By Kenneth Kowald
McCarthy in Queens, Part II
In the election of 1952, retired Gen. Dwight Eisenhower won the presidency with 55.2 percent of the popular vote — the greatest plurality since President Franklin Roosevelt’s landslide in 1936 — and with 442 electoral votes against Adlai Stevenson’s 89 electoral votes.
In Queens, a Middle Village lawyer, Lester Holtzman, ran for public office for the first time in 1952. In a surprise, this Democrat defeated a Republican congressman. It took several weeks of recounts to confirm the victory.
Not long after taking office, Holtzman found himself involved directly with former Sen. Joseph McCarthy, now riding quite high, who wanted to know who had promoted a certain Army dentist from Holtzman’s district from captain to major. This was one of a series of McCarthy attacks on the Army that led to his downfall.
It turned out the dentist was on a regular promotions list and he received it. No subversive connection was proved. But McCarthy’s tactics attempted to make it appear that the dentist was a danger to the country and that Holtzman was involved in some kind of conspiracy.
Holtzman served several terms in Congress before pursuing a distinguished career as a State Supreme Court justice. But the fear of McCarthy in Queens was very real for some time.
By this time, in early 1953 when McCarthy intervened in the matter of the Queens dentist, the senator from Wisconsin had turned from attacking professors, scholars and foreign service officials. He went after some Protestant clergy and the Army itself, attempting to demean and discredit wartime heroes such as Gen. George Marshall.
This proved too much for Eisenhower, who denounced him as one who tried “to set himself above the laws of our land” and “to override the orders of the president.” The Army-McCarthy hearings of 1954 proved the senator’s downfall and the Senate censured him with an emphatic vote.
In his memoirs, Eisenhower noted that “McCarthyism took its toll on many individuals and the nation. No one was safe from charges recklessly made from inside the walls of congressional immunity. Teachers, government employees and even ministers became vulnerable. The cost was often tragic.”
McCarthy died in 1957 at age 48, but he has a permanent legacy. In the Second College Edition of Webster’s New World Dictionary, the definition of McCarthyism is “the use of indiscriminate, often unfounded accusations, sensationalism, inquisitorial methods.”
Samuel Johnson, the great English 18th century essayist and lexicographer, said, “Patriotism was the last refuge of a scoundrel.” McCarthy tried to wrap himself in the flag with his flagrant disregard of the law, and he demeaned and denigrated American values.
McCarthy was an exponent of what those who lived through those times knew as the Big Lie. In Nazi Germany, the propaganda machine turned out enough stuff to make some poor souls believe, as they entered a slave extermination camp, the Nazi slogan that “Work makes you free.” It sure did: They worked you to death or just gassed you, to make sure.
But the Big Lie did not die with McCarthy. If we pay attention to what is being done and said in politics, it is unhappily clear that candidates and parties say one thing and mean and do another. That will be true, I am sure, especially this year. Watch the slogans: No Child Left Behind, Healthy Forests Initiative, Clearing the Air, Enhancing Health Care. Slogans, slogans, slogans. They are repeated over and over again.
Behind the words there may be little if any substance. In most cases — we learn sometimes too late — they mean just the opposite of what they say.
Wasn’t it the first President George Bush who cautioned that you should judge politicians not by what they say but by what they do?
Permit me to conclude with a quotation, which I believe is apropos not only in the context of its own time and that of McCarthy but for any time.
This is from Martin Niemoller, who had a distinguished career as a submarine captain for Germany in World War I and who became a leading Protestant clergyman. He was not opposed to the Nazis until they came to power in 1933, when he realized his mistake. His actions against them led to his being jailed from 1939 to 1945, when the Allies released him. At one point in his career, he wrote this:
“First they came for the Communists and I did not speak out — because I was not a Communist. Then they came for the Socialists and I did not speak out — because I was not a Socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists and I did not speak out — because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews and I did not speak out — because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me — and there was no one left to speak out for me.”
