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Transcription: [00:18:50]
{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
pursuit of the communists that he thought were existing, he manages to violate the - what I would take to be - the civil liberties of many of the people that he pursued using the IRS and the tax investigative

[00:19:02]
power of the United States and just the simple crushing burden of being a private citizen and having to hire a lawyer and ultimately in the case of him and in many others, having to go to jail.

[00:19:13]
And it really becomes a question with Americans about how far you will go in allowing, um,

[00:19:19]
personal liberties to be sacrificed for national security interests. And I would argue that, um,

[00:19:26]
in maintaining that balance, um, that McCarthy went too far, and that in a way, that you know, he becomes the tyrant in a way that we are supposed to be fighting against.

[00:19:37]
Um, this great picture is done in 1954 at the Army-McCarthy hearings, and I'll return;

[00:19:43]
portraits - you know, the standard way that we do portraits is, the oil portraits that you see here of Toni Morrison and Tom Wolfe, they're the most highly established, iconic pictures that we do when we celebrate an individual.

[00:19:56]
But we've got - in the same way that we've democratized the collection - we are also more interested in other ways of portraying individuals. And this of c-this is a news photo, in fact,

[00:20:06]
by George Tames whose photographs McCarthy, in his familiar role of questioning a witness at the Army-McCarthy hearings of 1954 in which the Army-which,

[00:20:16]
which Congress sets up, in effect, to investigate McCarthy, turns the tables on him, reveals him. It's one of the first great moments, by the way, in television,

[00:20:25]
where television becomes the cultural force as we now know it to be. In fact it was more of a cultural force then because it was rarer. It wasn't as ubiquitous. These days, everything's on television so it kinda loses its impact.

[00:20:37]
But back then it was on television and it was a sensation. And when the people saw it - you know, in the brief career of McCarthy from '50 to '54, they decided they really didn't like what they saw. And as McCarthy browbeat witnesses, and, and

[00:20:51]
and, and hectored them, kept them from answering, badgered them, badgered indiscriminately, it really became something that-when I was a student I didn't quite understand the McCarthy hearings because they didn't

[00:21:04]
have anything at all to do with Communism or Stalinism, they just seemed to be people dealing with somebody who was out of control. And the climactic moment of that is the defense counsel, Mr. Welch, saying to-and you can see it in the, in the,

[00:21:18]
in the newsreel footage of, you know, "Senator, have you no shame?" You know, he-- browbeating a poor young witness, you know, an associate in the law firm, a man who was just doing his constitutional job as a lawyer.

[00:21:31]
And McCar-that is the moment in which the tide breaks for McCarthy. This brief period in which he's able to ride the wave of this publicity and genuine national opinion against

[00:21:42]
against state-Soviet state intrusion into American politics, the Cold War beginning, and all the rest of it. That they realized that this was not how to go.

[00:21:53]
And he s-within short order - he had always raised a certain amount of distrust, for one thing - he was seen as a kind of a primitive, an outsider; he was seen as a willing instrument. He never really recognized that. It's kind of pathetic.

[00:22:07]
Eisenhower and the-and Bob Taft and the Republican hierarchy tolerated him as an election go-you know, an election issue, you know, as someone who could get out the vote, who could throw red meat to the mass, or the base, as we would now call it.

[00:22:19]
But they never really liked him and McCarthy didn't do much to make himself liked.

[00:22:24]
And they were very quick to turn on him. And he's censured in 1954 and he dies soon thereafter, essentially, he drank himself to death in a very close order.

[00:22:34]
He disappeared as suddenly as he arrived, politically, but he lives on in the concept of 'McCarthyism' - there are very few people who have an 'ism' named after them (even Hitler didn't get to be an 'ism', it was Nazism.)

[00:22:47]
But there is 'McCarthyism', a term coined by Herb Block, the Washington Post cartoonist, whose exhibition is on the second floor and there's some nice cartoons of the McCarthy era down there.

[00:23:02]
And he lives-'McCarthyism' lives on - and I was reading in the papers today or just talking to people about - in the current political comment about- which-climate, about which I will not comment,

[00:23:12]
about unsubstantiated slurs - that the-the censorship, on the basis of who or what you are assumed to be, rather than what it is you actually said.

[00:23:22]
And I actually would ask for a return to the original meaning of 'McCarthyism', because I think in some senses the word has become denatured. It's too ubiquitous. It's too easy. If you're in a political meeting, as I s-unfortunately sometimes am,

[00:23:36]
it's too easy to assume anybody who criticizes you or keeps you from talking is that "that's McCarthyism", as opposed to just smearing me. I mean it's like, you can smear me, but don't call me a 'McCarthyite'.

[00:23:47]
Because what I think 'McCarthyism' demonstrated is the abuse of the power of the government. And I think that needs to be kept distinct from somebody just shooting off their mouth or somebody being nasty or somebody being mean.

[00:23:58]
And I really think that the crucial issue of 'McCarthyism', which I don't think we've totally assimilated, is the fact that the--

[00:24:05]
is the state has the obligation to behave better than its citizens do.

[00:24:10]
And the state has the value and the right of upholding the values that-that, that we most cherish.

[00:24:16]
And it's the state that should always be most careful in the charges that it renders against its people.

[00:24:23]
And to that extent, I would like to return to the actual meaning of 'McCarthyism', which was the use of government power,

[00:24:29]
ostensibly to maintain the values of the state, but in fact to subvert it, and in effect to bring it into threat.

Thank you. [[applause]]
[00:24:42]

Transcription Notes:
George Tames - in the audio, sounds like "stamps" - I looked up name to confirm