A Lesson Joe McCarthy Taught Me - McCarthy's communist witch-hunt turned Republican into Democrat - Brief Article

Progressive, The, Jan, 1999 by David R. Obey

I am a Democrat today because of Joe McCarthy. I grew up in a Republican family and participated in my first political campaign as a junior high school student in 1952 in the Wausau area, which had about 10,600 households back then. That October, I tied my sister's wagon to my bicycle, filled it up with Republican literature for Eisenhower, McCarthy, and Laird, and distributed that literature to almost one-third of the households in the city. By 1956, things had changed. I was a Democrat, and I supported Adlai Stevenson for President.

There were many reasons for that conversion, but the most important was that I discovered what McCarthyism had done to the best teacher I ever had. His name was Arthur Henderson. He had taught in the Wausau school system for many years. He taught my mother American history, and when I was a junior in high school I was lucky enough that he also taught me. During classes, no matter what position we took on an issue, he would play devil's advocate, taking the other side to impress upon us the importance of critical thinking.

To teach us how to do historical research, he asked us to write a paper on what Presidents Harding, Coolidge, or Hoover had thought about subjects such as the role of capitalism, labor unions, the role of government regulation, anti-trust, and the like. I thought that he wanted us to do a paper on Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover. So when the day came to turn in my report, I looked around the classroom and saw that while mine was about twenty pages, everyone else had a paper about six or seven pages long. When I realized my mistake, I thought, "Well, at least he will give me an A for extra effort." He didn't. He gave me an A- for not following directions.

What Joe McCarthy's local supporters did to Art Henderson is a metaphor for what McCarthyism did to many good, dedicated Americans all across the country.

During the height of the Cold War Red Scare, the local supporters of Joe McCarthy on and off the school board tried to have Henderson fired for being a "Communist" or "Bolshevik." Art Henderson was about as much of a Communist as Jack Benny.

But he had the temerity to teach that the provisions of the United States Constitution and the political platform of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce did not necessarily coincide. He taught us about the Bill of Rights. He taught us that it guaranteed Americans the right to be wrong or to believe in whatever they wanted. He taught us the history of the 1920s, which showed what happened to American workers as they tried to exercise their right to organize and bargain collectively in order to achieve their fair share of the American dream.

McCarthy's supporters did not succeed in forcing Henderson from his job, but they did succeed in pushing his wife to another community for work. She wound up driving during the week to Waupaca County to teach in another school district because she simply did not want to teach in a community where an attempt had been made to destroy her husband.

Art Henderson bore the attacks on him with grace and dignity, but they traumatized his life and created pain for a teacher who should have been universally honored for his decency and his excellence.

That episode made me understand how much pain had been inflicted on good and decent Americans by McCarthy's reckless and irresponsible character assassinations. It showed me the personal cost of the malignant expansion of his influence on the nation's political dialogue. Its effects were felt in the nation's schools and universities and in the State Department, where a whole generation of China experts was professionally destroyed. It even extended to the entertainment industry, where people such as my friend Pete Seeger--now recognized as a national treasure--were blacklisted and denied an opportunity to make a better living because of their concerns for social justice and peace.

The point this country should learn from this unfortunate episode is not that the people whom McCarthyism injured or destroyed were always right in the positions they took. The point is that our political dialogue was stunted by intimidation, and people with unorthodox views protected by the Constitution were often terrorized into silence.

That this should have happened because of a Senator from Wisconsin was all the more ironic in light of the ringing statement of the University of Wisconsin Board of Regents many years ago that it is only through "the sifting and winnowing" of ideas that the truth may be found.

That it could happen even in Wisconsin should be a sobering warning to us to remain forever vigilant in preserving the right of Americans to think unpopular thoughts and speak unpopular words, even if they offend conventional wisdom or the orthodoxy of the entrenched and powerful.

Today's heresy, as history has taught us--in spite of Salem's witch hunts and Joe McCarthy's character assassinations--may often be tomorrow's truth.

Representative David R. Obey is a Seventh District Democrat from Wisconsin.