Stop Mass Hysteria

by Michael Savage

  As I said in the opening chapter, history has for the most part vindicated McCarthy. During the 1980s, details began emerging about an anti–Soviet Union counterintelligence program called the Venona Project.30 Intercepts of Soviet intelligence messages revealed that there had been communist infiltration of a wide range of American institutions: the diplomatic corps; the Manhattan Project, which was responsible for creating the United States’ first atomic weapons; the U.S. Treasury Department; and even Franklin D. Roosevelt’s White House. Even before World War II ended, America’s so-called allies in the Soviet Union had pipelines into our most valuable secrets—and our hearts and minds. The papers also named Hollywood writer Walter Bernstein and producer Boris Moros as fellow travelers.

  While there were indeed subversives to be rooted out, McCarthy’s style did not help his cause. He took no prisoners, and in 1953 he was given the chair of the Senate Committee on Government Operations. While this wasn’t the Senate committee that had been investigating communist influences, its subpoena power and purpose were broad enough that McCarthy was able to launch his own investigations into suspected communists.

  McCarthy initially focused on the Voice of America, the U.S.-run foreign propaganda arm that broadcast behind the “Iron Curtain.” While the charges of communist infiltrators in that essential resource haven’t to date been proven, the allegations were enough to ruin careers and cause at least one suicide.31 McCarthy’s investigators then went through State Department libraries, looking for names of authors who were communist sympathizers. The State Department cooperated, ordering international libraries to remove works by authors who McCarthy and his staff deemed inappropriate. When the list of authors was made public, domestic schools, libraries, and personal book collections were purged as well. There, I believe McCarthy and his movement went too far.

  McCarthy’s reign was not without unintended consequences. One of his lieutenants wrote an article accusing Protestant clergy of actively supporting communists. McCarthy’s Catholic followers, including Joe Kennedy, father of future president John F. Kennedy, loved the allegation. Protestants, understandably, didn’t. Influential clergy, politicians, and, most important, the electorate successfully demanded the lieutenant’s resignation. While McCarthy himself was not deflated, it was a dent, the first indication he was vulnerable.32

  McCarthy certainly overstepped his bounds when he challenged the loyalty of an army dentist. President Truman himself had issued an executive order in 1947 demanding that government employees sign a loyalty oath. While the dentist had refused to sign the document, there was no evidence he was a communist. Undeterred, McCarthy went after the dentist as well as whoever had arranged for his promotion to major.

  As it happened, the dentist had been given his rank under a law that rewarded medical professionals in the military—a law for which McCarthy himself had voted.33 A war with the military had begun, but the brazen McCarthy forgot that one thing an army knows very, very well is how to counterattack. In drafting their defense, army lawyers realized that McCarthy’s vulnerability wasn’t his allegedly overzealous prosecution of communists; there was too much truth in his allegations to muster enough support in Washington. Instead they portrayed him as a hypocrite. When one of McCarthy’s aides was drafted in 1953, the senator’s office had sought special privileges and commissions for him, including a stateside posting.34

  McCarthy wasn’t intimidated by this tactic and actually increased his vitriol. He accused the army of using that aide to blackmail his committee into dropping its investigation.

  Had McCarthy backed down, it might have saved his career. When the so-called Army-McCarthy hearings began in April 1954, they were broadcast live on television. Overnight McCarthy became a national figure, as did his infamous bulldog attorney, Roy Cohn. Robert F. Kennedy might have, too. McCarthy named the young attorney assistant counsel of the U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. But Kennedy found the senator’s methods unacceptable and resigned after seven months.35

  With hindsight, this image was not one that McCarthy would have crafted for himself. What Americans saw in this and other exchanges was a rash and bombastic senator attacking a member of the military, perhaps the nation’s most well-respected institution—one that had defeated Hitler and Tojo, had given them the much-beloved Ike, and had been a part of the lives of a whole generation of young men who had sworn an oath of loyalty when they donned the uniform.

  The McCarthy hearings were must-see TV until they ended in June. What survives from those hearings—what is burned into the memory of everyone who saw them—is the exchange between McCarthy and Boston attorney Joseph Welch, who had been called to testify about fellow attorney Fred Fisher. Fisher had been a member of the far-left National Lawyers Guild (NLG), which was suspected of being a communist front group at the time. The NLG has long been active in far left-wing causes, including filing several lawsuits on behalf of the Occupy movement in 2011. Disgusted with McCarthy’s questions about Fisher, Welch said:

  Until this moment, Senator, I think I have never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness. Fred Fisher is a young man who went to the Harvard Law School and came into my firm and is starting what looks to be a brilliant career with us.… Little did I dream you could be so reckless and so cruel as to do an injury to that lad. It is true he is still with Hale and Dorr. It is true that he will continue to be with Hale and Dorr. It is, I regret to say, equally true that I fear he shall always bear a scar needlessly inflicted by you. If it were in my power to forgive you for your reckless cruelty I would do so. I like to think I am a gentleman, but your forgiveness will have to come from someone other than me.

  When McCarthy persisted, Welch’s riposte was one for the ages:

  Let us not assassinate this lad further, Senator. You’ve done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?36

  It is an iconic moment in the history of television. Welch, who would later star as Judge Weaver in the Jimmy Stewart classic Anatomy of a Murder, was raised to heroic status as the man who ended “McCarthyism.” But there is one, stubborn little fact the Establishment glosses over and that the public, in the grip of this mass hysteria, isn’t curious about—McCarthy’s allegations were true. Fisher had indeed been a member of the far-left group, whose mission today remains to be “an effective force in the service of the people by valuing human rights over property interests,”37 according to the National Lawyers Guild’s own website.

  Television was not kind to McCarthy. On-camera, he came off as an angry, waspish bully, while army officials came off as righteous and solid.

  Newspapers that were once afraid of denouncing McCarthy now turned on him. Editorials and the coverage of the hearings were extremely unflattering, and popular opinion of McCarthy plummeted. On December 2, 1954, the Senate voted to censure the senator, effectively rendering him powerless. Regardless of the validity of McCarthy’s suspicions and accusations, he was no longer a viable messenger for the cause.

  Three years later, at the age of forty-eight, McCarthy died of hepatitis, a broken, alcoholic man.38

  Perhaps the most effective characterization of McCarthy’s efforts as abuse of power was delivered by the aforementioned Edward R. Murrow on a 1954 television broadcast of his program See It Now:

  The actions of the junior Senator from Wisconsin have caused alarm and dismay amongst our allies abroad, and given considerable comfort to our enemies. And whose fault is that? Not really his. He didn’t create this situation of fear; he merely exploited it—and rather successfully. Cassius was right: “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.”

  Thus the official story was written. McCarthy was a vindictive bully who exaggerated communist influence and ruthlessly destroyed many innocent people. Sixty-four years later, a generation of Americans who accept this mass hysteria about McCarthy as reality now believe socialism is superior to capitalism.

  JUVENILE DELINQUEN
TS

  After World War II, television and postwar prosperity moved forward in lockstep. The suburbs expanded thanks to low-interest loans from the GI Bill; veterans received an education; jobs were created; and television—which had been demonstrated effectively in 1927—took off in earnest. By 1951, TV was coast-to-coast. Almost at once, Americans were better informed, and more immediately and accurately so, than at any time in our history.

  But the 1950s were not as innocent as many people remember them to be. There were, for example, two kinds of hysteria over rock and roll in general and Elvis Presley in particular. First, the kids lost their minds when Elvis swiveled his hips or even when Buddy Holly just stood still singing about Peggy Sue. Second, parents, clergy, and psychologists teamed up to decry the music as sexual and barbaric—the very same arguments that had been leveled against the “swing” music they had listened to in their youth.

  Movies contributed to the hysteria. I remember soldiers who returned with technical skills becoming backyard mechanics, some of them tinkering with motorized go-carts, motorcycles, and hot rods, often with their sons. That led to drag racing that was legal in some places, lawless in others—and thus, movies about hot rods and juvenile delinquents. Some of these movies were geared toward adults, like Marlon Brando in The Wild One. Some were done with intelligence and insight, like Rebel Without a Cause, starring James Dean. But most of these movies were aimed at the younger audiences and were sensational by design, with titles like Hot-Rod Girl, The Ghost of Dragstrip Hollow, and Red Ball Express. Those same clergy, parents, and psychologists became concerned that these movies were not cathartic but aspirational. Many adults then became many hysterical adults, and were very vocal about these concerns—especially when writing and calling their representatives in Congress.

  The result was predictable. Showing concern about juvenile delinquency was a no-lose proposition for politicians. The United States Committee on the Judiciary is a standing group of twenty senators who, in 1953, formed a subcommittee called the United States Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency. It was decided the hearings would be televised. State politicians would have a national audience; their faces would become known; their reputations could be whatever they wanted them to be. And the public would respond as the politicians directed, by both their manner and words. Hysteria could be turned up and down like a TV dial.

  It was a dangerous new power and the subcommittee used it to destroy. Incredibly, the target was not Hollywood this time, though it was the most visible promoter of the sexy juvenile lifestyle. The industry donated heavily to political campaigns, and theater owners were having financial difficulty. Television had killed movie attendance and lurid movies—these so-called exploitation films—were bringing kids back to theaters. So the subcommittee turned, instead, on a vulnerable medium whose postwar sales were also shrinking.

  Without Nazis and the Japanese to fight, superhero comic books were failing. I was their target audience, and at ten and eleven years old even I wasn’t interested in reading them anymore. Publishers turned to other genres like war, western, romance, science fiction, and humor, which fragmented the audience even further. Furthermore, those genres left them competing with TV as well: if you had a TV, you had access to Hopalong Cassidy, the Lone Ranger, and old western movies… for free. All those World War II movies were sold to television as well. Even hysteria about the atom bomb didn’t help sell comics, since you can show a mushroom cloud over New York or a cratered London just so many times before it wears thin.

  And then someone tried a Hail Mary pass that briefly showed the way for comic books—and got him in a load of trouble.

  The story of William M. Gaines is one of the greatest comebacks in American history. It is also an example of how a businessman in fear of losing his livelihood should fight back when his government threatens him—not necessarily with protests or violence, not with an army of street thugs, but with a handful of bold conspirators… and wit.

  Gaines was the son of Max Gaines, one of the most important men in the history of popular culture. Odds are you’ve never heard of him, but all of us have been impacted, in some way, by what Max did. In fact, we wouldn’t be discussing this topic without him. His is the kind of story I love because it reeks of ethnicity (he was born Maxwell Ginsburg),39 40 city streets, and guts.

  Max Gaines was a loud, aggressive New York printing company salesman who was bothered by the fact that the color presses, which were only used to run off the Sunday newspaper comics, sat idle for six days a week. He came up with an idea to reprint those Sunday newspaper comic strips in a color book alternately called “funny books” or “comic books.” All you had to do, he reasoned, was take those big pages, fold them in half, then in half again, and staple them between two covers. The result of his vision was Famous Funnies: A Carnival of Comics, which debuted in 1933.41 Other comic books followed, including one featuring a comic strip that had been rejected all over town but which Gaines thought would work in the new medium he had created: Superman. Having partnered with others for his previous endeavors, Gaines set up his own publishing company, Educational Comics. When he died in a boating accident in 1947, his twenty-five-year-old son, William, fresh out of the Army Air Corps, took over the firm.

  Under Max, Educational Comics—or simply “EC”—published tales from the Bible, about science, and about U.S. and world history. William expanded into more commercial topics like horror, war, and science fiction. You may be familiar with one of his titles, Tales from the Crypt; long after its demise, it spawned a popular TV series and films during the late 1980s–’90s.42

  The new EC titles contained shocking, violent, and often lurid tales that were enormously popular among the youth of America… and equally unpopular among educators and psychologists, who were concerned about their impact on young minds and morals. With no reliable evidence or methodology, one particular attack caused shock waves: the bestseller Seduction of the Innocent, published in 1954 by psychologist Fredric Wertham,43 in which he charged that comics and comic books were systematically corrupting and destroying America’s youth. He suspected that Wonder Woman was a lesbian and regarded Batman and Robin as living in a homosexual paradise—which is why Aunt Harriet was added to the 1966 TV show.44

  The result of Wertham’s book was mass hysteria in schools and among parents, which dovetailed into the ongoing Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency, chaired by Tennessee Democrat senator Estes Kefauver. It’s incredible to think that the party of the progressives, which now approves of transgender schooling in kindergarten, was once alarmed because one hysterical, glory-seeking psychologist claimed (without proof) that young America was being dangerously exposed to alternative lifestyles.45

  Gaines was hauled before the committee in order to explain himself. The transcript of his testimony is available online and I urge you to seek it out. Bullied relentlessly, the young publisher fell back on giving honest, steadfast answers, which ultimately doomed him. For example, consider this classic exchange:

  Senator Kefauver: Here is your May 22 issue. This seems to be a man with a bloody ax holding a woman’s head up which has been severed from her body. Do you think that is in good taste?

  Mr. Gaines: Yes, sir; I do, for the cover of a horror comic.46

  While Gaines was telling the truth, there was also something disingenuous about his testimony. His comic books were often sadistic. It was not uncommon for him to run stories in which a slumlord was left at the mercy of ravenous dogs in a maze lined with razor blades or a corrupt young man’s heart was cut out and given to his father for Valentine’s Day. Yes, wrongdoers were usually punished and punished grotesquely. And yes, the publications may have been protected speech under the Constitution. But to feign complete innocence in the face of the allegations was coy at best, insincere at worse. Gaines knew his audience, and he was delivering what it wanted.

  The story wraps up much as the hysterics would have hoped: Senator Kefauver went on to become the vice
presidential running mate of Democrat Adlai Stevenson in 1956—a losing ticket—while Gaines ended up losing almost everything. The result of the backlash against comics was preordained: the establishing of a self-policing censorship board known as the Comics Code Authority. Gaines tried to operate under its restrictions, but titles like Tales from the Crypt and Shock SuspenStories simply didn’t lend themselves to sanitizing, and even the kinds of morality tales he had always told, the only publisher to do so—objecting to racism, anti-Semitism, corruption—were now considered too intense for children and were thus off-limits. Gaines ended up folding all of his titles, save for one. It was a comic book he transitioned into magazine format to avoid the restrictions of the Comics Code Authority. A magazine that skewered the kinds of people and institutions that had pilloried him. It also took on Madison Avenue, Hollywood, politics, and every aspect of human nature.

  It was called Mad.47

  Mad made Gaines wealthy and, through it, he and the “usual gang of idiots” (as he called Mad’s contributors on the masthead) influenced more young minds than Estes Kefauver and Fredric Wertham could have ever imagined. Mad continues to this day, while few remember Kefauver and Wertham. The Comics Code Authority? Dead and buried like one of the corpses from Gaines’s comic books. Inevitably, youthful fascination with hot rods ended with the decade as teen interest and movies shifted, as they always do, to activities such as surfing, guitar bands like the Beatles, our space race with the Russians, and, eventually, the drug culture. The “problem” would have self-corrected, in time.