Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 30

December 12, 2024: Hawaiian Histories: Pablo Manlapit

[150 yearsago this week, Hawaii’s King Kalākaua arrivedin Washington, DC for an extended series of events, a defining part of amore than two-month statevisit to the US. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that visit and otherHawaiian histories, leading up to a special post on cultural representations ofthe islands.]

First, acouple paragraphs on the Filipino American labor leader from my book We the People:

“Theconcentration of many of these early-twentieth-century Filipino arrivals inwestern U.S. communities of migrant labor led to new forms of inspiringcommunal organization and activism, ones that also produced corresponding newforms of exclusionary prejudice. The story of Pablo Manlapit and the firstFilipino Labor Union (FLU) is particularly striking on both those levels.Manlapit was eighteen when he immigrated from the Philippines to Hawaii in1909, one of the nearly 120,000 Filipinos to arrive in Hawaii between 1900 and1931; he worked for a few years on the Hamakua Mill Company’s sugarcaneplantations, experiencing first-hand some of the discriminations andbrutalities of that labor world. In 1912, he married a Hawaiian woman, AnnieKasby, and as they began a family he left the plantation world and beganstudying the law. By 1919, Manlapit had become a practicing labor lawyer, andhe used his knowledge and connections to found the Filipino LaborUnion onAugust 31, 1919; he was also elected the organization’s first president. TheFLU would organize major strikes on Hawaiian plantations in both 1920 and 1924,as well as complementary campaigns such as the 1922 FilipinoHigher Wage Movement; these efforts did lead to wage increases and other positive effects,but the 1924 strike also culminated in the infamous September 9 Hanapepe Massacre, when police attackedstrikers, killing nine and wounding many more.

 

Manlapitwas one of sixty Filipino activists arrested after the massacre; as a conditionof his parole he was deported to California in an effort to cripple Hawaiianlabor organizing, but Manlapit continued his efforts in California, and in 1932returned to Hawaii and renewed his activism there, hoping to involve Japanese,indigenous, and other local labor communities alongside Filipino laborers. In1935, Manlapit was permanently deported from Hawaii to the Philippines, endinghis labor movement career and tragically separating him from his family, buthis influence and legacy lived on, both in Hawaii and in California. In Hawaii,the Filipino American activist Antonio Fagel organized a new,similarly cross-ethnic union, the Vibora Luviminda; the groupstruck successfully for higher wages in 1937, and would become the inspirationfor an even more sizeable and enduring 1940s Hawaiian labor union begun byChinese American longshoreman Harry Kamoku and others. In California, a group ofFilipino American labor leaders would, in 1933 in the Salinas Valley, create asecond Filipino LaborUnion(also known as the

FLU),immediately organizing a lettuce pickers’ strike that received national mediaattention and significantly expanded the Depression-era conversation overFilipino and migrant laborers. In 1940, the American Federation of Laborchartered the Filipino-led Federal Agricultural Laborers Union, cementing thesedecades of activism into a formal and enduring labor organization.”

Justa quick addendum: there are many, many reasons to better remember AsianAmerican figures and histories like Manlapit and the FLU. But high on the listis the way in which those stories and histories complicate, challenge, andchange our broader narratives of topics like work, organized labor, and protestand social movements in America. Every one of those themes has been as diverseand multi-cultural as America itself, throughout our history just as much as inthe present moment; and every one has included Asian Americans in all sorts ofcompelling and crucial ways.

LastHawaiian history tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think? Hawaiian histories or stories you’d highlight?

December 11, 2024: Hawaiian Histories: Annexation

[150 yearsago this week, Hawaii’s King Kalākaua arrivedin Washington, DC for an extended series of events, a defining part of amore than two-month statevisit to the US. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that visit and otherHawaiian histories, leading up to a special post on cultural representations ofthe islands.]

A quarter-centuryafter the United States welcomed King Kalākaua with such respect, the federalgovernment treated another Hawaiian monarch, one who had servedas Queen Regent during his subsequent 1881 world tour, with utterdisrespect. I’ve written at length about the violent overthrow of Queen Liliuokalani and the subsequentannexation of Hawaii in two pieces, this one for We’re Historyand thisone for my Saturday Evening Post Considering History column. So in lieu of a full post today, I’llask you to check out those two interconnected and complementary pieces, and tohelp us better remember this pivotal and painful moment in Hawaiian andAmerican history.  

NextHawaiian history tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think? Hawaiian histories or stories you’d highlight?

December 10, 2024: Hawaiian Histories: King Kalākaua’s Visit

[150 yearsago this week, Hawaii’s King Kalākaua arrivedin Washington, DC for an extended series of events, a defining part of amore than two-month statevisit to the US. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that visit and otherHawaiian histories, leading up to a special post on cultural representations ofthe islands.]

On threestriking moments in the state visit beyond thetime in DC (on which check out that piece and thisone, among much other coverage).

1)     San Francisco: A significant layer to my recently completed podcast wasthe story of San Francisco in the 1870s (and into the September 1881 moment inwhich the Celestials played their last game). This was the city with the nation’soldest and largest Chinatowncommunity, and also the city that became theviolent epicenter of the period’s anti-Chinese American movement; obviouslythose two facts are related, but they also reflect the true duality of acommunity that both embodied and challenged our foundational diversitythroughout this decade. Which makes it pretty interesting to think about King Kalākaua’scelebratory week in thecity in late November and early December 1874. To quote one tellingresponse, from theBlack newspaper Pacific Appeal, “there has either been a sudden abandonmentof colorphobia prejudice, or an extraordinary amount of toadyism to a crownhead by the San Francisco American people.”

2)     Transcontinental Train Trip: On December 5th,the King and his traveling party boarded a train for the weeklong journeyacross the continent to Washington. They would make extended stops along theway at such significant Western and Midwestern American communities as Cheyenne(in what was then Wyoming Territory), Omaha,and Chicago.But it’s the trip itself that interests me most here—this was just five yearsafter the completion of theTranscontinental Railroad (with the famous 1869 Golden Spike Ceremony), and thus stillquite early in the histories both of this way of traversing the nation and ofthe concept of a more genuinely interconnected nation and continent at all.Changes which contributed to the so-called “closingof the frontier,” and which likewise can be directly connected to the needfor further expansion which prompted, among countless other things, theannexation of Hawaii 25 years after the King’s visit (on which more in tomorrow’spost).   

3)     New Bedford: That was all still ahead in thenation’s Transpacific future in 1874; but toward the end of his time in the US,the King also visited a city that was absolutely essential to the nation’s Transatlanticpast. That city was NewBedford, Massachusetts, center of thewhaling industry for well more than a century and also profoundlyinterconnected with the histories of Americanslavery, among other defining origin points andcommunities. Among the many compelling details of the King’s visitto New Bedford on New Year’s Day, 1875, my favorite for all those reasonshas to be the epic dinner hosted by Mayor George Richmondand featuring 100 master mariners from the community (with each and every oneof whom the King shook hands at the dinner’s end). Ain’t that America?

NextHawaiian history tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think? Hawaiian histories or stories you’d highlight?

December 9, 2024: Hawaiian Histories: Three Shifts

[150 yearsago this week, Hawaii’s King Kalākaua arrivedin Washington, DC for an extended series of events, a defining part of amore than two-month statevisit to the US. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that visit and otherHawaiian histories, leading up to a special post on cultural representations ofthe islands.]

On threemoments through which Hawaii’s history significantly shifted.

1)     1778-1779, Contacts: I was pretty tempted to orderthese three focal moments non-chronologically, as I really don’t want toreinforce the idea that contact with non-Hawaiians/Europeans was the mostsignificant part of Hawaiian history. But with a full recognition that anyindividual choices for a post like this will be partial and reductive, and ahope that you all understand where I’m coming from, I decided to stick with chronology.And there’s no doubt that Captain James Cook’s controversialseries of voyages to the islands in the late 1770s, the firstknown encounter between Europeans and Hawaiians, altered the histories ofboth this particular community and multiple nations (including Cook’s nativeGreat Britain but also the new United States). Not to mention the effects onCook, who was killedin February 1779 during a confrontation with Hawaiian leaders.

2)     1795, Kingdom: I don’t know nearly enoughabout the island’s histories to be able to say for sure whether this second shiftwas in any direct way related to that first one, but it seems likely that there’ssome causality between the two events, that these encounters with outsiderspushed Hawaiian leaders to establish a more formal and forceful rule. There hadof course been prominent native Hawaiian community leaders for centuries by thistime, but it was in 1795 that the leaderwho came to be known as King Kamehameha I founded the House of Kamehameha, aroyal dynasty that would reign over the islands for the next century. As anyonewith a general knowledge of human history and/or human nature would expect, hedidn’t unify the islands under his rule without multiple, extended conflicts,though—including a particularly significant, subsequent shift…

3)     1819, Conflicts over Kapu: Across much ofthose prior centuries of leadership, Hawaii had been a theocracy, governed by aset of religious and social rules knownas kanawai. More exactly, these rules outlawed various practices, known as kapu,a list of forbidden customs that included women eating alongside men. But in 1819,again likely influenced by the prior half-century of contacts and changes, King Kamehameha IIpublicly dined with two royal women, including his mother Queen Keopuolani.The controversial moment ignited an extendedcivil conflict that ended with both a reinforcement of the dynasty’s ruleand with a newfound sense of Hawaiian modernity—one that would directly connectto the royal outreach which inspired this week’s series and about which I’llwrite tomorrow.

NextHawaiian history tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think? Hawaiian histories or stories you’d highlight?

December 7-8, 2024: McCarthy’s America: 21st Century Echoes

[70years ago this week, the Senate voted to censure Senator Joseph McCarthy, akey final step in the downfall of that domineering and divisive demagogue. So inthis series I’ve AmericanStudied a few layers to McCarthy’s America, leading upto this weekend post on his and the moment’s modern echoes.]

[NB. I’mdrafting this post before the election, so y’know, as with every other damnthing in 2024, its meanings will likely vary wildly depending on how that goes.]

Onthroughlines, overt and overarching, and what we must learn from them.

I haven’thad a chance to see the new film The Apprentice(2024), and I’m not sure I will ever do so; spending an extra couple hours inthe company of DonaldTrump and Roy Cohn isn’t high on my to-do list. But I certainly believethere’s significant value in trying to highlight, in any way and through anymedium, that defining figure and relationship in Trump’s life. Long before hewas involved in politics in any real way, Trump seems to have learneda great deal from Cohn, who was (as I argued in Thursday’s post) one of themost hypocritical as well as one of the most vile and destructive figures in 20thcentury American history. Trump has dominated the last decade of our politicaland national life in ways that are strikingly similar to McCarthy’s influence inthe late 1940s and early 1950s [again, I’m drafting this before the election,so I don’t know how much he will dominate the next few years, but no matterwhat I’m frustratingly sure we are not close to through with him], and rightthere at the center of both moments is the odious Roy Cohn.

The more onelearns about Joe McCarthy, though, the more it’s he who parallels Trump in somany ways. McCarthy liedabout everything all the time, including if not especially hisown past and identity and actions. He attacked almost everyone else,defining them as enemies of both himself and the entire United States, in waysthat can only be read as projections of his own blatant desire to undermine theAmerican experiment. And when he was called out on those and so many otherhorrors, he made himself the victim (such as in the “lynch party” response tothe censure resolution that I highlighted in Friday’s post), because ultimatelyall of it was about his own fragile ego. (And oh yeah, he defendedfreaking Nazis too.) I’m not sure we can find anywhere in American historytwo littler men than Joseph McCarthy and Donald Trump, and that littleness is,ironically but unquestionably, at the heart of the outsized influence that thetwo men exercised on their respective moments.

InDecember 1954, McCarthy was finally and thoroughly rebuked by his colleagues (includingmany of his fellow Republicans), a culminating fall from grace that apparentlyserved to pushhim out of the public eye (and likely contributed to his death fromcomplications of alcoholism less than three years later, in May1957). To say it one more time, this time not in brackets but in the main proseof this post: I’m drafting this prior to the 2024 election, and so I can onlyhope—and sweet sassy molassy do I hope—that those results will serve as a similarand even more truly communal and national rebuke of Donald Trump and his MAGAmovement. But whatever has happened by the time this post airs, there’s nodoubt that we will need to continue pushing back, in every way and every moment,on another figure who has embodied the very worst of our histories, of ouridentity, of our impulses.

Next seriesstarts Monday,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think?

December 6, 2024: McCarthy’s America: Censure

[70years ago this week, the Senate voted to censure Senator Joseph McCarthy, akey final step in the downfall of that domineering and divisive demagogue. So inthis series I’ll AmericanStudy a few layers to McCarthy’s America, leading up toa weekend post on his and the moment’s modern echoes.]

On a seriesof quotes that reflect the histories and figures at the end of the December1954 censure vote.

1)     “Contrary to senatorial traditions”: By the springof 1954 McCarthy had been bullying and blustering his way through countless Senatehearings, but his April hearingson the U.S. Army still represented an escalation of those actions andattitudes. And one that prompted a striking response from one of his Senate andparty colleagues: on July 30th, SenatorRalph Flanders (R-VT) introduced a censureresolution against McCarthy, arguing that his actions ran “contrary tosenatorial traditions.” The Senate has always been a body divided between itsideals and its realities, as reflected by thehistory of the filibuster for example; but clearly McCarthy’s uglyrealities had finally become too much to bear by mid-1954, and the unusual stepof a censure debate illustrates that shift.

2)     “A lynch party”: On August 2nd, theSenate convened a bipartisanselect committee, chaired by Senator Arthur V.Watkins (R-UT) and featuring three Senators total from each party, to investigateFlanders’ resolution and the censure charges and report back to the entirebody. Throughout their months of work McCarthy was as aggressive and hostile ofa colleague as we would expect, building to an extended debate in Novemberduring which McCarthy calledthe entire investigation “a lynch party.” I’m not sure I need to say anythingelse about what that quote reveals about this man and his perspective, do I?

3)     “Dishonor and Disrepute” vs. “Dignity”: In responseto McCarthy’s attacks, SenatorWatkins delivered a speech on the Senate floor defending the “dignity” ofthe body. And when the Senate votedon December 2nd, 1954 to accept the committee’s recommendationand censure McCarthy, they continued to use that term and contrasted it withtwo others, arguing that McCarthy had “acted contrary to senatorial ethics andtended to bring the Senate into dishonor and disrepute, to obstruct the constitutionalprocesses of the Senate, and to impair its dignity.” Whatever we might sayabout the real vs. ideal histories of this body, there’s no doubt that thisunusual senatorial action reflected just how far and how low McCarthy had gone—alesson, as I’ll argue this weekend, we would do well to heed.

Specialpost this weekend,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think?

December 5, 2024: McCarthy’s America: Roy Cohn

[70years ago this week, the Senate voted to censure Senator Joseph McCarthy, akey final step in the downfall of that domineering and divisive demagogue. So inthis series I’ll AmericanStudy a few layers to McCarthy’s America, leading up toa weekend post on his and the moment’s modern echoes.]

On the figurewho embodies American hypocrisies—and perhaps something more.

Back before he went around a wholeseries of increasingly extreme bends, the journalist Glenn Greenwald wrote ascathing critique of the modern GOP entitled GreatAmerican Hypocrites (2008). While I certainly agree with Greenwald’spremise and his specific examples, and similarly feel that hypocrisy has becomea core ingredient of a party’s entire political platform in a way that it hasperhaps never before been, I would also emphasize just how strong a rolehypocrisy has played in American narratives throughout our existence. Thatargument could go back, for example, to the official seal of theMassachusetts Bay Colony, which depicted a Native American beggingprospective arrivals to “Come over and help us”: the seal reveals not only acore hypocrisy in the Puritans’ perspectives, since (as WilliamBradford’s Of Plimoth Plantation and many others documentsdemonstrate) the local Native tribes quickly (well before this seal’s creation)and thoroughly became the Puritans’ greatest perceived obstacle to overcome onthe path to building their city on a hill; but also another and more subtlehypocrisy in their experiences, since without the early aid of local NativeAmericans such as Squanto (as Bradford does admit, to his credit) thePlymouth colony (and thus likely the Puritan settlements that followed it)would almost certainly have failed.

I could probably maintain a dailyblog on such American hypocrisies and not run out of examples any time soon,but for this week’s series I wanted to focus on a figure whose public andpersonal lives and identities perhaps most fully embody (in every sense) thesenational hypocrisies: RoyCohn (1927-1986). Cohn rose to prominence in political and public life asone of SenatorJoseph McCarthy’s nastiest attack dogs, a lawyer who seemingly thrived onferreting out hidden and secret (and, as ever in the McCarthy era, dubious atbest) details of the lives of government employees and other McCarthy targetsand helping expose them for a paranoid and fearful nation. As was generally thecase in the anti-Communist witch hunts, Cohn was never averse to directlylinking homosexualityand other forms of “deviant” behavior to Communist leanings, since, in thisperspective, one kind of secret life was likely to echo and reveal others. Itwas only decades later, when Cohnwas publicly diagnosed in the 1980s with the decade’s newest and mostthreatening disease, AIDS, that the truth of Cohn’s own very secret (he hadbeen famously linked to various famous women over the years) gay identity wassimilarly revealed. While it is of course both unfair and ultimately impossibleto speak with any authority about any other individual’s sexual and intimateexperiences and life, it’s perhaps least unfair to do so when that individualhas made identifying and attacking the sexual preferences of others part andparcel of his career and legacy—after all, if Cohn believed, as both he andMcCarthy stated explicitly on numerous occasions, that being homosexual shoulddisqualify someone from taking part in political life in America, then his ownidentity as a closeted gay political figure was ideologically as well aspersonally hypocritical.

The truths of both individualidentity and communal existence, however, are really more complicated thanthat, and while it’s tempting simply to point out Cohn’s hypocrisy, and moresaliently to use it to critique the profoundly destructive and illegitimateroots of McCarthyism more broadly, there’s significant value in trying toimagine and analyze this very complex and certainly very representativeAmerican’s life and perspective. By far the best such imagined version of Cohnproduced to date, at least to my knowledge, would have to be that created byplaywright Tony Kushner in his two-part, Pulitzer-winning, innovative andbrilliant play Angelsin America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes (1991-1993). Kushner’splay has a lot to recommend it, including some of the most raw and powerfuldepictions of AIDS yet produced in any genre or medium, but without questionone of its strongest elements is the characterization of Cohn, a vulgar, violent,petty, power-hungry aging lawyer and Washington player who also manages to befunny, charismatic, likeable, and ultimately even sympathetic as he struggleswith both the disease that he refuses to admit he has and the ghosts of those(especially Ethel Rosenberg) to whose destruction he contributed so centrally.In a play full of interesting characters and show-stopping moments, Cohn isperhaps the linchpin and certainly the anti-hero and villain and star, and Ican’t think of a better description of national hypocrisies more generally.

LastMcCarthy context tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think?

December 4, 2024: McCarthy’s America: Edward R. Murrow

[70years ago this week, the Senate voted to censure Senator Joseph McCarthy, akey final step in the downfall of that domineering and divisive demagogue. So inthis series I’ll AmericanStudy a few layers to McCarthy’s America, leading up toa weekend post on his and the moment’s modern echoes.]

On the specialreport that helped begin McCarthy’s fall, and the response that only hastenedit further.

In this piecefor the Saturday Evening Post, on the 50th anniversary ofWalterCronkite’s famous February 27th, 1967 special report on theVietnam War, I argued that Cronkite, along with his contemporary investigativereporter David Halberstam, helped provide models of adversarial journalism thatchanged the journalistic landscape and have endured into our own moment. But inso doing, CBS Evening News anchor Cronkite was also following in the footstepsof his equally influential predecessor at CBS (bothin radio and television), EdwardR. Murrow. Murrow had been delivering radio reports for CBS since the late1930s, and by the early 1950s was one of the nation’s most prominentjournalists in multiple media. His longstanding radio program Hear It Nowtransitioned to television on November 18th, 1951 as See It Now, and atthe same time Murrow began contributing both reporting and opinion pieces tothe CBS Evening News.

One of Murrow’smost important and influential See It Nowpieces aired on March 9th, 1954. Entitled “A Report on Senator JosephMcCarthy,” the half-hour episode used McCarthy’s own statements andspeeches to highlight his contradictions and hypocrisies (foreshadowing whatmedia commentary shows like TheDaily Show would do half acentury later). CBS was extremely wary of running the show, and did not allowMurrow and his longtimeproducer Fred W. Friendly to use the CBS logo or to take advantage of CBSresources to publicize the episode. So Murrow and Friendly paid themselves toadvertise the show in newspaper across the country, clearly believing that theywere doing meaningful work that should reach as broad an audience as possible.I would agree, and would emphasize that in the era before either cable newsnetworks or the internet, it’s quite possible (if not very likely) that mostAmericans had not had the chance to hear the majority of the McCarthy statementsand speeches used in the episode. They certainly would not have been able tohear them in close succession, and thus to understand the kinds of deceptions,falsehoods, and half-truths that (as I traced in yesterday’s post) McCarthy hadbeen relying on throughout his life and career.

The episode’svery first statement emphasized that McCarthy would have the chance to respondon a subsequent episode of See It Nowif he chose. He did, and joined Murrow for another half-hour episode on April 6th, 1954.Unsurprisingly, given the history of ad hominem and inaccurate personal attacksthat I also traced yesterday, McCarthy mostly used his TV time to take onMurrow, calling him a communist sympathizer and then adding, “Ordinarily, Iwould not take time out from the important work at hand to answer Murrow.However, in this case I feel justified in doing so because Murrow is a symbol,a leader, and the cleverest of the jackal pack which is always found at thethroat of anyone who dares to expose individual communists and traitors.” Notonly were these accusations entirely unfounded, but they reflected McCarthy’sunwillingness (or, more exactly, inability) to respond to the specific factualcharges that the original episode had leveled against him. The audience andnationwide responses to the rebuttal show were just as fully in favor of Murrowand critical of McCarthy as had been those to the original episode, and takentogether these two episodes illustrate the possibility for quality adversarial journalismto truly help shift collective conversations and debates.

NextMcCarthy context tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think?

December 3, 2024: McCarthy’s America: Chambers, White, and Hiss

[70years ago this week, the Senate voted to censure Senator Joseph McCarthy, akey final step in the downfall of that domineering and divisive demagogue. So inthis series I’ll AmericanStudy a few layers to McCarthy’s America, leading up toa weekend post on his and the moment’s modern echoes.]

Onespionage, railroading, and the true complexity of historical nuance.

In one of myearliest posts for this blog, I used the wonderful Season 2 West Wing episode “Somebody’s Going toEmergency, Somebody’s Going to Jail” to think about recently revealed detailsof the Rosenberg case and the question of historical nuance. In lieu of a newfirst paragraph here, I’d love for you to check out that post if you would, andthen come on back here for today’s thoughts.

Welcomeback! The same thorny questions I considered in that post, of how we canaccurately critique McCarthyism (on which more in tomorrow’s post) whilegrappling with the apparent truths of the Rosenberg case, certainly seem toapply to the story of two of HUAC’s most famous targets, HarryDexter White and Alger Hiss. InAugust 1948, HUACsubpoenaed Whittaker Chambers, an admitted former Soviet spy now working asa senior editor at Time; in histestimony Chambers named names of other alleged Soviet agents in the U.S.government, including Treasury Department official White and State Departmentofficial Hiss. Both men denied the accusations categorically; White died of aheart attack a few days later and the questionof his espionage remains entirely unclear, while Hiss waseventually convictedof perjury (thanks to documents provided by Chambers which contradictedHiss’ sworn statements before the committee) and imprisoned for years. Hissmaintained his innocence until his death in 1996, but recently released Soviet archivalmaterials seem toprovide proof that he was at least for a time on the Kremlin’s payroll.

There’s alot more to say about these cases than I can fit into one more paragraph, but Iwant to make three points here. First, it’s important to note that someoneworking for the federal government and spying for the Soviet Union is in a fardifferent and more troubling position than a cultural figure accused ofCommunist sympathies (like all those about whom I wrote in yesterday’s post);if that was indeed the case for Hiss, he deserved at least to lose his job, andlikely to serve time in prison. Second, it’s just as important to note thatlives can be and were destroyed by such accusations regardless of the facts;Harry Dexter White, one of the 20thcentury’s greatest economic minds, is exhibit A in that case. Andthird, it’s precisely the job—or at least one central job—of all who seek toexplore and engage our histories to include both those points, among others, inour nuanced and multi-layered understanding and narrative of the past. We canadd our own emphases and arguments to be sure, and I would argue that HUAC andMcCarthy were more damaging to the US than Soviet spies. But there’s no way tounderstand the 1940s and 50s in America without recognizing that both thosecommunities were problematic parts of our political and social landscape.

NextMcCarthy context tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think?

December 2, 2024: McCarthy’s America: Mythic Patriotism

[70years ago this week, the Senate voted to censure Senator Joseph McCarthy, akey final step in the downfall of that domineering and divisive demagogue. So inthis series I’ll AmericanStudy a few layers to McCarthy’s America, leading up toa weekend post on his and the moment’s modern echoes.]

An excerptfrom Of Thee I Sing thathighlights how HUAC and (especially) Joe McCarthy embodied the worst of mythicpatriotism.

“Boththe Depression and World War II eras’ fears of anti-American radi­cals,movements, and communities likewise extended into the post-war mo­ment in aneven more prominent and overarching way, with the emergence of the hugelyinfluential, mythic perspective expressed and embodied by Wisconsin SenatorJoseph McCarthy. Despite McCarthy’s central role in perpetuating and amplifyingthose myths, it’s important to note that another vital source for thatperspective, the tellingly named House Committee on Un-American Activities(HUAC), pre-dated both McCarthy (who became a Senator in 1947) and the post-warperiod. HUAC, also known as the Dies Committee after its chair, TexasRepresentative Martin Dies Jr., was created as a special investigatingcommittee in 1938, building upon and making more official the work of earlierCongressional committees such as the 1934–37 Special Committee on Un-AmericanActivities to Investigate Nazi Propa­ganda and Certain Other PropagandaActivities. From the beginning HUAC’s investigations focused on fears ofcommunism and targeted many of the period’s most prominent Americancommunities: student radicals, as illus­trated by a 1939 investigation into thecommunist-affiliated American Youth Congress; New Deal artists, as illustratedby the 1938 subpoena of Federal Theatre Project director Hallie Flanagan toaddress communist influences on that project; and Japanese Americans, asillustrated by HUAC’s infamous “Yellow Report” which made the case forinternment based on a number of mythic arguments about Japanese loyalty to theempire.

When Senator McCarthy extended and amplified thoseinvestigations in the post-war period, he did so with the help of twointerconnected mythic pa­triotic arguments. First, the World War II veteranMcCarthy used propagan­distic war stories to make the case for his owncandidacy and governmental role. McCarthy had served as a Marine Corpsintelligence officer and aviator between August 1942 and April 1945, and in theprocess received (or quite possibly gave himself) the nickname “Tail-GunnerJoe.” When he ran for the Senate against incumbent Robert M. La Follette Jr.,McCarthy criticized La Follette’s lack of military service, although LaFollette was 46 years old at the start of the war, and used the slogan“Congress needs a tail-gunner” to play up his own. He also created myths abouthis military service: an exaggerated number of aerial missions (32, rather thanthe actual number of 12) in order to qualify for a Distinguished Flying Cross;a broken leg that McCarthy referred to as a “war wound” but had in factoccurred during a shipboard celebration upon crossing the equator; and a letterof commendation that he claimed had been written by his commanding officer butturned out to have been written by McCarthy himself. None of these myths elidethe reality of McCarthy’s wartime experiences and service, but they reflect awillingness to create pro­paganda based on such real experiences, in order tosignificantly bolster his own authority and arguments.

Ashe began making his overtly exclusionary arguments in early 1950, McCarthy didso through equally mythic images of a government and na­tion overrun by andfighting back against “enemies within.” McCarthy used that phrase in a February9th, 1950 speech to the Wheeling, West Virginia Republican Women’s Club, anaddress in which he also produced “a list of names” of alleged “members of theCommunity Party . . . working and shap­ing policy in the State Department.” Ashe turned that idea into the origin point for a four-year exclusionary crusadeagainst “anti-American” forces and communities of all types, from communistsand fellow travelers to leftist intellectuals and academics, artistic andcultural figures, homosexuals, and other “subversives,” McCarthy linked thatcrusade to a mythic vision of an embattled American identity for which he wasthe consistent and chief cham­pion. “McCarthyism is Americanism with itssleeves rolled,” he argued in a 1952 speech during his successful reelectioncampaign, and he titled his book published later that year McCarthyism: TheFight for America.”

NextMcCarthy context tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think?