Abstract
Despite historians’ best efforts to disassociate the anti-communist purges of the post-World War II era from one individual’s extreme behavior, the early Cold War years continue to be known as the McCarthy era, and Senator Joseph McCarthy remains a symbol—perhaps the paramount symbol—of irrationality and illegitimacy in American politics. His fall from grace in 1954 likewise denotes the return to moral order and political sanity. McCarthy did not introduce the practices and policies of political repression and sexual oppression that constituted the domestic Cold War, and many of those practices and policies outlasted him. Nonetheless, he inhabits our memories as their most visceral representation. The man—his name, his face, as much as his behavior—stands for the era.1
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Notes
Ellen Schrecker, Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America (princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998).
The most important accounts of McCarthy’s career include David M. Oshinsky, A Conspiracy So Immense: The World of Joe McCarthy (new York: Free Press, 1983)
Thomas C. Reeves, The Life and Times of Joe McCarthy: A Biography (Lanham, MD: Madison Books, 1997)
Richard H. Rovere, Senator Joe McCarthy (new York: Harcourt, Brace, 1959)
Robert Griffith, The Politics of Fear: Joseph R. McCarthy and the Senate (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987)
Arthur Herman, Joseph McCarthy: Reexamining the Life and Legacy of America’s Most Hated Senator (new York: Free Press, 2000).
John D’Emilio, “The Homosexual Menace: The Politics of Sexuality in Cold War America,” in Passion and Power: Sexuality in History, ed. Kathy Peiss and Christina Simmons (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1989), 226–240
K. A. Cuordileone, “‘Politics in an Age of Anxiety’: Cold War Political Culture and the Crisis in American Masculinity,” Journal of American History 87.2 (2000): 515–545
Robert D. Dean, Imperial Brotherhood: Gender and the Making of Cold War Foreign Policy (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001)
David K. Johnson, The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).
Thomas Doherty, “Pixies: Homosexuality, Anti-Communism, and the Army-McCarthy Hearings,” in Television Histories: Shaping Collective Memory in the Media Age, ed. Gary R. Edgerton and Peter C. Rollins (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2001), 193–206
also Cuordileone, “Politics in an Age of Anxiety,” 541–543; Dean, Imperial Brotherhood, 147–154.
Dean, Imperial Brotherhood, 66–67
Michael S. Sherry, In the Shadow of War: The United States since the 1930s (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995).
On master-slave rhetoric in the Cold War, see Michael Rogin, Ronald Reagan, the Movie: and Other Episodes in Political Demonology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987).
As David Johnson notes, lesbians were affected by the lavender scare in profound ways, but they were less visible as signifiers of the dangers facing the nation.
Jack Alexander, “The Senate’s Remarkable Upstart,” Saturday Evening Post, August 8, 1947, p. 15.
Johnson, Lavender Scare, 96 Stephen J. Whitfield, The Culture of the Cold War (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), 43–45
Allen J. Matusow (ed.) Joseph R. McCarthy (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1970), 22–23, 51.
Cuordileone, “Politics in an Age of Anxiety” Steven Cohan, Masked Men: Masculinity and the Movies in the Fifties (bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997).
Oliver Pilat, Drew Pearson: An Unauthorized Biography (New York: Harper’s Magazine Press, 1973)
Herman Klurfeld, Behind the Lines: The World of Drew Pearson (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1968)
Drew Pearson, Diaries, 1949–1959, ed. Tyler Abell (new York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1974), vii
February 25, 1950 column, box 5, Drew Pearson Papers (Syracuse University Library; hereafter DPP). On Winchell, see Neal Gabler, Winchell: Gossip, Power and the Culture of Celebrity (new York: Knopf, 1995). On distinctions between hard news and entertainment, see Sasha Torres, “Sex of a Kind: On Graphic Language and the Modesty of Television News,” in Our Monica Ourselves: The Clinton Affair and the National Interest, ed. Lauren Berlant and Lisa Duggan (new York: New York University Press, 2001).
May 1, 1950 clipping, box 2, Thomas Reeves Papers (State Historical Society of Wisconsin); see also Draft Radio Broadcast, and Memo FB to DP re: Handling McCarthy [n.d.], box G222, 3 of 3, Personal Papers of Drew Pearson (LBJ Library, Austin, TX; hereafter PPDP). On early criticisms of McCarthy, see Michael O’Brien, McCarthy and McCarthyism in Wisconsin (new York: Columbia University Press, 1980)
Edwin R. Bayley, Joe McCarthy and the Press (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1981).
Oshinsky, Conspiracy So Immense, 252
Roy Cohn, McCarthy (new York: New American Library, 1968), 45–46
Reeves, Life and Times, 464–465
Sidney Zion, The Autobiography of Roy Cohn (Secaucus, NJ: Lyle Stuart, 1988), 45, 87; Nicholas von Hoffman, Citizen Cohn (new York: Doubleday, 1988), 140–142; Thomas L. Dumm, “Trial of J. Edgar Hoover,” in Secret Agents: The Rosenberg Case, McCarthyism, and Fifties America, ed. Marjorie Garber and Rebecca L. Walkowitz (new York: Routledge, 1995), 77–92.
Cohn, McCarthy, 81; Zion, Autobiography of Roy Cohn, 90–91.
New York Times, April 12, 1953, 8; ibid., April 16, 1953, 6; Washington Post, April 26, 1953, 3B; April 22, 1953 column, box 3, Reeves Papers; Richard H. Rovere, “The Adventures of Cohn and Schine,” The Reporter, July 21, 1953, 9–16; Theodore Kaghan, “The McCarthyization of Theodore Kaghan,” The Reporter, July 21, 1953, 17–25; typescript [n.d. n.a.], and Jock Lawrence to Drew Pearson, April 15, 1953, box G221, 3 of 3, PPDP.
On anxieties about homosociality, see Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (new York: Columbia University Press, 1985)
Robert J. Corber, Homosexuality in Cold War America: Resistance and the Crisis of Masculinity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997).
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© 2014 Kathleen A. Feeley and Jennifer Frost
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Friedman, A. (2014). The Smearing of Joe McCarthy: The Lavender Scare, Gossip, and Cold War Politics. In: Feeley, K.A., Frost, J. (eds) When Private Talk Goes Public. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137442307_11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137442307_11
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