...AND THEY'LL NONE OF THEM BE MISSED :

Graying Now, McCarthyites Keep the Faith (DAVID OSHINSKY, June 1, 2002, NY Times)

Today, there is no street or building named for McCarthy, no sign commemorating his birthplace or career. His likeness does not appear in a large mural of local celebrities that hangs in the public library (and includes Harry Houdini, the author Edna Ferber and John Bradley, one of the marines who raised the flag at Iwo Jima).

Even the bronze bust was moved from the courthouse to the historical society after mild protests over the indignity of seeing McCarthy's face in a hall of justice. Like a figure from the Stalin era, he was airbrushed from history.

Bringing him back was a gamble, but museum officials were looking for something to lure visitors. Attendance at the Outagamie Museum had sagged during the late 1990's; Houdini was no longer a big draw. "We needed something fresh," said Kim Louagie, the museum's curator. "We wanted a local subject worthy of serious attention, something that was relevant to the community and likely to get people through the doors."

McCarthy was the obvious choice. Ms. Louagie said consensus quickly formed about taking a local angle. She researched the senator's life, gathered artifacts, and sent a draft of the script to numerous cold war scholars, including this writer, for fact-checking and comments. The exhibition emphasizes the regional connection, the story of McCarthy's Wisconsin roots. There are photos of him as a smiling farm boy, a high school student voted "most lovable man" in his class, a rugged boxing instructor at Marquette University, a hard-working circuit court judge.

Though careful to note McCarthy's reckless, often dishonest behavior in both Wisconsin and Washington, the exhibition's focus is on the personal tragedy of his squandered potential rather than the national tragedy he helped create. There is much here, for example, about the exaggeration of his military record during World War II and his mud-slinging campaigns for political office, but little about his role as a powerful Senate committee chairman and even less about the victims of his red-hunting abuse.

"Had I produced this exhibit in Chicago or New York, "I would have used a wider brush," Ms. Louagie said, explaining the emphasis.

So far, "Joseph McCarthy: A Modern Tragedy," which opened in January and is scheduled to run for two years, has avoided the backlash that undermined other recent exhibitions devoted to controversial subjects, like the National Air and Space Museum's atomic bomb fiasco, "Enola Gay." This may have as much to do with Appleton's physical isolation as the exhibition's remarkably evenhanded tone.

Even if a supporter of HUAC, the Black List, and the various Red Scares, one has to condemn Joe McCarthy, not just for acting dishonrably, but for tending to discredit the anti-Communist movement. It was the righteousness of his cause that made his tactics so heinous, because unnecessary as much as because unprincipled. Had he simply conducted his investigations in a responsible and professional manner, he'd have served his country and his cause far better.

That said, the reason the exhibit doesn't stir controversy the way the Columbus and Enola Gay observances did is because it celebrates the values of middle America, which were anti-Communist and pro-McCarthy, just as they are (one would think unsurprisingly) pro-Discovery of America and even pro-Hiroshima. Controversy plaqued those earlier projects when the people putting them on tried to tell us that Columbus was evil and the atomic bombings immoral. Never mind the truth of those accusations--which seems minimal--folks just don't want to hear it. Bully for them.

Posted by Orrin Judd at June 1, 2002 09:49 PM