Like The Leopard, Demagogues Don’t Change, From McCarthy To Trump
Adam Hats buckled under the relentless pressure from Sen. Joseph McCarthy, R-Wis., just like the Target retail chain withered and diluted its LGBTQ support because of pressure from trump.
Both McCarthy and trump, two of America’s biggest and most loathsome bullies ever, used lies and threats and blackmail to gain and sustain power. McCarthy rose to national power from a relatively minor position. Trumpn a TV personality, has taken a grip on the U.S. and the world.
The parallels are striking. Trump uses innuendo to smear opponents and McCarthy led a vile campaign in the 1950s alleging widespread communism in the U.S. government that led to blacklists, destroyed careers and suicides.
The one link between the two fear mongering, demagogues was lawyer Roy Cohn. Cohn was the ruthless advisor to McCarthy and later played the same role with trump.
Trump says that any media that criticizes him is peddling “fake news” and making illegal and corrupt claims. Trump has sued the N.Y. Times and other publications for alleged bias against. In his day, McCarthy accused The Washington Post of “moronic thinking.”
Trump has forced major corporations to cower to his will. Target has limited its LGBTQ marketing because of trump and other companies have revised, or canceled their DEI policies, or reduced staffing for their programs, after demands from trump. The companies include but are not limited to, CNN, DoorDash, Ford, Google, Harley-Davidson and John Deere.
Adam Hats
McCarthy claimed that he held a list of 205 State Department employees who were “known Communists.” He later responded to media questioning and reduced the number of names on the list to 57, but still maintained his demands for their expulsion.
Trump had threatened to out columnist Joe Alsop as gay and branded Wisconsin editor Cedric Parker a pinko. But he was unable to frighten his leading nemesis, syndicated columnist Drew Pearson.
In the 1950s, Adam Hats sponsored Pearson’s Sunday night show that drew an estimated audience of 20 million. In a speech on the floor of the Senate, McCarthy urged the public to protest to the 650 newspapers which carried Pearson’s column and to boycott Adam Hat Stores, Inc. McCarthy won and Adam Hats decided not to renew the contract with Pearson for $250,000 a year, equal to $2.5 million in today’s dollars.
In calling for the boycott, McCarthy said, “It should be remembered that anyone who buys an Adam hat, any store that stocks an Adam hat, anyone who buys from a store that stocks an Adam hat, is unknowingly and innocently contributing at least something to the cause of international communism by keeping this Communist spokesman on the air.”
Adam Hat President Charles V. Molesworth denied that dropping Pearson had anything to do with McCarthy. He insisted that it was “a planned change in advertising media.”
Trump is famously thin-skinned, most lately from those who call him “TACO,” short for “Trump Always Chickens Out.” McCarthy, a well-known alcoholic, was equally quick to scream back at criticism, especially at Pearson.
Pearson was hugely popular. His eight, weekly “Merry-Go-Round” columns were printed in 600 daily and weekly newspapers with a combined circulation of 40 million. Every Sunday night, 20 million listeners tuned their radio dial to hear “Drew Pearson Comments.”
McCarthy’s anti-communist crusade prompted Pearson to write 58 scalding columns, including one that noted, “This writer, who has covered the State Department for about twenty years, has been considered the career boys’ severest critic. However, knowing something about State Department personnel, it is my opinion that Senator McCarthy is way off base.”
“The alleged Communists which he claims are sheltered in the State Department just aren’t,” Pearson said.
He then rebuked McCarthy’s “witch hunt,” reporting that “Republicans consider this a calamity.” Pearson was unrelenting, reporting on McCarthy’s pre-Senate tax troubles, short-order divorces and near-disbarment.
McCarthy was so livid that the two met in a dinner club in Washington, D.C., in 1950, when McCarthy assaulted the columnist, “pinned my hands down, swung me around, and proceeded to kick me in the groin with his knee.”
Days later, McCarthy verbally attacked Pearson on the Senate floor, using words so vile that they would be echoed many years later from a new occupant of the White House.
McCarthy called Pearson, “one of the cleverest men who has ever prostituted one of the noblest professions — a man, who, in my opinion, has been and is doing an infinite amount of damage to America.”
“He has always consistently and without fail launched a campaign of personal smear and vilification against any man in public life who has stood against any plan of socialization in this country.” It was the kind of attack that would make trump smile.
Fox News Redux
Trump has nurtured the sycophancy of Fox News to extol his virtues and publicize his false claims. Trump has brought acknowledged white supremacists and anti-Semites into his orbit. McCarthy had his own Fox News in the name of political activist and right wing, Nazi supporter, Joseph Kamp.
Then presidential candidate, Dwight D. Eisenhower, flinched from publicly discrediting McCarthy after McCarthy gave a blistering attack against former war hero and Secretary of State George C. Marshall, calling him “a man steeped in falsehood.”
After his election, Eisenhower finally pressured Republican senators to go forward to censure McCarthy. In December 1954, the Wisconsin senator was condemned for conduct unbecoming a Senator. Eisenhower had to withstand the shameless assault waged by Kamp, who implied that Eisenhower was worse than Adolf Hitler for using federal troops to enforce the Brown v. Board desegregation ruling.
Kamp was a great-uncle of actor Jon Voight through his mother, and the great great uncle of actress Angelina Jolie. In 1956, Kamp issued a pamphlet in which he said the first step after desegregation would be black supremacy, and then Sovietism. Kamp said the civil rights movement had the goal of making the South a “Soviet South”, and then a “Soviet America.”
“Some intemperate Southern leaders have compared Dwight Eisenhower to Adolf Hitler. They are wrong. Hitler had the constitutional right to use Nazi storm troopers in any way he pleased. Eisenhower has no such right to use Federal troops in the South,” Kamp said.
Media Furor
Trump has repeatedly threatened the media when he is displeased with the coverage. He has made at least 15 calls for television stations to have their broadcast licenses revoked, though he does not have that power. Following Democratic nominee Kamala Harris’s interview with the CBS program “60 Minutes,” Trump accused the show of manipulating Harris’s responses to appear more flattering and posted on his social media site Truth Social that “CBS should lose its license.” He later told Fox News that he planned to subpoena CBS records.
Trump called for ABC News to be punished after the network aired his debate with Harris. Then a candidate for a second term, trump said that if elected, he would investigate Comcast, the parent company of NBC News and MSNBC, for “treason.”
Back in 1954, Republican publisher LeRoy Gore organized a “Joe Must Go” campaign to recall McCarthy. As a result, Gore lost his newspaper, the Sauk Prairie (Wis.) Star.
Gore used proceeds from his book “Joe Must Go” to fund the recall movement, which he started because of McCarthy’s smear campaign against Wisconsin’s war hero, General Ralph Wise Zwicker. Gore believed that McCarthy was undermining Eisenhower’s authority, and ignoring the real problems of dairy farmers who were facing price-slashing surpluses.
Gore, a Republican, founded his paper in 1952 and traveled throughout the nation delivering speeches, eventually collecting more than 300,000 signatures. But Gore’s revenues fell and his loses mounted, because of local supporters of McCarthy. His automobile insurance was canceled, and then news sources and advertising revenues dried up. In 1955 he was forced to offer his weekly for sale for $50,000.
And as trump calls his opponents “communists,” so did McCarthy in 1950, when he went after the Capital Times newspaper of Madison, Wis. In remarks before the annual convention of the Wisconsin Federation of Young Republicans, McCarthy compared the paper with the New York Daily Worker newspaper published by the Communist Party USA.
“When you expose a paper as being communistic, then I believe that businessmen should never send in a check for advertising,” said McCarthy.
Like trump, McCarthy issued not-so-veiled threats to those who opposed him. He once told Associated Press reporter Marvin Arrowsmith, “I know you’ve got six kids, Marv, and I don’t want to kick about your work, so I hope there is no reason to do so.”
McCarthy had a special vengeance for the Capital Times, a weekly newspaper published in Madison, Wis., that reported on a series of questionable activities by McCarthy. The newspaper’s editor, William T. Evjue, had warned Truman of McCarthy’s record, leading McCarthy to take the floor of the Senate and excoriate the paper as the “Prairie Pravda,” another denunciation that would bring a sparkle to trump’s eye.
The Capital Times had disclosed numerous questionable practices by McCarthy, including his granting of “quickie” divorces to campaign contributors; his avoidance of paying income taxes on huge stock market earnings, which led to investigations and fines by both federal and state tax investigators; questionable donations to his 1944 campaign in which several of his relatives were listed as having donated more than they made that year, the implication being the money was laundered by McCarthy; his doctoring of his rather ordinary war record to make it appear he was a tail-gunner on combat missions; violations of the constitutional provision against running for political office while holding a judicial post; the use by his campaign staff of Circuit Court stationery to raise campaign funds; his acceptance of “payments” by major corporations that had business before his Senate committee; and the role played by Communists in McCarthy’s victory over La Follette in 1946.
As he did with other opponents, McCarthy responded by labeling the newspaper “communist.”
Trump Opponents
Few national lawmakers have been more critical of trump than former Rep. Liz Cheney. Cheney once described trump as “an American man of depraved cruelty, corruption, and shame.” Cheney voted to impeach trump after he orchestrated the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol by trump supporters. She later sat on the special House committee that investigated the Jan. 6 uprising. Trump called Cheney a “deranged person” and a “very dumb individual, very dumb.” After her denunciation of trump, the Wyoming Republican lost renomination in Wyoming’s GOP primary.
LikMcCarthy also had few vocal detractors in Congress. But one stood out, Sen. Margaret Chase Smith, R-Maine. She addressed McCarthy in her June 1, 1950, “Declaration of Conscience” which condemned the McCarthy smear tactics and fomented “the level of a forum of hate and character assassination sheltered by the shield of congressional immunity.”
It took more than a half-century for another elected official to trigger so much hate and to be accused of undermining the nation, with a cloak of immunity granted by the Supreme Court.
Smith spoke of “a national feeling of fear and frustration that could result in national suicide and the end of everything that we Americans hold dear.” She blamed the lack of effective leadership on the legislative and executive branches.
“I think that it is high time for the United States Senate and its members to do some soul-searching — for us to weigh our consciences — on the manner in which we are performing our duty to the people of America — on the manner in which we are using or abusing our individual powers and privileges,” Smith said.
“The American people are sick and tired of being afraid to speak their minds lest they be politically smeared as ‘Communists’ or ‘Fascists’ by their opponents. Freedom of speech is not what it used to be in America. It has been so abused by some that it is not exercised by others. The American people are sick and tired of seeing innocent people smeared and guilty people whitewashed.”
They were words that would be appropriate as much today as they were in Smith’s time.