The Very American Roots of Trumpism | The Ezra Klein Show

This is the first commentary I've seen with a sense of American history and the Trump movement.  Like Klein, I'm not worried that there won't be midterms or a 2028 election.

Worth listening to.

Tuesday, January 14, 1975. Un-American.

The House Un-American Activities Committee was disbanded by the U.S. House of Representatives.

It's roots went back to 1918 and it had investigated a wide range of Communist activities in the US dating back to that time.  Often missed, quite a few figures that the committee investigated unsuccessfully prior to World War Two would be again after the war.  Many of those whom it suspected of Communist activity would, in fact, prove to have done just that, in spite of the reputation of the committee being tarnished during the McCarthy Era.

It's demise after the Watergate and the Vietnam War was inevitable, but it had a much better track record than is popularly recalled.

Henry Kissinger announced that the Soviet Union was rescinding its agreement to a trade deal with the United States following enactment of the Jackson–Vanik amendment to the Trade Act of 1974.

The Convention on Registration of Launched Objects into Outer Space was signed in New York.  It requires the signatories to inform the United Nations of things that are launched into space.

U.S. Vice-President Rockefeller was appointed to head a committee to investigate domestic espionage by the Central Intelligence Agency.

Last edition:

Saturday, January 11, 1975. Storms. Things can, and do, get worse.

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A repeat. June 9, 1954. The lesson of past hearings. . .

Lex Anteinternet: The lesson of past hearings. . .: 

The lesson of past hearings. . .

Joseph Welch, hand in head, being questioned by Joseph McCarthy

Joseph Welch was the chief legal counsel for the U.S. Army when it fell under the gaze of Joseph McCarthy.  McCarthy asserted that there were Communist that had not been brought to light by the Army in the Army, in defense plants, or in institutions associated with national defense.  The claim wasn't actually wholly without merit, actually as at least a few Communists, in 1954, were in the service and more in industry, which was not surprising if we consider that the 1930s had been the high water mark of American Communism and there were more at that time, the 30s, than there ever would be again. Some would end up in the service by default, and indeed at least one openly Communist American officer, a veteran of the Spanish Civil War, received the Silver Cross for heroism in the Pacific before later being killed in action. The Army certainly wasn't a hotbed of Communism, however, and the claims were seen as extreme at the time.

On June 9, 1954, Welch, now in day 30 of the hearings, challenged McCarthy confederate Roy Cohn to provide the Attorney General with the names of the 130 subversives that McCarthy claimed were working in American defense plants "before sundown" that day.  That wasn't done, but McCarthy called out the name of a lawyer who worked in Welch's Boston law office as a member of a Communist front organization.  The lawyer had indeed been a member of it in his youth (recall the comment about the 30s again).

When this occurred, the famous exchange resulted.  Welch at first commented:

Until this moment, Senator, I think I have never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness. Fred Fisher is a young man who went to the Harvard Law School and came into my firm and is starting what looks to be a brilliant career with us....Little did I dream you could be so reckless and so cruel as to do an injury to that lad. It is true he is still with Hale and Dorr. It is true that he will continue to be with Hale and Dorr. It is, I regret to say, equally true that I fear he shall always bear a scar needlessly inflicted by you. If it were in my power to forgive you for your reckless cruelty I would do so. I like to think I am a gentleman, but your forgiveness will have to come from someone other than me.

McCarthy should have known better than to attempt to joust with a figure like Welch, but he kept on and didn't yield, resulting in:

Senator, may we not drop this? We know he belonged to the Lawyers Guild ... Let us not assassinate this lad further, Senator. You've done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?

McCarthy still wouldn't yield. Welch rebuked him and informed him he wouldn't answer any more questions. The audience broke into applause.

McCarthy was wrecked forever.

Yesterday Republicans in the Impeachment hearings suggested that Lt.Col. Vindman, the child of Ukrainian immigrants, might not be fully loyal to the United States as the Ukrainian administration offered him a position as their defense chief several times.  He declined every time.  There's no suggestion that he ever entertained the offer, and to entertain it would not be a sign of anything in particular.  After all, Douglas McArthur was head of the Philippine's army after retiring, the first time, from the U.S. Army. That didn't make him disloyal.  And apparently at least one senior American Air Force officer with Eastern European ties has taken up such a position.  Claire Chenault spent years in the service of the Nationalist Chinese, but he's never been considered to have been disloyal.

The real question should have been what did Lt. Col. Vindman hear, and what did it mean.  Both Vindman and another witness said that they were distressed by what they heard, Vindman very much so, but that they didn't hear the word "bribe" and neither came so far as to claim what they heard was regarded as a bribe. Vindman did go further than the other witness in his opening remarks in upholding the reputation of the removed ambassador, a noble thing to do, but perhaps straying outsides of the confines of what he should have done.

Still, for the second time in two weeks the House Republicans have managed to attack a witness and have the attack fall back on themselves.  

Joseph McCarthy attacked a lot of witnesses in his hearings in the early 1950s.  Now forgotten, McCarthy's claims were a lot more accurate, indeed highly accurate, than recalled.  He benefited from the work of a prior committee from the 1930s and he was also almost certainly getting information secretly and without Administration knowledge from the FBI.  But his behavior just went to far.  Attacking the Army itself went too far, and then attacking Fred Fischer in a collateral attack went way too far.  It was so devastating, in fact, that McCarthy's apologist have accused Welch of cleverly setting  it up.  But McCarthy' set himself up.

Americans don't like politicians attacking servicemen, and the GOP, which has been closest to the service since World War Two, has members who dislike it most of all.  McCarthy didn't survive attacking the Army.  Today's House Republicans would have done well to remember that.

The results of these hearings, as already noted, are foreordained.  But the election isn't.  For undecided voters seeing a soldier like Vindman impugned may be hard to forget. 

McCarthy ended up censured later that year.  His career declined.  He died in 1957 with the cause officially being hepatitis, but which is widely believed to have been due to alcoholism or contributed to by alcoholism.  He was 48 years old.  He left behind a wife of for years, Jean, whom was 33 years old at the time of his death.

Joseph Welch would die three years after that, at age 69.  He's often best remembered today for his role as the judge in Anatomy of a Murder, which he played after his role in the Army McCarthy hearings.

Last prior (chronologicaly) edition:

Blog Mirror: January 14, 1954: Joe DiMaggio Marries Marilyn Monroe

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Saturday, May 10, 1924. J. Edgar Hoover becomes the head of the (Federal) Bureau of Investigation.

J. Edgar Hoover was named acting director of the Bureau of Investigation, which later became the Federal Bureau of Investigation.  He'd occupy the position of the agency's head until May 2, 1972, the latter being the date of his death.

Hoover in 1932.

Hoover was a lawyer who had graduated from Georgetown with an LLB in 1916 and obtained a LLM from the same institution in 1917.  That year, he went to work in the Justice Department War Emergency Division at age 22.  He was 77 when he died, the mandatory Federal retirement age having been waived in his case.  His extremely long retention is peculiar, and has given rise to speculation that various Presidents were afraid of what he might have on them in his files.

Hoover was foundational for the FBI, as might be suspected. As an individual personality he was peculiar and notably never married, and lived with his mother into his 40s and was extremely close to assistant director Clyde Tolson, who inherited his estate, all of which has given rise to speculation about his sexuality but nothing has been proven one way or another about it.

Personally, I suspect that Hoover was the source of information used by Joe McCarthy on Communists in the US government, something that the Truman Administration early on had attempted to keep the lid on, but I've never seen that speculated upon elsewhere.

It was a Saturday.

Last prior edition:

Friday, May 9, 1924. Scottish question results in chaos.

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Blog Mirror: Have they no sense of decency?

A Robert Reich item about Elise Stefanik:

Have they no sense of decency?

The descent of Stefanik has been epic.  It hardly makes sense, at least in the case of a person who has any integrity at all. Starting off as a centrist, she's turned into a Trump hack.

This effort to sanction the court and the court's clerk is shocking.

Stefanik is really playing with fire here. There's at least a halfway decent chance she'll be sanctioned for filing such a bogus challenge. And if the country survives the next election, long term she's going to have the same sort of reputation that Joe McCarthy now has, save for the fact that she'll fully deserve it and McCarthy only partially did.

Unlike McCarthy, Stefanik is a mother. What a legacy for that child will be left.

Lex Anteinternet: Monday, March 15, 1943 A Wyoming Federal Reservat...hmmm. . .

Lex Anteinternet: Monday, March 15, 1943 A Wyoming Federal Reservat...: Today In Wyoming's History: March 15: 1943  Franklin Roosevelt used executive authority to proclaim 221,000 acres as the Jackson Hole National Monument, the predecessor to today's Grand Teton National Park.  Governor Hunt threatened to use the Highway Patrol to prevent Federal authority on its grounds.  Congress, for its part, refused to appropriate money for the monument. 

His principled stance on McCarthyism aside, it's just this sort of thing that makes it so you can't really be too sorry that the Legislature didn't honor Hunt this session.

Tuesday, November 3, 1942. The 1942 Election.

Today was election day in 1942.  Overall, the nationwide election saw an increase in Republican office holders.

In Wyoming, the following occurred:

1942.  Lester Hunt, DDS, the sitting Wyoming Secretary of State and a Democrat narrowly defeated Governor Nels H. Smith.

Lester C. Hunt.

Hunt would serve as Governor for two terms before going on to becoming Wyoming's Senator.  He killed himself in 1954 after Washington D. C. policy picked up his son in 1953 for soliciting a male prostitute.  The scandal was kept quiet for awhile, but political opponents threatened to use it against him as a threat to keep him from engaging in a 1954 bid for office.

In the Senate Hunt had been an opponent of Joe McCarthy.

In the same year that Wyoming went from Republican to Democrat for the Governor's mansion, the state went in the opposite direction for the Senate.  Edward V. Robinson defeated incumbant Harry Schwartz.

Robinson.

Robinson's election was part of a nationwide treand that year that saw a Republican increase.  He's serve only one term and lose a bid for reelection.  He was Welsh and had served in the British Army in the Boer War, and is little remembered as a Wyoming politician.

Hunt's death, it should be noted, remains an enduring tragedy of the McCarthy Era, and one which, at least in some Wyoming circles, came to define McCarthyism and certain right wing elements of the press.

More on Hunt:

Baseball, Politics, Triumph and Tragedy: The Career of Lester Hunt

Robinson, on the other hand, gives us a rare example of a nearly completely forgotten Wyoming politician.  In some ways, that's a shame, as his life story was one that was somewhat typical of the era in that he was an early, post Frontier Era, immigrant to the state when a person could still enter ranching, which he did, in spite of having an engineering background.  Following his defeat for reelection he ultimately retired to Pendleton Oregon in 1958, where he died in 1963. 

 The Marines and Army begin an offensive on Guadalcanal at Koli Point.

Marine Corps pack artillery in action at Koli Point

Friday August 29, 1941. Shifting sands

On this day in 1941, Charles Lindbergh at a rally of the American First Committee in Oklahoma City warned the audience that the United Kingdom might turn against the US "as she had turned against France and Finland". 

Senator Burton K. Wheeler of Montana.

Lindbergh was backed up by Montana Senator Burton K. Wheeler who counseled that "If our interventionist want to free a country from the domination of another country, we ought to declare war on Great Britain and free India.  I have never seen such slavery as I saw in India a few years ago".

Wheeler was an outspoken left wing Democrat who had at one time crossed over to the Progressive Party and then back.  He opposed entry to the war right up until December 7, 1941 and was instrumental in the leaking of US plans to aid the British prior to the war, which went to press on December 4, 1941.  His isolationist stances caused him to suffer defeat in the first Montana election in which he was up after December 7, and he never returned to politics. A lawyer by training, he returned to practicing law and defended Max Lowenthal in front of the House Committee On Un American Affairs in the 1950s.  He's an example of how opposition to entry into the war was not, as sometimes imagined, politically uniform.

The rally itself was not well received by the public, and polls started increasingly swinging towards the Administration's interventionist policies.

Speaking of Finland, the Finns retook Viipuri.  Not forever of course, its Vyborg, Russia.

Flag for the city of Vybork, in the Leningrad Oblast.

The city did have a Finnish population at the time, but its entire population was evacuated in 1944 with the collapse of the Eastern Front.  It is, therefore, an example today of the massive population disruption brought on by the Second World War.

Finnish victory parade, August 31, 1941.

In Serbia, the puppet collaborationist Government of National Salvation commenced control of the country.

Vichy authorities arrested American journalist Varian Fry.  Fry was running an underground railroad effort helping Jews escape from France and to the United States, using Spain and Portugal as conduits.  He'd be expelled from the country.

Arthur McFadden became Australian Prime Minister in a coalition government.  He was a member of the minority Country Party.  The National Country Party, the "Nats" is a center right party that's strongest in rural areas and which has a focus on agrarian issues.