HS history books used to have a couple paragraphs about Joe McCarthy and the red scare

[captain queeg]

I hope they devote a whole chapter to the trump years. That is, if we survive them.

[3Hotdogs]

1. I taught history in 2 N.J. school districts. 1970-2006. None of our text books had Tail-gunner Joe.

I developed a separate unit on him/red scare, using school level books by other publishers. These were a series of books by secondary publishers on topics that varied from labor history, immigration, Japanese internment and so forth. They all used primary sources.

Alls I can say is thank Jesus for Herbert A. Philbrick. (Anyone remember that cheesy show?)


I do remember when a kid in our school - would'a been 1953 or so, -- her father, along with a couple of other people in our county, were arrested as Russian spies. I don't know if they were convicted.

[captain queeg]

2. I remember a picture of Joe sitting at a table. I think it was in history class

But maybe not a standard history book. Now that you say it, I had an 8th grade teacher who was pretty far left back in the day. He might well have introduced non standard books. That was the year of the shootings at KSU which was only about 20 miles from us and he’d just graduated the previous year.

[3Hotdogs]

3. The beginning of the Red Scare. It was a Sunday

And Joe was to give a speech - he had nothing prepared so he starts to talk about the communist threat.

He pulls a paper out of his inside suit pocket, I have here, a list of 50 members of the Communist Party working now, in the state department.

He never showed The list to anyone….

[captain queeg]

4. Wow. I never heard that story just the one about him having vodka is his glass at the hearings

The memory of a journalist telling him he had no decency (can’t remember the wording now) has come to me several times during the trump years, though the politicians have sunk much lower these days. A mild rebuke like that wouldn’t even register with gym Jordan.

[3Hotdogs]

5. "Have you no sense of decency, sir at long last?

Have you left, no sense of decency?

JosephN. Welch, attorney.


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