McCarthy

In his introduction to an edition of Lord Acton’s lectures on the French Revolution, Stephen Tonsor quotes a professor of history as saying “tell me what you think about the French Revolution, and I will tell you what you think about everything else.” That is an exaggeration of course, and  it would be a bigger one to say the same thing about Senator Joseph McCarthy. However people’s opinions of and reactions to McCarthy can be revealing.  Doctrinaire  leftists tend to present him as a veritable Robespierre, running a reign of terror against innocent people and trumping up a red scare when there were no reds, only nice guy progressives like themselves. More moderate establishment and academic leftists frequently depict him as a dangerous and déclassé populist from the sticks - similar to  Huey Long - who threatened the tranquility of the realm  but was put in his proper place by the valor and superior virtue of moderate establishment and academic leftists.  (Media types in this group usually hand McCarthy a black top hat and moustache, conflate his activities with the HUAC, boogerman stories of blacklists in Hollywood, and maybe Nixon and Hiss, stir in a general contempt for the post-war years, and serve up  a melodrama with Edward R. Murrow untying Nell from the railroad tracks just in time.) Conservatives, particularly Catholic and authoritarian conservatives, often defend McCarthy with claims he was  mainly correct and well intentioned, even heroic,  if perhaps a little careless from time to  time. Some such as Ann Coulter even dispute most of  the carelessness.  Libertarians and others  with liberal sentiments usually accept the evidence that there was a threat from Soviet espionage and subversion while seeing McCarthy’s activities as a wrong and counterproductive way to deal with the threat and seeing McCarthy as a dishonest and unsavory demagogue. 

As well as I can tell, the last assessment seems about right.  The steps taken by the government after World War II to counter Soviet espionage and subversion were made  independently of McCarthy  and largely before he became interested in the issue. No one he accused was convicted of espionage, perjury, or treason as a result of his investigations.  His overall effect was  to give anti-communism a black eye and hand leftists a straw man they have been attacking and exploiting for cover ever since. 

While his targets varied from obscure government employees  (at least one of whom really was a communist) to Generals Marshall and Eisenhower, probably his most significant case was that of Owen Lattimore.   Lattimore was an author and China hand who had significant influence on American policy in the Far East in the 1930’s and 1940’s. Many conservatives believe he was a  traitor in the service of Soviet Union. Many leftists believe he was a wronged innocent and dismiss his faithful and consistent support of Mao, Stalin, and of Soviet interests in the Far East as indicative of nothing in particular.  In recent times Lattimore  has become something of a fallback guy for leftists who have found it harder to defend Hiss and other traitors as innocents since the opening of Soviet archives and the release of some of the Venona data. (His Wikipedia article is a fairly typical, though of course amateurish, example  the technique.  He comes across in it as an evenhanded, disinterested scholar and all around good guy who got caught up in politics and suffered for it.)  In fact Lattimore was clearly an active and influential supporter of the  Soviet Union who worked with communists to advance the interests of the Soviets and the Chinese communists. As such he was morally guilty of harming this country and aiding and abetting  two of the most brutal and murderous tyrannies in human history. If McCarthy had simply noted and demonstrated those facts and stopped and shifted his attention to preventing such things in the future, he would have been both correct and useful. However, he went far beyond the evidence and recklessly declared Lattimore was not only a Soviet secret agent but the top Soviet spy in the country. He presented no convincing evidence to support his claim, and none has been made public since. The result was a fiasco serving to  prevent legitimate inquiry into the harmful activities of Lattimore and his associates, give the left a useful martyrdom myth, let Lattimore off the hook, and facilitate a lot establishment dirt being swept under a lot of establishment rugs.

A senator should have known better. The distinction between supporters of  foreign government and secret agents of foreign governments is crucial. A secret agent works for and owes his primary allegiance to a foreign government, acts clandestinely in the interests and under the control of  that government, and attempts to hide the fact of his employment by it. Secret agents usually fall into one or both of two categories - spies who attempt to steal secrets from a country and saboteurs (in the broad sense) who try to do the country harm, sometimes by influencing decisions on policy.  A supporter of a foreign government  simply favors the interests of that government and works to promote them.  In the context of national security, there is nothing wrong with an American’s doing this as long as he does nothing to harm this country, and the foreign power is not hostile to the United States. (If I had been alive and influential in the period between the two world wars, I would have tried to support the interests of the British Empire, believing it to be, in comparison to the possible alternatives, a force for liberal and civilized values. Many patriotic Americans in those years did.)

Lattimore may have been a secret agent of influence for the Soviet Union. He may have been only a very harmful pro-Soviet activist  who might have thought he was not damaging America. (During Roosevelt’s administration, while the Soviet Union was hostile to the United States even during the years both were fighting Germany, the U.S. government did not consider it to be so.)  We don’t know, and neither did McCarthy. His style, manner, and crudely blundering ahead with this and other claims  in other cases he could not back up either hurt the cause of freedom, helped the communists, and provided convenient cover for subversives, Soviet sympathizers and apologists, anti-anti-communists,  and traitors for the rest of the Cold War.  Good causes can suffer when inept,  unreasonable, dishonest, or unappealing people become their best known advocates. That is something to be thinking about these days too. 

Professor Williams' Klansman

The economist Walter Williams  has said  a Klansman wanting harm black people could scarcely have come up with a more effective means of doing so than the government schools attended by many black children.  With a nod to Professor Williams,  let’s try a  thought experiment along the same line. Suppose you are a grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan fifty years ago in 1963.  You and your  colleagues detest black people and wish to see them held back from achieving prosperity, kept poor and ignorant, and separated from the mainstream of American life.  You, however, are smarter and more observant than your comrades and realize that the days of Jim Crow laws and direct oppression are numbered. So you start trying to find more subtle ways to accomplish your objectives.  The first thing you come up with, after noting the importance of stable, two parent families to the development and later success of children is to create perverse incentives favoring single parent households headed by indigent women.  Then, considering  the importance of learning to read, write, calculate, and understand something of the world for success in life, you hit on the idea of destroying schools which serve black children by turning them into useless holding tanks - overrun with thugs and trouble makers, staffed by ineffective time servers, and teaching the average student very little.  Next, realizing how the qualities of thrift, prudence, grooming, ability to plan ahead and defer gratification, sustained effort toward  self improvement, and honest enterprise contribute to success, you come up with the idea of fostering a cultural milieu among black people that  devalues and dismisses those things, and tags black people who display them as pathetic, contemptible copies of whites. Since you certainly do not want black people feeling self confident and able to deal with life, you think of ways to inculcate  a sense of weakness, despair, radical separateness, and victimhood among them and make as many as possible helpless wards of the state. Finally, as the last thing you want is harmony between whites and blacks, you plan to encourage black people to resent and hate whites, to offend their sense of fairness by demanding and getting quotas and special favors from the government, and to display behaviors and attitudes tending to confirm white people’s worst stereotypes of blacks.  Along these last lines, if you were perverse enough, you might even invent hip hop.  

Of course this is only a mental exercise.   No real Klansman, no matter how much he hated black people, would have had the power to do those things.  Yet they all happened, and the country is worse off for them. One has to wonder why. It was not inevitable.  People working for civil rights in the 1950’s and early 1960’s did not expect these things, nor did trends at the time suggest them. Politicians and bureaucrats, opinion makers in the  traditional media and entertainment companies, so-called civil rights leaders, teachers and administrators in government schools, and others made these things happen with their decisions and actions.

The usual explanation is that this was an unintended consequence of well intentioned efforts or at worst the result of simple blunders and venal politics. Those explanations  certainly would have been true in many cases. Yet the effects have been so obviously pernicious, and  there have been so few attempts to change direction and make corrections  that a person has to wonder if that is  the whole story.  It is fair to ask if all the powerful and influential people who contributed to creating the present situation did  so innocently or inadvertently or if some were motivated by anti-American malice or a need to maintain a large, politically  reliable underclass. 

Alone by Richard Byrd

A few weeks ago I reread Alone, the book Admiral Richard Byrd wrote about the Antarctic winter he spent alone at a research station near the South Pole. I don’t remember exactly when I read it before.  My best guess is that  it was sometime in the last couple of years of junior high in the eighth or ninth grade when I would have been between thirteen and fifteen years old.

It is a tale of fortitude, courage, and adventure and one well worth reading. However my rereading was less to enjoy the book itself than to try to figure something out.  I remembered very little of the details of the book, but I remembered vividly  what reading it had done to me.  I came away from the experience  having decided a person had to deal  with the big questions of life and existence and work out for himself what he thought and believed. (I didn’t always do much about it, and I certainly did not immediately become a philosopher, but things were different from then on.)  I wanted to read it again  after many years  to see what had led me to those conclusions.  So I did, but I still don’t know for sure.  

The book is mainly a month by month account of Admiral Byrd’s daily activities, observations, and struggles. There are a few fairly short passages about his philosophical musings over the winter and the changes his reflecting on his experiences caused in his life and world view. Perhaps it was the example of a strong, admirable and scientific man of action engaging in philosophical speculations that got my attention. (I know it wasn’t his specific conclusions. I had forgotten what they were until I read the book again.)  Maybe it was the romantic image of an adventurer, isolated at the end of the world, with only his books and thoughts, taking advantage of that isolation to decide for himself what he really believed and how he really wanted to live.  It might have been simply a reaction to reading about  someone honestly and clearly questioning  the beliefs and attitudes he had held in the past without any fear or idea that the act of  questioning was wrong but rather with a sense that it was both right and important.   Maybe it was just exposure to the idea and act of delving into those sorts of questions. It could have been some of all of that. I  don’t know. I do know I’m grateful.

I would guess that many people have had similar experiences, often also with books one would not have thought likely to produce such results. It would be interesting if someone would compile information on that.