Quote of the Day (Margaret Chase Smith, on a Party That ‘Puts Political Exploitation Above National Interest’)

“I don't believe the American people will uphold any political party that puts political exploitation above national interest. Surely we Republicans aren't that desperate for victory. I don't want to see the Republican party win that way. While it might be a fleeting victory for the Republican Party, it would be a more lasting defeat for the American people.”— Margaret Chase Smith (1897-1995), Republican Senator from Maine, “Declaration of Conscience,” U.S. Senate speech, June 1, 1950

In two recent articles, the Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist and former Presidential speechwriter Peggy Noonan has highlighted the lonely courage of Senator Margaret Chase Smith. I briefly referred to that address in a post from 2½ years ago, but current circumstances make it more pertinent than even then.

Without ever naming Joseph McCarthy, Smith was unmistakably denouncing him for using the Senate as “a forum of hate and character assassination.” Fear of the demagogic conspiracist from Wisconsin—and the hope of exploiting his fraudulent, reckless charges of Communism for partisan purposes—led his GOP Senate colleagues to stay silent on McCarthy’s abuses, as well as on Smith’s rebuke.

The contemporary parallel that Noonan has in mind, of course, is the Capitol Hill GOP’s cowardly refusal to acknowledge Joe Biden as President-elect—not only more than a month after the election but after multiple courts and electoral boards in multiple states have rejected Donald Trump’s charges of massive electoral fraud that surpass McCarthy’s wild Senate harangues in their fact-free content and rank irresponsibility. (Trump has no more evidence of such trickery than McCarthy had a list of Communists in the State Department.)

Over in the House of Representatives, 125 Republicans—more than 60% of that group—signed an amicus brief backing a Texas lawsuit seeking to overturn results in battleground states won by Biden.

Of course they were hypocritical in criticizing the state prerogatives they have always regarded as intrinsic in the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution and opportunistic in keeping in the White House a member of their own party.

But they also acted cravenly in the face of a President who, like McCarthy, has not hesitated to provoke the party base against even mildly dissenting GOP incumbents in primaries—and shamefully in supporting an unprecedented challenge to the traditional orderly transfer of power in the Oval Office from one party to another.

For all their cavalier confidence that their support for the lawsuit was cost-free (even Republican judges have ensured that the litigation would have no chance), they may still reap the whirlwind at the hands of a President they were always too fatally sure would be stopped without any help on their part.

Trump aide Stephen Miller is now putting the GOP congressional delegation on the spot by speaking of an “alternate” slate of electors in the contested states that will be submitted to Congress in January, before Biden is scheduled to be inaugurated.

There will be nobody left to protect them from Trump’s wrath once they nervously decide to derail his clown car. Many will have to consider what they have dreaded for many of their waking hours these past few years: a life away from the privileges they enjoyed in Congress.

Relax, folks—you’ll find plenty of company in unemployment. Maybe you’ll even learn from others what it’s like to have a GOP ready to help a would-be dictator but not ordinary Americans still out of work through no fault of their own.

(By the way, if you want to see a fictional character inspired by Smith, see a very young Betty White in this YouTube clip from the 1962 film Advise and Consent, in which her Sen. Bessie Adams expertly cuts down to size McCarthy stand-in Fred Van Ackerman, played by George Grizzard.)

Quote of the Day (Margaret Chase Smith, on ‘Americanism’ and Character Assassinations)

“Those of us who shout the loudest about Americanism in making character assassinations are all too frequently those who, by our own words and acts, ignore some of the basic principles of Americanism:

            The right to criticize;

            The right to hold unpopular beliefs;

            The right to protest;

            The right of independent thought.

“The exercise of these rights should not cost one single American citizen his reputation or his right to a livelihood nor should he be in danger of losing his reputation or livelihood merely because he happens to know someone who holds unpopular beliefs.  Who of us doesn’t?  Otherwise none of us could call our souls our own.  Otherwise thought control would have set in.” — Margaret Chase Smith (1897-1995), Republican Senator from Maine, “Declaration of Conscience,” speech to the U.S. Senate, June 1, 1950

Speaking on behalf of herself and six other Republican Senators, Senator Smith warned fellow party members about abetting the tactics of GOP colleague Joseph McCarthy. Look in vain for her like among today’s Republicans on Capitol Hill. The only ones willing to denounce the reckless charges coming from a figure far more consequential than McCarthy are those who will not be facing primary voters. 

Read Smith’s words, then weep that her kind is no more.

Quote of the Day (Dwight Eisenhower, on the ‘Book Burners’)

“Don't join the book burners. Don't think you are going to conceal faults by concealing evidence that they ever existed. Don't be afraid to go in your library and read every book, as long as that document does not offend our own ideas of decency. That should be the only censorship.”—President Dwight D. Eisenhower, “Remarks at the Dartmouth College Commencement Exercises, Hanover, New Hampshire,” June 14, 1953

A quarter century before Dwight Eisenhower warned Dartmouth graduates against book burners, the practice would have been regarded as a throwback to the witch-burnings of the Middle Ages. But on this date in 1933, German counterparts to Dartmouth—the finest their country had produced—gathered in university towns to incinerate approximately 25,000 books for propagating“un-German” ideas.

The authors whose works were burned that day form an indelible part of the modern era: Henri Barbusse, Franz Boas, John Dos Passos, Albert Einstein, Lion Feuchtwanger, Friedrich Forster, Sigmund Freud, John Galsworthy, Andre Gide, Ernst Glaeser, Maxim Gorki, Werner Hegemann, Ernest Hemingway, Erich Kästner, Helen Keller, Alfred Kerr, Jack London, Emil Ludwig, Heinrich Mann, Thomas Mann, Karl Marx, Hugo Preuss, Marcel Proust, Erich Maria Remarque, Walther Rathenau, Margaret Sanger, Arthur Schnitzler, Upton Sinclair, Kurt Tucholsky, Jakob Wassermann, H.G. Wells, Theodor Wolff, Emile Zola, Arnold Zweig, and Stefan Zweig.

High Nazi officials, along with professors, university rectors, and university student leader,s addressed the mass audiences at the awful ceremonies, in which the books were heaped onto bonfires attended by band playing and “fire oaths.”

It was only less than half a year since Adolf Hitler had become Chancellor of Germany, but he had already provided an extraordinarily vivid symbol of how fast he would move against enemies—not just those he could see, but those whose thoughts he wished to suppress.

Only two months before Eisenhower spoke, Senator Joseph McCarthy had demonstrated that the same 

thing could happen here—or, rather, in United States Information Service (USIS) posts in Western Europe, many of whose libraries felt pressured by the senator’s bumptious young aides Roy Cohn and David Schine to remove books by the likes of Dashiell Hammett, W.E.B. Du Bois, John Steinbeck, Herman Melville, and Henry Thoreau.

When American forces came upon Nazi concentration camps at the end of WWII, General Eisenhower had members of Congress and journalists visit the gruesome sites so that the horror of what occurred would be seen, understood and documented. He knew, as well as anyone, that it was but a short step from burning books to burning people. Privately, he had grown to loathe McCarthy for his bullying. But concern about looking undignified—his vow not to "get into a pissing contest with that skunk"—led him to issue only veiled warnings such as the one at Dartmouth. Onlyy when “Tailgunner Joe” went after the institution to which Ike gave his best years, the U.S. Army, did the President finally determine that this modern-day know-nothing needed to be destroyed--and even then, his hand remained, publicly, largely hidden from the controversy.

(The image accompanying this post, of the May 10, 1933 book burning in Berlin, comes from the U.S. National Archives.)

Quote of the Day (The U.S. Senate, Slapping Down Joe McCarthy At Last)

“Resolved, That the Senator from Wisconsin, Mr. McCarthy, failed to cooperate with the Subcommittee on Privileges and Elections of the Senate Committee on Rules and Administration in clearing up matters referred to that subcommittee which concerned his conduct as a Senator and affected the honor of the Senate and, instead, repeatedly abused the subcommittee and its members who were trying to carry out assigned duties, thereby obstructing the constitutional processes of the Senate, and that this conduct of the Senator from Wisconsin, Mr. McCarthy, is contrary to senatorial traditions and is hereby condemned.”--Transcript of Senate Resolution 301: Censure of Senator Joseph McCarthy (1954)

If you ask me, it took them long enough, and the result was akin to the Feds nailing Al Capone on income-tax evasion. But when it was all over, the U.S. Senate had voted on this date in 1954, 67-22, to censure—or, in the language of the resolution, “condemn”—Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin. At long last, they had proven there was a limit to what they would tolerate.

After Ralph Flanders (R-Vermont) introduced his resolution to censure McCarthy in late July, 46 counts of misconduct were tallied, then reduced to five broad categories. (Not surviving the initial cut: Flanders’ move to strip the Wisconsin senator of his authority over the Committee on Government Operations and its Subcommittee on Investigations. Too many senators disliked the idea of anything potentially infringing on their jurisdiction.)

The Senate adopted Minority Leader Lyndon Johnson’s idea of having a bipartisan select committee with vast judicial experience. The six members of the Watkins Committee ended up voting to deplore McCarthy's s actions on three of the five counts but felt that censure was not required.

The committee did feel that two areas required punishment: a) McCarthy’s abusive treatment of the highly decorated Gen. Ralph Zwicker, and b) his bullying of a Senate investigation of their investigators into his conduct. Eventually, the Zwicker count was exchanged for the Watkins count (embodied in the quote above).

In bone-dry language, the Senate was saying that McCarthy did not play well with others—specifically, them. Nothing about his reckless use of the Senate’s investigative powers; nothing about how he hid behind senators’ immunity from libel suits to make broad innuendoes about citizens’ loyalties; nothing about how he spread a wave of terror in American embassies, colleges and universities, and libraries; nothing about how he lowered America’s standing abroad with his antics.

For a long time, many of McCarthy’s Senate colleagues—including, suggests biographer Robert A. Caro, LBJ—feared what he could do. (LBJ’s typically memorable quote on why he didn’t move against McCarthy sooner: “You don’t get in a pissin’ contest with a polecat.” Maybe I should have made that the quote of the day!)

The Senate did not act until the televised Army-McCarthy hearings exposed his conduct for longer than the normal couple-minute news segment, dropping his approval ratings below 30 percent. In that light, you could argue that the censure vote was like someone coming along to pump a suicide victim full of bullets.

But three more outcomes had to follow the censure vote before McCarthy could be consigned to history:

* his fellow senators had to do what they originally had done when they encountered McCarthy in the Senate, before they came to fear him: ostracize him;

* the press had to ignore him; and

* Bibulous “Tailer-Gunner Joe” had to sink into a watery grave in 1957.

Flashback: Einstein Comes to America, October 1933

October 17, 1933—Albert Einstein and his wife arrived in New York Harbor on the ocean liner Westernland, then were whisked away from a crowd of reporters by tugboat to New Jersey, where he would take a position with Princeton University’s Institute for Advanced Study. 

His move, as newsworthy as it was, was just one part of what might have been the greatest brain drain in history—the vast exodus of scientists, writers, directors, artists, architects, and other intellectuals who first fled Hitler’s Germany, then the other European powers that fell under the Nazi shadow.

As a Jew, the German scientist had already been marginalized in his own country. 

A Nazi edict on April 7 dismissing politically suspect academics would undoubtedly have caught him in its web anyway, since by the start of the 1933-34 school year that fall fully 15 percent of the nation’s established university teachers had already been cashiered, according to Richard J. Evans’ The Coming of the Third Reich.

Einstein had taken the extraordinarily brave step earlier in the year of denouncing the thuggish crackdown by the regime after the Reichstag fire. He resigned from the Prussian Academy of Science before that organization could accede to the Nazi demand that he be expelled. 

But, since he was visiting America at the time of his denunciation of Hitler’s terror, there was nothing he could do to prevent the seizure of his property.

Joining Einstein among the refugee tide were the following past or future Nobel laureates: Gustav Hertz, Erin Schoringer, Max Born, Fritz Haber and Hans Krebs. Who knows how much of a military advantage Hitler would have gained during World War II if he had not evicted so many?

Staying in America –even a beautiful campus such as Princeton’s—did not prove to be the happiest period in Einstein’s life, however, and for more than the obvious reason that he was now cut off from longtime friends and family. There were also these issues:

* Just like a great forebear in applying the laws of mathematics to the physical universe, Isaac Newton, Einstein devoted himself to an endeavor that consumed his energy with little to show for it. Newton had become sidetracked by alchemy, while Einstein’s unfulfilled passion was for a unified field theory.

* Einstein’s prestige was considerable enough that his letter to FDR warning that Germany could design an atomic bomb would lead to the Manhattan Project. But his socialism and pacifism rendered him so politically suspect that he could not serve on the project.

* The scientist’s political views led him to run afoul of Senator Joseph McCarthy and J. Edgar Hoover. His public statement that all intellectuals called before McCarthy’s committee should refuse to testify led at least one witness to take his advice. Hoover’s paranoia was so wide-ranging concerning Einstein—as attested to by the 1,800 pages in the FBI file—that the agency head even suspected the scientist might be a Communist spy.

For a treatment of the Princeton sojourn of this genius, I recommend renting a DVD of a highly fanciful—but equally delightful—romantic comedy, I.Q., with Meg Ryan and Tim Robbins as the young lovers brought together by Walter Matthau, playing the bushy-haired refugee who in this movie—if not in real life—had a sly twinkle in his eyes during these years.