Phrases like “Red menace” and “Cold War” dominated the headlines in the mid-1950s when the late U.S. Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy brought his accusatory fear-mongering crusade to Boston under the guise of ridding America of dangerous Communists.
Thanksgiving was just around the corner in 1953 when the Wisconsin Whirlwind gaveled in a Senate subcommittee hearing and quickly demonstrated his flair for the dramatic.
McCarthy trotted out a former Fitchburg General Electric employee who identified himself as a Communist and said he had been working undercover for the Federal Bureau of Investigation. In classic McCarthy fashion, the agent fingered two River Works employees as fellow travelers and, according to Daily Evening Item coverage, “… said that there is a cell of 30 Communists at the Lynn GE plants.”
That was all revelation McCarthy and the press needed to launch the kind of witch hunt McCarthy loved to pursue with no end in sight, except to ruin reputations and keep his name in print.
The two workers accused by McCarthy at the Boston hearing were refused permission to speak unless, in the senator’s words, “… you are ready to state if you are or are not Communists.”
McCarthy operated straight out of the have-you-stopped-beating-your-wife yet school and his particular political brand has not vanished in the 60-plus years since he set about on a one-man terror campaign.
It’s hard to frame the fears and thoughts of 1950s Americans into a context understandable to 21st century Americans. But you don’t have to be older than 40 to remember when Federal Street in Lynn was closed to traffic for national security reasons and only reopened long after GE stopped building engines where the Market Basket store now stands.
McCarthy did not aim his interrogation campaign at the River Works because someone had blown the plant up or hoisted the hammer and sickle on Western Avenue. He made his accusations as sort of an unintended case-in-point illustrating Franklin D. Roosevelt’s famous warning that “… the only thing we have to fear … is fear itself.”
McCarthy held up Communism as a threat to all things American without ever illustrating and detailing where exactly Communism had hurt Americans or threatened them.
The River Works employees he focused on at his November 1953 hearing challenged the senator with Robert Goodwin shouting, “We still have the Bill of Rights don’t we, Senator?” after he was refused the opportunity to question the FBI agent who testified before McCarthy.
Nathaniel Mills was ordered out of the hearing room by McCarthy. In a statement to the press following the hearing, he said McCarthy offered no evidence of spying or sabotage.
In contrast, McCarthy’s right-hand man Roy Cohn, said the inability or unwillingness on the part of witnesses to embrace or denounce Communist Party membership was proof in itself of some evil or threat lurking within them.
McCarthy’s accusations resonated with the public with the Item reporting that the televised Boston hearing prompted “Scores of Greater Lynn residents … to demand action be taken to oust alleged Communist workers from the G.E. plants.”
By January 1954, McCarthy was complimenting GE for “… the speed in which they have discharged employees who have been identified with Communist affiliations.”
The tables started turning on McCarthy six months later with fellow senators censuring him for the way he handled his hearings and a now-historic showdown with Army officers.
Democrats took over the U.S. Senate in 1955 and McCarthy found the rug yanked out from under him with the loss of his investigations subcommittee chairmanship. The witness list for his final hearing as chairman included River Works employees but the writing was on the wall for the fear-monger: Democrats made it clear that the subcommittee’s focus moving forward would be on the economy “and other domestic policies.”
The great Tom Dalton in a 1983 article summed up the scourge that was Joseph R. McCarthy by quoting Michael J. Bonislawski, a River Works union member who wrote his master’s thesis on the River Works and the Red Scare. Bonslawski wrote these words about the men accused by McCarthy.
“Once they were dismissed, they had little chance of being employed anywhere else or collecting unemployment assistance. They were condemned to disgrace and poverty, not for anything they had been convicted of, but for what they believed or were assumed to believe …”