Rehabilitating Sen. McCarthy

The central idea in Scruton’s column is an oversimplification that distorts history. Scruton says that McCarthy was “a great American patriot whose name has been a term of abuse” because he was an “anti-communist.” Not so.

McCarthyism became a term of abuse not because McCarthy opposed communists or communism but because he accused individuals of being “soft” on communism or “dupes” of communism through innuendo or on the basis of faulty, distorted or disproved charges. It was a political tactic that had nothing to do with ideology, and it was the element of falsity that shaped the term McCarthyism .

Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary (1973) defines McCarthyism: “A mid-twentieth-century political attitude characterized chiefly by opposition to elements held to be subversive and by the use of tactics involving personal attacks on individuals by means of widely publicized indiscriminate allegations esp. on the basis of unsubstantiated charges.”

Joe McCarthy was neither the first nor the last to employ this tactic, and his legacy-- McCarthyism --is a useful word. Its meaning should not be blurred.

EDWIN R. BAYLEY

Carmel

The writer is the author of “Joe McCarthy and the Press,” published in 1981 by the University of Wisconsin Press.