American Hysteria by Andrew Burt

Author:Andrew Burt
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lyons Press
Published: 2015-04-18T16:00:00+00:00

In February of 1950, most Americans didn’t know much about Senator Joseph McCarthy. Born to an Irish-American family in northeastern Wisconsin’s Outagamie County, the forty-one-year-old senator had risen from an obscure political career in Wisconsin to a slightly less obscure one in the Senate, thanks mainly to an ambition that was driven more by intensity than by intellect. Indeed, McCarthy’s very life and personality had been defined by extremity from an early age. He moved in and out of school throughout his childhood, at one point working sixty hours a week to put himself through college, then cramming “a year’s work into a few days of study” to pass his courses, according to one friend. He was a rough-and-tumble student, an Irishman who liked to fight and drink and gamble—the latter activity being a major source of income. He once earned enough money from gambling to pay for an entire semester of college. His style? Reckless bluffing. So reckless, in fact, that his opponents would end up doubting their own cards. But McCarthy wasn’t all brashness all the time. He was fiercely loyal too. He’d lend money to whoever needed it, beg for forgiveness if he wronged any of his friends. “He couldn’t stand to have people stay mad at him,” recalled one associate. “It upset him to no end.”

By 1935, he had received his law degree and moved to Waupaca, a small town near Appleton, Wisconsin, to become a practicing attorney. By 1939, he had gotten himself elected circuit judge for Langlade, Shawano, and Outagamie Counties. When war came after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December of 1941, McCarthy signed up for the Marine Corps. Soon McCarthy became a statewide celebrity, known as “Tail Gunner Joe,” routinely sending dispatches to Wisconsin newspapers from his station in the Pacific, where he served as an intelligence officer, to enhance his image of a “fighting judge” back home. It didn’t take long, however, before reporters learned that most of McCarthy’s stories were grossly exaggerated, if not flatly fabricated. They learned, for example, that when McCarthy claimed to be a tail gunner engaged in Japanese bombing raids, he was really firing at coconut trees during danger-free joyrides. And yet, in a lesson that would stay with him for the rest of his career, McCarthy’s supporters back home wanted to hear of his exploits much more than they wanted to know that they were fake, and the image he crafted for himself would ultimately endure in the public mind. Sure, some reporters attempted to correct McCarthy’s distortions, but such reports were by and large overlooked. McCarthy’s falsehoods never seemed to catch up with him, even from the earliest days of his life in the public sphere.

When McCarthy returned to the States after the war, he had his sights set on the US Senate. Through a combination of bluster and politicking, McCarthy got himself onto the Republican ticket for the 1946 campaign, where he slung all the mud he could against his opponent, including allegations that his challenger was “communistically inclined.

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