Nobert
Practically Family
- Messages
- 832
- Location
- In the Maine Woods
Indeed so -- McCarthy himself was personally such an odious man, surrounded by even more odious men, that he makes a perfect villian for the period. That kind of reductive, caricature thinking is exactly what we're talking about here.
Censorship and blacklisting were inarguably part of the period -- to the point where kindergarten teachers in many school districts in the early 1950s were required to take loyalty oaths -- but it wasn't McCarthy himself who was to blame. He merely exploited the national mood of the early postwar period, which was there well before "The Fifties" began. As Mr. Murrow pointed out, "the fault is not in our stars, but in ourselves."
My favorite quote is from James Thurber, writing about his WWI experiences during the height of the Red Scare: "In those days, we naively feared the enemy more than each other."
You could argue, I suppose, that McCarthy actually ended the height of Red baiting by revealing himself to be a power-crazed buffoon. Even Margaret Chase Smith said that he could have done the country a service if he had been sincere.