Nightmare in Red: The McCarthy Era in Perspective by Richard M. Fried

Author:Richard M. Fried
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 1990-01-25T05:00:00+00:00

AS LONG AS it lasted, the Korean War ensured the persistence of the politics of disloyalty on which McCarthy thrived. The passage of the Internal Security Act attested to the fevers the war had induced. McCarthy had no role in the enactment of this measure, but the same forces that maintained his presence in public life prompted his colleagues to rush the bill to passage.

The 1950 congressional elections also revealed how Korea amplified the politics of anti-communism. Even before the war, redbaiting tinted several Democratic primary races. Senators Claude Pepper of Florida and Frank P. Graham of North Carolina both were labeled pro-Red. (White-supremacy rhetoric also flourished.) Pepper’s foe termed him “an apologist for Stalin.” Senator Glen Taylor, Henry Wallace’s ex-runningmate, lost the Idaho Democratic primary to a man who called him a Communist “dupe.” In California’s senatorial primary, liberal Congresswoman Helen Gahagan Douglas survived similar aspersions by conservative Democrats, but they continued to dog her in the general election, which she lost to Richard Nixon. The Nixon forces put out “pink sheets” detailing Douglas’s leftist votes in Congress.

At first Democrats fancied that the war might protect them from redbaiting. Liberal commentator Elmer Davis observed hopefully that McCarthy’s “campaign against imaginary Communists looks sillier than ever when the very people he has attacked most bitterly are trying to stop the real Communists.” By November, however, the growing casualty lists, the vexations of fighting an undeclared war of uncertain scope, and China’s crushing intervention made Korea a Republican, not a Democratic, asset.

In state after state, Republican candidates leveled lances at the Stalinist dragon. Anti-Communist rhetoric resounded in Senate races in California, Utah, Illinois, Connecticut, Idaho, and Maryland and less boistrously in nine other states. McCarthy spoke in several places, notably Connecticut, Maryland, and Illinois, where critics of his sought reelection. Most stunning was the failure of his chief adversary, Millard Tydings, to retain his seat in the Senate. One observer likened the Communist issue’s impact to “political polio.”

Still, while redbaiting did contribute to the campaign’s uniquely gamy flavor, most observers exaggerated its potency. The Democrats’ loss of five Senate and twenty-eight House seats actually fell below the norm for midterm elections. McCarthy received excessive credit for the defeat of Tydings, Scott Lucas, and other Democrats. The Korean undertow weakened all Democrats, and the candidacies of Tydings and Lucas were damaged by local issues. But columnist Marquis Childs expressed a prevalent, if overheated, view of the time when he wrote that “in every contest where it was a major factor, McCarthyism won.” Such expansive assessments of McCarthy’s political muscle under-girded the fear in which his colleagues held him and consequently his staying power as a demagogue.10

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