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in favor of melodramatic black and white. It was a world the newspaper reader could understand and where he could see Results. That it was also as fictional a world as Kipling’s—more so, in fact, since Kipling knew a lot about British India while McCarthy never bothered to find out anything about American Communism—was irrelevant. The Senator was a good enough dramaturge to persuade the public to believe in his provincial little world, and his daily revelations had the same interest that village gossip does. After all, since when did gossip have to be true to be interesting?

In other ways, also, McCarthy’s years of power—surely one of the strangest episodes in our political history, which suffers from no paucity of the cockeyed—represented a melancholy Triumph of the Fact.

For half a century, what Theodore Roosevelt contemptuously dubbed “muckraking”—after Bunyan’s Man with a Muck-Rake—was a monopoly of the liberals. The reformers’ ritual began, and often successfully ended, with Getting The Facts. Popular magazines flourished on the formula, notably McClure’s with series like Lincoln Steffens’ “The Shame of the Cities” and Ida Tarbell’s “History of the Standard Oil Company.” Brandeis invented the “sociological brief,” which substituted socio-economic data for legal reasoning—in a ratio of 50 to 1 in his famous 1907 brief in defense of the Oregon Ten-Hour Law. “There is no logic that is properly applicable to these laws except the logic of facts,” he explained, echoing Tom Paine’s “Facts are more powerful than arguments.” But the reformers’ chief instrument was the legislative investigating committee, from the Hughes insurance investigation (1905) and the Pujo Committee’s hearings on the “Money Trust” (1913) through the Nye munitions investigation (1933)[5] to the LaFollette civil-liberties hearings (1937) and the massive economic researches of the Senate’s “Monopoly Committee” (1938–40). The assumption was that The Facts would favor civic virtue, and indeed they generally did. Malefactors trembled when Al Smith, the reform governor of New York, rasped “Let’s look at the record!”

The junior Senator from Wisconsin turned Let’s-Get-the-Facts in the opposite direction. He was not the first to try, of course. In the ’twenties and ’thirties, the Lusk and Fish committees of the New York legislature, and the “Dies Committee” (on Un-American Activities) of Congress, among others, investigated Communism; but their chairmen lacked McCarthy’s flair for melodrama. More important, the times were not ripe: it was not until the late ’forties, when Soviet Russia first emerged as a powerful and dangerous enemy, that the national temper grew edgy enough for the rise of a McCarthy.

The puzzling thing about McCarthy was that he had no ideology, no program, not even any prejudices. He was not anti-labor, anti-Negro, anti-Semitic, anti-Wall Street, or anti-Catholic, to name the phobias most exploited by previous demagogues. He never went in for patriotic spellbinding, or indeed for oratory at all, his style being low-keyed and legalistic. Although he was often called a fascist and compared to Hitler, the parallel applied only to his methods. Not only was the historical situation hopeless for a radical change like fascism, the country being unprecedentedly prosperous, but McCarthy never showed any interest in reshaping society. Half confidence man, half ward politician, he was simply out for his own power and profit, and he took advantage of the nervousness about communism to gain these modest perquisites. The same opportunism which made him dangerous in a small way prevented him from being a more serious threat, since for such large historical operations as the subversion of a social order there is required—as the examples of Lenin and Hitler showed—a fanaticism which doesn’t shrink from commitment to programs which are often inopportune.

The contrast in demagogic styles between Hitler and McCarthy is related to national traits—and foibles. Hitler exploited the German weakness for theory, for vast perspectives of world history, for extremely