Monday, March 01, 2010

A Piece of Terrifying History

The venue where I gave my talk today in Wheeling (thanks, Erik R! You are the BEST!) turns out to have been home to an actual famous speech, almost exactly 60 years ago.

The text of the speech, given by Senator "Tailgunner Joe" McCarthy, can be found here. In that speech, the Senator claimed to have a list of 57 proven Communists in the US State Department, waving some blank papers as if that were the "list." That was Feb 9, 1950.

I feel...weird. I was there, on that podium. And from the sounds of the heating unit, it is original also.

(UPDATE: In this article from the Wheeling Intelligencer, it seems that the speech was given at the Hotel McLure, down the street, though MacCarthy did work on the speech at the Fort Henry Club. This book says that, too, on p. 182....)

1 comment:

Patrick R. Sullivan said...

Why is this 'terrifying history'? If you read the book you link to--Stanton Evans' 'Blacklisted by History'--you'll see that not only was McCarthy right about communists in the State Dept, he was right about just about everything else he spoke about.

Note that China has just fallen to Mao, and McCarthy is correctly predicting the upcoming wars in Korea and Vietnam. McCarthy knew something he didn't mention in this speech; that Geo. C. Marshall, upon being named our Ambassador to China in late 1945 was convinced by the 'China hands' (who were supposed to be working to further America's interests, but were secretly working for Stalin and Mao) to tell Chang Kai Shek that if he continued fight Mao, he would withhold all further American aid to Chang.

Had he not done that Mao would have been destroyed by Chang's battle tested and well armed forces in 1946. Marshall's intervention gave Stalin breathing space to arm Mao with captured Japanese weapons and to send his generals, who had defeated Hitler's Wehrmacht, to NW China to train Mao's men. Eventually, he prevailed and drove Chang's army to Taiwan.

Confirmation of this can be found in Jung Chang's (who knew Mao personally) 'Mao; The Untold Story'.