Joe McCarthy

This is A Crowd Podcast. Harry Truman. Darris D. Red China. January. South Pacific. Walter Wynch. Joe DiMaggio. Joe McCarthy. Joe McCarthy. Joe McCarthy. Hello and welcome to episode eight of We Didn't Start the Fire, the podcast that races through post-war history and the reasons why the world today is as it is. All done through the medium of a number one smash hit for Billy Joel. I'm Tom Fordeis. This is Katie Puckwick. Katie, as always, our minds are ready to be expanded, astonished, quite possibly blown. Yeah, I don't know. I'm not sure if I have high hopes for my mind being blown because today's topic is a fellow who has left quite a stain on American politics and American history, Senator Joseph McCarthy. He was the senator from the state of Wisconsin in the late '40s and he became the public face of the Red Scare. Basically going after people, tarnishing their name by calling them communists, which you think what's the big whoop about that anyway, but basically it was a way to throw his power around and be a little bit of a mini Stalin from what I understand. Some of these references we get from Billy, we don't know much about do we or certainly I don't. And then you get the big ones. You get the bangers. McCarthy's a big one. Yeah, he's a big one. Did you have a awareness of him when you were a young'un? Probably because of what McCarthyism stands for and everything that's been going on in the last, I don't know, six, seven, eight years in America, you get a lot of references to McCarthyism, don't you? Yeah. It's a different scare and different people in power, but the tactics he's used, some of the things he tried to do seem to have come bouncing back. Yeah, that's an interesting point because when I was growing up, my parents were from an older generation. I was the youngest of four and I was the youngest by far. So in fact, they were a really good reference point for that whole Cold War era. And I remember my mother saying to me about McCarthyism was a dark time in America and it was very clear by the time I was growing up in the '70s and the '80s that he was a bad guy and America had learned their lesson and that whole idea of damning somebody's entire career because of they were politically maybe a little bit to the left, like those times had gone and well, guess what, they're back, they've been remixed and they're top of the charts right now. Yeah. Yeah. So we're just kind of spitballing here. We don't really know the nitty gritty, but thank goodness our guest today is somebody who knows all about Joe McCarthy, Senator Joe McCarthy on a molecular detail. He is Dr. Josh Hollins. He is a lecturer in U.S. history at the UCL Institute of America's. Welcome Josh. Thank you, Katie. It's lovely to be here. Yeah, wonderful. So what do you think about our vague summation of Joe McCarthy? What do you think that's sort of an accurate picture? I think you're absolutely right to say that McCarthy has kind of cast a long shadow over the course of the 20th century. And I don't think it's a coincidence that other elements who are around McCarthy also appear in Billy Joel's song, right, so Roy Cohn, the Rosenbergs and others. I think it had a huge impact on many people's lives and in popular culture as well. What's he looking like? If I try and picture Joe McCarthy in my head, what sort of man was he? What does he dress like? What does he sound like? I think perhaps slightly unkempt is how I might describe him for the time period. If you think about, you know, that Mad Men era, the sharp suits, the hats, perhaps someone like Richard Nixon fit that bill a bit more. He was a bit more sharp. And I think you would recognise his voice if you heard it on the radio. He was slightly shouty and he certainly in the hearings that were really a big part of the Red Scare in the 1940s and 1950s, he was very much willing to shout back when, say, a fellow senator or a congressman or someone from the army was answering him. He was very willing to answer back, to cut them down. And I think that really did feed into an image of him as a bully and as someone who was really not willing to be told that he was wrong. Was he verbally adept, like was he, you know, was he quite good with the waspish quips or was he just more like a mean person? Well, I think perhaps this is maybe one of the reasons why he did translate is I think he was able to pull some of those people around him, the waspy types, the elites, you know. But actually, it was really that populist image that he portrayed that really had people interested in him as well, that he seems to be part of this elite, but also challenging them. I'm interested in how Joseph McCarthy even came to power. Was he somebody who was power crazy and was just kind of looking for an angle to latch on to, like in an opportunistic fashion, and he just thought, ah, read the room. People don't like pinkos, I'm jumping on that. Almost certainly. And he's elected in 46, 47, has a very, not particularly interesting career, not particularly powerful in the Senate. And there's these speeches that all Republicans are due to make, right, on Lincoln's birthday in 1950, and all the top places, all the big cities that you know of, in California, in New York, in Chicago, they all get the big guns of the Republican Party, in Nixon's and so on. And he goes to Wheeling, West Virginia. Now, no offense to West Virginia, or Virginia, or any of those places. Why the Virginia? Yeah, why all the Virginias. You know, I am from Virginia. Did you know that? I'm not from West Virginia. That is a different state. It's actually a separate state, but go continue carefully. It's interesting that he is sent to Wheeling, West Virginia, right, that are not one of these top big cities, and no one's expecting him to come out with anything interesting or let alone coherent, right? He's not really seen as someone that might even be re-elected in '50. Is his speech even going to be recorded, because it's at the Republican Women's Club? Is it even broadcast on radio? No, no. So this is the start of the Red Scare in this sort of nowhere town, with no one listening? Yeah, it's interesting in the sense that he turns up with something, and whether it's off the cuff or not, that is so compelling to the whole nation. He says that, you know, I have a list in my hand of 205 communists in the State Department, and he didn't actually have anything in his hand, and he also didn't have any list. And the only reason we know about this speech, really, is because newspapers really followed him around the country when he went to do other speeches in the next couple of days, kind of saying, "Well, have you got the list?" And so we get the speech later on, and the numbers change constantly. I think he goes from 205 to 57. I mean, it's a decent reduction there, isn't it? You're thinking, if I'm listening to Joe McCarthy at that point, and I'm intrigued, Katie, I've gone, "What, 200 communists?" Yeah, yeah, traitors. Yeah, and then, oh, hang on, it's '50, what's happened to the other 150? People don't keep track in those days. It's not like, you know, there was no social media, so there weren't, like, fact-checkers or, you know, citizen fact-checkers. I'm interested in just pulling back to see the bigger picture how commies were considered the bogeymen of the '40s and '50s. I mean, the average American, you know, having been an average American, you know, living amongst other average Americans, you're not really confronted so much unless you're interested and reach out about the rest of the world. It's not like living in Europe where, you know, countries are small and you can pop over to one without too much hassle. People are pretty insulated and in a bubble in America. So they wouldn't really know or care, I would have thought, about communists unless it was rammed down their throat. So it seems to me that somebody, and obviously McCarthy was part of this movement, just decided that communists were a convenient bad guy to kind of make people forget about other problems, perhaps. I mean, was it a mask for a different kind of enemy or a way to distract people? Certainly anti-communism had been ramping up in the 1940s and I think it's important to see Joseph McCarthy not as a lone actor here, right? I said he was an opportunist earlier because he really gets that sense that there is this anti-communist Red Scare building and the wider context as well is quite important here. It's the post-war era. People are obviously aware that there is a Cold War going on. They feel that there is, you know, there is potential for destruction and the water really heats up. Of course, by the time that McCarthy makes his speech, the USSR has nuclear bomb capabilities. You have this wider kind of, what you might call paranoia, right, that comes into the domestic sphere very much. And certainly the reason why I think McCarthy really takes off is because he comes up with this very specific number. I've got 205, or then I've got 57. Eventually he says, "If I just find one communist, that proves it." He's made. Convenient. Yeah. Yeah. I said 200, but one will do. Yeah. The bars are getting so low by then. Yeah. And so I think that's why it really begins to take off. And I know you mentioned before, Katie, about cultural elites as well, right? I think it's in fact more in the 1940s that we see more of a focus on those cultural actors. So the Hollywood 10 is one of the most famous, and that really kicks off around '47. And what's the Hollywood 10? Tell us about that. Yeah. So writers, directors, members of the screen guild who were called to testify in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee. Now they're not convicted of being communists or doing anything particularly wrong. It's not against the law to be a communist, is it? No. Not at all. I mean, it's just ridiculous. Yeah. But it's interesting because it's not even that. It's because they plead the fifth. The fifth amendment says, "You don't have to say anything if it will criminalize you." Yes. So they plead the fifth and say, "I'm not going to answer that question." And it's more out of principle, really, it's saying, "This is censorship. This is the kind of thing that you're actually accusing the USSR of. You're doing this right here in Hollywood." And so they refuse to answer the questions and then they lose their work, their livelihoods. The Hollywood 10 actually go to jail for a contempt of court, essentially, for refusing to answer the questions. And they hold their ground, and it's people like Dalton Trumbo, who, you know, they famously go on to write things like Spartacus. But under a pseudonym, right? Under pseudonyms because they're not able to find work. Now, it's interesting because those kind of what we might call cultural elites or the people that really had some form of kind of cultural influence, they're obviously targeted because of that influence. But even if you did nothing wrong, if you just took that principle stand, you might lose your livelihood, your job. Casey, we're looking at each other with sort of astonishment at some of this, aren't we? It seems impossible. But all those slogans that go around the red scare, the idea of reds under the bed and the enemy within, they're quite potent things, aren't they? So I was wondering what it must have been like to live in that paranoid era where, you know, the Soviet Union has done a nuclear test. Like, we like to think, Casey, don't we, that have we been around that time, we would have gone, "This is nonsense." But maybe we would have been swept up in it. I don't know. Yeah. It's an interesting thing. I mean, that's a good point. Did the average American buy into this? Was this sort of an attractive, spooky time for them? I mean, because sometimes people sort of thrill to the, you know, they catastrophize. They indulge in a little "disasterbation." And I was wondering if, yeah, did the Americans really buy into the red scare? Well, "disasterbation" is a fabulous word that I must steal for a future text, I'm sure. But I think the context is key here for, certainly for ordinary people, I think a lot of people did buy into the idea that there was a credible threat from the Soviet Union. I want to lay a little bit of blame here on President Harry Truman, who I'm sure pops up elsewhere in your podcast. It's our very first episode. Oh, really? So, you know, Truman really sells the idea of the need to contain communism abroad. And in doing that and really playing up the threat, he helps to kind of fuel that fire at home. And so, those that we might call "cold warriors," so Richard Nixon and McCarthy and others, really argue that communism had to be contained and fought at home. Some of those kind of cultural things that, when we look back to the 1950s now, I think stand out. Obviously, in episodes of The Simpsons, right, Homer, it works in a nuclear power plant. But there's all these episodes where they're crouched under their desks, doing these drills. Yeah, duck and cover. Duck and cover, yeah. You know, shelters in basements and backyards. And that all feeds into that broader sense that America is at war and that there was a threat at home. Here's something I'm wondering, Josh. So there seems to be a lot more of a tie between McCarthy and the Kennedy family than you might expect from the Kennedy family's politics. So what's going on there? Yeah, that's a really good point. I think, partly, this is influence, right? And it's about access. And the Kennedy patriarch, so Robert Kennedy, JFK's dad, had been a very powerful kind of democratic player. He really helps to get his sons elected. He has a really outsized influence, and Joseph Kennedy, the dad, puts pressure on McCarthy to have Robert Kennedy, JFK's younger brother, to be part of his legal team in the hearings. And McCarthy takes him on, but in a more junior role, and they end up traveling to Wisconsin to attend the funeral when McCarthy dies. And so I do think that you see something at the top of society that even though it's fear stricken, and there's all kinds of issues with democracy here and rights, that even those at the top of society that we now look back on and say held onto those ideals really failed in this era to live up to those ideals that they will later propel. And I think a lot of that has to do with power and influence. I am really discouraged by the spinelessness continuing, obviously, in American politics. But not only do we see dedicated Democrats, such as the Kennedys, throwing their lot in with McCarthy, but the fact that the president, Dwight Eisenhower, was implicitly cow-towing to Senator McCarthy's agenda. He stood by passively, it seems, while all this was going on, while McCarthy was attacking Eisenhower's State Department. And it seems like he only discovered his co-honus when McCarthy was going after the military. Can you develop that a little bit? Sure. I think it's Harry Truman's democratic presidency that's really under attack here, that notion that Democrats are disloyal, that they're harboring communists, and so on. So you might have thought that when Eisenhower comes to power as the president, that someone like McCarthy would roll back a bit, and he doesn't. And I think it's not politically expedient for Eisenhower to go after McCarthy in this initial point, even though we know from his private documents that he's not happy with McCarthy. He's not happy that he's going after officials that Eisenhower respected in the democratic party. So he didn't like him personally is what you're saying. That's interesting. So it was politically convenient for the president to just take a back seat and let McCarthy be the attack dog, but then there got to a point where enough was enough. Yeah, perhaps the dog begins to bite you after a while. We're going to zip out for a quick ad break, but stay put and we'll be right back. Well, it's a quiz, but this time it's a podcast. Yes. Yes. With me, Makita Oliver. I was going to go with that at first, you know, I really was. I love a quiz. I'm nervous. Aww. How many edges does a 20p have? Oh. Oh my gosh. Oh my God, I'm doing so badly. We will quiz. We will chat. And then we will repeat forever. Just search quiz, chat, repeat in your podcast app. Those were the adverts. This is Katie Puckry. I do remember this is a little bit of a sidebar, but I a couple of years ago was looking through all of these very poignant letters that my mother had written to my father before they got married in the late '40s, and she was living in Washington, D.C., and he was based, he was in the Air Force, and he was based in Oberammergau in Germany, and she was talking about the chatter that was around at the time in the late '40s, like '47-'48, that people were worried about World War III, that there was talk about that and that things were still very volatile and unstable. So I just remembered that when we were talking about this. So I think it would have been really prevalent back then. Yeah, certainly. I think that's part of the appeal of Joseph McCarthy as well, because there is that wider sense of we might be heading to World War III. Why has China fallen? Why has, from the American perspective, why have all of these people, they should be our allies, or we should have influence in their sphere, not the Soviet Union? I think McCarthy's speech is really interesting in Wheeling, West Virginia, because he really says America is the greatest nation in the world. Where do we hear this? Yeah. It keeps coming up. Exactly. And we love hearing it. Us Americans? Like, sure we are. Yeah. That's us. Yeah. So America is the greatest nation in the world. We just won World War II, but China has fallen, and we're not winning abroad, and they're going to go on to Korea and not win that war. Fall into communism, you mean? Yeah. Fall into communism. Right? And there's a big narrative of, well, why does this happen? And he says in his speech, before he comes onto the 205 people that don't exist, he says, it's because there's people in the State Department that are purposely trying to wreck our foreign policy goals. Oh, gosh. I mean, that's what Trump was doing during his whole time ruining America, was talking about the deep state, and basically disemboweling the State Department, which is now in the process of painfully being built up again. But yeah, it's the old playbook. Oh, absolutely. I think we can certainly see a lot of links between Trump and the previous eras. So a prominent historian of the United States, Richard Hofstadter, writing not too long after the McCarthy eras is in the mid-60s, he describes what he calls as the paranoid style in American politics. And what Hofstadter meant was a politics that evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fancy. And I think, you know, if our recent history is anything to go by, we may well indeed say that Trump fits that bill, right? He has sought to whip up support by targeting Black Lives Matter protesters, Muslims, migrants, and rather than Russia being the problem, he has focused on conspiracies within the US. Conspiracies, the 2020 election was rigged, and you know, he refuses to distance himself from... QAnon. QAnon. You knew what I was looking to pronounce there, yeah, QAnon conspiracy theories, which are even more outlandish. QAnon. Oh, I mean, it's like fan fiction. It's like whatever you want. You know, one day you find out that Beyoncé is ruling the world, and she's very interested in cannibalism or something, and then, yeah, you get some flat earthers in there and some anti-vaxxers, and it's a pretty toxic little soup. QAnon. Wow. So is he... It might sound a bit of a strange thing to ask, but is he happy when he's doing all this? Because it clearly works for him. It makes him... it turns him from a pretty average senator who isn't doing anything to this global figure, not just a huge figure in America. But does it work for him personally? Because he was a heavy drinker, wasn't he? QAnon. Yeah, so I... Well, I think, you know, the media needs to take a little bit of the blame for McCarthy as well, really. QAnon. Well, it's just a great story. Like, if you're trying to sell papers, Katie, some guy coming out with these amazing conspiracy theories is great. QAnon. Oh yeah, it's an early clickbait. QAnon. Yeah, I mean, one historian describes McCarthy as really a media demagogue, that he thrives on the press and the press thrive on him. And I mean, you can see links here with other politicians and people that might go on to presidency, that in fact, you know, it's really the press that helps to fuel this. There's this sense that he is selling newspapers that people are interested because obviously there might be a legitimate issue at stake here that's feeding into this fear and perhaps paranoia of the post-war era, but it's really the press that helps to push this forward. QAnon. Right, Josh. So it sounds like McCarthy's quite successful. So why then does he take on the US Army? He's made all these accusations against the State Department. Is it almost like he just needs a bigger target? QAnon. Well, partly it might be a bigger target, and I think there's a sense that he's a little bit out of control here now, that, you know, the media has fed his image, he's feeding the media, and he's able to keep getting that attention that he kind of craves. And so, I mean, part of the issue with McCarthy is that some of the checks and balances in the United States that are supposed to protect democracy really didn't step in. So Eisenhower kind of lets him get away with it for so long. QAnon. Why? QAnon. I think because he, well, he's also partly afraid of kind of tackling someone within his own party, they're both in the Republican Party. I am not kind of suggesting here that Eisenhower was in any kind of conspiracy here. But I think there's certainly that sense of fear when all the way to the top of society. But at this point, when McCarthy tackles or charges the Army, Eisenhower really turns around and says that enough is enough. QAnon. Well, yeah. And he was a general. So, you know, he's like, "Wait a minute, you're talking about people in my family." QAnon. Yeah, he's like, "State Department, okay, have a pop." It's interesting how the fact that people can see with their own eyes this man who's just being a glorified thug and a playground bully and just lying in people's faces, you know, to the extent that there's the Army legislator just saying, "Have you no decency, sir, at long last?" That has an effect on Americans, whereas I know I keep coming back to this, but I'm traumatized by the whole Trump regime. But you know, Trump being, you know, lying in people's faces, you know, on television, that didn't seem to make a dent on his supporters. But I guess people had a more firm set of sense of right and wrong. QAnon. I suppose as well. We're so used to TV now. TV is part of everyone's lives. Maybe Katie, I don't know, Josh, if you were buying your first TV set in that post-war period, that TV had this... It was brand new. Yeah, it's like hearing from the pulpit. So it had this authenticity that you believe what you saw now, I don't know. I think that's a really good way to put it, you know, it's important to remember how influential and how fast television spread. The start of the '50s, 3 million people owned television sets. By the end of the '50s, 55 million people owned television sets. And that's a huge proportion of American society, and, you know, the McCarthy hearings were smack in the middle of that decade. And so I think you're right to say that television played a role, and the fact that people really trusted what they were seeing, and for the first time they really got a sense that, you know, McCarthy wasn't perhaps the kind of hero that might have been portrayed, or you can obviously read into things in your own kind of narrative when you read newspapers. Now they were seeing it for the first time with their own eyes. Yeah, with context. I'm interested in his targets, in McCarthy's targets, because obviously his first big prey were the so-called communists, the Red Under the Bed, and he widened his net, obviously, to include various departments of the American government and also the military. But was he looking at other groups of people as well? Well, I think McCarthyism and the Red Scare really permeated all of society, and teachers and lecturers, public and civil servants, lose their job, auto workers, because auto workers are manufacturing, their unions are kind of targeted, right? Oh, because unions are considered to be lefty/pinko, yeah. And then what about other people on the margins of society? So as I mentioned earlier, you know, you have this notion of domestic containment, and historians like Erika Ryan have really done an interesting job at demonstrating how this actually specifically impacted gender relations, and so the state also ramped up its effort to excise sexual dissidents, gay men, bisexuals, lesbian women, gender nor conformists in this era. And we get a sense of what we call a lavender scare. So you've got the Red Scare and you've got the Lavender Scare. Pretty. Yeah. So it runs concurrent, but overlaps with the Red Scare, and so LGBT people are targeted for removal from jobs in government and education, because they are seen as a security threat. And so it's this notion that they're not necessarily communists, it's that they could be blackmailed because they're doing something illegal or seen as abhorrent, right? Oh, it's considered that they're hiding something already, a big secret, so they're vulnerable. Yeah, absolutely. And so this vicious circle emerges where you're not necessarily doing anything wrong, but you have something to hide, and so you're worried that that might be outed. You're also worried that you could be targeted by, say, Soviet spies, but it's actually that lavender scare, which is far more effective at removing people from the State Department. And so when they're doing these interviews and trying to work out if you're loyal to the country, it often transpired that people were, had engaged in same-sex sexual activities or lived with same-sex partners and so on, and it was more of those who were outed and ousted in the State Department rather than communists, and so it has this wider effect as well. Katie, this is sounding really weird to me, because so much of American culture seems to heart back to the '50s. It's like pure Americana, isn't it? The wealth is starting to come after the Great Depression is in the rearview mirror, and people are getting washing machines and TVs and cars, and it's perfect America, but you hear this sort of stuff, how restrictive it must have been to live in that era. There's a huge number of Americans who can't be the people they want to be. I think the tension in post-war America was the renewed prosperity in the country. So you had all of those material goods, and you had an advanced quality of life. And also with media and television and film, we were exporting that quality of life, basically rubbing everybody else's noses in it, so the rest of the world. You pour beleaguered brits over here, we're like, "Oh, I'd like a hamburger and a milkshake one day." With our bad teeth and our ration books. Yeah, with your rickets and your lard or your margarine, whatever you had. But at the same time, and then of course, he had minorities and women who'd seen advances during wartime because they were able to work and they were given more status and they were obviously contributing to the war effort, and then it was like, "Oh, black soldiers coming back from the front? No, don't get ideas above your station. You got to wash dishes." And women coming back from the front, "You got to wash dishes too." So I think there was a lot of tension there. So I think just as you say, Tom, people weren't really allowed to be who they wanted to be and who they could be to the detriment of America. It's interesting. The only people who could be what they wanted to be were horrible people like Joseph McCarthy. Yeah, absolutely. And I think perhaps at the top of society, it's that sense that, yes, it's a prosperous time in the post-war era. You have this notion of a military industrial complex, but Eisenhower's saying, "We're going to keep ramping up production." Oh, he's the one that came up with that term, didn't he? Yeah. So he's saying, "We're going to fight the war, but also we just need to keep growing the economy in this way." But at the same time, those new gains that were made for women during the war, for African Americans, also for gays and lesbians, going away from home, small towns perhaps to the coasts, meeting other people, creating communities, what you can sense at the top of society and certainly from the more conservative elements of the Republican Party is a sense that they needed to push back on that. Yeah. And I think the Red Scare and the Lavender Scare, of course, feeds into that. So women, as you say, are going to have to return to the home. African Americans are going to try to push back into segregation, right? You have a sense that something is stirring here, and certainly in the '50s, you see the kernels of the civil rights movement, but also you get that sense that the top of society is pushing back on this. Katie, it just sounds so stifling to me. If you think about the '60s, the '60s now feels to me like America starts breathing properly again. Well, I think not least because women don't have to wear girdles anymore, so literally they're breathing again. I'm wondering maybe even the beginning of Americans being able to breathe again possibly started with the downfall of Joseph McCarthy because that is when perhaps people were employing a little bit more critical thinking when they realized we shouldn't accept everything that were being spoon-fed by the person who's shouting the loudest. Yeah, indeed. He's censured by the Senate where he's a senator, and essentially, censure means that you no longer have the sphere of influence. They don't kick you out of the Senate, but you no longer have the same influence. So it's a huge deal, and it's not happening to many other Senators? No, not at all. Oh, it's like basically being cancelled, right? Yeah, that's a good point. And that happens in the December of '54, so it's a very rapid decline from the Army hearings that happened just before the summer to the December when he's censured, and after that there's a rapid spiral, I think probably into depression and alcoholism, and I believe he dies of hepatitis. And he's not an old man, he's 48 when he dies. Oh, really? Yeah, so that's probably, he'd done enough damage for a lifetime, probably just good enough that he made an exit. Yeah, and well, maybe. But I think that analogy that you had earlier of America being able to breathe again in this post-McAfee era, perhaps is a good one. Ellen Trecker, who's kind of the key historian of the McAfee era, says that in assessing the legacy of McCarthyism, we really need to look at the things that didn't happen, so the movies that weren't made, the books that were not published, the political movements that were not organized, policies and ideas that had previously been supported by, say, communists, but were also supported by other leftists and liberals, like President Harry Truman, supported universal health care, but those kind of notions disappear from mainstream political debates because really, you know, McCarthy has narrowed that political terrain. Squeezes them out, doesn't he? Yeah. And I think that's probably the lasting legacy of McCarthyism, really, is that narrowing of the American political terrain. People who shared even vaguely left-leaning or progressive views were marginalized, but many of the things that they advocated for, so an end to racial and gender prejudice, better wages and working conditions, these are still issues that remain central to inequality and injustice in America today. In my mind, Katie, I am now almost imagining an alternative America where McCarthy doesn't come along, and some of those issues you just mentioned there, Josh, that are still huge issues in modern America, aren't there because society develops in a different way without the weight of McCarthy. Tom, I'm feeling after everything that Josh is telling is that I hate McCarthy even more. Like, I started, I came into this thinking he was kind of a bad egg, and now I just think he was such a pernicious influence, and it's sad, but hateful people are quite seductive, like it's quite easy to hate, it's quite easy to plant those seeds of suspicion and fear, and that's the thing that takes hold, and we're still pulling out the roots of these weeds so many years later in America and across the world. Yeah, and it's the influence of, as we go through this podcast and we find out about different people and about different aspects of American life, you just see these threads, don't you? We talked about Walter Winchell, there's a Roy Cohn connection there, and then we're going to talk about the Rosenbergs in a few weeks' time, and the Rosenbergs who are these Russian spies, that feeds into McCarthyism, and then we've got an episode still on Roy Cohn himself at some point, this pernicious influence all the way through that late 40s, early 50s, into the 60s, and then Roy Cohn is the man who teaches Donald Trump everything he knows. Yes, although I have to say, even Roy Cohn met his match in Donald Trump, as we'll find out, but he found that Donald Trump was even colder than he was, so. Because you're saying something, isn't it? Saying something. Hey, do you feel, we always say this at the end of the pod, do you feel that Billy Joel is justified in sticking Joe McCarthy, because I've got absolutely no doubt in my mind, he's a massive figure. Yeah, Billy was not reaching for this one. This was a- It's a gimme for Billy this one. It's a low-hanging fruit, obviously deserved his place in the song. And Josh, if you were to sum him up, Senator Joseph McCarthy, sum him up in one single sentence for him, because I'm like, "Katy, I've just got this horrible, horrible man in my mind. It's bully." Like you say, "Katy, a playground bully." Yeah, playground bully. Yeah, I think that's a good way to put it. Yeah, I think this was a dark era in US history, but that playground bully, McCarthy really used that environment to propel his own career. But I think it's also important to note that he was by no means alone. He was aided by other opportunist politicians, and democratic structures really failed to reign in his bullying and his recklessness. It seems quite neat to me, Katy, that our next episode is about Richard Nixon. Oh gosh, we have a real rogues gallery going on right now. So many wrongs. Yeah, so many wrongs, and so many bad eggs. Well, thank you, Josh Holland, so much for your expertise and for coloring this very dark picture for us. Yeah, and thank you very much for having me. Well, that's all we have in our tidy little package for you this week, and we didn't start the fire. Did you like it? Please tell us. I do love a stroke. Feel free to leave a review, certainly subscribe. Come on, prop us up. You can also share your thoughts with complete strangers by writing to [email protected], and we will spill it to the world. Fire@crowdnetwork, a place where you belong. Ever wonder whether stoicism is actually as terrible as all those red-pilled bros on Tiktok make it seem? I'm Tanner Campbell, American philosopher of stoicism and host of the Practical Stoicism podcast, and I'm here to tell you that, thankfully, those bros couldn't tell the difference between their you-know-what's and a hole in the ground, let alone teach anyone anything about any proper philosophy. 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