The Big Lie
No student either of psychology or of sociology can fail to be interested in Senator McCarthy, upon whose ambitious attempts to pollute decisively the atmosphere—seldom very limpid for very long—of public life in America a Senate investigating commission has reported this week. The commission's majority report, signed by its three Democratic members, described his far-flung allega- lions (he claimed, for instance, that there were 205 Communists in the State Department) as " a fraud and a hoax perpetrated on the Senate of the United States and the American people." In a minority report Senator Lodge fought a not very honourable rear- guard action on behalf of the Republican Party, to which he and Senator McCarthy belong, but his object was rather to besmirch his political opponents than to whitewash Senator McCarthy. Senator Hickenlooper, the other Republican member of the com- mission, virtually boycotted its proceedings. To all this Senator McCarthy, little daunted, replied with an hysterical counter-blast in the worst possible taste. What he has done, and will presumably continue to do, is to attack American society on what is perhaps its weakest flank. It is because so many Americans hardly trust each other at all that even their most fantastic witch-hunts are followed by so large a field ; and from a long-term point of view the effect of Senator McCarthy's somewhat degrading antics may be salutary. They have caused a minor crise de confiance in the State Depart- ment and elsewhere, but they have done little more ; and in the process they have shown how vulnerable American political life is to what the investigating commission called " the big lie." The American public, for all its volatility, learns lessons comparatively quickly ; and its reaction, if anything of the sort occurs again, may well be " Once bitten, twice shy." For it certainly has been bitten.
