Have You no Sense of Decency?
By Fifty years ago today Joseph Welch shredded Tailgunner Joe McCarthy at the Army-McCarthy hearings, asking:
“Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?”
The Army-McCarthy hearings began because Tailgunner Joe and his lapdog, Roy Cohn, were irritated that the Army had transferred Cohn’s boyfriend out of Cohn’s reach. The response, as typical, was to claim that the US Army was shot through with Communists. Unfortunately for McCarthy and Cohn, the Army did not take to such allegations with the grace of, say, the Hollywood establishment or the State Department. Instead, the Army fought back, with Joseph Welch as their primary advocate. The hearings led to McCarthy’s humiliation, alcoholism, death, and overdue exit from the American political stage.
The hearings are condensed in Point of Order, a wonderful little documentary by Emile de Antonio. Welch is consistently magnificent, funny, smart, incisive, and utterly contempuous of McCarthy and his sidekick. At one point he gets away with obliquely referring to Cohn as a fairy. Welch parleyed the Army gig into a brief Hollywood career, where he appeared most notably as Judge Weaver in Otto Preminger’s Anatomy of a Murder, one of my favorite Jimmy Stewart films.
A brief transcript of Welch’s remarks on this particular issue is here. It’s good to remember the destructive, careless, egomaniacal Nazi apologist once dominated American politics, and how he was taken down. American democracy sometimes embraces those who would destroy it. Recognizing the threat and dealing with it forcefully, as Welch did and as I believe Howard Dean is now doing, is critical. That our media and political establishment are now shot-through with McCarthy apologists demonstrates just how bad things have gotten.