The smearing of Joe McCarthy: The lavender scare, gossip, and cold war politics

American Quarterly

Volumn 57, Issue 4, 2005, Pages 1105-1129

  Friedman, Andrea ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 34347226558     PISSN: 00030678     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/aq.2006.0005     Document Type: Review

References (95)

1. Ellen Schrecker, Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998)
2. The most important accounts of McCarthy's career include David M. Oshinsky, A Conspiracy So Immense: The World of Joe McCarthy (New York: Free Press, 1983)
3. Thomas C. Reeves, The Life and Times of Joe McCarthy: A Biography (Lanham, Md.: Madison Books, 1997)
4. Richard H. Rovere, Senator Joe McCarthy (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1959)
5. Robert Griffith, The Politics of Fear: Joseph R. McCarthy and the Senate (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987)
6. Arthur Herman, Joseph McCarthy: Reexamining the Life and Legacy of America's Most Hated Senator (New York: Free Press, 2000)
7. John D'Emilio, "The Homosexual Menace: The Politics of Sexuality in Cold War America," in Passion and Power: Sexuality in History, ed. Kathy Peiss and Christina Simmons (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989), 226-40
8. K. A. Cuordileone, "'Politics in an Age of Anxiety': Cold War Political Culture and the Crisis in American Masculinity," Journal of American History 87.2 (2000): 515-45
9. Robert D. Dean, Imperial Brotherhood: Gender and the Making of Cold War Foreign Policy (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001)
10. David K. Johnson, The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004)
11. Thomas Doherty, "Pixies: Homosexuality, Anti-Communism, and the Army-McCarthy Hearings," in Television Histories: Shaping Collective Memory in the Media Age, ed. Gary R. Edgerton and Peter C. Rollins (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2001), 193-206
12. also Cuordileone, "Politics in an Age of Anxiety," 541-43; Dean, Imperial Brotherhood, 147-54
13. Dean, Imperial Brotherhood, 66-67
14. Michael S. Sherry, In the Shadow of War: The United States Since the 1930s (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995)
15. Cuordileone, "Politics in an Age of Anxiety"; Dean, Imperial Brotherhood. My thanks to an anonymous reviewer for this phrase
16. On master-slave rhetoric in the cold war, see Michael Rogin, Ronald Reagan, the Movie: And Other Episodes in Political Demonology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987). As David Johnson notes, lesbians were affected by the lavender scare in profound ways, but they were less visible as signifiers of the dangers facing the nation
17. Dean, Imperial Brotherhood, 7, 120-24
18. Johnson, Lavender Scare, 33, 122
19. Allen Weinstein, Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case (New York: Knopf, 1978)
20. On sexual gossip and politics generally, see Gail Collins, Scorpion Tongues: Gossip, Celebrity, and American Politics (New York: William Morrow, 1998)
21. John H. Summers, "What Happened to Sex Scandals? Politics and Peccadilloes, Jefferson to Kennedy," Journal of American History 87.3 (2000): 825-54
22. Rovere, Senator Joe McCarthy, 57
23. Oshinsky, Conspiracy So Immense, 57
24. Jack Alexander, "The Senate's Remarkable Upstart," Saturday Evening Post, August 8, 1947, 15
25. Dean, Imperial Brotherhood, 13, 48, 92
26. Johnson, Lavender Scare, 96
27. Stephen J. Whitfield, The Culture of the Cold War (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), 43-45
28. Allen J. Matusow, ed., Joseph R. McCarthy (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1970), 22-23, 51
29. Cuordileone, "Politics in an Age of Anxiety"; Steven Cohan, Masked Men: Masculinity and the Movies in the Fifties (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997)
30. Oliver Pilat, Drew Pearson: An Unauthorized Biography (New York: Harper's Magazine Press, 1973)
31. Herman Klurfeld, Behind the Lines: The World of Drew Pearson (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1968)
32. Drew Pearson, Diaries, 1949-1959, ed. Tyler Abell (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1974), vii; February 25, 1950, column, box 5, Drew Pearson Papers, Syracuse University Library (hereafter DPP)
33. On Winchell, see Neal Gabler, Winchell: Gossip, Power, and the Culture of Celebrity (New York: Knopf, 1995)
34. on distinctions between hard news and entertainment, see Sasha Torres, "Sex of a Kind: On Graphic Language and the Modesty of Television News," in Our Monica Ourselves: The Clinton Affair and the National Interest, ed. Lauren Berlant and Lisa Duggan (New York: New York University Press, 2001)
35. May 1, 1950, clipping, box 2, Thomas Reeves Papers, State Historical Society of Wisconsin; see also Draft Radio Broadcast, and Memo FB to DP re: Handling McCarthy [n.d.], box G222, 3 of 3, Personal Papers of Drew Pearson, LBJ Library, Austin, Tex. (hereafter PPDP). On early criticisms of McCarthy, see Michael O'Brien, McCarthy and McCarthyism in Wisconsin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980)
36. Edwin R. Bayley, Joe McCarthy and the Press (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1981)
37. Reeves, Life and Times, 349
38. "Where I Stand," box 1, Reeves Papers
39. Jack Anderson with James Boyd, Confessions of a Muckraker (New York: Random House, 1979), 260
40. Roy Cohn, McCarthy (New York: New American Library, 1968), 45-46
41. Sidney Zion, The Autobiography of Roy Cohn (Secaucus, N.J.: Lyle Stuart, 1988), 45, 87
42. Nicholas von Hoffman, Citizen Cohn (New York: Doubleday, 1988), 140-42
43. Thomas L. Dumm, "Trial of J. Edgar Hoover," in Secret Agents: The Rosenberg Case, McCarthyism, and Fifties America, ed. Marjorie Garber and Rebecca L. Walkowitz (New York: Routledge, 1995), 77-92
44. Zion, Autobiography of Roy Cohn, 90-91
45. Cohn, McCarthy, 81
46. New York Times, April 12, 1953, 8
47. Washington Post, April 26, 1953, 3B
48. Richard H. Rovere, "The Adventures of Cohn and Schine," The Reporter, July 21, 1953, 9-16
49. Theodore Kaghan, "The McCarthyization of Theodore Kaghan," The Reporter, July 21, 1953, 17-25
50. William Bragg Ewald Jr., Who Killed Joe McCarthy? (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984)
51. Griffith, Politics of Fear, 243-69
52. Herman, Joseph McCarthy, 238-78
53. For a contemporary analysis of the hearings, see Michael Straight, Trial by Television (Boston: Beacon Press, 1954)
54. On anxieties about homosociality, see Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985)
55. Robert J. Corber, Homosexuality in Cold War America: Resistance and the Crisis of Masculinity (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997)
56. "A Report on Senator McCarthy"; See It Now
57. Robert L. Ivie, "Diffusing Cold War Demagoguery: Murrow versus McCarthy on See It Now," in Cold War Rhetoric: Strategy, Metaphor, and Ideology, ed. Martin J. Medhurst, Robert L. Ivie, Philip Wander, and Robert L. Scott (New York: Greenwood Press, 1990), 81-101
58. Michael Dennis Murray, "See It Now vs. McCarthyism: Dimensions of Documentary Persuasion," Ph.D. diss., University of Missouri, 1974
59. John E. O'Connor, "Edward R. Murrow's Report on Senator McCarthy: Image as Artifact," Film & History 16.3 (1986): 55-72
60. Thomas Rosteck, 'See It Now' Confonts McCarthyism: Television Documentary and the Politics of Representation (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1994)
61. Thomas Rosteck, "Irony, Argument, and Reportage in Television Documentary: See It Now versus Senator McCarthy," Quarterly Journal of Speech 9 (1989): 277-98
62. Milwaukee Journal, December 12, 1951
63. Capital Times, December 12, 1951
64. See It Now script, Edward R. Murrow Papers (microfilm, Microfilming Corporation of America, 1982), reel 41. I have been unable to identify the source of Keefe's verse. Operation Truth was a 1951 Wisconsin Democratic Party campaign against McCarthy
65. O'Brien, McCarthy and McCarthyism in Wisconsin, 124
66. Rosteck, "Irony, Argument, and Reportage in Television Documentary"
67. O'Connor, "Edward R. Murrow's Report on Senator McCarthy." That Friendly and Murrow had to edit and reedit to shoehorn the show into its twenty-five-minute spot - even when they went on the air, Friendly recalled, they did not know if the program was too long - suggests that this lengthy sequence carried a good deal of weight
68. See Michael D. Murray, "Television's Desperate Moment: A Conversation with Fred W. Friendly," Journalism History 1.3 (1974): 68-71
69. On media coverage of the hearings, see Bayley, Joe McCarthy and the Press, 204-10
70. On the hearings' gender and sexual meanings, see Doherty, "Pixies"; Thomas Doherty, Cold War, Cool Medium: Television, McCarthyism, and American Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003)
71. Kristen Hatch, "Daytime Politics: Kefauver, McCarthy, and the American Housewife," in Reality Squared: Televisual Discourses on the Real, ed. James Friedman (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2002), 75-91
72. Time, February 15, 1954, 38-39
73. "The Big Show: Nobody Wins," Newsweek, May 10, 1954, 31-35
74. "McCarthy and a Besieged Army," Life, March 8, 1954, 25-33
75. Capital Times, February 4, 1954
76. Quoted in "Trade Winds," Saturday Review of Books, August 14, 1954, 5-6
77. Charges and Countercharges, 4127-28, 4169, 4318, 4698, 4771-75, 5972-75, 5991-92
78. Michael Straight, "McCarthy Takes the Stand," New Republic, May 17, 1954, 6; letters in folders 735-59, 760-75, 776-88, Welch Papers
79. Straight, "Two Roy Cohns"; April 1, 1954, Pearson column, box 8, DPP; Congressional Record, 83rd Cong., 2nd sess., June 1, 1954, 7389-90
80. Straight, "McCarthy Takes the Stand."
81. For examples of the image in the popular press, see "Investigations: The First Day"
82. "The Fight Over Private Schine and Why He's Still a Private," U.S. News and World Report, April 30, 1954, 85
83. Herblock, "A Little More Picture Cropping," New Republic, June 7, 1954, 9
84. Robert F. Goodman and Aaron Ben-Ze'ev, eds., Good Gossip (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1994)
85. Michael Cadden, "Strange Angel: The Pinklisting of Roy Cohn," in Secret Agents: The Rosenberg Case, McCarthyism, and Fifties America, 93-105
86. A similar question has proven contentious in much of the literature about J. Edgar Hoover. See Anthony Summers, Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1993)
87. Athan Theoharis, J. Edgar Hoover, Sex, and Crime (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1995)
88. Dumm, "The Trial of J. Edgar Hoover," 77-92
89. Michelangelo Signorile, Queer in America: Sex, the Media, and the Closets of Power, 2d ed. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003)
90. Ellen Willis, "Tis Pity He's a Whore," Our Monica Ourselves, 239
91. Catharine Lumby, "The President's Penis: Entertaining Sex and Power," Our Monica Ourselves, 225-36
92. David Kirby, "Sexual McCarthyism," The Advocate, February 2, 1999
93. Judith Shulevitz, "Sexual McCarthyism," Slate, September 10, 1998, http://slate.msn.com/id/1000912/ (accessed January 31, 2005)
94. "Critics Decry 'Sexual McCarthyism' in Media," The Michigan Daily, September 28, 1998, http://www.pub.umich.edu/daily/1998/sep/09-28-98/ news/news17.html (accessed September 17, 2005)
95. Alan Dershowitz, Sexual McCarthyism: Clinton, Starr, and the Emerging Constitutional Crisis (New York: Basic Books, 1998)