(Think, for instance, of FBI head and fellow monster J. Then as now, his was hardly the only belligerent face in the room. In the wake of that censure, in fact, a Gallup poll found that 34 percent of all voters still approved of him. In April 1954, the Post assigned my mom to cover the televised Army-McCarthy hearings and, for that purpose, bought our family its first black-and-white TV.Īnd like Trump, even after Joe was a total loser-censured by his Senate colleagues in 1954, he would die a few years later, possibly of drink, a broken man-his fans among the voters remained with him. Its editor James Wechsler took on Joe McCarthy in its pages and was then called before his Senate committee in blistering testimony in which he was attacked as a communist sympathizer. The Post, curiously enough, had her do caricatures of just about every political figure of that moment, nationally and globally, and ran them as if they were photos, even sometimes on its front page. In the 1950s, as that way of life disappeared ( Al Hirschfeld aside), she found work doing her caricatures to accompany articles in The New Yorker and, above all, in the New York Post, which was then a liberal rag, not a Murdoch one. (Well, okay, there was also Helen Hokinson of The New Yorker, but you get the idea.) In the 1930s and 1940s, my mom had done mainly theatrical caricatures for every paper in town from The New York Times and Herald Tribune to PM and the Brooklyn Eagle. (She worked under her maiden name, Irma Selz.) That was so rare then that, in a gossip column I still have, she was referred to as “New York’s girl caricaturist.” While there were men aplenty in the world of cartooning then, there was just one of her. My mother was a professional caricaturist. I came from a liberal Democratic family in New York City. Recently, however, I once again came across a figure from the McCarthy era who did indeed notice, but bear with me as I slowly wend my way toward him. That’s a story all too little noticed by most Americans in Joe McCarthy’s time as in our own. And, of course, since the 9/11 attacks that funding has simply gone through the roof. Even the implosion of the Soviet Union that left this country, at least briefly, without a significant enemy on the planet never resulted in a “peace dividend” when it came to lowering “national-security” spending. That turns out not to be a choice in American politics. Nothing, not defeat as in Vietnam and Afghanistan, or anything else has ever stopped it from being massively overfunded by whatever administration is in power or whatever party controls Congress. It hasn’t mattered in the least that, since World War II, the most wildly overfunded military on the planet hasn’t won a significant war of any sort, despite fighting and losing a number of them or, at best, in Korea and perhaps Iraq, tying them. Trump), began holding hearings investigating supposed communist influence in the Army and, in response, the military, you might say, did him in. In 1953, with the help of his chief counsel Roy Cohn (who, I’m sure you won’t be surprised to learn, would later become a guiding light for one Donald J. And then, with the all-too-hot Korean war at an end and the Cold War becoming ever more frigid, McCarthy, who had had a field day, went one step too far. He made life a living hell for a stunning range of Americans. He shot to fame in 1950 by claiming he had inside information that 205 members of the State Department-yes, 205!-were card-carrying members of the Communist Party.īefore that spring of 1954, McCarthy had the Trumpian time of his life holding endless Senate hearings to denounce public figures of every sort as communists. The star, if you want to think of him that way, and the most distinctly Trumpian figure of his moment and perhaps any other moment before The Donald, was Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy. At that time, long before anyone had even dreamed of social media, TVs-black and white ones, of course-were changing lives and habits across the country. It was April 1954 when what came to be known as the Army-McCarthy hearings hit television screens nationwide. Still, young as I then was, I do remember one of those earlier mad moments in American politics. They even banned publications they didn’t like from the mail and managed to put a former presidential candidate for the then-popular Socialist Party, Eugene V. I didn’t live through the era that, in his recent book, historian Adam Hochschild called American Midnight, the moment during and after World War I when President Woodrow Wilson and his associates cracked down on dissent of almost any sort. In fact, Washington has long been a stranger and more ominous place than one might imagine.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |