FOR RIGHT-WINGERS LIKE JOSEPH MCCARTHY, YOU DIDN’T have to be a Communist to be accused of being a disloyal American. You could also be a socialist, a philosophy that wasn’t so tied into the Soviet Union, but one which posited that we’d all be better off if certain powerful industries were better-controlled by the government. Franklin Roosevelt was the one president who understood the benefits of letting the government control certain functions that formerly had been left in private hands: he began Social Security, a socialistic program that guarantees every American some income in their later years; he began a system of welfare that kept the poorest Americans from starving; and he initiated legislation that controlled corporate greed, calling for a minimum wage, better working conditions, a curbing of monopolies, environmental protection, and higher taxes for richer Americans. All these programs were anathema to McCarthy and his wealthy conservative friends. (These were the programs dismantled by George W. Bush.)
The socialists believed that their message of civil rights and social justice was ethical. Joseph McCarthy—another in the tradition of Christian Puritans—pursued tactics that were contemptible, if not unconstitutional, to stop them. Be that as it may, McCarthy had the power of Congress behind him, and during the first half of the 1950s he planted the fear of prosecution into anyone who had ever gone to a meeting of any radical group.
Joseph Boskin, who as a youth felt strongly about the rightness of socialism, saw the effect McCarthyism had on America.
JOSEPH BOSKIN “The radical community began to pull in badly with the start of the Smith Act prosecutions and then HUAC’s and McCarthy’s hearings in the late 1940s. The radical teachers and professors became much more conservative in their lectures and in their behavior and criticism. They were not as open or as blatant as they were before. A great fear came into existence.
“There was a debate over how we should handle the loyalty oath, whether to sign or not. I was confronted with this when I was drafted for the Korean War. You had to sign a loyalty oath. There were two parts to it. The first part says, ‘Are you now or have you ever been a member of…’ and then they list about 270 subversive organizations in the United States, ranging from the Lower Slobovian Marching Band to the CP to the Socialist Party.
“Organizations you couldn’t possibly imagine were on the list. And you had to indicate whether you had actually been a member at any time. If you put down yes, tried to be honest about it, you were taken away and put in a very ‘safe’ area, away from everyone else, and then you were constantly monitored. Then you were haunted for the rest of your career in the army, and after you got out, the FBI followed you and monitored you.
“If you put down that you were a member of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, you had your phones tapped, your mail confiscated, and so on.
“But if you lied and put down that you never had been a member of anything, they didn’t follow up on it. So the question was, should you be honest or dishonest? How to deal with it became a serious question for a lot of my friends.
“Two of my friends told me what happened to them after they answered yes on the army questionnaire. It was deplorable. And for no reason. None of us were radical in the sense that we believed in the overthrow of the government. Most of my friends were evolutionary socialists. They believed with Erich Fromm, who extolled independent thought and the use of reason to establish moral values, that there was a close relationship between socialism and ethics.
“There was no doubt in my mind what I was going to do: I said no. Of course not. I wasn’t going to give in to this kind of nonsense and also be harassed for the rest of my life. It was crazy. We knew it was nonsense.”
The irony was that Joseph Boskin, the onetime socialist, who had to lie to escape harassment from the government, wound up in a top-secret army outfit. Said Boskin, “At the time the United States was ringing the Soviet Union with air force bases. I was assigned to the Transportation Arctic Group, a scientific expeditionary force that went to Thule, Greenland, to see if we could find a feasible route across the polar ice cap on the other side of Greenland to build a B-52 base closer to the Soviet Union. But you couldn’t do that. It was impossible. Besides, shortly afterward, missiles came into existence, and they rendered the B-52 bombers obsolete. Thule became a missile base.” After the war ended, Boskin went to the State University of New York at Oswego. It was there that he discovered what he wanted to do for the rest of his life: teach.
JOSEPH BOSKIN “I was blessed with a roommate in college who had the most insatiable curiosity of anyone I ever knew. His name was Mel Bernstein. He was also from Brooklyn. We roomed together in college for three years.
“His art form was the question. He was always moved by the question itself, and he taught me the whole beauty of the question itself. We took a lot of classes together, and before we’d go to class, we would arm ourselves with questions for the professor. Which we then sat down and asked.
“We had one young professor in sociology, and we would come to class and pepper him with questions. One day he said, ‘Enough. Enough. You two guys. Are you roommates?’
“We said, ‘Yes.’
“He said, ‘Now it makes sense. You, Bernstein, you’re the most pessimistic young man I’ve ever met. You’re truly cynical. I want you to get a book’—it was a book on altruism—‘and I want you to report back to the class. An oral report.’ He added, ‘And you, Boskin, you’re one of the most optimistic persons I’ve ever met. You need a dose of cynicism. I want you to read Sigmund Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents. And I want you to report to class.’
“We went to the library, got out the books, and I started reading. I was nineteen years old. I had never read Sigmund Freud in my life.
“It wasn’t easy reading. I couldn’t get past the first two pages. I didn’t know what thanatos or eros meant. I had the dictionary next to me, and I was looking up all the words.
“‘I’ll never make it,’ I told my roommate. ‘I don’t understand any of this.’
“‘Continue reading,’ he said.
“I read the book three times. I finally had it memorized. And then I drew up a flow chart, and I gave a full lecture before the class and answered questions.
“I was blown away by the experience. Blown away. I never realized what it meant to be a professor. That was my epiphany. From that day on I knew what I wanted to do for the rest of my life.
“My big debate was whether to become a sociologist or a historian. I don’t know why, but I opted for history. I became a social historian.”
David Schine, Roy Cohn, and Joseph McCarthy. Library of Congress
Boskin’s first job was at the University of Iowa. He went from there to the University of Southern California, and then to Boston University. He has also been a visiting professor at UCLA and the University of California at San Diego.
Boskin managed to avoid getting ensnared by the evil web of McCarthyism. He was one of the lucky ones. Unlike Teddy Rosenbaum, he got to fulfill his lifelong dream of becoming a teacher.
As a footnote, after Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968, there was rioting in the black sections of many cities, including Baltimore. One of Joseph Boskin’s uncles was an optometrist who had several offices, including one in Baltimore’s black community. When the riots took place, his brother took a copy of a book Joseph had written, titled Urban Racial Violence in the Twentieth Century. He put it up in the window with a big sign: MY NEPHEW. His office was spared.
The McCarthy era came to an end because McCarthy’s legal assistant Roy Cohn had become infatuated with his friend David Schine, who was drafted, and after failing to get him a commission, Cohn did everything he could to make sure the object of his affection lived like a king at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey, where he was stationed. When Cohn’s unseemly behavior was revealed, McCarthy, trying to protect Cohn, then decided to investigate whether there were subversives at Fort Monmouth. The whole thing smacked of blackmail. During the hearings McCarthy attacked Fort Monmouth’s commanding officer, General Ralph Zwicker—who had led a key regiment at the Battle of the Bulge—for allowing a dentist to get an honorable discharge even though he had refused to answer questions about his being a member of a “subversive organization.” McCarthy tried to humiliate Zwicker, a close friend of President Eisenhower, by accusing Zwicker of protecting a Russian spy. The charge was absurd.
Edward R. Murrow. Library of Congress
On March 3, 1954, Edward R. Murrow did his show See It Now. He showed clips of McCarthy terrorizing witnesses. He showed him patronizing the president. At the end, he intoned, “The actions of the junior senator from Wisconsin have caused alarm and dismay amongst our allies abroad and given considerable comfort to our enemies. And whose fault is that? Not really his. He didn’t create the situation of fear. He merely exploited it, and rather successfully. Cassius was right. The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars but in ourselves. Good night—and good luck.”
Then the White House released a memo revealing how McCarthy and Cohn had been demanding favors for David Schine. Forty-four counts of improper behavior were listed.
The next day McCarthy went after Robert Stevens, secretary of defense. At a hearing about the Cohn-Schine affair, Joseph Welsh, a trial lawyer from Boston, represented the army. When McCarthy charged that Welsh had hired a Communist attorney as an assistant, and named him, Welsh turned to McCarthy and said, “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?”
When Welsh was finished, the room broke into thunderous applause. It was all caught on TV. McCarthy had become a liability to the Republicans and even to the cause of anti-Communism.
On June 17, 1954, after thirty-six days of testimony, the army hearings were recessed. Said Arkansas senator John McClelland, the Democrat who’d led the walkout of the hearings, “I think this will be recognized and long remembered as one of the most disgraceful episodes in the history of our government.”
When the fall election was fought, Vice President Richard Nixon used McCarthy’s tactics and methods to tar Democratic opponents from sea to shining sea with charges of being soft on communism. The Democrats won both houses of Congress anyway.
On December 2, 1954, McCarthy was censured by the Senate, sixty-seven votes to twenty-two. He was finished. Eisenhower put the senator’s name on the list of people never to invite to state dinners. Worse, reporters stopped writing about him, even when he called press conferences.
Joe McCarthy had two and a half years to live. He died on May 2, 1957, of acute hepatitic infection. Though he had hepatitis, he wouldn’t stop drinking, and the combination killed him. But the conservatives have never stopped defending, even praising him. He is a hero to Ann Coulter. Said an editorial in the Fort Worth Southern Conservative, “Joe McCarthy was slowly tortured to death by the pimps of the Kremlin.”
After all the hearings, with so many of the accused losing their jobs, McCarthy never uncovered one single subversive. Instead he just smeared innocent people with impunity. He brought with him names, documents, and statistics, even though most of them were phony. Said historian David Oshinski, “He understood intuitively that force, action, and virility were essential prerequisites for a Red-hunting crusade.”