Conservapedia and the McCarthy Vindication Myth

Recent scholarship has established of 159 persons investigated between 1950 and 1952, there is substantial evidence nine had assisted Soviet espionage using evidence from Venona or other sources. Of the remainder, while not being directly complicit in espionage, many were considered security risks.
From Conservapedia's entry on Joseph McCarthy

The myth goes as follows: Once upon a time there was a courageous patriot named Joseph McCarthy, who sounded the alarm about Communist infiltration in the United States State Department. Liberals and leftists insisted there was no such thing as Communist espionage, and McCarthy was maligned and ultimately brought down by a liberal journalist and a conniving lawyer. Then, decades after McCarthy’s death … vindication! The 1995 declassification of the Venona Project, which had probed Soviet spying activities during WW II and the Cold War, revealed that there were Soviet Spies in the State Department!

It’s a storyline that relies on the premise that Joseph McCarthy’s critics were all “liberals and leftists” who denied the very existence of Soviet spies. How else, after all, can anyone claim that being right only nine times out of 159 qualifies as vindication?

McCarthy apologists hope to erase awareness of exactly what attorney Joseph Welch meant when he asked, ‘Have you no decency, sir?” in his famous rebuttal to McCarthy. Conservapedia’s entries on McCarthy and McCarthyism seek to obscure the fact that McCarthy was viewed with contempt not just by liberals and leftists, but by many conservatives and anti-Communists, that he was reviled not because of that small number of the guilty, but because of that overwhelming majority of the innocent among those he smeared.

'Infuriating' the Left

McCarthy's efforts to remove security risks from government infuriated the American Left and they often use the term (McCarthyism) to mean aggressive questioning of someone's background or personal beliefs, or making accusations of disloyalty.
From Conservapedia's entry on McCarthyism

The right=good/left=bad world view promoted by Conservapedia requires that objections to McCarthyism be presented strictly as a matter of political disagreement between the right and the left, rather than disagreement with McCarthy’s tactics. This serves the double purpose of obscuring the real issue of McCarthy’s dishonesty, and of implying that what liberals objected to was the exposure of Soviet Spies in the State Department. The fact that there were conservatives who disliked McCarthy and people on the left who disliked both McCarthy AND communism must not be acknowledged.

In reality, many of McCarthy’s most ardent critics were anti-Communist liberals and conservatives who were themselves concerned about Communists spying for the Soviets. New York Post editor James Weschler, for instance, was an ex-Communist turned anti-Communist who wrote in 1947 that "It would be nice if the world were prettier, but it isn't; espionage and sabotage are facts of modern life." Wechsler’s concerns about espionage did not prevent him from being an early and vehement critic of McCarthy. The New York Post’s 1951 17-part series on McCarthy was entitled "Smear, Inc.--The One-Man Mob of Joe McCarthy.”

Even Henry Luce’s Time Magazine, by no means a liberal publication, was critical of McCarthy to the point of contempt. Luce himself went so far as to publish a Letter from the Publisher (June 5, 1950) in which he commented that “some, however, both moved and confused by the charges of Senator McCarthy and others, have compounded the hysteria which says that any man is right who cries anticommunist.”

It’s interesting to note that one non-leftist critic of McCarthy who is mentioned in Conservapedia is not cited as a critic, even though she was one of McCarthy’s most famous detractors. In Conservapedia’s reference section is a link to Republican Senator Margaret Chase Smith’s June 1, 1950 “Declaration of Conscience” along with the following excerpt:

The Democratic administration has greatly lost the confidence of the American people by its complacency to the threat of communism here at home and the leak of vital secrets to Russia through key officials of the Democtaric administration. There are enough proved cases to make this point without diluting our criticism with unproved charges"; "..there have been enough proved cases, such as the Amerasia case, the Hiss case, the Coplon case, the Gold case, to cause nationwide distrust and strong suspicion that there may be something to the unproved, sensational accusations.

Not excerpted from the Declaration is the text that follows that passage:

Yet to replace it with a Republican regime embracing a philosophy that lacks political integrity or intellectual honesty would prove equally disastrous to the nation. … I do not want to see the Republican party ride to political victory on the Four Horsemen of Calumny -- Fear, Ignorance, Bigotry, and Smear. ... As an American, I condemn a Republican Fascist just as much as I condemn a Democrat Communist.

Conservapedia’s young readers would no doubt be surprised to learn that Margaret Chase Smith’s “Declaration of Conscience” is a direct denunciation of McCarthy and McCarthyism.

McCarthy, Welch, And 'Decency'

I don't see anything wrong with what McCarthy did in this incident.
From the Joseph McCarthy article discussion page

Today, many people who know little else about Joseph McCarthy know that his public career ended about the time that Joseph Welch, a registered Republican and a highly respected attorney, made his famous “Have you no decency” rebuke. Incredibly, there currently is not a single reference to the Welch/McCarthy encounter in the Joseph McCarthy article, though the McCarthyism article does include this description:

McCarthy had a confrontation with Boston attorney Joseph Welch in televised hearings. Welch demanded that McCarthy name someone who had belonged to a Communist front organization, and then complained that it was cruel, reckless, and indecent to do so. McCarthy named Welch's associate Fred Fisher as a member of the National Lawyers Guild, who Welch himself had previously outed to the NY Times six weeks earlier. Welch dishonestly pretended to be shocked, and famously said, "Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?"

As anyone actually familiar with that exchange is aware, Welch was not shocked and angry at the news that Fred Fisher had been in the Lawyer’s Guild. He was shocked and angry because McCarthy had violated an earlier private agreement that McCarthy would not bring up Fred Fisher if Welch would not bring up McCarthy aide Roy Cohn’s military record.

In fact, Welch’s response makes it plain that he was aware of Fisher’s affiliation with the Lawyer’s Guild, and the transcript of the exchange includes a reference to Roy Cohn’s alarmed reaction to McCarthy’s invoking of Fisher. “I know that Mr. Cohn would rather not have me go into this,” McCarthy says at one point, in response to a note Cohn had passed him pleading with McCarthy not to violate the agreement.

It is a tribute to the moral power of Joseph Welch’s speech that Conservapedia has deliberately eliminated any detailed description of the McCarthy/Welch encounter. Instead of the transcript, Conservapedia’s passage on the Welch/McCarthy exchange links to an inaccurate AIM article by Wes Vernon that falsely describes Welch as “sobbing” during his speech and mentions as proof of Welch’s “dishonesty” Welch’s earlier announcement in the NY Times about his decision not to include Fisher in the Army McCarthy hearings.

After all, it would not do for Mr. Schlafly’s students to hear the exchange between Welch and McCarthy for themselves. They might come to the same unflattering conclusion about McCarthy that thousands of Americans did back in 1954.

Innocent Victims? What Innocent Victims?

Conservapedians discuss victims of McCarthyism:

While innocent persons may have been abused, many of the truly guilty walked away free under the cloak of "McCarthyism".

Who are these innocent people? I can't find anyone that was innocent and abused by McCarthy.

… the threat of nuclear annihilation pales in comparison to some poor shmuck who lost his job.

Conservapedia is not just seeking to whitewash McCarthyism. It’s seeking to redefine the concept of what is acceptable in America’s approach to dissent. It is selling the notion that intimidating liberals and leftists into silence is necessary, just, and desirable. This idea can’t be successfully promoted directly by saying, “We want to shut up liberal dissenters by making the consequences of speaking out too dire for the average citizen.”

Instead, the arguments must be framed as though this agenda were normal and acceptable. The victims of McCarthyism must be minimized, resmeared, denigrated, and the damage done to their lives dismissed as inconsequential. Only then can McCarthy’s careless use of lists be treated as minor quibbles. The fact that he cited 205 “members of the Communist Party” in the State Department one day, 57 “card-carrying Communists” a day or two later, and 81 on the floor of the Senate a week or two later matters less if you think of everyone on those lists as guilty anyway.

Conservapedia’s articles on McCarthyism expend a great deal of text on Venona and the exact numbers of names on McCarthy’s lists. The most famous of these is the Lee List, from which McCarthy read on the floor of the Senate during his February 20, 1950 speech. As Conservapedia puts it:

Most but not all of Senator McCarthy’s numbered cases were drawn from the “Lee List” or “108 list” of unresolved Department of State security cases compiled by the investigators for the House Appropriates Committee in 1947. Robert E. Lee was the committee’s lead investigator and supervised preparation of the list. The Tydings subcommittee also obtained this list. The Lee list, also using numbers rather than names, was published in the proceeding of the subcommittee.

Unfortunately, McCarthy had not spoken in terms of mere “unresolved security cases.” He’d called the people on the list Communists. This habit of conflating “security risk” or even “New Deal liberal” with “card-carrying Communists” is especially evident in McCarthy biographer Thomas Reeves’ examination of McCarthy’s Feb. 20th Senate speech, during which McCarthy sought to bolster his claims by reading through the Lee List. Reeves, who examined the Tydings Committee’s cross listing of the Lee list and McCarthy’s speech, observes that “Joe altered, twisted, and improvised upon the cases used to make them appear sinister and sensational.” He then goes on to give examples:

From the Lee list:

The subject was described in reports by various witnesses as interested in communism as an experiment but his political philosophy is in keeping with liberal New Deal social reform under democratic processes of government; ‘he is a very ardent New Dealer; he is a live liberal;’ but an informant who also lived in the International House at one time said “He was one of those accused of being a Red here but the people who do get up and talk communism are refuted.”

McCarthy:

He was described in reports by various witnesses as interested in communism and by his roommate at the International House as a communist.

From the Lee list:

This employee is with the office of Information and Educational Exchange in New York City. His application is very sketchy. There has been no investigation. (C-8) is a reference. Though he is 43 years of age, his file reflects no history prior to June 1941. Case is awaiting a report from the New York Office.

McCarthy:

This individual is 43 years of age. He is with the Office of Information and Education. According to the file, he is a known Communist. I am not evaluating the information myself, I am merely giving you what is in the file. This individual also found his way into the Voice of America broadcast. Apparently the easiest way to get in is to be a known Communist.
(The Life and Times of Joe McCarthy, Chapter 12 “The Top Russian Spy,” pgs 239-40)

Given this level of “accuracy,” it’s no wonder that the majority of those people unlucky enough to end up on one of McCarthy’s lists aren’t mentioned in Venona or in any truly credible source as Communist spies.

So who are some of these innocent victims? One example that illustrates the cruel personal consequences that could result from McCarthy’s habit of exaggeration is the case of Carl Greenblum, an engineer at the Monmouth facility of the Army Signal Corps. While being cross-examined by Roy Cohn, Greenblum, whose mother had died two days before, broke down and wept and had to be led, visibly upset, from the closed-door session. McCarthy announced to the press that “I have just received word that the witness admits he was lying the first time and now wants to tell the truth.” Greenblum’s name was leaked and he and his family were harassed, a hammer and sickle painted on the door of their house. Greenblum explained that he'd been upset about the death of his mother and that after he’d broken down he’d “sent word that I wanted to go back and tell my story from the beginning. That may have been interpreted to mean I was lying but that certainly was not the case.” Greenblum was fired from his job, but reinstated in 1958. McCarthy Hearings 1953-54, Volume 3

Another case is that of Julius Hlavaty who, during McCarthy’s investigation of the Voice of America, was called before McCarthy’s committee to testify. According to Conservapedia:

A teacher named Julius Hlavaty testified at the VOA hearings, and refused to answer whether he had been a Communist or had tried to recruit students to the Communist Party. He lost his job as a distinguished public school teacher and had to take a job at Columbia University. Critics say that McCarthy should have ignored Communists making broadcasts on VOA because exposing them might have personally embarrassed them.

Note the manner in which Conservapedia trivializes the firing of Hlavaty, implying that he had been a Communist at the time of the broadcast (Hlavaty denied this) and that the consequences to Hlavaty resulted in little more than “personal embarrassment.” Conservapedia treats ending the public school career of someone who had devoted over twenty years of his life to it as comparable to firing someone from a summer office job.

The hundred of employees who endured McCarthy’s investigation of the presumed sabotage of equipment at the VOA were also more than “personally embarrassed” by their experience. Many found themselves being interrogated by McCarthy’s committee, not about the placement of transmitters, but about their personal religious and political beliefs.

After being grilled about a book he’d written twenty years before, VOA employee Reed Harris turned in his resignation. The Director of VOA’s religious programming was asked if he were an atheist. (“I believe in God,” he explained to the Committee) and questioned about his church attendance. Casual comments made among employees at the VOA could result in being hauled before McCarthy’s committee, questioned, and ultimately transferred or fired. Edwin Kretzmann, a VOA policy director, “was assailed for having told a supposedly closed-door conference of Voice officials that an order by Dulles to cooperate with the subcommittee was ‘rather depressing.’” (Reeves, “No Team Player” pg 482)

That level of pressure puts in context the case of one of McCarthy’s most well known victims, VOA engineer Raymond Kaplan. After being summoned to testify before McCarthy’s committee, he killed himself by jumping in front of a truck. The suicide note he left for his son explained, “once the dogs are set on you everything you’ve done since the beginning of time is suspect.” (Reeves, Chapter 18, “No Team Player”) As of this writing, no mention of Raymond Kaplan can be found in the Conservapedia articles on either McCarthy or McCarthyism.

Attacking Common Usage

The claim that McCarthy destroyed the lives of many innocent people is a preferred refrain of those who don’t know what in the world they’re talking about.
Michael M. Bates, New Media Journal, 5/25/2007

A popular method used by Red Scare apologists to low-ball the number of victims of McCarthyism is to claim that it’s inaccurate to describe as “a victim of McCarthyism” any person not targeted by Joseph McCarthy himself. Conservapedia’s definition of McCarthyism implies as much when it says, “It is often used to refer to HUAC or the Hollywood Blacklist, even though those weren't really part of McCarthy's campaign,” and links this sentence to a silly "Media Journal" piece by Michael M. Bates where he complains about this presumed misuse of the term. Despite this assertion, like any commonly used word that derives from a proper name, "McCarthyism" can be correctly applied to situations not directly linked to that individual.

There were many victims of “McCarthyism” in addition to the individuals fired in the wake of the VOA hearings and the Army Signal Corps hearings. They include victims of the Hollywood blacklist, like Phil Loeb, an actor who, unable to get enough work to support the care of his grown schizophrenic son, committed suicide. They include John Henry Faulk, a popular radio host and storyteller whose radio career was ended by an anti-Communist group’s blacklist. They include many, many less well-known individuals, like the hundreds of public school teachers who were fired or forced to resign for refusing to sign loyalty oaths, or inform on other teachers, or simply for having the “wrong” politics, and the many college and university professors “purged” from their institutions.

Phil Loeb is not named in Venona as a spy. Nor is John Henry Faulk. Nor, apparently, is Minnie Gutride, a shy, middle-aged public school teacher who, in 1948, committed suicide after being questioned by investigators about her politics and threatened with charges of subordination when she refused to answer. It is unclear how the persecution that led to her suicide, or Phil Loeb’s, or Ray Kaplan’s or the damage done to Faulk’s career is made right by the amount of text Conservapedia expends on the Venona files and cold war timelines. Nor is it clear how firing several thousand VOA employees and purging overseas libraries of such “subversive” authors as Lillian Hellman, Dashiell Hammett, and Theodore White mitigated the “threat of nuclear annihilation.”

McCarthyism -- whether practiced by Joseph McCarthy himself, or the HUAC, or self-appointed guardians of American patriotism like AWARE and RED CHANNELS -- was never really about espionage. It was and still is about intimidating liberals and leftists into silence.

For the people running Conservapedia, the fact that most of those whom McCarthy named were not involved in espionage is really beside the point -- the liberalism or leftism of his victims rendered them unfit to teach, or to have their works included on VOA libraries, or to work in government service. As Andrew Schlafly once advised on the main talk page, “Remember, liberals don't mind being deceitful. We all get fooled by that, and that is why it is essential to track down the basis for a liberal claim before repeating it.”

And since a liberal or leftist is inherently untrustworthy, it is, apparently in the minds of the editors of Conservapedia, no terrible thing when a liberal is fired from his or her job merely for being a liberal or leftist.

I had seen that movie "Point Of Order" many years back. When I made a websearch for it a few years ago, I found it priced for institutions --- ie: WAY too high for me. But I just checked Amazon and found it for ~$20. Still a bit high --- but what the hell ---it's Bastille Day today --- so I ordered it!

pnorman

Their nervous systems just can't handle any input from outside their personal paranoia and group think.

Pamela, you've done an extraordinary amount of work to expose and correct the Conservapedia revisionism. The trouble is that, in a few days, your thoughtful and fact-filled summary will be buried in the GD archives.

There's obviously no point in trying to persuade Andrew Schlafly to write honestly. Anyone who edited Conservapedia to present your facts instead of right-wing fantasies would surely be reverted. What I hope you'll do instead, to preserve your work and make it more widely accessible, is to make sure that the facts are included in the relevant Wikipedia articles, such as those on , , and .

I'm guessing that at least some of the people who turn to Conservapedia for information might also look at the Wikipedia article, if only to laugh at the "left-wing" bias they expect to find there.

Conservapedia is just so creepy, and you've put your finger on why.

I can only imagine what McCarthyites would think of the likes of me!

.. is the Right. Telling us how good Reagan was, how bad Clinton, Carter, Kennedy and FDR were. Trying to prop up McCarthy and (what I call his) 'adversarialism'. It was commmunism then, it's terrorism now, and the anti-christ is always lurking in the background. The republicans always need an enemy, and no one was better at making them than McCarthy.

and utterly destroyed, it's Conservapedia. I'm not condoning that type of action, mind you, just saying they deserve it. ;)

What is WRONG with those freaking people? :wtf: Conservatism is truly a mental illness. The Truth never seems to enter into their extremely narrow corridor of perception. They are mentally ill. They live in a world where their delusional version of events exists as fact.

I'm ashamed to inhabit the same planet as them. :grr:

Between the over-the-top "Sabotaged" articles and the "Real" ones there.

http://www.conservapedia.com/Kangaroo
Kangaroo:

"After the Flood, these kangaroos bred from the Ark passengers migrated to Australia. There is debate whether this migration happened over land<5> with lower sea levels during the post-flood ice age, or before the supercontinent of Pangea broke apart<6>, or if they rafted on mats of vegetation torn up by the receding flood waters.<5> The idea that God simply generated kangaroos into existence there is considered by most creation researchers to be contra-Biblical. "

There are thousands of bizarre entries at Conservapedia. It's hard to parody because they are so far beyond that.

It began a reversal of the blow-back from WWII propaganda about the ideals of "democracy."

And it attacked liberals and progressives in government --

And in our schools --

Anywhere at all --

Removing them --