***
After thirty-six days of testimony the Army-McCarthy hearings ended on June 17. The subcommittee then studied the 7,400 printed pages of testimony and issued a report blaming both sides. At first the extent of the damage done to McCarthy was unknown. He had been exposed before and had recovered quickly each time. His physical stamina was unimpaired, he retained the loyalty of eight to ten key senators, his influence with the Republican legislative leadership continued to be great, and with his customary vigor he announced new investigations of Communists in the Army, the defense industry, and the CIA.
All died stillborn. New voices were being heard in the land on the subject of McCarthy, and old voices spoke in different tones. From Nebraska, Republican leader Jim Schramm wrote Sherman Adams that every member of the Republican State Central Committee felt that GOP candidates had been hurt by the “public spectacle” of the hearings. In Colorado Palmer Hoyt said, “It is now time for the Republican party to repudiate Joe McCarthy before he drags them down to defeat,” and in Ohio conservative Republican congressman George Bender, campaigning for Taft’s Senate seat, declared that “McCarthyism has become a synonym for witch-hunting, star-chamber methods, and the denial of those civil liberties which have distinguished our country in its historic growth.” Cohn, it was generally agreed, had been discredited. With every subcommittee member except McCarthy against him, he resigned July 19. (“A great victory for the Communists,” Joe said bitterly.) Since the first open rupture between the senator and the Army, at the beginning of the year, poll takers had been observing a vast change in the public’s view of McCarthy. By late August some 22 percent of the adult population had revised their opinion of him downward. Over 24 million Americans now looked upon him with disfavor.
Ralph Flanders didn’t wait until all the evidence was in. Two days after McCarthy’s disastrous attack on Fisher, the Vermont Republican introduced a resolution calling on the Senate to strip its junior member from Wisconsin of his chairmanships. McCarthy said, “I think they should get a net and take him to a good quiet place.” The measure was given little chance then. Knowland denounced it next day at a hurriedly called press conference, and southern Democrats let it be known that they were wary of a precedent which might threaten the seniority system. Debate opened on Friday, June 30. That evening Flanders, shifting tactics, substituted a simple motion of censure: “Resolved, That the conduct of the Senator from Wisconsin, Mr. McCarthy, is contrary to senatorial traditions, and tends to bring the Senate into disrepute, and such conduct is hereby condemned.” Knowland proposed that it be referred to a select committee of three Republicans and three Democrats. That seemed safe. The members, chosen by Knowland and Lyndon Johnson, were all conservatives. Their chairman was Utah Republican Arthur V. Watkins. The McCarthy men felt they had won.
They misjudged Watkins. Determined to avoid another carnival, the chairman banned television from the new hearings and laid down strict ground rules. Even smoking was forbidden. Either Joe or his attorney would be allowed to cross-examine witnesses, but not both. Since McCarthy was a poor courtroom lawyer, this meant that he had to yield the center of the stage. At the first session he tested Watkins with cries of “Mr. Chairman, Mr. Chairman.” The chairman’s gavel came down like an executioner’s ax. He said crisply, “The Senator is out of order…. We are not going to be interrupted by those diversions and sidelines. We are going straight down the line.” McCarthy bolted into the corridor, where the television crews were waiting, and spluttered into a microphone, “I think this is the most unheard of thing I ever heard of.” Unimpressed, the select committee reported out the Flanders resolution with the recommendation that McCarthy be censured, and the full Senate agreed 67 to 22—this in a chamber which had produced exactly one anti-McCarthy vote, Fulbright’s, the previous January.
Vice President Nixon, exercising his prerogative as presiding officer of the Senate to alter the title of a measure, struck out the word “censure,” changing it to “Resolution relating to the conduct of the Senator from Wisconsin, Mr. McCarthy.” He was trying to help Joe, and McCarthy’s admirers sought semantic solace in that. McCarthy himself was undeceived. “Well,” he told reporters, “it wasn’t exactly a vote of confidence.” He said, “I’m glad to have this circus ended so I can get back to the real work of digging out Communism, crime, and corruption.” In the White House Eisenhower greeted his cabinet with a slow grin. “Have you heard the latest?” he asked. “McCarthyism is McCarthywasm.”
So it was. Missing the stimulus of Cohn, Joe became listless, flabby, and easily depressed. His devoted followers had formed a Committee of Ten Million Americans Mobilizing for Justice, with a retired rear admiral as “chief of staff,” to protest the censure; they delivered to the Capitol, in an armored truck, a petition bearing 1,000,816 signatures. In New York thirteen thousand attended a “Who Promoted Peress?” rally. Its sponsors included Governor Bracken Lee of Utah, Alvin M. Owsley of the American Legion, Mrs. Grace Brosseau of the D.A.R., a former governor of New Jersey, and a former ambassador to Russia. A high school band played “On, Wisconsin.” A rock singer intoned that he would “shake, rattle, and roll” for their leader, and Cohn told the crowd that “Joe McCarthy and I would rather have American people of this type than all the politicians in the world.” But Joe himself wasn’t there. He had hurt his arm shaking hands with a voter. In what some saw as a symbolic act, the other man had inadvertently shoved Joe’s elbow through a glass table top. The senator went into Bethesda Naval Hospital and emerged with a sling.
***
McCarthy’s successor as chief Republican campaigner was Richard Nixon. The Democrats said they couldn’t see much difference. Nixon charged that their party was “bending to the Red wind.” When Adlai Stevenson observed that the American economy appeared to be in the doldrums, Nixon accused him of “spreading pro-Communist propaganda.” If the Democrats endorsed by Stevenson were elected, he said, “the security risks which have been fired by the Eisenhower administration will all be hired back,” and he urged patriotic Democrats to “put their party in their pocket and vote for an Eisenhower Congress” because “we recognize the Communist menace and this administration is determined to crush that menace.” The Communist party, he warned, was battling “desperately and openly” against Republicans because “the candidates running on the Democratic ticket are, almost without exception, members of the Democratic party’s left-wing clique which has been so blind to the Communist conspiracy and has tolerated it in the United States.”
“By golly,” said Eisenhower, “sometimes you sure get tired of all this clackety-clack.” Nixon was weary of it, too; “I’m tired, bone tired, my heart’s not in it,” he told a friend. Barnstorming the country seemed particularly fatiguing this time, but the President’s decision not to campaign actively left Nixon as the party’s highest-ranking politician, and he believed that much was at stake. “The election of a Democratic Eighty-fourth Congress in November,” he told the Ohio Republican state convention in Columbus, “will mean the beginning of the end of the Republican party. It is that simple.” To stave it off he delivered 204 speeches, held over a hundred press conferences, flew 26,000 miles, and visited 95 cities in 31 states. By the end of it he had become the country’s second most controversial figure. “McCarthyism in a white collar,” said Stevenson of his tactics. Walter Lippmann went further. He described the Vice President as a “ruthless partisan” who “does not have within his conscience those scruples which the country has a right to expect in the President of the United States.”
It was characteristic of the 1950s that even Eisenhower’s adversaries were anxious to believe the best of him, and he was not held responsible for Nixon’s speeches. How he could have avoided knowing about them was unexplained. The Herald Tribune, whose most loyal subscriber he was, played them on its front page. Somehow it was felt, as James Reston wrote, that the President would never imply that the Democrats had winked at treason, “but things are done in his name
he knows not of.” To be sure, Nixon’s style was not Eisenhower’s style. Ike wanted to be regarded, he said, as “President of all the people,” and invective wasn’t his forte anyway. Nevertheless, he wanted the candidates of his party to win, believed Nixon was helping them, and cheered him accordingly.
Both men had hoped that Republicans could stow campaign rhetoric and run on the administration’s record. “The time, the right time to start winning the 1954 elections is now,” Nixon had told the cabinet in April 1953. Eisenhower believed that his 1954 legislative accomplishments were worth boasting about. It had been a good session, despite the sideshow in the Senate Caucus Room. He had signed into law bills extending the federal housing program and reciprocal trade agreements, liberalizing the Atomic Energy Act, broadening unemployment insurance and social security, simplifying customs procedures, establishing a new farm program, authorizing two billion dollars for federal highways, and providing more than a billion dollars in tax relief. He calculated that his “batting average” had been .830 and was delighted. The Congressional Quarterly, figuring differently, put it at .646; even so, he had done well, and Democratic predictions that a Republican administration would bring back the Depression—as irresponsible, in their way, as Nixon’s Red issue—had been exposed as myth.
But the twenty-year trend toward Democratic voter registrations had given the party out of power the same advantage that the Republicans once had. All other things being equal, the man in the middle tended to favor the Democrats. Eisenhower and Nixon were also fighting history; the party in power has nearly always lost strength in off-year elections. Furthermore, postwar prosperity had paused to catch its breath. There were no breadlines in 1954, but farm prices had taken a downward lurch, and the recession had given some employers the jitters.
In view of the hurdles ahead, party councils had decided that a Republican hatchet man was needed. The Vice President had been chosen because he handled hatchets well, because using this one would endear him to the rank and file of his party, and because, as Eisenhower pointed out, it would add to his fame. Nixon was game—“Every campaign has to have someone out front slugging,” he said—but he was also unenthusiastic. It wasn’t pleasant to return to Whittier as commencement speaker, which he did in the spring of 1954, to find that two reception lines had been set up, one for students who didn’t want to shake his hand. His wife liked strife even less than he did, and in mid-February, after a long talk, they had discussed the possibility of his retirement from public life when his present term ended in 1956. According to Murray Chotiner, Nixon weighed the relative merits of opening his own law practice and joining an established firm while flying back to Washington on election eve. As the plane entered its glide pattern he handed Chotiner seven pages of notes. “Here’s my last campaign speech,” he said. “You may want it as a souvenir, I’m through with politics.”
The results of the election were perplexing. The Democrats did regain control of Congress, whereupon Nixon had to admit that the survival of Republicanism hadn’t been at stake after all. McCarthy called it “a bad defeat” and held the administration responsible for waging “jungle warfare among those of us who were trying to expose and root out Communists.” But it wasn’t bad at all. The Republican edge in the 83rd Congress had been so slight that realists had conceded its loss in advance. After the dust had cleared the Democrats had recaptured twenty House seats—they had expected fifty—and in the Senate they had won just two. “The administration,” the Washington Post and Times Herald concluded two days later, “has experienced neither victory nor overwhelming defeat at the polls.”
Nixon interpreted the returns for the cabinet that same day. What they showed, he said, was “really a dead heat.” He thought he knew a way to improve performance. The key to future campaigns, he said, was a good public relations program. The American people had to be “sold.” The party with the best image would win elections; the secret to control of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue would lie not on Main Street or Wall Street, but on Madison Avenue. Parties would invest in catchy jingles, not pretentious campaign songs. How a candidate looked on the television screen would be as important as what he had to say. It would all be one big package, Nixon told them, and he offered to show them the gist of it. Reaching into his pocket he drew out a mechanical toy drummer, wound it up, and sent it clattering down the polished table past the astonished President and his secretaries. The Vice President said, “Just keep beating that goddamned drum.”
***
The most memorable singing commercial of that year, as evocative of the Army-McCarthy hearings as Joe’s sonorous “Mr. Chairman, Mr. Chairman,” went:
When the values go up, up, up,
And the prices go down, down, down,
Robert Hall this season
Will show you the reason,
Low overhead, low overhead!4
Robert Hall, clothier, was a precursor of the discount houses which had begun to rise, like vast gymnasiums, on the outskirts of metropolitan areas and in suburban shopping centers. The first of them, E. J. Korvette, had opened its doors in 1948. It had been an instant success. In the past, discounting had been largely confined to shabby little factory annexes, difficult to find and seldom clean. Labels had been removed from wares; the wholesaler didn’t want the retailer to know that he was competing with him. Now an entirely new approach to merchandising was emerging. Businessmen had begun to grasp the implications of America’s automotive economy. In the 1930s and 1940s, when the greater part of customers had arrived on buses and streetcars, downtown streets lined with retail stores had made sense. But now public transportation had begun to atrophy. The typical urban shopper of the 1950s came in a car and had no place to put it. Downtown parking had become almost impossible. Millions of meters were being installed, but the results were disappointing; as often as not a Main Street merchant, blind to his own interests, would allow his clerks to occupy the spaces in front of his store and feed the meters every hour while potential customers cruised up and down.
Shopping centers were the obvious solution. Planners provided them with ample parking facilities, great tracts paved with macadam. Nationwide firms began erecting discount wonderlands: Korvette’s, Topp’s, Bradlee’s, Grant’s, King’s, etc. By selling directly to the consumer there, manufacturers avoided the retailers’ overheads. Those Main Street merchants who could afford suburban annexes built them. The rest joined a long, slow decline into what sociologists began to call “inner-city blight.”
Meantime the discount marts were acquiring problems of their own. Shoplifting grew to epidemic proportions, encouraged by the discounters’ practice of substituting checkout counters for aisle clerks. After hours, shopping center parking areas were often inhabited by restless teen-agers. Mobile like their parents, they needed a place to rendezvous. Unfortunately, police discovered, the paved expanses became staging areas for gang fights and drag racing.
Fueled by affluence, the teen subculture continued to develop its separate identity in the 1950s, with its own customs, status symbols, stigmata, rites, and fads—the ducktail haircuts and sleeves rolled up to a prescribed length for boys, and, for girls, poodle cuts and pop-it necklaces that could be changed from chokers to waist-length. Long hair and peculiar modes of dress lay a decade away, but the new language which would go with them was already developing. Like the bop musicians they admired, teen-agers frequently used the term cool, though for them the emphasis was different; it meant pretty much what keen, neat, swell, snazzy, or smooth had meant twenty years earlier. “Like” had become an all-purpose pause-word and modifier.
Scram had been replaced by blast-off, and a drip was now a drag. The draggiest were variously described as spastics, turkeys, nerds, yo-yos, or—the most popular of all pejoratives—square. A teen-ager would say, “She’s a—,” switching to mimicry and drawing a square in the air with his index finger. It was considered tactful, if the square was present, to refer to her obscurely as an “L7” (because the letter
and the numeral could form a crude square). The ultimate in squares was the cube. Wits would say that he was so square he could block his own hat. That might elicit a grudging laugh, but as a rule joking with teen-agers of that period was a risky business; they would often riposte with a withering “Hardeeharhar.”
Every adolescent familiar with the facts of life, as they were still called, knew that a drive-in movie was a passion pit. Admittance to these arenas of foreplay was restricted, of course, to those with automobiles (wheels), but almost every boy in the great middle class either had wheels or knew someone who could get them; the Allstate Insurance Company found that nationally 75 percent of all high school juniors had driver’s licenses and nearly 60 percent had access to the family car for “social purposes.” The auto was so fundamental a part of the subculture that teen-age argot was often almost indistinguishable from hot-rod slang (also called jive), though subtle distinctions could be detected. To a pure hot-rodder, drag, for instance, had nothing to do with social acceptability; it was a race, from a standing start, between motor vehicles powered by souped-up engines. The hot-rod itself was also known as a hack, a stormer, a bomb, a screamer, or a draggin’ wagon. Substantial alterations, a sure way to acquire greater prestige within the peer group, were chopping (lowering the roof) and raking (lowering the front end). Tires were skins; whitewalls, snowballs. Driving around for the sheer joy of the trip was bombing or spooking.
The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972 Page 108