This Week in 1954, One Man Changed the Country

[scrubthedata]

This week in 1954, the U.S. Senate voted 67 to 22 in favor to “condemn” paranoid, communist-hunting Senator Joseph McCarthy for “conduct that tends to bring the Senate into dishonor and disrepute.”

Because the resolution used the seemingly unenforceable term condemn rather than censure, McCarthy’s supporters on the Senate floor erupted into laughter. Within moments, McCarthy pledged to go on with his witch hunt – one that had already ruined scores of American lives and humiliated our nation.

In typical American fashion, after months of work, Congress failed to correct a situation that Congress itself created.

And in typical fashion, it was one lone, brave American who, ultimately, picked up the shovel that was going to put McCarthyism in its rightful grave: Joseph Welch.

Joseph Welch was an attorney who just got too damn sick and tired of the madness when McCarthy set out to destroy the life of an employee at his law firm. And this impromptu denunciation of McCarthy changed the course of history in ways that no politician ever could:

Sometimes, it only takes one voice to start a chorus. So start singing!

(Text published with permission from Lester & Charlie Review)

[MousePlayingDaffodil]

1. Loved him in "Anatomy of a Murder" . . .

. . . although it was years before I came to learn that it was the same man!

[RufusTFirefly]

4. Hah! Beat me to it!

Took so long to get my facts straight (some of the "facts" on the InterTubes are wrong), that you'd posted before I'd finished.

[CurtEastPoint]

2. The link you gave is asking for a login.

[scrubthedata]

5. Thank you for pointing that out!

Should be fixed now.

[RufusTFirefly]

3. And five years later, Welch played to role of a judge...

Last edited Fri Jun 10, 2016, 11:15 PM - Edit history (1)

... in Otto Preminger's Anatomy of a Murder. That voice was unmistakable.

The late Bob Elliott of Bob and Ray did a great Welch imitation in a courageous, but hilarious sendup of the McCarthy Hearings that they broadcast in 1954. Both men played multiple roles. Bob also played mediocre actor Harry Backstayge, who was in hot water with the zoning commission of Skunkhaven, New York, for attempting to build a skyscraper on his residential property. Ray Goulding's Commissioner Carstairs was an uncanny imitation of McCarthy.

[MousePlayingDaffodil]

6. Ironically, it was that distinct voice . . .

. . . that finally clued me in! The "McCarthy era" was rather before my time, but I'd seen growing up a film clip of Welch's confrontation. Then, years later, I saw the movie. I never put two-and-two together until I happened to watch/hear again a clip of the confrontation in near proximity to my having watched the movie again. Then I went to IMDb, and the penny dropped, as it were.

I felt rather foolish that for all that time I hadn't realized who the "actor" portraying the judge really was!