H eadlines
Series Examines Legacy of Sen. Joe McCarthy
L OCA L
SOPHIE PANZER | JE STAFF
DICK LEVINSON knows the
tumultuous political climate of
the past five years didn’t appear
out of thin air.

When he heard polit-
ical pundits claim President
Donald Trump was unlike any
leader who came before, he
was troubled that they didn’t
seem to be aware of Trump’s
connections to another promi-
nent Republican: Sen. Joe
McCarthy, who spearheaded
the Red Scare of the 1950s.

Levinson, who works
as librarian II at the Free
Library of Philadelphia, and
his colleagues are hosting
“Trust No One: Joe McCarthy
and the Politics of Fear.” The
lecture series about the legacy
of McCarthy is designed to put
current events into perspective.

“One of the reasons we’re
doing this program is that Joe
McCarthy is really the guy who
wrote the political playbook
that was used throughout
the Trump presidency and
is now used by politicians in
both political parties,” said
Levinson, who is Jewish.

McCarthy was
the namesake of McCarthyism,
the practice of lobbying sensa-
tional accusations of treason,
subversion and communist
activity at political opponents.

The right-wing politician
from Wisconsin warned the
American public that commu-
nists had infiltrated American
society and sought world
domination. He gave a speech
claiming to know the number
of card-carrying communists
in the State Department.

“That number
was constantly fluctuating, and
every time people in the media
attempted to pin McCarthy
down about what he was doing
or why the figures were always
changing, he always had some
lie and he always had some
excuse,” Levinson said.

With the help of aide Roy
Cohn, who went on to mentor
Trump; FBI Director J. Edgar
Hoover; and other Republicans
in Congress,
McCarthy launched a series of probes into
largely baseless allegations of
communist activity in the State
Department, the White House,
the Treasury Department and
the Army.

Politicians, government
officials and other federal
employees whose political
views were deemed suspicious
Sen. Joe McCarthy
Courtesy of the Library of Congress
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H eadlines
were interrogated and jailed,
despite the fact that they had
committed no crimes, or
fired and barred from future
employment, a process known
as blacklisting. Congress
subpoenaed hundreds of
people to testify before inves-
tigative bodies like the House
Un-American Activities
Committee under threat of jail
or blacklisting.

As the anti-communist
campaign gained traction,
schools, film studios, manufac-
turers and other employers
began using the same scrutiny
McCarthy and his allies
directed at civil servants toward
their own employees. College
professors, school teachers,
writers, labor organizers and
anyone with left-of-center
political views were targeted
for blacklists.

Peter Siskind, associate
provost and professor of history
at Arcadia University, said that
while McCarthy did not engage
in overt anti-Semitism, many
of his actions covertly targeted
Jews, who were already easy to
scapegoat. Many of the workers
he went after during his inves-
tigation of the Signal Corps
complex in Fort Monmouth,
New Jersey, were dispropor-
tionately Jews who had lived
and studied in New York.

were among the accused
during the Red Scare and that
investigators followed their
movements and interviewed
their coworkers about their
behavior. McCarthy
eventually met his downfall during the
Army-McCarthy Hearings.

Siskind, who is Jewish, said that
when attorney Joseph Welch
Graduate Center of the City
University of New York and a
lecturer in the series, said the
effects of McCarthy’s witchhunt
lasted long after he lost power.

He succeeded in emptying the
State Department of experts on
China and Vietnam, leaving
government leaders devoid of
knowledge of East Asia during
the Vietnam War, Nasaw said.

There’s no question that anti-Semitic innuendo and actual focus on
Jewish figures and Jewish activists was a part of Joe McCarthy’s arsenal,
if you will.”
PETER SISKIND
“There’s no question that
anti-Semitic innuendo and
actual focus on Jewish figures
and Jewish activists was a part
of Joe McCarthy’s arsenal, if
you will,” Siskind said.

Levinson said one Jewish
Philadelphia resident reached
out to tell him that her parents
rebuked McCarthy for his lack
of decency during the televised
hearings, about 400 people in
the hearing room applauded.

Soon after, politicians who had
been afraid to speak out were
able to censure him.

David Nasaw, professor
emeritus of history at the
intervention among the public.

“Why are we the only
country in the world without
any national health program?
Because McCarthy successfully
lambasted those who supported
such programs as doing so
because they were communist
or communist-adjacent,” Nasaw
said. Siskind added that segre-
gationists tried to discredit civil
rights activists with accusations
of communist activity.

Siskind will present his
lecture, “Death by A Thousand
Cuts: How A Broken Promise
Destroyed Joe McCarthy,” on
April 28 at 7:30 p.m. The last
installment in the series, “The
Strange Afterlife of Roy Cohn,”
will take place on May 10 and
be presented by Marie Brenner,
writer-at-large for Vanity Fair.

Registration is available at
freelibrary.org/blog/post/4494. l
Nasaw, who is Jewish, said
McCarthy also used investi-
gations as political weapons
to portray Democrats as soft
on communism. He attacked
the social welfare programs
of the New Deal for being
communist, generating an spanzer@jewishexponent.com;
overall distrust of government 215-832-0729
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