Decency missing from today’s America
In June 1954, with Sen. Joseph McCarthy having subjected the American people to four and a half years of mendacity, it was Boston attorney Joseph Welch who found the words that finally penetrated the public conscience and turned Americans against the schoolyard bully from Wisconsin. “Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness,” the Hale and Dorr trial lawyer addressed McCarthy during televised hearings that transfixed the nation. “You’ve done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you no sense of decency?”
Welch’s appeal to American decency sounds quaint 65 years later, in a time when the sneering indecency of the president of the United States is not only indulged, but gleefully embraced by roughly half the country. It is a mark of what a different country we were then that Welch’s words were enough to turn on the light switch when it came to McCarthyism and the un-American values he represented. When 1954 began, 50 percent of Americans supported McCarthy, while only 29 percent viewed him unfavorably. After Welch’s oldfashioned takedown, only one third of Americans supported him, and a majority rejected him.
How much we have changed, and how far in the wrong direction we have moved, has been illustrated in recent days by the treatment of Sen. Elizabeth Warren by a jeering president and supporters who, it must be said, have lost their way.
Elizabeth Warren has done nothing wrong, and has done nothing to apologize for. She learned about her Native American heritage the same way that all of us learn about our heritage: from our families, to whom we do not typically administer lie detector tests. On a handful of occasions, she identified herself with that heritage not, apparently, under circumstances calculated to garner for herself any concrete advantage. Indeed, she obtained no apparent advantage from having done this, and needed none. After being taunted by the right to take a DNA test and release the results, and after being prodded by others to take a DNA test and release the results — including former Obama speechwriter Jon Lovett and “Meet the Press” host Chuck Todd — she took a DNA test and released the results. A Stanford University professor who is a recognized expert in DNA analysis concluded that the results strongly suggested that she did indeed have the heritage she has claimed. This conclusion, in turn, was supported by a document from a genealogical society. There is no evidence to the contrary.
It is the false charge that Warren has committed a “fraud” that is itself fraudulent. And it is a measure of the moral rot eating away at the America of 2018 that Warren, who has apparently truthfully asserted that she has Native American heritage, is accused of lying, while Saudi Arabia, patently lying when it says that the journalist it murdered died during a “fist fight,” is termed “credible” — all by a president who has literally been demonstrated to have uttered thousands of falsehoods since taking office.
It has been an article of faith that Americans are at their core a deeply decent people, and turn their backs on bullies. With large segments of America enthralled by a president who brings audiences to a frenzy mocking sexual assault victims because they can’t remember the address of the locale at which they were assaulted 35 years earlier or calling women “Horseface” — or “Pocahontas” — it is clear that decency has taken a hit. It is a sad time in which we live, and a different America.