Servetus: The remote, atmospheric Joseph McCarthy Connection

So — now that it’s signed and sealed: As everyone knows by now, The Crucible fictionalizes elements of the Salem witch trials of the 1690s as an allegorical comment on the anti-Communist sentiment of the 1950s U.S. A major figure in the creation of that mood was Senator Joseph McCarthy.

Joseph McCarthy was born in Grand Chute, Wisconsin — a township in the area that’s been the location of many a meeting between me and Obscura — and lived out his childhood and teen years on a farm less than two miles as the crow flies from the house where I grew up. McCarthy Road was the school district boundary between my school district and the next one over, and the school bus drove past that farm every day. When I was growing up, you could see the original farmhouse, and we knew the (unrelated) family who farmed there, but I haven’t driven that way recently so I don’t know if the house is still there. The joke was that the failure of McCarthy’s agricultural ambitions (he had a sideline in chicken farming that didn’t take off) led to his decision to finish high school (in Manawa) and then move on to higher education (at Marquette University in Milwaukee). Of course, I did the obligatory report on Senator McCarthy in high school history. At that time you could still look at the original plat book for that part of town; in the meantime most of the McCarthy memorabilia in the public library has been either archived or defaced beyond legibility — it was already a problem with the library books in the 1980s when I did my report, although it was interesting to read all the different opinions people wrote in the margins of those books. McCarthy died while my parents were in high school, but my father worked in bookkeeping with his sister, Olive, in his first job out of high school at the (now demolished) Elm Tree Bakery on West College Avenue. He’s buried in one of the Catholic cemeteries in Appleton and a fair number of people who are still around remember him.

When I was a kid, the bust above was on display in the Outagamie County Courthouse — McCarthy was a local hero and respected figure in the area, and he’d been a Outagamie Circuit Court Judge. The first attempts to have the bust removed began in the mid-1980s, when I was in high school, and for the last decade or so, the figure’s been housed in the Outagamie County Museum.

Other random McCarthy-era judicial / political data that you might not know unless you remember the 1950s personally or are from the area: Greta van Susteren, of CNN and Fox News fame, also comes from our area — her father was Urban van Susteren, betimes a close friend of McCarthy and also an Outagamie County Circuit Court judge (an elected position). His judicial career ended in the mid-1980s over a series of accusations of judicial misconduct as a result of which he was suspended from his position by the state Supreme Court. I remember that vividly — it was all over the papers just as I was getting interested in reading news.

~ by Servetus on April 16, 2014.