No political figure in American history has been more vilified than Sen. Joseph McCarthy. I was in grade school in that era and my parents were ardent McCarthy supporters. Over the years, I have found that the hysteria ascribed to McCarthy and his supporters is more appropriately ascribed to the anti-McCarthyites. As William F. Buckley, Jr. once remarked that he had never heard anything written or said by McCarthy that matched in venom the things that were said about him. That is undeniably true.
The mere mention of McCarthy’s name is enough to reduce liberals to frothing fits of apoplexy. College classmates of mine called him vicious and other names, many unprintable. One letter writer to The (Jacksonville) Florida Times-Union called Roy Cohn, McCarthy’s chief counsel, ‘one of the most sinister and evil men in that period of history’. That is quite a statement given that that period of history included Josip Stalin, Mao Tse-tung and Enver Hoxha. On the domestic scene, we had Albert Anastasia, Meyer Lansky and Sam Giancana.
One of the biggest problems in any discussion of Joseph McCarthy concerns the lack of differentiation concerning his activities and those of other anti-communists of the time. Often cited is the case of The Hollywood Ten. Among those invoked are Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall and others as standing up to the House Un-American Committee. In fact, McCarthy never served in the House and consequently had nothing to do with the Hollywood investigation and that episode occurred in 1947, three years before McCarthy’s famous speech in 1950.
But it gets more interesting. Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Gene Kelly, John Huston and others formed The Committee For The First Amendment to lend support to the accused Hollywood group of directors and screenwriters. There were originally eleven. When they arrived, they were appalled at the actions of several of that group and immediately withdrew their support. Bogart, Edward G. Robinson and John Garfield all wrote articles lamenting that they had been duped by communists. They all continued with very successful film careers, Bogart going on to ‘The Caine Mutiny’, which I think was his best performance. That movie was directed by Edward Dmytryk, another member of the Ten. The eleventh, playwright Berthold Brecht left for East Germany, the day after his appearance before HUAC, which should tell you something.
Dmytryk said that he and Robert Rossen worked together to insert pro-communist lines in their movies. Rossen was actually insulted that he had not been called to testify. They were taking their orders directly from the Comintern. Abraham Polonsky, as late as 1996, maintained that the communists in Hollywood were essentially a social club. That’s like calling the Mafia, a Boys’ Club.
The infamous blacklist resulted from hearings in 1951 and not from the earlier Hollywood Ten incident. More than 320 people were on that blacklist but many found work later under other names and overseas. It is this blacklist that the Left so laments. There were some injustices. Larry Parks cooperated but did not find film work afterwards. He did work on stage with his wife Betty Garrett, so at least he was able to support himself comfortably, a far cry from what would have been his fate under the ideology that he had, at one time, espoused. For me, most of the wailing and gnashing of teeth falls on deaf ears. Communists and sympathizers were participating in a plot to replace our government with a Stalinist dictatorship. They should have been proud to give up something as meager as their careers for their great cause. The early Christian martyrs gave up their lives.
It is interesting to speculate that this Leftist lament may actually be saying more about their nature than any liberal ever intended. Materialism is the philosophy of the Left, not the Right. Communism is, after all, dialectic materialism. Material success is the side effect of libertarian and conservative philosophy. It is not the goal.
“Published originally at EtherZone.com : republication allowed with this notice and hyperlink intact.”