Tail-gunner Liz
From Arizona, not Wisconsin
“Have you no sense of decency?” —Joseph Welch to Joe McCarthy, 1954
“It’s when the world seems darkest, and Americans are most divided and fearful, that paranoia swells—like some night-blooming poisonous plant. How else explain the rise of a demagogue like Joe McCarthy in the Furious Fifties, with his ever-shifting ‘exposés’ of a Communist conspiracy in high places? There actually was one, but [he] tended to get lost amidst the sound and fury of Tail-gunner Joe’s rapid-fire accusations and hallucinations.”
—Paul Greenberg to readers, 2014
WASN’T the Army officer and suspected communist a dentist or something? He didn’t exactly have the keys to All National Secrets. But the junior senator from Wisconsin rose to fame during the Red Scare hammering away at the old boy. Until Joseph Welch’s famous question put an end to it. Or at least his question was the beginning of the end. Or the end of the beginning.
According to the U.S. Senate’s official website: “. . . Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy rocketed to public attention in 1950 with his allegations that hundreds of communists had infiltrated the State Department and other federal agencies. These charges struck a particularly responsive note at a time of deepening national anxiety about the spread of world communism . . .”
He had a point, even if his style clouded it: There were a few communists in the U.S. government at the time. But how get around Tail-gunner Joe’s style as he charged in hot pursuit?
Senator McCarthy became chairman of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations during the Red Scare era, a scare for which he could claim much responsibility. While he had his day in the sun, his overstated claims eventually caught up to him. The American people became fed up with his shenanigans, and in December 1954 he became only the sixth member (there have been nine total) to be censured by his colleagues. The vote was 67-22.
It’s a cautionary tale for election deniers across the country. Another lesson played out in Arizona last month when state Rep. Liz Harris was ousted from the state House, only the fourth such expulsion in Arizona history.
Like McCarthy, she made outlandish and unprovable claims against individuals at all levels of government, including claims against high-ranking officials within her own party. When her claims were investigated to determine whether there was any truth to what she was saying, the results that came back were not in her favor.
Her conspiracy theories, and that of those whom she brought before the Arizona Legislature, spoke of Mexican drug cartel payoffs to state and local government officials. Senior Republican leaders were implicated with claims of money-laundering, drug trafficking, public corruption and election fraud. Allegedly, the state’s Democratic governor, city judges and even the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints were in on it.
Imagine that. You’d have to imagine it, because all those claims are false.
Representative Harris doubled down and publicly stated that her claims were only “the tip of the iceberg.” (Senator McCarthy made similar statements.)
And like Joe McCarthy, the vote to remove her was bipartisan. With only 28 Democrats in the Arizona House, 46 members voted to remove her.
Representative Harris, and politicians like Representative Harris, do Republicans no good, because they preach not to a choir, but to somebody sitting outside wearing a tinfoil hat and screaming at ghosts. They can’t attract everybody in their party to their views, much less independents who decide elections.
We are reminded of what Whittaker Chambers said during the Red Scare, and what he said about Tail-gunner Joe: “But, all of us, to one degree or another, have slowly come to question his judgment and to fear acutely that his flair for the sensational, his inaccuracies and distortions, his tendency to sacrifice the greater objective for the momentary effect, will lead him and us into trouble.
“In fact, it is no exaggeration to say that we live in terror that Senator McCarthy will one day make some irreparable blunder which will play directly into the hands of our common enemy and discredit the whole anti-communist effort for a long time to come.”
That could have been written yesterday.