My uncle and Joe McCarthy

The older brother writes to Harvard defending freedom of speech

As a follow up to the newsletter I posted last weekend about my father and Joseph McCarthy, here is my uncle Joe’s take on freedom of speech which my brother Stewart sent on to me. You can read the article about it in the May 22nd issue of the Atlantic here. In 1953, when he was a member of the board of overseers at Harvard University, Uncle Joe wrote a letter to Harvard defending the right to free speech because during the McCarthy era as Conor Friedersdorf, the author of the article, (and a Substack contributor) points out, “Hundreds of professors were summoned by the House Un-American Activities Committee and the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, forced to appear as witnesses, and pressured to name names––that is, to identify fellow academics with ties to the Communist Party. Many were then censured or fired and blacklisted by their employers.”

As uncle Joe wrote in his letter, “The real aim of these committees is not to bring persons guilty of crime before courts of law. It is to make political capital by incriminating their victims before the court of public opinion — to use the headlines to damage reputations beyond subsequent repair.”

It’s hard to accept that what freedom of speech means is the freedom to hold controversial views, to tell lies, to smear opponents with false accusations and innuendoes. But my uncle, a devout and vocal anti-Communist, concludes that “In these cases the individuals are nothing and the principles are everything.” In speaking about a university’s temptation to fire controversial professors or ones who may have briefly joined the Communist Party, he says: “I dislike the individuals, I deplore their views, and I wish they held no Harvard appointments. But this is irrelevant to the central issue. That issue is simple. Harvard has been asked to be the judas goat, leading the whole American academic community to the slaughterhouse. Harvard cannot be untrue to her past, cast shame upon her present, and jeopardize her future, by accepting this plausible but sinister invitation.”

My uncle, who served in China during the war under Claire Chennault, volunteered to testify before the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee on the subject of Vice President Henry Wallace’s mission to China in June, 1944. After his testimony in October of 1951, Uncle Joe encountered McCarthy in the elevator and like my father, refused to shake his proffered hand to the Senator’s amazement and to the shock of the other newspapermen in that elevator. In his memoir I’ve Seen the Best of It, my uncle writes that “It was my introduction to the weakness of the press in the face of McCarthyism. I do not deny that the charges made by McCarthy with such total irresponsibility were news and that printing them was part of the job of the newspaper business. But with very little hard work, it was entirely possible to prove that the man was a practiced and habitual liar. Although he told so many lies and varied the tune so much from lie to lie that it was difficult to pin down and counter his claims, the job could have been done. …If the newspaper business had had the guts to follow back over the trail of McCarthy’s rise and to show him up as a liar over and over again, I doubt very much whether he would have inspired such terror.”

Forgive me for quoting that oft repeated saying that those who forget history are doomed to repeat it. In our country, the problem is that history is no longer being widely taught in the schools. So I was glad to see that Harvard has decided to offer a free online course in civic education to any person who wishes to sign up. Maybe if we start there, an interest in learning our history and a renewed civic engagement in our voting population will follow.

We can only hope.