The importance of what is commonly called the “McCarthy Era” is dawning quickly on historians and others. For example, a nationally known feminist (not an historian) with whom I had dinner a while ago told me that she had begun teaching courses on that period because she had noticed that so many other things she was teaching about either began there or were transformed then.
Exactly.
I dislike the name “McCarthy Era,” for a number of reasons listed in the Introduction to The Philosophy Scare (which I’ll just call “Scare” from now on). One main one is that it obscures its connections to what happened to the entire world—not just the US—in the late 1940’s and the 1950’s. For that was when the United States stopped being a country and became a global empire.
This required major changes in the home society. Look at ancient Rome. By 49 BCE, the Roman Republic was structurally outdated. It lacked, for one thing, a central administration for many public services. Things like police protection were largely in private hands—and as the city’s prominence grew and wealth flooded in to just a few families, gangs of bodyguards became private armies. Inevitably these started fighting one another, tearing the city apart. The need was for a single, centralized authority to supply services and stop the bloodshed—and that transformed not only Rome, but the whole Mediterranean basin.
As the Cold War began, the United States was governed mainly by local elites (C. Wright Mills explored a lot of this in The Power Elite). These elites were usually family based, but in the large companies which dominated certain states (Delaware, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania) membership often came from job performance over decades (at a moment of great military prestige, this was called “rising through the ranks”). Such a decentralized oligarchy was not quick or supple enough to counter the nuclear-age Communist threat. As Nicholas Lemann shows in The Big Test, it was replaced by meritocracy: elite college degrees, themselves largely allocated on the basis of performance on a single measure of “scholastic aptitude,” replaced not only family connections but personal accomplishments as the gateway to higher position.
The result was a nation governed by people whose signal achievement came when they were 17. We live with this monolithic system today: tell any American that somebody got 440, 540 640, or 740 on their college boards and she can tell you a great deal about how they live. This system placed great burdens on universities, elite and other, and they had to be quickly transformed into bastions of intellectual purity. We’ re living today with the consequences of that, too.