Joe McCarthy’s Threat

Why did Senator Joseph McCarthy pose a threat to the powers that be?

Why were they so concerned about him weeding out communists?

Didn’t they considered themselves anti-communist?

That seems strange, does it not?

Why would Dwight Eisenhower be concerned about Joseph McCarthy reporting a communist, spy ring at Fort Monmouth?

One would think Eisenhower would be delighted as Joe McCarthy would be protecting the integrity of the Army.

Senator McCarthy was also attacking government institutions in Germany because (he felt) they were promoting communist literature.

Indeed, our government had been sponsoring cultural centers throughout Germany to promote American values.

Collectively these cultural centers and their libraries were called Amerika Haus.

Included in the libraries were various books which promoted the leftist point of view. This is true.

McCarthy’s point was that the views of JohnPaul Sartre were not in agreement with the basic precepts of what made this country great, so why are we promoting them? If people want to hear those points of view, they can go somewhere else.

Well, men like John McCloy, corporate lawyer, and former High Commissioner of Occupied Germany felt that Germans should get a balanced point of view. Yes, the point of Amerika Haus was to cajole the German people into accepting the American point of view, yet that effort, he felt, would be more effective if we presented a balanced point of view.

There is a good argument to be made for that, and I’m not so sure that I disagree with it.

Nevertheless, McCarthy had a good argument also. What’s the point of presenting American values if we’re going to present values that don’t represent what we stand for?

At any rate, it’s not important who was right or wrong on this issue. What is important is that McCloy, Eisenhower and their internationalist friends opposed Joe McCarthy. They felt that his presence in America threatened the American Empire.

They felt that if Germans did not see a balanced point of view in these libraries that Amerika Haus was presenting, then Germans would be less likely to adopt the American point of view.

The goal of America Haus was to foster free enterprise capitalism in Germany to act as a bulwark against communism.

Joe McCarthy threatened that. Or so they thought.

For that reason and others, Joe McCarthy had to be taken down.

But, was Joe McCarthy right but for the wrong reasons?

Did Joe McCarthy stumble inadvertently onto something? Did he accidentally reveal who and what our leaders were and represented?

I think he did.

I also don’t think Joe McCarthy fully understood the formidable enemy he was up against.. If he had, he probably wouldn’t have taken on this battle against the establishment.

Few people would.

Joe McCarthy was essentially an isolationist in the sense that he felt that America should take care of America first, and that it should stand up for American values.

I think he saw internationalism as a dilution of Americas energy and treasure.

I don’t think he was opposed to international trade so much as he was opposed to American busybody-ism.

What these internationalists truly represented was the American Empire.

They weren’t so much opposed to communism as they were for American internationalism.

And if they had to choose between a socialist America enforcing a Pax Americana upon the world and the converse – a free America being one nation among many – they would choose the former. Joe McCarthy believed in the latter.

His opinion was that an America diluted of its true value sets no example for the world.

And that truth expressed to the American people was a mortal threat to the powers that be.

Sincerely,

Archer Crosley

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