When in my lifetime have Americans ever been so politically divided and, if so, how was that division resolved? I was born at a time when Senator Joe McCarthy of Wisconsin was in the process of lending his name to a period which was also called the Red Scare of the late 40s and early 50s. The country had been seized with a fear that communism was poised to subvert its way of life. Communist conspiracies were felt to be hiding everywhere. The term “scare” is itself very indicative of the country’s frame of mind at the time.
Was the country united or divided regarding the actions of the government then? Too young to know that personally at the time, I’m relying on Katherine Graham from her autobiography, “Personal History,” who wrote that “Many emotions flared up in this period of McCarthy’s heyday. Friends fell out with each other. Rows erupted on every side.” The Senate was being held hostage to McCarthy’s antics. Wikipedia characterizes those as being marked by “demagogic, reckless, and unsubstantiated accusations, as well as public attacks on the character or patriotism of political opponents.”
There eventually was resolution. Doubtless many factors contributed, but the most pivotal was the resistance shown by Joseph Welch, a lawyer who was selected to act as chief counsel for the Army in a series of hearings to determine if it had itself become too heavily influenced by communist sympathies. Formally called the Army-McCarthy Hearings, they were broadcast on television and viewed by an estimated 20 million Americans, lasting 36 days. The turning point came when Welch asked McCarthy, whose maligning of a junior colleague had exhausted Welch’s patience, “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?”
A Big Think clip on YouTube introduced me to the concept of The 3 Ways Stupidity Spreads Through a Society. It was Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s definition of stupidity to which the creators were referring. He’d used it to describe the behavior of his fellow Germans who’d surrendered their intellect, or became “stupid,” by following the Nazis’ program.
It also raised the question of whether this kind of stupidity continues to afflict us through time. In Bonhoeffer’s eyes, this results from the willful decision to ignore what our reason tells us by relying on the more primitive motivations of ego and identity preservation. The clip added to this the Aristotelian theory that persuasion rests on three things: ethos (character), pathos (emotion) and logos (reason).
Up until the moment of Welch’s plea to McCarthy, the various poles of opinion had rested more on emotion and identity, but Welch’s question opened the nation’s mind to viewing the situation more clearly through the lens of reason. That plea for decency was so important because it served as an alarm to the Senate plus the millions of Americans who’d been observers of the proceedings.
Welch’s action defeated McCarthy along all three of Aristotle’s lines of persuasion. His character was seen as more worthy than McCarthy’s since he was rising to the defense of another who was being attacked in absentia. His emotional appeal, by calling on a shared sense of decency, traveled like a bolt of lightning through those that heard it. Finding themselves more allied with someone of Welch’s character and emotion, the nation came to see the main protagonist of this crisis as a bully who was loose with his facts. The untangling of the first two of Aristotle’s prerequisites permitted the third, logos (reason), to become dominant. The momentum shifted and McCarthy was eventually censured by his fellow Senators and disgraced.
Twenty million television viewers represented 12% of the American population in 1954. That percentage would be equivalent to 42 million now. Could such a spectacle, viewed by 42 million of us, have a similar sobering influence on the nation today? The answer to that question has two implications.
As we struggle with the influences of our pride (ethos/identity) or fears (pathos/emotion) in grappling with the issues that confront us, the extent to which we can call on reason (logos) will decide our ability to solve those problems. In 1954, the country was permitted to overcome the influences of the first two and chose reason as its standard.
If we today were given a similar opportunity to all see an individual steadfastly refuse to accept unjustified pummeling from a popular demagogue, without the majority of us then choosing the road of reason, any judgment regarding the comparative degree of our stupidities would be hard to dismiss.
Philip Lussier is a retired educator who lives in Ashfield.