The final resting place for a man who tore America apart is a lovely spot.
Joseph McCarthy’s grave sits overlooking the Fox River. Beyond the headstone of the Wisconsin senator who made two presidents and politicians from both parties tremble — the man who destroyed American lives during his calamitous pursuit of power, notoriety and Communists — the water flows, as if cleansing the earth itself.
The serenity is both incongruous and reassuring.
Joe McCarthy didn’t flow.
He raged.
The hungers that drove him tore not just Americans apart, but families. He ruined lives, pushed people to suicide, did lasting damage to the cause he claimed to serve and saw his name become shorthand for cruel and unscrupulous zealotry.
McCarthyism.
As I stand here in St. Mary’s Cemetery, early on a high summer morning, I listen to the sounds of this quiet Midwestern community beginning to stir and wonder what twisted a man like McCarthy.
His most recent biographer, Larry Tye, does a superb job in “Demagogue: The Life and Long Shadow of Senator Joe McCarthy” of tracing the man’s record of recklessness and ruin. We see how McCarthy took a meat cleaver to the land he claimed to love and the ways he bent, if not broke, the law, honor and decency as he did so.
We read in Tye’s authoritative recounting about the ways McCarthy lied about how many Communists he found, covered up his own abuses of power and wrenched America’s institutions and constitutional safeguards out of shape, contorting them until they almost collapsed from the strain. Worse, he did so without noticeable qualms — or even second thoughts — about the wreckage he left in his wake.
The why of the man’s scorched-earth march through life, though, remains elusive.
I’d come here, to this land where Joe McCarthy was born and where he is buried, hoping to find clues regarding not just what ailed the America of 70 years ago, but also what plagues my homeland today.
But answers to life’s mysteries are never easy to find.
Appleton is a pleasant place. In the neighborhoods near the graveyard, the homes are stately and well-kept. Mothers push baby strollers in the early morning hours before the day’s heat settles in. Men walk dogs. Young people jog.
Grand Chute, Wisconsin, where McCarthy was born, is only a few miles from where his remains reside. Once farm country, Grand Chute now is a bedroom community, with the baseball fields, playgrounds and manicured walking trails to prove it.
Neither Appleton nor Grand Chute seems like the sort of place that would nurture a soul with such ravenous and destructive appetites.
But they did.
The signs were there early.
Joe McCarthy was always in a hurry. From the beginning, there was a tendency to cut corners, to take every advantage the rules afforded.
Then a little more.
Then a lot more.
When he was young, he started a business raising chickens. It grew fast. He prospered. But a McCarthy tendency to overreach manifested itself, and he found himself ruined.
A pattern developed.
He raced through high school in a single year, then college and law school in five years total, without learning much along the way. He practiced law, amassed gambling and business debts, drank some and then too much and ran for office.
First, he was a Democrat.
Then, out of expediency, he became a Republican.
He served as a judge, where his court became a mill for quickie divorces.
He became a Marine, built a combat record that was admirable, and then, in defiance of both the rules of the military and federal law, ran for the Senate while still on active duty. He lost that race, but then won the next one.
There, McCarthy found himself in a position to tear and gouge at the system that indulged him.
Which he did.
Yet, millions followed him — in fact, admired, even adored him. They cheered as he shredded the principles he’d vowed to preserve.
As I stand at Joe McCarthy’s grave, right here in the heart of America, I wonder what it is about my country that makes it, every now and then, surrender both sense and rectitude to sideshow hustlers.
As I ponder that question, my gaze drifts to the water.
Down below, the river flows on, washing over the country itself.
John Krull is director of Franklin College’s Pulliam School of Journalism and publisher of TheStatehouseFile.com, a news website powered by Franklin College journalism students. Send comments to editorial@therepublic.com.
