Sidewalks - Joe McCarthy’s Silent Partner

by Tom Deignan

AS we emerge from one of the most bitterly contested political battles of all time, it is important to remember that the American political scene has always had its share of rancor, anger and scoundrels.

Fifty years ago, one of the most infamous characters in history finally met a fitting fate. After years of abusing political enemies, Senator Joe McCarthy shriveled under the glare of a hot light he himself switched on. 

Under the guise of hunting down Communists, the Republican senator from Wisconsin — raised a devout Irish Catholic — finally went too far. In hearings held on live television, McCarthy was exposed as the paranoid bully he was. 

His fall was swift and his death soon followed. “McCarthyism” became synonymous with the worst kind of witch hunting.

But what about McCarthy’s fellow senator, Pat McCarran? Well, with the exception of some political scientists, most people probably have no opinion on the senator from the far-flung state of Nevada.

But according to an explosive new book, Senator McCarran, the son of Irish immigrants, may in fact have had a greater impact on American political life than McCarthy. While McCarthy was getting in front of all the cameras, it was McCarran who was instrumental in actually getting laws on the books. 

Some of those laws were among the most regrettable of the 20th century. Among them, it was McCarran who was responsible for clogging detention centers at Ellis Island, where immigrants who were thought to be subversive were detained. It goes without saying that this is an ironic legacy for a politician who himself was the child of immigrants.

But then again, as Michael Ybarra’s mammoth new biography of McCarran notes, McCarran’s life was filled with complications and ironies.

First of all, unlike McCarthy, McCarran was a Democrat, a member of the political party who at times was willing to cut deals with socialists or others somewhat sympathetic to Communism. Meanwhile, for all of his shortcomings, McCarran’s climb to the top of the American political heap deserves to be recognized as yet another kind of Irish American success story. In a way, that hardscrabble Irish background may very well have contributed to McCarran’s zeal when it came to politics.

In Washington Gone Crazy: Senator Pat McCarran and the Great American Communist Hunt (Steerforth), Ybarra, a former Wall Street Journal reporter, outlines McCarran’s rise to power, as well as his parent’s painful trip from Ireland to the U.S.

Patrick McCarran Senior. was born in Derry in 1834. Of course, the famine was looming and by the time he was in his 20s, McCarran had survived a trip to Quebec on a coffin ship, settled in New York, then went off to the Missouri frontier. 

By the 1860s, railroad work had drawn McCarran to Nevada. That was where he met a much younger Irishwoman named Margaret Shay in 1872. 

Born to tenant farmers in Co. Cork (not County “Cook” as Ybarra’s book has it), Shay married McCarran. On October 8, 1876 Patrick Anthony McCarran was born.

Despite his illiterate parents, the young McCarran became a successful rancher, then a judge and attorney. When the Great Depression rolled around, McCarran rode the Franklin D. Roosevelt wave into the Senate. 

But these two Democrats quickly clashed. McCarran earned a reputation as a fierce anti-Communist and a reliable opponent of measures aimed at benefitting immigrants.

Later, as the Cold War set in in the 1950s, McCarran wrote a bill that essentially outlawed the U.S. Communist Party. Known as the McCarran Act, the law was denounced by one senator as the worst threat to freedom since the 1798 Alien and Sedition Acts (which, ironically, were aimed at deporting Irish as well as French Catholics.)

In 1952, McCarran helped pass the Immigration and Nationalities Act, which tightened an existing quota system and made it easy to deport suspect Communists. This resulted in Ybarra’s powerful images of Ellis Island not as a symbol of freedom but one of detention and abuse of law.

After all that, McCarran was swiftly gone. He died in 1954. 

But with Washington Gone Crazy, Michael J. Ybarra has resurrected this important life and given us another complicated chapter in the history of Irish America.

(Contact Sidewalks at tdeignan@irishvoice.com)