Editor’s note: Mark Bushnell is a Vermont journalist and historian. He is the author of “Hidden History of Vermont” and “It Happened in Vermont.”
[M]any Americans deemed the senator a threat to the country. His bullying tactics were destroying personal lives and harming the nation’s reputation overseas. Worst of all, his obsession with a small risk was distracting the country from bigger, and potentially catastrophic, dangers posed by the Soviet Union.
Sen. Joseph McCarthy had to be stopped: Ralph Flanders knew it in his bones. In early 1954, the U.S. senator from Vermont decided to take on McCarthy.
For four years, McCarthy, a Republican senator from Wisconsin, had been a scourge on the American political landscape. The country was in the depths of the Cold War, and McCarthy saw communist sympathizers everywhere, trying to wheedle their way into positions of influence and power. Many, he warned ominously, were already there.
McCarthy’s all-out attack on perceived communists began in February 1950, when the then-obscure senator from Wisconsin claimed he had a list of communists who worked in the State Department. Some accounts say McCarthy claimed 205 names were on that list; other reports say it was only 57. The number, though, never really mattered. McCarthy began making other unsubstantiated charges as he went along. During a Senate investigation of his charges, McCarthy failed to produce a single name to back up his assertions.
But in later years he did name names of supposed communists and communist sympathizers, including many leading academics. He even attacked George C. Marshall – chief of staff of the Army during World War II, author of the Marshall Plan and U.S. secretary of state – for not being decisive enough in the battle against communism. The senator declared that Marshall was at the center of “a conspiracy so immense and an infamy so black as to dwarf any previous venture in the history of man.” Marshall, who in the early 1950s had become secretary of defense, retired from office in outrage. Countless others also suffered from McCarthy’s verbal assaults. Being labeled a “communist sympathizer” was enough to destroy people’s careers.
In 1953, McCarthy took over what had been a political backwater – the Investigations Subcommittee of the Senate Government Operations Committee – and attacked members of the newly elected Eisenhower administration, the International Information Agency, and even top brass in the U.S. Army.
Flanders had seen enough. It was time to take on McCarthy, even though the two were fellow Republicans. From a distance it is tempting to view Flanders as the antithesis of McCarthy — and in many ways he was — but on one key point they were in agreement: They both viewed communism as a serious threat to the country. But while McCarthy was concerned with communist infiltration in the government, universities and other domestic institutions, Flanders was more worried about international communism. Flanders viewed McCarthy’s hunt for communist infiltrators a harmful distraction from the real threat.
Several events seem to have spurred Flanders to action. One took place on the far side of the world. In his autobiography, “Senator from Vermont,” Flanders recalled his shock at the questions he was asked while visiting New Zealand and Australia in 1953: “As we alighted from the plane … the reporters met us. They asked ‘What about McCarthy?’ … The same question appeared and reappeared at luncheons, dinners and informal meetings. … It became clear that in the outside world McCarthy was the United States and the United States was McCarthy.”
At the time, both parties wanted to leave McCarthy alone. Republican leaders feared a confrontation might divide the party and leave it vulnerable in that fall’s elections. Similarly, Democrats worried that an attack on McCarthy might be labeled un-American.
But Flanders, it seemed, was uniquely suited to the task. At 74, he had decided not to run for reelection when his term ended in 1958, so he would not have to worry about any political fallout in Vermont. He was pious, honorable and gentlemanly, so any attack against McCarthy could not easily be construed as gratuitous or mean-spirited. He always had been more than a politician: Before joining the U.S. Senate in 1946, he had been a leader in Vermont’s machine-tool industry.
For months, Flanders mulled what he might do about McCarthy. He seems to have gotten the answer on Friday, March 5, 1954, while in Springfield for a meeting with constituents. As during his trip the year before, he was peppered with question about McCarthy. But this time it was: What was he going to do about the senator? Years later, his secretary, Elizabeth French, spoke to a newspaper reporter about the meeting. “They tackled him,” she recalled, “and he went home and wrote the speech on yellow foolscap.” Back in Washington on Monday, Flanders handed French the draft and she typed out the most famous speech of his career, the one that would help mark the beginning of the end for Joe McCarthy.
Flanders started by saying that McCarthy didn’t really seem to be a Republican or a Democrat. Instead, Flanders said, “One must conclude that he is a one-man party, and that its name is ‘McCarthyism,’ a title which he proudly accepted.”
In McCarthyism, Flanders diplomatically said, he found “much to praise and much to deplore,” but then Flanders denigrated McCarthy’s crusade by comparing it to noisy housecleaning – too distracting to be of much benefit. “(W)e are being diverted, and to an extent dangerous to our future as a nation,” said Flanders, who saw the Iron Curtain of communism closing off Korea and Indochina and communists gaining power in Europe. He feared he was seeing a recurrence of the fall of nations at the start of World War II.
Flanders, a devout Christian, viewed the fight against communism as a battle between “God and the Devil for the souls of men.” “In this battle of the age-long war, what is the part played by the junior Senator from Wisconsin?” Flanders asked. “He dons his war paint. He goes into his war dance. He emits his war whoops. He goes forth to battle and proudly returns with the scalp of a pink Army dentist. [A reference to an Army Medical Corps dentist whom McCarthy had outed as a communist sympathizer.] We may assume that this presents the depth and seriousness of communist penetration in this country at this time.”
It was OK with Flanders if McCarthy continued to clean communists out of American society. “If he cannot view the larger scene and the real danger, let him return to his housecleaning,” Flanders said. “… But let him not so work as to conceal mortal danger in which our country finds itself from the external enemies of mankind.”
The speech received muted praise. President Eisenhower sent a two-sentence note thanking Flanders for his comments.
Flanders’ words, however, had no effect on McCarthy. The Wisconsin senator continued his crusade. Between April 22 and June 17 of 1954, he became embroiled in what would become known as the Army-McCarthy Hearings. The hearings, broadcast on television, pitted McCarthy against the secretary of the Army and other top officers, whom he accused of security lapses. (The Army countered with accusations that McCarthy had sought special treatment for one of his Senate aides who had been drafted.) The spectacle was broadcast live to the nation on television, which was then in its infancy. For the first time, McCarthy and his bullying tactics were on full display to Americans. (Most Vermonters, however, had to rely on newspaper and radio accounts of the event, since the state’s first television transmitter would not be erected until that fall.)
McCarthy’s performance outraged Flanders. As the hearings were ending, he called on the Senate to remove McCarthy from his controversial subcommittee. The resolution went nowhere. With an eye on the upcoming elections, the Republican Senate leader buried it in committee. So Flanders filed another resolution in late July, calling for the Senate to censure McCarthy for his conduct. By rules, this resolution had to be voted on by the full Senate, but party leaders managed to delay the vote until after the election.
Finally, on Dec. 2, 1954, with the election behind them and public sentiment turned against the senator, the Senate voted 67-22 to censure McCarthy. Flanders and George Aiken, Vermont’s other Republican senator, joined 20 other Republicans and 45 Democrats in voting against McCarthy.
A legislative rebuke might seem unlikely to stop a political steamroller like McCarthy, but it did the trick. After the vote, senators suddenly weren’t afraid to take on the senator, or to ignore him entirely. McCarthy’s political career, indeed his life, spiraled downward. By 1957, he would drink himself to death.
Through it all, Flanders said he never felt personal animosity toward McCarthy. Shortly after the censure vote, McCarthy entered a Senate dining room and found only one seat open, one next to Flanders. With no choice, McCarthy sat beside his nemesis. Flanders struck up what must have been an awkward conversation at first. He showed McCarthy the new briefcase he had just gotten, one with a newfangled plastic zipper that Flanders thought was pretty neat. The ice-breaker must have worked.
“From that time on,” Flanders wrote, “our personal relations were friendly.”
