HTTP://WWW.STOPNATO.ORG.UK --------------------------- Thursday, January 24, 2002 12:36 PM
Echo of present paranoia in McCarthy
museum
Matthew Engel in
Washington
Thursday January 24, 2002 The Guardian A nation in panic. The possibility
of sudden attack any moment. A vast international conspiracy. Perverted ideals.
Insidious and dangerous enemies living the lives of ordinary Americans and just
waiting to strike ...
When a small-town museum in the mid-west decided, three years ago, to put on
an exhibition about the most resonant figure from one of the most fearful
periods in the US, the organisers thought they were just adding to local
people's understanding of history.
But by the time the exhibition - Joseph McCarthy: A modern tragedy - opened
in Appleton, Wisconsin, on Saturday, it had acquired an entirely unexpected and
far wider relevance.
"The debate between individual rights and national security has become very
similar to the debate in the 1950s," its curator, Kim Louagie, said. "Since
September 11 the parallels have become very apparent."
Appleton has two famous sons. One, the escapologist Harry Houdini, escaped.
But McCarthy did not go away, and has never gone away. Like Houdini's, his name
persists in the language on both sides of the Atlantic ("McCarthyism: "the
practice of making unsubstantiated accusations of disloyalty or communist
leanings," Collins dictionary).
Unlike that of most historical figures, his global reputation has remained
almost unretouched since his death 45 years ago. Even his kindest biographer,
the historian Arthur Herman, calls him "the single most despised man in American
political memory".
McCarthy, born just outside Appleton in 1908, was elected to the Senate at
the age of 37. He became famous in 1950 when he claimed that communists had
"infested" the state department, theatrically waving a piece of paper which he
said contained the traitors' names.
For the next four years he denounced alleged communists from Washington to
Hollywood, whether he had evidence or not.
But in 1954 his Senate hearings were televised and the public saw his
bullying methods for itself.
Other politicians finally found the courage to turn their loathing of him
into official censure.
McCarthy was broken, and alcoholism killed him three years later.
But in Wisconsin there is inevitable ambivalence. The state voted for him
twice, after all. And the view expressed in Herman's book, that "McCarthy often
overreached himself. But McCarthy was often right", never wholly disappeared.
Ms Louagie says the museum is not trying to rehabilitate him, and the
two-year exhibition looks very balanced. But she is proud that McCarthy's
closest living relative - who has asked not to be identified - has praised it
for helping him come across as a human being rather than a demon.
But while visitors muse on the connection between the 1950s and the present
crisis, one thing remains different: no new Joe McCarthy is rampaging through US
politics.
"Not right now, there isn't," Ms Louagie says, portentously.
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