On February 9, in Wheeling, West Virginia, Sen. Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin delivered a Lincoln Day address to the Ohio County Women’s Republican Club. In the wake of several recent spy scandals, and with just-announced plans for a hydrogen bomb ratcheting up public fears, McCarthy bitterly denounced the Democrats’ conduct of the Cold War, which had been compromised, he said, by Soviet sympathizers in the government. The high point of the speech came when he brandished a sheet of paper and said it contained the names of 205 Communists in the State Department.
In a typical McCarthy tactic, his allegations straddled the line between wild exaggeration and outright fabrication. The figure he quoted was based on a letter that Secretary of State James Byrnes had written back in July 1946. Byrnes’s letter said that investigators had screened 3,000 job applicants and employees of wartime agencies transferred to the State Department, gotten adverse recommendations against 285 of them, and terminated 79. By subtraction McCarthy came up with a total of 206 potentially disloyal employees, which somehow became 205 when he delivered his Wheeling speech. His three-and-a-half-year-old figure included many who had later left the department or been cleared; in fact, less than a third of the group he cited were still employed at the State Department. And notwithstanding his theatrical flourish, he did not have a list of their names but merely a set of totals.
Over the next few days McCarthy revised his count, now claiming to have evidence of 57 “card-carrying Communists” in the State Department. The figure of 57 came from a different document, a list of potential State Department security risks drawn up in 1948 by a congressional investigator. McCarthy refused to reveal their names—ostensibly to protect their rights but actually because he had no names, just case numbers. As he had done with the group of 205, he made no distinction between accusation and proof or between Communist sympathizers and enrolled party members. Nor did he take care to learn that 35 of the 57 had been cleared since the report was compiled.
At first McCarthy’s claims received only moderate attention. One survey of 129 newspapers has found that only 18 mentioned the Wheeling speech on February 10. Twelve of those 18 were in Wisconsin. For another week the story limped along uncertainly. Then, on February 20, in a marathon Senate session, McCarthy read 81 numbered case histories of purported Communist sympathizers. Once again he had no names, and none of his cases involved actual members of the Communist party, card-carrying or otherwise. Nonetheless, his performance threw Congress and the nation into an uproar and instantly made him the nation’s leading Red-baiter.
Over the next four years, McCarthy grew ever more powerful and arrogant. He ruined many lives before he was done, but worst of all, his overreaching made people associate even careful, legitimate anti-Communism with the taint of lunacy. In this way, he bore out President Harry S. Truman’s assessment of his clumsy witch-hunt as “the greatest asset that the Kremlin has.”
The Lower-Priced Spread
On March 16 President Truman signed legislation to eliminate the ten-cents-a-pound federal tax on yellow margarine, putting the synthetic spread on an equal footing with butter for the first time in sixty-four years. The repeal ended one of the nation’s most glaring examples of a fair trade regulation degenerating into simple protectionism. The controversy dated back to the 1870s, when margarine was introduced in America. At that time it had an unsavory reputation because of its manufacturing method, which was fairly innocuous by the standards of meatpacking plants but sounded unwholesome in more delicate surroundings.
The original process, devised by the Frenchman Hippolyte MËge-MouriËs and patented in 1869, was a not very sophisticated attempt to duplicate a cow’s internal metabolism. Beef suet, finely minced or crushed between rollers, was heated with water, potassium carbonate, and chopped bits of sheep’s stomach. Digestive enzymes from the sheep’s stomach separated the fat from the cellular tissue. The extracted fat was bleached with acid, further digested with bicarbonate of soda and sliced udders, and then blended with milk, water, and a coloring agent. After the solids settled out, a substance resembling butter was left.
Although producers soon found they could do without stomach and udder tissue, the stench of the slaughterhouse remained. The dairy industry heaped abuse on its upstart competitor, calling margarine “a compound of diseased hogs and dead dogs” made from “the raw fats and stomachs of diseased animals, and of those that die on the cars.” A Vermont congressman sneered at margarine as “an alleged article of food” that was “a step back toward the raw tallow and lard which were the delight of our Saxon ancestors in the forests of Germany.” He said it often contained soap grease and the residue of hog slops and called its dubious composition “the mystery of mysteries—a far profounder mystery than hash or sausages.”
Since grocers dispensed butter (and most other goods) from bulk containers, it was easy for an unscrupulous operator to pass off margarine as the genuine article. To prevent this, starting in 1886, a series of federal laws placed heavy taxes and license fees on margarine and restricted its sale with yellow coloring added. Some state laws went much further: A few even required margarine to be dyed pink, red, or black until the Supreme Court struck them down.
Attitudes toward margarine changed as the product itself changed. In the 1880s manufacturers began adding vegetable oils to increase spreadability, and during World War I all-vegetable margarines were introduced. The key advances were improved refining methods, which removed unwanted flavors, and hydrogenation, in which hydrogen is added directly to vegetable oils to make them harder.
With its ingredients and manufacture far removed from the abattoir, opponents could no longer call margarine “slag of the butcher shop.” At the same time, the retail revolution let consumers buy individually labeled packages, greatly reducing the possibility of fraud. Where yellow margarine was illegal, it was sold uncolored with a small pellet of yellow dye that could be kneaded in by the purchaser. The Depression and World War II rationing led many consumers to try margarine, and as its use spread, the tax and the yellow pellets started looking more and more anachronistic.
The federal repeal opened the flood-gates. By 1955, of the fifteen states that had prohibited yellow margarine, all but two had removed their restrictions. In 1957, for the first time, per capita consumption of margarine exceeded that of butter. Minnesota maintained its ban on yellow margarine until 1963, and not until 1967 did Wisconsin, faced by wholesale smuggling from neighboring states, finally join the rest of the country and make honest women of its housewives.
1850 One Hundred and Fifty Years Ago
Clash of the Titans
“Mr. President, never on any former occasion have I risen under feelings of such painful solicitude.” With these words—sounding hyperbolic, yet if anything an understatement—on February 5 Henry Clay of Kentucky rose in the Senate and began the most critical speech of his long and illustrious career. A week earlier he had introduced a set of resolutions designed to end the nation’s strife over slavery. The main provisions would admit California as a free state, leave the territory of New Mexico’s slavery status unspecified, strengthen the fugitive slave law, and essentially prohibit the sale of slaves in the District of Columbia. In an impassioned oration that stretched over two days, Clay defended his plan against opponents on all sides.
The Senate debate over Clay’s package, which came to be known as the Compromise of 1850, was the last major battle for three titans of American politics: Clay, John Calhoun of South Carolina, and Daniel Webster of Massachusetts. All three had been born during the Revolutionary War; all three could remember President Washington. To them the blood of patriots and the ideals of the Revolution were real, not stock images to be summoned up on the Fourth of July. After four decades together at the forefront of American politics, each of these aging statesmen would make one last effort to preserve the sacred principles of the Republic as he saw them.
For clay, the genius of the American Union was compromise, accommodation, and working together for prosperity. From a muddy rural upbringing, Clay had lived to see a nation that spanned the continent, dotted with factories and knit together by railroads, turnpikes, and steamboats. The prospect of his beloved Union’s abandoning everything it had achieved made him desperate to find a solution.
Paradoxically, Clay’s argument for his compromise rested on its lack of real effect. Slavery’s absence in California, he said, was a fait accompli enacted by a unanimous legislature. In barren New Mexico the institution could never take root. With Maryland and Virginia nearby, the ban on slave sales in the District of Columbia would be of little account. As for the return of fugitive slaves, the Constitution already required it. Were any of these points worth fighting over?
Calhoun stayed defiant to the bitter end, dying four weeks after his final speech.
On March 4 came Calhoun’s turn. As a boy he had heard tales of his relatives fighting in the Revolution; his very name came from an uncle murdered by Tories. To him States’ Rights were an indispensable bulwark against the tyranny his ancestors had vanquished. Severely ill with tuberculosis and weakened by political exertions, Calhoun apologized for being unable to deliver his speech himself. Then, as the silent, cadaverous figure sat hunched at his desk, Sen. James Mason of Virginia read Calhoun’s remarks.
They began by tracing the North’s long record of encroachments on the rights of the South, beginning with the 1787 proscription of slavery in the Northwest Territory, which ensured Northern preponderance in Congress. But merely usurping control of the government was not enough. Now the North was bent on abolishing slavery, the very foundation of Southern life. Talk of compromise was absurd, for the South had nothing left to give up. The only way to protect its interests was with a constitutional amendment to give each section an equal voice regardless of population. If the North persisted in its aggressions, Calhoun warned, “we shall know what to do, when you reduce the question to submission or resistance.”
Three days later Webster spoke. Although a committed foe of slavery, he accorded paramount importance to the Constitution. Just as it gave Congress the power to govern the territories and the District of Columbia, so too did it require the return of fugitives and give states exclusive control over slavery within their borders. Like Clay, he said the arid Southwest climate made restricting slavery superfluous: “... I would not take pains to reaffirm an ordinance of nature, nor to reenact the will of God.” And he scorned absolutists on both sides of the slavery issue: “They deal with morals as with mathematics, and they think what is right, may be distinguished from what is wrong, with the precision of an algebraic equation.”
Webster, the intellectual New Englander, relied on facts, laws, reason, and precedent to build his case. Clay, the practical Westerner, appealed to what worked, while Calhoun, the Southern aristocrat, stressed tradition and wounded honor. Their rhetorical styles showed a similar pattern: Webster high-flown, metaphorical, and eloquent, Clay genial and conciliatory, and Calhoun coldly defiant.
Characteristically, Calhoun had maintained his defiance to the bitter end; he died at his Washington residence on March 31. Webster was still in fairly good health, and he harbored hopes for the Presidency in 1852, but his weakness for high living would soon catch up with him. He died in the fall of 1852, a few months after Clay, who had the satisfaction of seeing his compromise enacted into law and escaped any glimpse of the terrible mess that the next generation of statesmen would make of it.
1825 One Hundred and Seventy-five Years Ago
The Most Fractured Election
On February 9 Congress met in joint session to count the electoral votes from America’s most fractured presidential election ever. With the Federalist party of George Washington and John Adams all but extinct, the ruling Democratic-Republicans had faced no opposition, but as often happens, the clawing and scratching from within proved even more fierce. The electioneering had begun almost as soon as President James Monroe—the last remaining Revolutionary leader in national politics—was inaugurated for his second term, in 1821. By the spring of 1824 the choice had narrowed to four men: Henry Clay of Kentucky, the Speaker of the House of Representatives; Secretary of the Treasury William Crawford of Georgia; Secretary of State John Quincy Adams of Massachusetts; and Gen. Andrew Jackson, the hero of the Battle of New Orleans, who was now a senator from Tennessee.
The electoral tally had been known (though not officially counted) since mid-December: Jackson 99, Adams 84, Crawford 41, Clay 37. Because no candidate had a majority, the House of Representatives would choose from the top three finishers, with each of the twenty-four states having a single vote. Crawford’s health was widely known to be failing, so the choice came down to Jackson and Adams.
Two years earlier, as the other candidates’ henchmen combed the country for support, the refined Adams had privately decried the “Sodom of political chapmen, who would barter a Presidency for a department or an embassy.” Soon after that expression of distaste, however, he abandoned his fastidious objections and began meeting almost nonstop with men who could help his cause. Now, with the electorate shrunk to a relative handful (including four states represented by a single congressman apiece), he resumed his wheeling and dealing. Being naturally cautious, Adams made no explicit quid pro quo agreements, but the promise of reward if he should be chosen was clear.
Most observers had predicted numerous ballots before the issue was decided, so the House chamber was in shock when Adams won on the first ballot with exactly the thirteen states he needed. Seven of those states had given a majority of their Electoral College votes to Adams, three to Clay, and three to Jackson. A few days later—as a reward, it was widely believed, for giving his vote and influence to Adams—Clay was named Secretary of State, an office that Adams and the three Presidents before him had all had on their résumés.
For the rest of his career, Clay was dogged by accusations of a “corrupt bargain.” While he remained influential for another quarter-century, he never won the Presidency he so ardently desired. Clay always denied any deal, and in fact he had been the victim of skullduggery himself when three putatively pro-Clay members of New York’s Electoral College delegation switched their votes to other candidates. Before that, mysterious rumors that he had withdrawn from the race circulated throughout 1824.
As for Adams, the maneuvering he engaged in to win office left him severely troubled throughout his Presidency with the internal torment that tends to afflict amateur wrongdoers. His single ill-starred term turned out to be the least effective segment of his otherwise distinguished public career. Jackson got the last laugh by ousting Adams in the 1828 election. He went on to serve two vigorous terms, establish a new party system around himself, and eventually have an era named after him.
