Ralph Flanders - U.S. Senate Career - The Censure of Joseph McCarthy

The Censure of Joseph McCarthy

Flanders was an early and strong critic of fellow Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy’s "misdirection of our efforts at fighting communism” and his role in “the loss of respect for us in the world at large.” He felt that rather than looking inward for communists within U.S. borders, the nation should look outward at the “alarming world-wide advance of Communist power” that would leave the United States and Canada as “the last remnants of the free world.” On March 9, 1954 he addressed Senator McCarthy on the Senate floor, expressing these concerns. (McCarthy had been advised of the speech, but was absent at the time.) Apart from a brief note of encouragement after this speech, Flanders was grateful that President Eisenhower stayed out of the McCarthy controversy. Members of President Eisenhower’s cabinet passed along the message that Flanders should “lay off.”

The Times-Argus newspaper of Randolph, Vermont reported:

The speech was a sensation, and the next day Vonda Bergman reported to the Herald that Flanders was unable to appear on the Senate floor because of the flood of telephone calls and telegrams, said to run 6-1 in his support. One message called his speech "a fine example of Vermont courage, humor and decency," while another told him, "Your remarks brought a breath of fresh clean air from the Green Mountains." Two Senate colleagues, John Sherman Cooper, R-Kentucky, and Herbert Lehman, D-New York, were among those who heaped praise on the Vermont senator. The editor of a national publication said: "It was one of the few recent indications that the Republican Party on Capitol Hill is not wholly devoid of courageous moral leadership." And an editorial in the Rutland Herald stated, "the effect of the speech was to hearten that vast majority of Americans who hate communism but who also revere the Constitution."

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Other reactions were not so favorable. People who wrote the Rutland Herald “hinted at retribution for McCarthy’s foes” and called McCarthy “a demigod above the law of the U.S.A. … If you disagree, you are RED.” William Loeb, owner of the Burlington Daily News, wrote, “It would take somebody as stupid as Senator Flanders to finally swallow the Democratic bait on the subject of Senator McCarthy.” In a speech that Flanders did not mention in his autobiography, the Times-Argus article reported that on June 1, 1954 Flanders

…addressed the Senate on "the colossal innocence of the junior Senator from Wisconsin." Comparing McCarthy to "Dennis the Menace" of cartoon fame, the Vermonter delivered a scathing address in which he lambasted the Wisconsin man for dividing the nation. "In every country in which communism has taken over, " he reminded the Senate, "the beginning has been a successful campaign of division and confusion." He marveled at the way the Soviet Union was winning military successes in Asia without risking its own resources or men, and said this nation was witnessing "another example of economy of effort...in the conquest of this country for communism. He added, "One of the characteristic elements of communist and fascist tyranny is at hand as citizens are set to spy upon each other." "Were the junior Senator from Wisconsin in the pay of the communists, he could not have done a better job for them." "This is a colossal innocence, indeed."

On June 11, 1954, Flanders introduced a resolution charging McCarthy “with unbecoming conduct and calling for his removal from his committee membership.” Upon the advice of Senators Cooper and Fulbright and legal assistance from the Committee for a More Effective Congress he modified his resolution to “bring it in line with previous actions of censure.” The text of the resolution of censure condemns the senator for “obstructing the constitutional processes of the Senate” when he “failed to cooperate with the Subcommittee on Privileges and Elections of the Senate Committee on Rules and Administration and acting “contrary to senatorial ethics” when he described the Select Committee to Study Censure Charges and its chairman in slanderous terms. Time reported that a “group of 23 top businessmen, labor leaders and educators… wired every U.S. Senator (except McCarthy himself) urging a favorable vote ‘to curb the flagrant abuse of power by Senator McCarthy.’" The Senate censured McCarthy on December 2, 1954 by a vote of 65 to 22. The Senate Republicans were split 22 to 22. For a further treatment of this episode, refer to Joseph McCarthy—Censure and the Watkins Committee.

A 1990 article in the Rutland Herald characterized the reaction in Vermont to Flanders’s role in the McCarthy censure as “sour.” It concludes that Flanders’s convictions did not necessarily reflect the priorities of his constituency, which regarded the issue as “not our problem.”