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The intellectuals and McCarthy: The radical specter
The late Joseph McCarthy left a permanent mark on American political life. But the meaning and depth of that mark has been obscured. A major theme of this important study is that McCarthy did not suppress or stifle political thinking so much as he radically transformed it. A large block of American intellectuals evolved an original theory of politics in reaction to McCarthyism. The author states that, "A loosely coherent social theory, substantially concerned with comprehending McCarthyism, emerged in the 1950's. My interest is in that social theory, as it explains McCarthy, as it reinterprets the reform tradition, as it refracts American history through the myopia of a traumatized intelligentsia."Many American intellectuals found McCarthy's roots in the agrarian radical tradition--emerging from Populists, La Follette progressives, the Non-Partisan League. During the McCarthy years, the term 'radical Right' began making its appearance in liberal circles. Liberal intellectuals became suspicious of popular movements; the mass of people, they felt, could not be trusted to support beneficial social policies. The populace seemed more preoccupied with suspicion of the educated, the cosmopolitan, the alien. Established political elites and institutions seemed to provide surer safeguards for constitutional values. In this connection, the author discusses the responses of such men as Richard Hofstadter, Seymour Martin Lipset, Daniel Bell, Edward Shils, Oscar Handling, Peter Viereck, and William Kornhauser.But the evidence, Rogin contends, does not support the view that McCarthyism grew from agrarian radical soil, and his study examines how McCarthyism was neither a radical movement outside of 'normal' American politics nor a cause that drew its strength from the mobilization of masses.The book concludes by suggesting that fear of popular uprisings and radical protest has divorced political analysis from the specific issues around which protest forms. These issues determine whether mass movements will be dangerous or valuable. Ignoring the issues of politics, Rogin argues, leads to a reliance on established institutions unhealthy and unrealistic in a free society.
- GenresPoliticsAmerican History
366 pages, Paperback
First published May 15, 1967
88 people want to read
About the author
Michael Rogin
13 books8 followers[NB: sometimes published as Michael Paul Rogin]
Rogin was a political theorist and the Robson Professor of Political Science at UC Berkeley. He received his bachelor's degree summa cum laude in government from Harvard University and his master's and doctoral degrees in political science at the University of Chicago.
Rogin began teaching at UC Berkeley in 1963 and remained there throughout his distinguished career. His books and many articles and essays earned him a distinguished place in the United States and Europe among scholars of American politics, who valued the breadth and originality of his work and its interdisciplinary character.
Rogin's books included:
• The Intellectuals and McCarthy (1967) [which he described as "a Gothic horror story disguised as social science."]
• Fathers and Children: Andrew Jackson and the Subjugation of the American Indian (1975)
• Subversive Genealogy: the Politics and Art of Herman Melville (1983)
• 'Ronald Reagan', the Movie, and Other Episodes in Political Demonology (1987)
• Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot (1996)
• Independence Day, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Enola Gay (1998)
Rogin's work appealed to and challenged the preconceptions of a wide variety of academics. His book on Ronald Reagan attracted the attention of the media (Rogin was interviewed on CBS TV's "60 Minutes") and the general public.
He served on the editorial committee of UC Press for several decades and was one of the founding members of the prestigious humanities journal Representations.
He was famed at Berkeley for his remarkably creative lectures, which would combine political theory, literature, feminism, interpretations of film and art, psychoanalytic insights, and a firm grasp of the history & material conditions underlying any lecture topic.
http://www.berkeley.edu/news/berkeley...
Rogin was a political theorist and the Robson Professor of Political Science at UC Berkeley. He received his bachelor's degree summa cum laude in government from Harvard University and his master's and doctoral degrees in political science at the University of Chicago.
Rogin began teaching at UC Berkeley in 1963 and remained there throughout his distinguished career. His books and many articles and essays earned him a distinguished place in the United States and Europe among scholars of American politics, who valued the breadth and originality of his work and its interdisciplinary character.
Rogin's books included:
• The Intellectuals and McCarthy (1967) [which he described as "a Gothic horror story disguised as social science."]
• Fathers and Children: Andrew Jackson and the Subjugation of the American Indian (1975)
• Subversive Genealogy: the Politics and Art of Herman Melville (1983)
• 'Ronald Reagan', the Movie, and Other Episodes in Political Demonology (1987)
• Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot (1996)
• Independence Day, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Enola Gay (1998)
Rogin's work appealed to and challenged the preconceptions of a wide variety of academics. His book on Ronald Reagan attracted the attention of the media (Rogin was interviewed on CBS TV's "60 Minutes") and the general public.
He served on the editorial committee of UC Press for several decades and was one of the founding members of the prestigious humanities journal Representations.
He was famed at Berkeley for his remarkably creative lectures, which would combine political theory, literature, feminism, interpretations of film and art, psychoanalytic insights, and a firm grasp of the history & material conditions underlying any lecture topic.
http://www.berkeley.edu/news/berkeley...
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
January 23, 2018
Who will claim Joe McCarthy today? Evidently his home town of Appleton Wisconsin still remembers him.
Rogin seeks to rescue the Populists and Progressives from McCarthy. It is not the reform impulse that generated the phenomenon, but rather traditional conservatism. In taking on the "pluralism" of 1950s social science theory, he demonstrated that the people who had supported agrarian reform in the mid-west were not the same constituencies merely transmogrified. It was the traditional conservatism of the mid-west that fed McCarthy. Playing upon splits in the republican party between an Eastern elite and heartland conservatism, as many have argued since, he was able to keep Eisenhower at bay in the heated atmosphere of the Korean War. It was the right wing of the Republican party, not the progenitors of reform movements, who aided and abetted the reign of terror. The linkages made looking backwards are thus to the opponents of the New Deal. One could, it seems reasonable, map a trajectory from McCarthy forward to the Moral Majority and 700 Club much more easily than one could link him to the counterculture.
Chapters include Introduction; Radicalism and The Rational Society: The Pluralist View; Lockean Moralism and Conservative Ideology; Wisconsin: McCarthy and the Progressive Tradition; North Dakota: Agrarian Radicalism, Ethnic and Economic; South Dakota: From Left to Right; Populism; The Transformation of the Reform Impulse; McCarthyism as Mass Politics; Protest Politics and the Pluralist Vision.
Of the many books written on the phenomenon of McCarthyism, Michael Paul Rogin' s stands out. His thesis is that Senator Joseph McCarthy's rise to political influence between 1950 and 1954 resulted from a combination of wide-spread Cold War anxieties, frustration over America's prolonged involvement in the Korean War, and partisan politics. Anxious to return to national power in 1952 after 20 years of Democratic rule, Republican's exploited the edge provided by this admittedly vulgar interloper. Conservative Republicans constituted the hard core of McCarthy supporters, yet moderates also lent their support. McCarthy gave credence to the Republican claims that the Democrats were soft on Communism, had "lost" China, and were proving unequal to the task of fighting Communism in Korea.
It is somehow curious, this side of Vietnam, to read as "revisionist" account of McCarthyism which seeks to demonstrate that the movement was sponsored by conservative Republicans with strong overtones of partisan Republican politics. My generation has simply grown up with the assumption that the phenomenon fed on excessive fears of international communism, fanned by elements in the Republican party. The idea which Rogin disputes, that McCarthyism took its impetus from a dangerous American anti-establishmentarian tradition, seems an odd straw man. The thought that this book is somehow a "revisionist" interpretation calls for more explicit contextualization.
To appreciate this book it is important to know that in 1967, the reigning interpretation of McCarthyism as expounded by such luminaries as Daniel Bell and Richard Hofstadter stressed its radical left-wing sources. For them, McCarthy's high rate of approval in the midwestern states demonstrated the "populist" (i.e. leftist) nature of McCarthy's politics. This curious line of argument becomes more intelligible when placed within the larger context of what has become known as the "consensus history" of the 1950s. In attacking the social theory of "pluralism, Rogin is undermining the foundations of "consensus history."
The genius of American politics, according to the most prominent historians of the first decade-and-a-half of the post-WWII period, had been its ability to eschew radicalism and to find what Arthur Schlessinger called "the vital center." Expositors of "consensus history," a group in which Daniel Bell and Richard Hofstadter figured prominently, generally held that an informed elite could best guide the American Republic. What they feared most were the ravages of "mass democracy." McCarthy provided the "consensus historians" an excellent case study in the malevolent effects of trusting "the people." His career seemed to demonstrate that the legacy of American radicalism was mainly destructive.
The effect of Rogin's liberation of the radical tradition from tinges of McCarthyism, in concert with other contemporary works in a similar vein, was a restoration of faith in the creative power of America's radical tradition. In 1967, when this political scientist won the Albert J. Beveridge Award from the American Historical Association, his was an idea whose time had come. We've come a way since such an idea was novel.
Rogin seeks to rescue the Populists and Progressives from McCarthy. It is not the reform impulse that generated the phenomenon, but rather traditional conservatism. In taking on the "pluralism" of 1950s social science theory, he demonstrated that the people who had supported agrarian reform in the mid-west were not the same constituencies merely transmogrified. It was the traditional conservatism of the mid-west that fed McCarthy. Playing upon splits in the republican party between an Eastern elite and heartland conservatism, as many have argued since, he was able to keep Eisenhower at bay in the heated atmosphere of the Korean War. It was the right wing of the Republican party, not the progenitors of reform movements, who aided and abetted the reign of terror. The linkages made looking backwards are thus to the opponents of the New Deal. One could, it seems reasonable, map a trajectory from McCarthy forward to the Moral Majority and 700 Club much more easily than one could link him to the counterculture.
Chapters include Introduction; Radicalism and The Rational Society: The Pluralist View; Lockean Moralism and Conservative Ideology; Wisconsin: McCarthy and the Progressive Tradition; North Dakota: Agrarian Radicalism, Ethnic and Economic; South Dakota: From Left to Right; Populism; The Transformation of the Reform Impulse; McCarthyism as Mass Politics; Protest Politics and the Pluralist Vision.
Of the many books written on the phenomenon of McCarthyism, Michael Paul Rogin' s stands out. His thesis is that Senator Joseph McCarthy's rise to political influence between 1950 and 1954 resulted from a combination of wide-spread Cold War anxieties, frustration over America's prolonged involvement in the Korean War, and partisan politics. Anxious to return to national power in 1952 after 20 years of Democratic rule, Republican's exploited the edge provided by this admittedly vulgar interloper. Conservative Republicans constituted the hard core of McCarthy supporters, yet moderates also lent their support. McCarthy gave credence to the Republican claims that the Democrats were soft on Communism, had "lost" China, and were proving unequal to the task of fighting Communism in Korea.
It is somehow curious, this side of Vietnam, to read as "revisionist" account of McCarthyism which seeks to demonstrate that the movement was sponsored by conservative Republicans with strong overtones of partisan Republican politics. My generation has simply grown up with the assumption that the phenomenon fed on excessive fears of international communism, fanned by elements in the Republican party. The idea which Rogin disputes, that McCarthyism took its impetus from a dangerous American anti-establishmentarian tradition, seems an odd straw man. The thought that this book is somehow a "revisionist" interpretation calls for more explicit contextualization.
To appreciate this book it is important to know that in 1967, the reigning interpretation of McCarthyism as expounded by such luminaries as Daniel Bell and Richard Hofstadter stressed its radical left-wing sources. For them, McCarthy's high rate of approval in the midwestern states demonstrated the "populist" (i.e. leftist) nature of McCarthy's politics. This curious line of argument becomes more intelligible when placed within the larger context of what has become known as the "consensus history" of the 1950s. In attacking the social theory of "pluralism, Rogin is undermining the foundations of "consensus history."
The genius of American politics, according to the most prominent historians of the first decade-and-a-half of the post-WWII period, had been its ability to eschew radicalism and to find what Arthur Schlessinger called "the vital center." Expositors of "consensus history," a group in which Daniel Bell and Richard Hofstadter figured prominently, generally held that an informed elite could best guide the American Republic. What they feared most were the ravages of "mass democracy." McCarthy provided the "consensus historians" an excellent case study in the malevolent effects of trusting "the people." His career seemed to demonstrate that the legacy of American radicalism was mainly destructive.
The effect of Rogin's liberation of the radical tradition from tinges of McCarthyism, in concert with other contemporary works in a similar vein, was a restoration of faith in the creative power of America's radical tradition. In 1967, when this political scientist won the Albert J. Beveridge Award from the American Historical Association, his was an idea whose time had come. We've come a way since such an idea was novel.
February 7, 2014
Rogin really lays into the pluralists for conflating the demographics of radical agrarian populism with the demographics of supporters of McCarthyism. If that sounds boring to you, you will hate this book.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews