-a-Mole]

I was surfing Ann Coulter’s web site and on the front page she said the following:

I’ve been asking for just one innocent person ruined by Joe McCarthy for six weeks, but until now all I had gotten was wild speculation about my personal life.

But strangely, while Beichman claims to have the names of McCarthy’s innocent victims, he declines to mention them. (It’s been almost 50 years and these people still won’t name names.)

SOURCE: http://www.anncoulter.org/columns/2003/080603p.htm

I admit I am vague on the specifics of the McCarthy era but I have mostly been of the opinion that what Joe McCarthy did on his witch hunts is considered one of the low points in American history. I haven’t read Ann Coulter’s new book ( Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism ) but from what I can gather from her webpage she seems to contend that McCarthy was a patriot and doing good and necessary work (just what I think…I don’t know as I will again say I did not read her book).

I figure if any group will manage to debunk this it will be the people of the SDMB. Or, alternatively, the people of the SDMB will set me straight and point out that she’s right. Either way is anyone able to take a swing at this one?

[Captain_Amazing]

She puts in the caveat “innocent”, so for anyone you name, she’s just going to say, “But they weren’t innocent”.

[Whack-a-Mole]

*Originally posted by Captain Amazing *
**She puts in the caveat “innocent”, so for anyone you name, she’s just going to say, “But they weren’t innocent”. **

Yeah…I saw that dodge as well. Nevertheless I was hoping we could either find somone clearly innocent (was everyone McCarthy accused shown to be ‘guilty’?) or come-up with a spectrum. For instance a person who gave $10 to the communist party once and got crucified even though that was the extent of their ‘guilt’. Make Coulter define what is needed to be innocent and show her extremism for what it is (obviously she won’t reply here but if there is sufficient evidence produced maybe we could interest the Chicago Reader or some other rag to hold her to account and answer her own claims).

[Captain_Amazing]

If you want innocent, you might try Fred Fisher, who was the proximate cause of Joe Welch’s denunciation of McCarthy.

Fisher was an associate at Welch’s law firm, who, when he was in Law School, was a member of the National Lawyers Guild, which is a left wing organization that widely considered a Communist front group. Even though Fisher had left the organization (and even though he didn’t participate in the Army-McCarthy heaings), McCarthy still publicly denounced him, by name, accusing Welch of employing a known member of a Communist front group, and giving him access to sensitive information.

So was Fisher innocent? On the one hand he was a member of the NLG in law school, so he was “guilty” of that, but on the other hand, that was something in the past, his views had changed, and he wasn’t an active Communist when McCarthy denounced him, but a mainstream liberal Democrat.

That’s something you’ll find with a lot of McCarthy’s victims. They had been Communists or mixed up with Communist dominated or controlled organizations in the 30’s or 40’s, but their views had moderated since then, and they had put that part of their life behind them.

So these people found themselves forced by the Senate (and it’s counterpart in the House) to relive part of their history that they had left behind, and in a lot of cases were embarrassed about. They were publicly exposed and humiliated for things they had done or organizations they had joined or given money to 20 years ago, and the burden was on them to prove their innocence of Communist ties now. They were also forced to name other people they remembered from back then, who would be put through the same treatment.

[johnnyk]

If memory serves me correctly, there were people that were victims of Tail Gunner Joe’s Witch Hunt that were simply guilty of not naming names. Because of their silence they were branded as being “Communists” when in actuality they were far from it. John Henry Faulk, a CBS commentator, was blacklisted for simply standing up for his rights.

An open letter to Ann Coulter regarding Mr. Faulk and the unfair treatment he received at the hands of McCarthy and AWARE can be found at:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/944689/posts

If that didn’t post right, I apologize. Please read the letter. It makes some good points.

[Alan_Owes_Bess]

Going from memory, didn’t McCarthy make a big deal in public or in the Senate about: “who promoted Peress.” a fairly low level federal bureaucrat who was supposed to have had some contact with communist groups?

If so, Peress and the person who promoted him, would have experienced considerable mental anguish at being pilloried in public by McCarthy. So there’s at least one name to throw at Ann Coulter and effectively demolish her thesis that McCarthy’s reign of terror was a fiction.

One name was all she was after, wasn’t it?

[Squink]

Names are not difficult to find:

Most blacklisted actors deserted their first love and did any job that could be found. The blacklist took its toll on everyone connected to the members. Mental and physical distress, broken marriages, even suicides were all common to blacklistees. Clifford Odets could never write as he had before the listing. Committee appearances are said to be the cause of the deaths of John Garfield, J. Edward B romberg, Canada Lee and a dozen others. Character actor Philip Loeb committed suicide.

The Blacklisting of Hollywood’s Talent

[tomndebb]

The really sad thing about Coulter and other historically ignorant people who want to lionize McCarthy is that they miss the boat on so many aspects of his little show.

• McCarthy did not start the witch hunts; there were people doing the same thing, back before WWII.

• McCarthy’s excesses actually brought an end to most of the witch hunts (although not immediately), so Coulter should actually be reviling him for disgracing what she would consider a “good thing.”

• McCarthy’s ham-handed tactics did not actually result in making the country safe; his theatrics actually provided early warning and cover for the actual Soviet agents in the country.

[tomndebb]

Squink, the problem with your list, when compared against Coulter’s challenge, is that most of those people were victims of the earlier witch hunts by the HUAC and the Hollywood and Broadway industries, themselves. This fits in with my observation that McCarthy was a late-comer, simply looking for publicity, whose over-the-top mishandling of his “investigations” began to turn the country against the witch hunts. (Recently released transcripts of his closed hearings demonstrate that he was a coward and a bully who backed down from any victim who stood up to him, exposing them to the public hearings only if it appeared that he could humiliate them.)

In fact, it is McCarthy’s very incompetence that may very well allow Coulter to continue maintaining her challenge. McCarthy was noticeably unsuccessful either in finding Communists or in (ultimately) ruining careers. The story of John Faulk, you will note, is only tied to McCarthy beacuse AWARE was supposed to have been “inspired” by him. I suspect that they were equally inspired by the entertainment industry Congressional investigations of 1947(?) and 1951.

McCarthy was a loud, incompetent, cowardly, bullying boob, who failed in everything except exposing the witch hunts for the un-American activities they were (or for the truly American excesses that they were).

[Alan_Owes_Bess]

Squink,

Your link makes for interesting reading except that it makes a better case for abandoning the term “MCCarthyism” and substituting, instead, either “Thomasism” or Woodism".

From the link you so kindly provided:

Films of Hollywood had always been regulated in different forms, but the House of Un-American Activities (HUAC) became indirectly involved with its regulation. When the committee was established in 1938 by congress, its purpose was to investigate people suspected of unpatriotic behaviour. Under mandate from the House of Representatives and Senator Joseph McCarthy, the House was responsible for spotlighting communists. The committee became inactive during the war years, but it returned revitalized under the leadership of J. Parnell Thomas, the New Jersey congressman.

The first mention made of McCarthy. No indication that he was involved in a reign of hurt against Hollywood. In fact the HUAC is stated to have been inactive during the war years and returned revitalized under Parnell Thomas.

From paragraph 7.

At the end of November, immediately after the ten went before the HUAC, the head of the major Hollywood studios and fifty executives gathered for a two-day secret meeting at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York City. The situation and their future actions were debated. Realizing huge box losses no matter what outcome came from the HUAC findings, a decision was complied. On November 24, 1947, as one, they released a statement that the Hollywood Ten had been suspended without pay. The statement included “We, will not knowingly employ a Communist or a member of any party or group which advocates the overthrow of the Government of the United States by force, or by any illegal or unconstitutional method.” Later the statement became an announcement firing the Ten and explaining that they would not rehire them until cleared by the committee.

No mention of McCarthy gallivanting around hurting Hollywood people here either, but you get some idea of how the blacklist was developed, and by whom.

Para 9

Prominent leftists could find no jobs in the film industry. While the ten was in the federal penitentiary in 1951, the second series of hearings began in Washington and Hollywood under watch of John S. Wood, now the director of the HUAC. A list of 324 people were compiled showing present and former Hollywood employees who were or had been Communists and part of the party. All stayed on the blacklist (n. a list of persons who are under suspicion, disfavour, or censure, or who are not to be hired, served, or otherwise accepted) [6] whether confirmed or not. The 212 people who were working when the list was released, instantaneously lost their jobs. Many found out about their blacklist by being simply banned from the studio lot. …In 1954, the HUAC left Hollywood after condemning over 324 people. There was no official blacklist, studios continuously denounced the fact that blacklisting existed. Even though blacklisted actors were told that they didn’t get a part because they were “too good”.

(I shortened the extract slightly) From this, it seems, John S. Wood caused a list to be compiled of people who were presumably already “blacklisted” pursuant to paragraph 9 quoted above.

After plodding my weary way to paragraph 30 or thereabouts, good old Tailgunner Joe makes a final apearance and is given credit for the blacklisting, viz.

The 1947 investigation of Communist Infiltration of the Hollywood Motion Picture Industry brought about by the House of Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) denied the Motion Picture Industry of the United States of America much of its talent in the 1950s by blacklisting humanitarian idealists or so called “communists”. The House of Un-American Activities Committee and McCarthy’s blacklisting of the members of the Motion Picture community denied America talented writers, actors, producers and directors for an entire decade.

Based on the information in the link you provided, it would be difficult to discover how anyone could possibly reason themselves into a belief that McCarthy was the villain of the piece.

There may exist other evidence tying McCarthy more closely to the creation of the “blacklist” and the hounding of all the names listed but this screed does not pass muster.

[Whack-a-Mole]

Can anyone give me a super quick history lesson on the McCarth era? To be more specific:

Were the people accused and found guilty by McCarthy and his ilk arrested or just hounded out of office, their job, polite society, etc.?

If anyone was jailed was it for being a communist sympathizer or was it shown these people were spies?

What happened to the Constitution during all of this? You know…free speech and other such commie pinko parts?

Was the entire congress and executive branch gung-ho over this or were they too scared by the loudmouths to do anything?

Did the Supreme Court ever weigh in on this?

[Master_Wang-Ka]

This is heavily oversimplified, but here goes:

In a nutshell, the Truman Doctrine, post WWII, involved the “containment” of communism. We weren’t going to start WWIII, but we were going to make damn sure it wouldn’t SPREAD. The Cold War was off and running.

Tailgunner Joe got his start by making a large public noise about suspected communist sympathizers in the State Department. From there, it kind of spread. Richard Nixon got a huge amount of political mileage by jumping on the bandwagon and bending the law in order to nail State Department employee Alger Hiss on charges of espionage.

A variety of other Congressmen, particularly the ones on HUAC, thought this was peachy, and the witch hunt was on. The hearings dealing with movie and television stars got the most publicity; at one point, even Lucille Ball got dragged in, because she WAS a member of the Communist Party at one point. Husband Desi Arnaz appeared before the committee, laughing the whole thing off as a ditzy redhead thing to do, back before she understood what Communism was all about, and remarked “(These days,) the only thing red about Lucy is her hair. And even that’s not real.”

Others weren’t so lucky. Writers, in particular, got blacklisted in droves. The “blacklist” was basically a series of unofficial lists of names of folks who had either refused to cooperate with HUAC… or had been unsufficiently helpful to HUAC… or were known communists… or who had been NAMED as communists (or even SUSPECTED commies) by people who HAD named names for HUAC.

You could also get on the blacklist by ASSOCIATING with someone on the blacklist… or HIRING someone who was on the blacklist. Movie studios in particular made a point of cutting loose any of their actors, writers, or other employees who were “suspicious.”

Much of the stink arose over the Fifth Amendment, which guarantees you the right to not be forced to incriminate yourself in a court of law. People who didn’t like being pushed around and bullied during HUAC hearings often took the fifth. This became a tactic by which HUAC could make them look guilty, simply because they refused to talk, and also allowed HUAC to find them guilty of “Contempt Of Congress” for refusing to answer questions. Several folks were jailed for this, Fifth Amendment rights notwithstanding.

It all made great theatre, and the guys on HUAC were having a fine time, making lots of political hay out of it. Why deal with sticky REAL issues and problems when you could just go on TV and be seen by the voting public, terrorizing “commies?”

…and then McCarthy decided to go after the Army.

The idea of ripping apart the Armed Forces the way they’d scrambled the State Department and the entertainment business struck the saner members of the government as a bad idea. McCarthy, though, refused to back down, and was eventually censured by Congress. He drank himself to death a few years later, after losing his bid for reelection.

[Squink]

Aww damn, I’d forgotten what a cesspool that era was, and mixed up McCarthy with the earlier HUAC. Digging a little further delivers up this short McCarthy timeline. With regard to the Tyding committee hearings (1950), this right-wing website claims

Of the 110 names McCarthy gave to the Tydings subcommittee, 62 were at the time employed by the State Department. Though the subcommittee cleared them all, within one year a State Department Loyalty Board instigated proceedings against 49 of the 62, and by the end of 1954, 81 of those on McCarthy’s list had either resigned from their government posts or been dismissed.

It fails to mention whether the any of the 81 were actually found guilty of anything.
Senator Tyding himself was the victim of a smear campaign by McCarthy:

(1950) July 20 report by Tydings Committee denounced McCarthy
Oct. midterm elections gave McCarthy the opportunity to attack the Democrats, especially members of the Tydings Committee; used false picture associating Millard Tydings with Earl Browder, and Tydings was defeated in Maryland by Republican John Marshall Butler; Senate Majority Leader Scott Lucas was defeated in Illinois by Republican Everett Dirksen; Republicans won 5 seats…

The smear campaign is corroborated in this interview with Francis O. Wilcox Chief of Staff, Senate Foreign Relations Committee, 1947-1955.:

A suggestion was made at the outset that a special investigative staff should be hired to conduct a thorough going investigation of the charges. But this idea was sidetracked. Only a few names were ever produced and only a very few individuals were ever investigated. None of the charges were ever proved. But I know that the investigation got Senator Tydings, because he lost the election when he ran the next time. He was one of the few people in the Senate who had the courage to stand up and say what he thought about Senator McCarthy and the harm that he was doing to his country and to our foreign policy.

Finally, this Article from Colliers (1954) offers a timely assessment of the damage brought about by the Army-McCarthy hearings.

-Disclaimer. This is web research, and all these sites may contain bullshit. If so, there’s enough such sites to make it reasonable to postulate a shadowy conspiracy to undermine the historical record. Perhaps it’s time to hold congressional hearings on the matter, and straighten out the McCarthy era once and for all.

[tomndebb]

Tailgunner Joe got his start by making a large public noise about suspected communist sympathizers in the State Department. From there, it kind of spread.

Quibble: It had been going for years before Joe jumped on the publicity bandwagon in a speech in Februay, 1950. It did not “spread from there” so much as he saw an opportunity for publicity and jumped on the bandwagon. Nixon jumped on the bandwagon the same year, smearing Helen Gahagan Douglas as being a “conduit” for Stalin’s desires in the U.S. and refering to her as the “Pink Lady,” (a fact that he then resolutely denied against the physical evidence for the rest of his life).

[Alan_Owes_Bess]

I’m not sure that anything spectacular has been demonstrated by Squink’s post. Nor has any other poster managed to provide an adequate refutation to the Coulter thesis.

So, of the 102 names provided to the Tydings Committee, 81 ended up no longer employed in the Civil Service. After an unspecified period, an unspecified number of them having left the service or been dismissed.

Did they all up on skid row because of Joe McCarthy?

Were their lives really destroyed?

Were they found to be unemployable in the private sector?

Who were they?

what were their names?

Can’t they even ghost write books?
As far as the 1954 article from Colliers is concerned, what is this article supposed to prove about the great Senator Tailgunner Joe McCarthy reign of hurt.

To cite a shortened extract from paragraph 2:

We suppose the effect can be summarized in one word: damage. The legislative operations of Congress must have been delayed…But the greatest damage, we believe, occurred in the millions of homes where the televised proceedings were seen and heard.

And from paragraph 6:

But in general the hearings seemed to us as pretty much of a disgrace to the tradition of a Senate where great men have served, great words have been spoken and great decisions made.

Paragraph 7:

What must many Americans have thought, knowing that tradition but seeing government in action for the first time! It was a carnival, a sprawling, brawling travesty.

And finally, paragraph 8:

How much damage was done cannot be calculated. But fortunately the carnival is over.

No mention made anywhere of lives destroyed. That is not to say that political fortunes didn’t change, by that, I mean the careers of various political hacks, for better or worse, but they are not supposed to have tenure, are they?

It seems that, in the final analysis, the only real damage done was by Senator McCarthy to his political opponents and by his political opponents, playing by the same rules, to the Senator. He not only managed to came off second best in the encounter but has somehow been transformed into a personage who is rated by the liberal cognoscenti as the equivalent of Lenin, Stalin and Hitler, to name but three socialist tyrants of the previous century.

Senator Joe McCarthy behaved no more cleanly to his political opponents than Senator Ted Kennedy behaves against his. The Bork confirmation hearings a decade or so ago would provide a good comparative example here.

[pseudotriton_ruber_ruber]

This is a discussion that badly needs definition of terms, specifically “innocent” and “destroyed.” Coulter’s defenders are able to weasel out of virtually any claims by saying that the victim in question wasn’t actually destroyed by McCarthyism (“they are not supposed to have tenure, are they?”) or that the victim once read Marx, hence is not really innocent.

[Alan_Owes_Bess]

Pseudo rr,

The comment about “They are not supposed to have tenure” referred to political hacks, ie. professional politicians.

No, politicians are not supposed to have tenure and only a servile mentality would believe this.

If a politician lose an election, his or her political career is usually “destroyed” but it is not a time for mourning.

Except, perhaps, by those who are in a position to benefit from the political hack’s success, materially or, equally as importantly, emotionally.

[Squink]

So, of the 102 names provided to the Tydings Committee, 81 ended up no longer employed in the Civil Service. After an unspecified period, an unspecified number of them having left the service or been dismissed.

Unspecified as in the 81 left “by the end of 1954”, or did you miss that ?

If a politician lose an election, his or her political career is usually “destroyed” but it is not a time for mourning.

Perhaps not, if you happen to be an unprincipled party hack who thinks that photoshopping together a picture of an enemy with the leader the American Communist party, and bandying it about as proof of wrongdoing, is “politics as usual”. True Americans, are offended by this sort of lie, regret the damage it caused back in the 50’s, and find it disturbing that similar cynical manipulation of public opinion continues to happen today.

[Telcontar]

Just to toss another name out there, how about General, later Sec State, Marshall? Not sure how much damage he took but McCarthy sure gave it a good try.

[december]

A neighbor of mine lost his career as a result of McCarthyism, although I don’t know whether McCarthy himself played a role. He was the head of math department at New York City’s special high school of science. After losing that job, he spent the rest of life as a tutor, working out of his home. He was an incredible teacher. Not only did he lose his career, but the students at Bronx High School of Science lost his teaching ability.

AFAIK he had been a Communist many years earlier. I do not know whether there are things he could have done to have kept his job.