Town Faces Legacy of an Infamous Son

His mother doted on him. His older brother bullied him. By 14 he had his own chicken farm, and by the time he was 19, it had failed. It wasn’t until age 20 that he started high school; classmates voted him “Most Lovable Man.” He was a judge at 30 and a U.S. senator before 40.

Although the early life of Joseph McCarthy was a politician’s dream, he died in 1957 at age 48, felled by hepatitis and liquor and the certainty of history’s harsh judgment. Brandishing a list of names, he seared himself into the national memory with his zealous investigations of communist penetration of the government. Those probes failed, and McCarthy lives on today as an epithet, a synonym for reckless attacks and dishonest smears. Here, in his hometown, even his name seemed forgotten, so rarely was it uttered.

McCarthy goes unmentioned in local tourist guides, which dwell instead on Harry Houdini and Edna Ferber, even though they spent most of their lives far from Wisconsin. No buildings or bridges are named for McCarthy. No signs mark the farmhouse where he was born and raised. Nor is the cemetery where he is buried listed in the phone book.

But this year, for the first time, the town is facing the legacy of its most infamous native son head-on. In the first comprehensive museum exhibit on his life anywhere, McCarthy, the last major American politician born in a log cabin, is being revived not just as a historical villain but as the star of a classic bootstraps-up tale.

“Joseph McCarthy: A Modern Tragedy,” which opened to the public Saturday at the Outagamie Museum in this town of 70,000, has attracted considerable attention. The local newspaper has assigned a reporter to produce a series of stories on McCarthy’s life and the new exhibit. Groups of McCarthy defenders have raised their profiles. Politicians, long wary of invoking McCarthy, discuss him publicly. America’s McCarthy scholars, nearly all of whom have advised the exhibit’s curator, are looking anew at the senator’s roots.

In raising McCarthy’s profile, the exhibit has revealed that, far from being forgotten by his hometown, McCarthy remains the object of quiet but enduring sympathy.

“It’s really a coming-out party for McCarthy. Before this in Appleton, it was almost as if the guy never existed,” said Jerald Podair, a historian at Lawrence University here. “In Appleton, it’s one of the most relevant exhibits that’s ever been put on. And you learn that if he had been just a regular senator, he’d be an American success story.”

In making that case, the exhibit is cautious. There is a warning posted at the door (“This exhibit includes strong language and discussions which some viewers might find disturbing”--a reference to the subject and a few coarse words in museum quotes.) And the curators have included a bulletin board to give visitors a chance to air complaints.

The overall presentation is so evenhanded it may upset those who see McCarthy as an irredeemably evil figure. While taking note of what it calls McCarthy’s “reckless” behavior and “character flaws,” it emphasizes that his anti-communist crusades were grounded in the Cold War fears fanned by communist victories in China and Korea. And the exhibit texts invoke post-Sept. 11 concerns in appealing for understanding of the subject.

“Once again Americans are weighing issues of national security and individual rights,” said Kim Louagie, the Outagamie Museum curator who first conceived the exhibit three years ago. “McCarthy wrestled with the same issues.”

But while texts, pictures and an audiotape from his investigations are on display, the balance of the exhibit is devoted to humanizing a man who has been demonized for decades.

“They have made this exhibit into a personal tragedy about his life rather than a national tragedy about politics, and that is probably about right,” said David Oshinsky, a Rutgers University professor and author of the 1983 biography “A Conspiracy So Immense: The World of Joe McCarthy.” “His was a story of a local boy who hit the national scene--and really screwed up.”

“I think this exhibit will make it easier to talk about him,” said Sally Mielke, chairwoman of the Outagamie County Board of Supervisors. Her husband had met McCarthy. “I don’t think you can simply say he was just evil--no one who knew him believes that. I think he had a touch of truth but went too far. Since 9/11, people are remembering we have to be watchful, even paranoid. And like McCarthy did, we all have to decide for ourselves how far we should go to protect the country.”

Joe McCarthy usually made a good first impression. Cody Splitt, now a county supervisor in Appleton, remembers watching him descend a staircase at a hotel in Madison during his 1946 Senate campaign. Broad-shouldered and handsome, he was the only man in the room not wearing a tie. Impressed, Splitt, then a law student at the University of Wisconsin, befriended him and volunteered in the campaign, handing out matchbooks with McCarthy’s name.

“He was a charming Irishman,” said Splitt. “People think his appeal was anti-communism, but that’s not why anyone voted for him. He could talk to the common man because he was one of them.”

The exhibit makes that appeal clear. On display are blown-up family pictures and a wood slab from the granary into which McCarthy carved his initials at age 13. His boxing gloves from his Marquette University team are here. Letters from his high school principal marvel at the drive of a young man who managed to complete four years of study in one. “Joe was the irresistible force who overcame the immovable object,” the principal wrote.

The exhibit, however, does not hesitate to point out McCarthy’s many lies. There are “McCarthy for Judge” postcards that he used in a successful campaign to unseat an aging incumbent; McCarthy told voters his 66-year-old opponent was 73. The exhibit also includes a medal, the Distinguished Flying Cross, that McCarthy got by exaggerating his combat experience, and a letter of recommendation he solicited from Adm. Chester Nimitz under a forged signature. Nearby is his military trunk and the helmet he wore for pictures showing him in the back of a plane. “Tailgunner Joe” became his nickname, even though he was an intelligence officer.

The exhibit offers few artifacts from McCarthy’s career in Washington. There are books, correspondence and a brush (given to him by a brush company owner who wanted communists swept away), but little else.

One exhibit room is devoted to the 1954 nationally televised hearings on McCarthy’s charges that the Army was protecting communist sympathizers. The Army--through its hired lawyer, Joe Welch--counterattacked and exposed McCarthy’s cruel tactics, famously asking, “Have you no decency, sir?” The room notes McCarthy’s subsequent censure by his colleagues in 1954, the end of his political relevance. But it feels sparse next to the clutter of the biographical displays.

After the senator died, some 30,000 people filed through St. Mary’s Catholic Church here to view the body. The mayor asked public offices, schools and businesses to close. Most did.

A photograph shows residents of the nearby town of Little Chute lined up five deep along the road to watch McCarthy’s funeral procession. There is a reprint of a Wisconsin State Senate resolution praising McCarthy, and an excerpt from a pastor’s speech at his memorial service: “McCarthy saw danger to his country and clothed in the shining armor of zeal and love and holding within his hands the sword of truth marched forward into battle with the cry of his lips.”

Kelly Kornely, the son of McCarthy’s sister Olive, was 12 when his Uncle Joe died. His family, never close, didn’t talk much about its famous kinsman, and Appleton’s schools and libraries offered little.

Two years after his death, Outagamie County dedicated a 250-pound bronze bust of McCarthy, rendered at twice life size, in the lobby of its courthouse downtown. The bust was the first and last public monument to McCarthy. Six years ago, Lawrence University tried to put together a symposium on McCarthy but couldn’t find a donor to sponsor it.

“People here hate controversy, so no one would bring him up,” said Cliff Sanderfoot, a longtime member of the county board.

There were minor exceptions. Leftists tracked down McCarthy’s grave, on a bluff above the Fox River, just to dance on it. A group of McCarthy supporters based in Milwaukee, known as the McCarthy Educational Foundation, began holding an annual memorial service at his grave each May. Between 40 and 100 people attend. A Jesuit priest, Cletus Healy, says the rosary on the dead senator’s behalf, and the group adjourns to a nearby restaurant for dinner and conversation.

“He was a martyr,” said Earl Denny, a retired salesman who is the foundation’s soft-spoken leader. The group sends McCarthy’s books to university libraries, campaigns for a Joe McCarthy national monument and demands an investigation into his death. (They suggest he was murdered.) “Joe McCarthy gave his life for the truth,” said Healy, 84, who runs a Catholic bookstore in a Milwaukee suburb.

By the mid-1980s, the desire to forget McCarthy had grown to the point that some politicians tried to have the courthouse bust removed. But the removal efforts--in 1986 and 1991--attracted unwanted publicity for the town and were quickly voted down.

The end of the Cold War sparked new scholarship regarding McCarthy. Declassified American intelligence cables and Soviet files made clear the degree to which communists had penetrated the U.S. government after World War II. Some scholars have argued that McCarthy might have been right about communist penetration, even if his specific charges were wrong and his tactics despicable.

But this renewed interest in McCarthy drew little notice in his hometown. One by one, McCarthy’s personal ties to Appleton eroded. Friends and contemporaries died. His daughter, adopted in 1957 shortly before his death, reportedly lives in the Washington, D.C., area. (She did not respond to entreaties from the museum.) His wife and his siblings are dead. Kornely, the senator’s nephew, believes he is the closest living relative in the area.

Kornely, though uncomfortable with the subject of his uncle, thinks historians have been too hard on McCarthy, and he sees the term “McCarthyism” as a slur against his hard-working family. But he is no fan of McCarthy’s right-wing defenders either.

“He was a human being--no saint and no sinner,” said Kornely, president of an insurance agency here. “He achieved a lot. And he did a number of things wrong.”

Last year, Kornely attended a Rotary Club luncheon where the speaker was Louagie, curator of Outagamie Museum. Raised and educated in Canada, Louagie decided shortly after she arrived in Appleton in 1999 that she would curate a McCarthy exhibit. And she was undeterred by the local aversion to discussing McCarthy.

Kornely, who was impressed by Louagie’s commitment, invited her to his home. Soon Kornely was digging family pictures and his uncle’s military trunk out of the basement.

Louagie persuaded the county board to donate the heroically sized McCarthy bust, which she planned to use as the exhibit’s centerpiece. Anticipation grew. The local newspaper, the Post-Crescent, ran daily stories, examining nearly every piece of the exhibit.

The museum, recognizing the publicity bonanza, won’t stop with just an exhibit, which runs through January 2004. There is a virtual tour of the McCarthy displays on the Internet at www.foxvalleyhisto ry.org/mccarthy.

The Outagamie County Historical Society is also planning a McCarthy film series showing “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” and other movies born of the McCarthy period. And it is organizing a McCarthy book club to read texts that McCarthy attacked, such as Dashiell Hammett’s “Red Harvest” and Lillian Hellman’s “Scoundrel Time.”

A preview on Friday night attracted nearly 100 people, who sipped wine and snacked on hors d’oeuvres as they viewed the exhibit.

The crowd included local politicians, historians and several people who, like County Supervisor Splitt, had met McCarthy.

“It showed him in his complexity,” said Podair, the Lawrence University scholar, approvingly. “And he obviously was a complex guy.”