The Decline of *The McCarthy Show*

In this final chunk of Doherty, he accomplishes what he set out to do with this book. Although, as we’ve pointed out, this book isn’t as argument driven as some of our other course texts, that doesn’t mean that Doherty doesn’t have a clear task in the project. Doherty’s task is to rewrite what he calls the “conventional wisdom” regarding television in the McCarthy era: the view of TV as “Purveyor of sedative pabulum, facilitator of the blacklist, handmaiden to McCarthyism” (2). In Doherty’s introduction he quotes Eric Barnouw as saying that TV “would learn caution, and cowardice” during the McCarthy period; Doherty undermines this assertion, however, by appending that TV “would also utter defiance and encourage resistance” (3). Illustrating this resistance and, in doing so, illuminating the ways in which McCarthyism and McCarthy were addressed, exposed, articulated and critiqued by television of the 1950s is just what Doherty does in this last section.

The televisual defiance of McCarthyism that comes across in this section is especially vivid because Doherty has set it up so that this section figures the decline of McCarthy, his downfall. For instance, Joseph Welch, articulating the vox populi, famously asks Senator McCarthy if he retains any sense of decency. In this moment Welch speaks for the entire contingent of the television audience that had grown tired of the McCarthy Show, which was a sort of rerun before such a thing existed in that, despite the fact that the McCarthy Show ran on different networks and under different names, the plot was conventional, the characters often the same, and even the script and punchlines predictable. As Doherty illustrates, 50s Americans got a kick out of reciting “Are you now, or have you ever been, a communist?” and shouting “Point of order!” Audiences had enjoyed it for a time, but as Welch illustrates, many TV viewers were ready for the McCarthy Show to be cancelled.

Perhaps feeling that his readers were also growing tired of McCarthy coverage, Doherty offers us a bit of a relief in Chapter 10 by taking the spotlight off of McCarthy and onto some glittery 50s celebrities, Christine Jorgensen and Liberace, and then suggesting that these two queer icons have more in common with “McCarthy and his men” than we might have ever suspected. Although it’s very easy today to look back and shake our heads, imagining that McCarthyism’s connection of homosexuality with communism is a logical conclusion of a xenophobic era, there’s more to learn from this point than simply a confirmation of our assumption that people in the 50s were closed minded. Doherty wants to assert here and elsewhere that the 1950s was a period of acute worry and anxiety on multiple fronts: communism, homosexuality, the decline of religion, momism, new expectations for men, and so on. That these things were seen related is far from outrageous: communism, for instance, was connected to irreligiosity because Marx extolled atheism; homosexuality was related to those “gender troubles” because it was seen as a dysfunction that was produced by dominating mothers or too-soft fathers.

As we’ve learned during this semester, these anxieties are linked to real things: a postwar climate in which men had returned from war and women had returned to home from the workplace, a rise in domestication whereby a new model of the nuclear family had become—very quickly— taken for granted, and so on. What these worries all had in common was that they were commonly believed to be readily preventable if only people would recognize the problems and cling to the “Judeo-Christian heritage” that was so often invoked in this era.

The remainder of Doherty’s book largely concerns fictional treatments of McCarthyism that were undertaken after the fact. With the relative immunity afforded by time, these films and television shows are unafraid to take on McCarthyism and blacklisting; in the case of The Front, for instance, Doherty mentions the notations of blacklisting that accompanied its closing credits and vividly shows us that “a scar of shame in the 1950s has become a badge of honor in the 1970s” (253). That’s no surprise, of course; today we’re allowed to say with all impunity that McCarthy was a scoundrel. But what Doherty’s text has shown us is that the dissent seen in media after McCarthy was really not all that different than the dissent seen in television during the height of McCarthyism.

Ultimately we can say that the McCarthy Show was never truly cancelled but instead, due to popular demand, reinvented after the decline of its protagonist. It wasn’t a one-way process, though: while the McCarthy Show was reinvented after the decline of its protagonist, it was simultaneously reinvented in order to facilitate that decline. In this way the McCarthy Show is much like the Howard Beale Show in Paddy Chayefsky’s 1975 film Network, in which Howard Beale is killed on the air in order to save the poor ratings of his show. He was pretty popular for a while. We all got a kick out of his ranting and raving. But then we just plain got tired of him.