Michael Paul Rogin (1937–2001)

Who will claim Joe McCarthy today? Evidently his home town of Appleton Wisconsin still remembers him.

Rogin seeks to rescue the Populists and Progressives from McCarthy. It is not the reform impulse that generated the phenomenon, but rather traditional conservatism. In taking on the "pluralism" of 1950s social science theory, he demonstrated that the people who had supported agrarian reform in the mid-west were not the same constituencies merely transmogrified. It was the traditional conservatism of the mid-west that fed McCarthy. Playing upon splits in the republican party between an Eastern elite and heartland conservatism, as many have argued since, he was able to keep Eisenhower at bay in the heated atmosphere of the Korean War. It was the right wing of the Republican party, not the progenitors of reform movements, who aided and abetted the reign of terror. The linkages made looking backwards are thus to the opponents of the New Deal. One could, it seems reasonable, map a trajectory from McCarthy forward to the Moral Majority and 700 Club much more easily than one could link him to the counterculture.

Chapters include Introduction; Radicalism and The Rational Society: The Pluralist View; Lockean Moralism and Conservative Ideology; Wisconsin: McCarthy and the Progressive Tradition; North Dakota: Agrarian Radicalism, Ethnic and Economic; South Dakota: From Left to Right; Populism; The Transformation of the Reform Impulse; McCarthyism as Mass Politics; Protest Politics and the Pluralist Vision.

Of the many books written on the phenomenon of McCarthyism, Michael Paul Rogin' s stands out. His thesis is that Senator Joseph McCarthy's rise to political influence between 1950 and 1954 resulted from a combination of wide-spread Cold War anxieties, frustration over America's prolonged involvement in the Korean War, and partisan politics. Anxious to return to national power in 1952 after 20 years of Democratic rule, Republican's exploited the edge provided by this admittedly vulgar interloper. Conservative Republicans constituted the hard core of McCarthy supporters, yet moderates also lent their support. McCarthy gave credence to the Republican claims that the Democrats were soft on Communism, had "lost" China, and were proving unequal to the task of fighting Communism in Korea.

It is somehow curious, this side of Vietnam, to read as "revisionist" account of McCarthyism which seeks to demonstrate that the movement was sponsored by conservative Republicans with strong overtones of partisan Republican politics. My generation has simply grown up with the assumption that the phenomenon fed on excessive fears of international communism, fanned by elements in the Republican party. The idea which Rogin disputes, that McCarthyism took its impetus from a dangerous American anti-establishmentarian tradition, seems an odd straw man. The thought that this book is somehow a "revisionist" interpretation calls for more explicit contextualization.

To appreciate this book it is important to know that in 1967, the reigning interpretation of McCarthyism as expounded by such luminaries as Daniel Bell and Richard Hofstadter stressed its radical left-wing sources. For them, McCarthy's high rate of approval in the midwestern states demonstrated the "populist" (i.e. leftist) nature of McCarthy's politics. This curious line of argument becomes more intelligible when placed within the larger context of what has become known as the "consensus history" of the 1950s. In attacking the social theory of "pluralism, Rogin is undermining the foundations of "consensus history."

The genius of American politics, according to the most prominent historians of the first decade-and-a-half of the post-WWII period, had been its ability to eschew radicalism and to find what Arthur Schlessinger called "the vital center." Expositors of "consensus history," a group in which Daniel Bell and Richard Hofstadter figured prominently, generally held that an informed elite could best guide the American Republic. What they feared most were the ravages of "mass democracy." McCarthy provided the "consensus historians" an excellent case study in the malevolent effects of trusting "the people." His career seemed to demonstrate that the legacy of American radicalism was mainly destructive.

The effect of Rogin's liberation of the radical tradition from tinges of McCarthyism, in concert with other contemporary works in a similar vein, was a restoration of faith in the creative power of America's radical tradition. In 1967, when this political scientist won the Albert J. Beveridge Award from the American Historical Association, his was an idea whose time had come. We've come a way since such an idea was novel.… (més)