Haynes Johnson Interview (2005): Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
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It's important to emphasize that not only was he lighting the matches to fuel these fires, but he was also burning down our institutions, or attempting to. Talk a little -- maybe take a particular case -- what his method was and the ways in which he violated people's civil rights.
"McCarthyism" is in the dictionary today for good reason, because he stamped his name on an era. It means making false charges, accusing people of disloyalty on no evidence and guilt by association. McCarthy started attacking institutions of the United States, not just the government service. One of the most damaging things he did was to accuse the government of being "a nest of communist traitors and we're going to get rid of them." So, the government service began cowering, withdrawing, and many fine, talented people were either defamed or ruined, or left in disgust over the government service.
He attacked the press because the press was a left-wing lackey of Joe Stalin, and people who worked for the press, like me, I guess, were "com symps," as the phrase was at the time, or disloyal Americans. It was full of liberals. The word "liberal" that we hear today, another echo from past to present. They were all "liberals."
Education, he took on education, people who would speak out. You began to have a real sense of terror and conformity throughout the United States that if you subscribed to a certain progressive magazine, or left-wing, or read a certain book, you could be hauled in and put on a list of disloyalty. So, people withdrew and started sinking in.
If I could tell you one episode that spells out for me how the terror of conformity afflicted [people]: I was in graduate school at the University of Wisconsin at Madison which was, as you know, at that time, the "Berkeley" before Berkeley. It was the center of protest and liberalism, the La Follettes, progressive. In 1952 -- I was then in the army -- Joe McCarthy made a speech and said that the University of Wisconsin had the greatest collection of communist literature, and they are allowing scholars to look at it and be shaped by it. And the university chancellor was asked, when I was a graduate student, "Is it true?" And the chancellor said, "Yes. We intend to increase it." And I thought, "Right on." But that was a rare thing.
On July 4th, '52, it was so bad in Madison, Wisconsin, that a pollster went around in this liberal bastion and he took 112 people, citizens of Madison, Wisconsin, and he said, "I'm going to read you a series of quotations. I'm going to ask you if you would sign a petition saying you agree with these statements." And he read them. Every quotation was from the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights, and 111 out of 112 students, citizens of Madison, Wisconsin, hallmark of liberalism and progressivism, did not, were afraid to sign that petition, because they thought they'd be accused of subversion or communism. That's how bad it was.
As you've already suggested, the Senate over time gave him free reign, so he had a committee, he was chairman of a special Senate operations committee, he could hold witnesses before them, and hold secret or not secret sessions, and so on.
The power that he began to wield and wielded in almost unaccountable ways, because after helped lead the Republicans to their new majority, he got the power via the Senate chairman of investigating, and doubled the size of staff and appointments, and he started devoting his entire energies to exposing "communism in America," not just in the government but in America, American institutions, hauling in writers ...
Dentists.
Yeah, "pink" dentists who had signed a -- maybe if you had signed a petition in 1932, if you were a young radical in the Depression, you could be put on a disloyal list, and he browbeat them and he attacked them of subversion, and he expanded these hearings. The hearing records of that time -- most of the hearings -- many of them were open and televised, but the great bulk were behind closed doors, and those were classified, sealed, for fifty years until I began writing this book, even as we were invading Iraq. I'll tell you, if you read -- I did read all of this stack of the actual hearings, it is one of the most shameful -- it is a witch hunt, it is Salem revisited in the United States in the 1950s. People were terrified. And he ruined lives! There was one suicide, and many people were fired from their jobs who had nothing to do with communism but were seen as disloyal, therefore you didn't want them around. It was a witch hunt that went on for five years, Joe McCarthy's reign, more and more and more, and the arc went up in his power and his terror.
People were not willing -- the shame of that period -- the moderates and distinguished people of good will on both sides, Republicans and Democrats, did not take him on. He was fed by the anti-communism [fear].
We'll talk about individuals, who did stand up, or at least one or another of them, and those who did not. Let's emphasize that for the Republicans it was about winning elections and having a new mandate after all the years of the New Deal, but the Democrats ran scared here, and you point out that the Truman administration, in response to the first stirrings, instituted a security program to check on the loyalty of government employees.
Yes, they did. The Truman administration embarked on the loyalty investigations and loyalty hearings and blacklisted people, hauled in and questioned, then fired, and it raised all kinds of questions. That was the material that McCarthy could carry on and actually expand more.
It didn't all start with Joe McCarthy. The reason the Democrats were reacting that way is because they thought they would lose the 1948 election which Harry Truman did win. McCarthy and the Republicans had just won the Congress in '46, so by the time McCarthy grabbed this material, the Democrats saw him raising his power, and the Republicans saw him as a vehicle to gain power, and it worked. The Democrats saw themselves eroding, and they thought they'd counter McCarthyism by their own loyalty investigation, so you had this whole climate. By the time Joe McCarthy, and Eisenhower and the Republican administration came, then he started turning his targets on the Eisenhower appointees as disloyal. He wanted to be president.
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