Blowing Smoke - Michael Wolraich [134]
Between the efforts of Buckley, Goldwater, and Hofstadter, the JBS became associated with pernicious extremism and outlandish paranoia. For instance, the California Fact-Finding Subcommittee on Un-American Activities had praised the JBS in 1963, but two years later the same subcommittee declared that the organization had attracted “a lunatic fringe” and “emotionally unstable people.”49 The JBS’s membership evaporated, and it vanished into the political fringe where it has remained ever since. Almost. In 1997, Glenn Beck invited JBS spokesman Sam Antonio onto his CNN show to discuss Antonio’s views of the government conspiracy to smuggle drugs across the Mexican border. “Sam, I have to tell you,” Beck professed, “When I was growing up, the John Birch Society, I thought they were a bunch of nuts, however, you guys are starting to make more and more sense to me.”50
“No Sense of Decency”
But even at its height, the JBS never reached an audience even close to that of Glenn Beck, so it was relatively easy to marginalize. For a more commensurate comparison, we need to step back one more decade to the last great epidemic of political paranoia in the United States. In the early 1950s, the country was wrought with anxiety over communism. The Soviets had acquired nuclear weapons, Mao Tse-tung had taken over China, and the Korean War threatened to expand communism around the globe. In addition, a series of high-profile spy cases, including those of Alger Hiss and the Rosenbergs, provoked fears of subversion from within.
Sen. Joe McCarthy (R-WI) harnessed these growing anxieties to convert the anticommunist paranoia that had been simmering on the fringe into a full-blown epidemic of paranoia. Across the nation, governments, companies, schools, and other organizations imposed loyalty oaths, inquisitions, and blacklists. Conservatives attacked unions and civil rights leaders for supposedly collaborating with the Soviet Union. Careers were destroyed, books were banned, and anti-intellectualism ran rampant.
As has been happening today, Republicans encouraged the paranoia for political gain. Joe McCarthy often campaigned for his colleagues, and historians have credited his anticommunist crusade with the defeat of several prominent Democrats in the 1950 elections. Dwight Eisenhower despised McCarthy, but that didn’t stop him from campaigning with him through Wisconsin in pursuit of the presidency. Once in office, Eisenhower cut his ties to McCarthy but refused to publicly condemn him, concluding that “nothing will be so effective in combating his particular kind of trouble-making as to ignore him.”dh51
But ignoring McCarthy didn’t help. Nor did Eisenhower’s attempts to co-opt McCarthy’s platform by purging federal employees in a loyalty campaign. Instead, the dismissals encouraged anticommunist Republicans to boast loudly of the 1,456 “subversives” that the government had sacked.52 Like today’s paranoid right, the anticommunists’ success in intimidating and marginalizing critics affirmed their paranoia and emboldened them to spin even more outrageous conspiracy theories.
And that would finally prove their undoing. For when Joe McCarthy expanded his attacks to the U.S. Army and the nation’s churches, he finally provoked the one force that could stop him: public condemnation.
At first, the army tried to appease McCarthy, which only encouraged him to humiliate a celebrated general in subcommittee hearings. And after a lunch meeting with Secretary of the Army Robert Stevens, McCarthy crowed that Stevens “could not have given in more abjectly if he had got down on his knees.”53
Finally, in 1954 the army fought back, accusing McCarthy of improperly pressuring military officials to give an enlisted former aide preferential treatment. The U.S. Army-McCarthy hearings were broadcast on national television, and Joe McCarthy did not come off well. After weeks of McCarthy’s bullying and belligerent disruptions, the army’s attorney, Joseph Welch, issued his famous rhetorical masterstroke as McCarthy sought