Heather Cox Richardson:

From CAFE and the Vox Media Podcast Network, this is Now & Then. I’m Heather Cox Richardson.

Joanne Freeman:

And I’m Joanne Freeman. This week, Heather, you and I came together and decided that in a word, what we really wanted to talk about was commissions. I think there was a point at which you and I both came up with a similar question, which was we both noticed that in the last, I don’t know, week to 10 days, suddenly, political commentators and pundits and journalists and op-ed writers and even political scientists and a petition, in one way or another, a whole bunch of people had stepped forward and said, “Wow! Democracy is really in danger.” You and I have been for a very long time saying that all over the place, online, to each other.

So, it’s striking, I think, and I think you and I both had the same response. Why now? Why suddenly has everyone joined and basically jumped on this train? We both came up with a simple answer and I guess we’re going to complicate that as we talk today. But the simple answer was, perhaps this has something to do with the fact that on May 28th, Senate Republicans blocked the creation of an independent commission to investigate the January 6th attack on Congress. That may be that decision to not have that investigation drove people to have a sense of urgency that they didn’t have before.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Well, it certainly seemed to be the case, that that was a turning point for a lot of people who had tried to look away before that and say, “Oh, really we’re going to go ahead and figure out some way to sure another attack on our democracy doesn’t happen. But when the Senate Republicans went ahead and filibuster for the first time this year that bipartisan bill that came out of the House of Representatives to establish an independent bipartisan commission, I think it really was a wake-up call for a lot of people. If you remember what happened that day was so extraordinary. 

Even Republicans, even once who were thought of as being really partisan, people like Lindsey Graham from South Carolina, for example, were talking about how much we needed the commission to figure out what on earth had happened that day.

Lindsey Graham (archival):

We need a 9/11 commission to find out what happened and make sure it never happens again, and I want to make sure that the Capitol footprint can be better defended next time.

Heather Cox Richardson:

It was really clear to a lot of people that there was this real disconnect between what was supposed to be happening in American democracy and what had happened that day. So there was a sense even among them that they needed to look into this. Of course, at the same time, they were using that in part to justify voting against convicting Donald Trump for incitement of insurrection in a second impeachment trial. So it’s partly an excuse. But they hinge on that American sense of, gee, something’s not right here and we have to figure out why.

Joanne Freeman:

Right. So, in essence, it puts a spotlight on the political process, on the mechanics of politics, at a moment when people know that something wrong, and then the question becomes, what’s going to happen now? How is that process going to work? And well, depending on who you are, it either works really well or doesn’t work at all.

Heather Cox Richardson:

And actually, when you think about it, don’t you really want to know how that happened. I mean, we’re sort of talking about it intellectually, but as historians, I want to look at all the transcripts, I want to look at all the phone- [crosstalk 00:04:45]

Joanne Freeman:

Oh, Heather.

Heather Cox Richardson:

… I want to look at… I mean, that’s my happy place. And people are saying, “Oh, we know, we can see the videos.” I’m like, “No, you don’t.”

Joanne Freeman:

No.

Heather Cox Richardson:

“You don’t know what happened on most phone calls.”

Joanne Freeman:

That’s true.

 Heather Cox Richardson:

“You didn’t know who called whom.”

Joanne Freeman:

That’s totally true.

Heather Cox Richardson:

“You don’t know who was in the rooms.”

Joanne Freeman:

Well, we have a sense… Which is interesting, I hadn’t thought about it this way before. We have a sense of what evidence can really be, right? Because we, as historians, we’re knee deep in evidence all the time. And you’re right, as historians, we want to really wallow in it and read it and see the wording and see the phrasing and get a sense of the mental landscape and the dynamics going on between people, which is the sort of thing you can only get with that evidence.

Heather Cox Richardson:

And the physical landscape. I happen to be looking through my diary this week and looked at the fact that there was a meeting in Trump Tower on either December 18th or December 19th with a whole bunch of people at it. Well, of course, when I wrote that on December 18th or 19th, whenever it was, I just noted that it was a meeting. Now I’m thinking, “Were they talking about what they were going to have for dinner?” I think not.

Joanne Freeman:

Probably not.

 Heather Cox Richardson:

So anyway, back in the present, one of the complaints coming from Republicans is that any commission looking into what happened that day is going to be partisan. So we actually sat down and we were like, “Well, aren’t all hearings partisan?” So we actually sat down and took it from the other direction and said, “Let’s come up with a list of hearings that were not partisan.” And I still have that list. Finally, we found one, I’m like, “There we go. We’ve got one that wasn’t partisan,” and looked it up.

 Joanne Freeman:

We got one.

 Heather Cox Richardson:

The very first line I saw on Wikipedia was, “This was a highly contentious partisan commission.” It’s like, we quit. Every hearing is going to be partisan.

 Joanne Freeman:

Here’s the thing that I love about us, right? Is that we think of the topic, we’re like, “Oh, commissions. We want to talk about commissions.” Then we’re like, “Okay, we think they’re partisan. Are they?” Then we jump in and investigate and shoot these texts and emails back and forth. It’s like we’re so open-minded to try and figure this out. I mean, I guess that’s part of what makes it fun.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Well, but what really came down to though once we had done that is sitting there and figuring out then if they’re partisan. If they’re all partisan, why do they matter? Why do we need them? We’ve got plenty of other partisan things around, so why does it matter? And I sent Joanne great texts where I said, “Joanne, what we really need to talk about is why this matters. Your turn.”

Joanne Freeman:

First thing in the morning, I was like… admittedly still in bed, pick up my phone, and Heather’s like, “Okay, why do commissions matter? Go, Joanne.” But we came up with a list of reasons, right? I responded and I had a list of reasons that I thought… I don’t know, five or six things that I thought were actually important about commissions that were not necessarily about creating legislation on the basis of a commission, but were varied and wide ranging, and in some ways more about sentiment or feelings about the government and about the nation than they were necessarily about a concrete outcome.

Heather Cox Richardson:

What we really came down to and what I loved about that was that what it seemed to me is that a hearing or a commission happens at a time when a number of people believe that there is an imbalance in the American government, that one side or another is trying to take advantage and they want that to be looked at. But crucially, Joanne pointed out that when in fact that happens and when two parties or two different groups or fear of an outside influence become serious enough that the government wants to take a look at it, the people want the government to take a look at it, what they do is they go to the nation’s highest tribunal, the public, and that I think is where we are right now with this January 6 commission.

Joanne Freeman:

You and I are going to be sort of banging up against this as we talk today, but that gets at one of the reasons why… and we’ll see how we veer back around to this at the very end of our conversation, but one of the reasons why these kinds of commissions can really important, because they are opening something to the public and declaring in front of the public and enabling them to register their own response among themselves, so potentially they have a wide impact, to declare an act wrong. It’s a moment where people are saying “This thing happened and this thing seems unacceptable, so let’s publicly air it and look at it and see what it looks like, and in so doing, declare that it seemingly crossed a line.”

 Now, the commission can decide it didn’t happen. But even if it does that, still, standing up and saying, “This thing that happened, even though it didn’t happen the way we thought it did, that thing is not acceptable.” As vague and abstract as that sounds, I think that’s really important. And I think we see that every day when something, for example, like the January 6 event happens, and you see people murmuring that it might happen again. Well, we haven’t really responded as a nation to what we think of that in an official kind of a way. That’s what the political process is about and that’s part of what commissions can do.

Heather Cox Richardson:

And we have not yet said it isn’t okay, which is one of the reasons people are worried that it might happen again. There has not been a public hearing, if you will, a public airing of whether or not the events that happened on January 6 were okay in a democracy. And a lot of us think they weren’t okay. But I want to throw in here before we get into the different ways to look at commissions in times at which they have been very valuable in trying to figure out how in fact democracy works, I want to throw out that there are a lot of commissions that have been held or hearings that have been held at times when people thought that there was the wrong pressure on the American government.

And none of us really remember those, even if they were a really big deal at the time, like they really monopolized the public conversation. They have faded into obscurity, because at the end of the day, it turned out they proved that or at least they suggested that there really wasn’t a terrible imbalance that had to be adjusted in American democracy. One of my favorites of that is, in the 1950s, there was a really major series of hearings called the Kefauver hearings, named after Senator Estes Kefauver of Tennessee, was a Democrat, in which he organized hearings to investigate the influence of the mob in America and in American business and by extension into the American government.

And this was a huge deal. The committee met in 14 different cities, it interviewed 600 different witnesses. There were an estimated 30 million people watching the testimony in Congress. If you go to the Mob Museum in Las Vegas, it’s actually in the building in one of the courtrooms where these hearings were held and they still have bulletproof glass up in front of where the judge sat because they were so concerned that people were going to get shot at. Although at the end of the day, in the 1970s, 1970 I guess, we did get the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, or RICO, to try and get the big fish who are ordering the little fish around to commit crimes in the mob.

 Heather Cox Richardson:

At the end of the day, people were like, “Nah, it turns out the mob wasn’t as big a deal in the government as we thought it was.” And most people nowadays have never even heard of the Kefauver hearings, even though they were the set of hearings in the 1950s.

 Joanne Freeman:

I really wonder if there are two levels of thinking about what commissions do. And one of them is immediate, in the moment, is this thing right or wrong? And another one has more long-standing implications. And what you just said was some of these were big deal and they happened and now we don’t remember them. They happened because there was a moment that seemed like it needed investigating. So it could be that the more we think about this, the more it will be that regardless of what they find, or if they find anything, there’s an immediacy in a moment of crisis that these commissions have that may or may not have a long-standing legacy in American memory, but that doesn’t mean that they don’t matter.

 I think that looking at past commissions can show you a lot of the things that can happen from these commissions outcomes of awareness, if not legislative outcomes or electoral outcomes even, that have a big influence.

 Heather Cox Richardson:

Well, after going through all of our texts and all the different commissions that we came up with, we finally centered on three that seemed to represent exactly the sorts of important issues we’re thinking about, not the commissions that didn’t end up mattering. By the way, in the 19th century, it was a really big deal. Anytime anybody was mad about anything, they said, “Let’s have a hearing,” and they would have a hearing and then nobody would ever read about it. These are goldmines for historians because they’re verbatim testimony about any number of things, the purchase of guns in 1890 in Nebraska, for example, I am not kidding. Yet there are some that matter a lot. So, the first one we picked out was an investigation into what happened in May of 1856. Take it away, Joanne Freeman.

Joanne Freeman:

When people think about violence in Congress, this is the one thing normally that they think about. And that is the very famous caning of Massachusetts abolitionist, Senator Charles Sumner, in the Senate. So, Sumner is at his desk and he’s signing copies of a speech that he just gave that offended many southerners, including the man who ultimately canes him, Preston Brooks, signing them so that they can ultimately be sent out to constituents and a variety of other people. Now, Sumner had given a really deliberately aggressive speech on May 19th and 20th of 1856. In print, it ended up being about 112 pages, which tells you that was quite a speech.

 He deliberately wanted to confront what he called the slave oligarchy. The issue at play at that moment was the state of Kansas and whether Kansas was going to be a free state or a slave state. There was violence in Kansas as people were literally fighting over what kind of state it would be, which constitution would be accepted as the legal constitution of Kansas? Would it be a free constitution? Would it be one that allowed slavery? It was vital, huge. It’s at a moment when the slavery debate is really picking up and Sumner picks this moment to give a speech that he titled, The Crime Against Kansas.

 Heather Cox Richardson:

I’m sorry, I’m laughing here. You saying it’s an aggressive speech. It is so incendiary. He accuses a fellow senator of rape on the floor of the Senate.

 Joanne Freeman:

Well, right. Literally, the next word in my notes here is rape, okay? We’re in the same zone.

 Heather Cox Richardson:

It is such an incendiary speech that I won’t teach it actually.

 Joanne Freeman:

Right. No, it’s really extreme. He does indeed talk about literally the rape of Kansas vice pro-slavery forces, he attacks a number of senators specifically by name using that kind of sexualized rhetoric, one of them being Andrew Butler of South Carolina, talks about plantation manners, talks about how southerner was routinely trample the rules of Congress under foot. Well, Preston Brooks is a relative of Senator Andrew Butler, and Preston Brooks read what Sumner had said in the newspaper to make sure that it was as offensive as he thought it was. 

Then he came into the Senate on May 22nd, and essentially said, this is a bad paraphrase, “Senator Sumner, you’ve insulted my kinsmen and you’ve insulted my state and you’ve insulted my region and I now must revenge them.” Something along those lines.

Heather Cox Richardson:

You’re making this sounds so civilized.

Joanne Freeman:

I know, it’s really not civilized. 

Heather Cox Richardson:

He came up to the guy and he beat the crap out of him-

Joanne Freeman:

Well, I’m getting to the crap beating.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Can you just get to the crap beating? 

Joanne Freeman:

He did say that before the crap beating, he did. He stood in front of him and made this formal declaration. You got to know.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Do we know that from the hearing?

 Joanne Freeman:

Yes, as a matter of fact. I was going to say it at the outcome, thank you for reminding me. A great example of the amazing value of these committee reports from hearings is the Sumner committee report. It’s huge and it includes eye witness testimony from people who saw what happened as to exactly what they saw and exactly what they heard, and testimony that should be used a lot more often. So, yes, that is indeed the testimony. And that’s very formal on our stuff. You’re talking to an honor scholar.

 So at any rate, he makes this form of pronouncement and then he beats the crap out of Charles Sumner, really violently beating him with his cane over the head until Sumner who can’t get away quickly enough because the desks in the Senate were bolted to the floor, he ultimately wrenches his desk from the floor and collapses in a heap bleeding and Brooks’ cane at some point breaks and he’s taken away and Sumner is carried away. Really, really obviously dramatic incident. So then of course, the question is, what do we do about that? Or should something be done about that? It’s not the first time there was violence in Congress, but it’s a really symbolic, extreme example.

 So, the day after the attack, Senator William Seward, who’s a New York Republican, so an anti-slavery Republican, called for an investigation and the House passed a resolution to appoint a committee to look into what would be the appropriate punishment for Brooks’ actions. Ultimately, the committee was divided and southerners did not really think it was the Congress’s place to punish, although as a whole, the majority of this committee thought that, and this is their language, “The assault was a most flagrant violation not only of the privileges of the Senate and the House and the personal rights and privileges of the senator, but of the rights of his constituents and of our character as a nation.”

 So, it suggests that expulsion for Brooks would be a fine thing and then comes debate of Brooks expulsion in the House. Ultimately, it does not garner the required two thirds majority to remove Brooks. All Southern congressmen, except one, voted for Brooks to stay on. Brooks feels dishonored by the debate. Ultimately, he resigns goes home and is immediately reelected back into Congress. Now, that leads to the question, one of the ones that we’re dealing with today, which is, what’s the impact of these hearings and commissions and moments in which extreme crises are aired in front of the public?

In this case, the event itself and the debate over it increased polarization, intensified polarization. People in the north thought that the north itself was being beaten to the ground. In the New York Times, they stated, “The blow struck at Sumner takes effect upon freedom of speech in that spot, Congress, where without freedom of speech, there can be no freedom of any kind.” It struck at the heart of the north. Meanwhile, southerners thought this was a fine, wonderful thing that finally someone from the south had stood up and silenced these arrogant, aggressive, nasty northerners, these crazed… The word they liked to use was fanatical abolitionists who were out to suppress and silence and insult the south.

Preston Brooks was sent canes, celebratory canes, for what he had done. People began talking about having southerners “Sumnerize” other northerners abolitionists who got in the way. So, there’s this hearing in the end, they decide that they won’t act and expel Brooks. He is re-elected, although he dies soon after actually from a throat infection, which many considered providential. So, what is the impact of this? Well, in this case, it was important to do something. It was such an extreme act, it needed to be discussed, it needed to be aired, it needed to be, as we’ve said before, highlighted as a line crossing moment in many ways.

 But at that moment in time, given where politics was, it didn’t solve really any problems, it just, if anything, intensified polarization. But equally important, it changed how people understood Congress and what they expected of their congressmen in the north and northerners began to elect members of Congress that were a little bit more willing to fight and defend themselves, and it really helped the Republican Party. They were a brand new party, and in the next presidential election, they actually won 33.1% of the electoral vote. So, it had an impact on the north, it had an impact on the Republican Party, and it had an impact on the nation, despite the fact that ultimately the committee and the hearing didn’t act.

Heather Cox Richardson:

What was at stake with discussing the attack on Charles Sumner by Preston Brooks is whether or not it was okay for a Congressman to try and kill another Congressman on the floor of the Senate. I hope that now we have an answer to that, but it’s really a question now, is it okay to try and silence your opponents in a democracy by using physical harm against them? The attack on Sumner was a really profound moment in which people said, “Nah, it’s probably not okay to try and kill a senator on the floor of the Senate.”

 That question ties really nicely into one of the next hearings we picked, and that was the KKK hearings that were held after the American Civil War in 1871. What happens there is that after the war with the expansion of a political voice to African Americans in the south after 1867 when Congress says, “Well, yeah, we need new state constitutions here in the south.” And under the Military Reconstruction Act of ’67, they say for the first time in American history, the delegates to those constitutional conventions are going to be voted for by white men, but also by black men. So, African Americans get a voice in the American south in the political body in 1867.

 When that happens and the new state constitutional conventions come together and they write really very reasonable constitutions, white supremacists in the south, who are Democrats, take a look at the fact that these constitutions might actually get ratified and they begin to try and terrorize Republicans, who are the African Americans and their white allies in the south after the Civil War, they start to try and terrorize them. They do that by dressing up as the ghosts of dead Confederates. In order to do that, they wear these stupid outfits made of sheets, and that’s actually how we get KKK members dressing in sheets. Their faces are covered so that they-

 Joanne Freeman:

I didn’t know that before this. I have to say, I don’t know what that means.

 Heather Cox Richardson:

You know why I know that?

 Joanne Freeman:

I didn’t know that.

 Heather Cox Richardson:

My advisor was Professor Donald, David Donald, and he always told that story and it’s the first time it ever made sense to me either. It’s like, “How do you wear those stupid sheets?”

 Joanne Freeman:

A wonderful scholar of the 19th century and 19th century politics and political culture.

 Heather Cox Richardson:

The idea behind the KKK was to go ahead and to terrorize African American voters and white Republican voters from ratifying those new state constitutions. They don’t manage to succeed, the state constitutions do get ratified in 1868, and the Southern states come back into the union first under an omnibus bill in that year and then of course Georgia gets thrown out and comes back in 1870. But the Democrats continue to use the KKK to try and turn the American south into a one-party state. They continue to try and keep Republicans from voting.

 It gets so bad after the readmission of the southern states, the United States government needs to go ahead and enforce voting rights for African Americans. In 1870, Congress under Ulysses Grant gives us the Department of Justice. That’s where the Department of Justice comes from and why it is set up in 1870. Then they figured out they got to do something about what’s happening in the south. So the Congress begins to pass a series of laws that are designed to go ahead and protect the rights of African Americans in the south. When they do that, Congress goes ahead and tries to get a picture of what’s really going on in the south.

 Because remember, we don’t have televisions, we have telegraphs, but the news coming out of the south is written by former Confederates, so it’s very difficult to tell what’s really going on. So, beginning in 1871, Congress begins to hold hearings on what is happening in the south. And it’s known as the Joint Select Committee Appointed To Inquire Into The Condition Of Affairs In The Late Insurrectionary States. That’s the reason we all just abbreviate that as the KKK hearings. But what happens is a sub-committee goes ahead and it takes from a number of African-Americans in the south, also white observers in the south who’ve been watching what’s been happening with the KKK in the Southern states.

 And they travel around to figure out what’s happening down there. The committee is incredibly productive. It goes ahead and it produces about 13 volumes of information, each one of which is like 700 pages long. What these do is they give a picture of what life was like in the south, but also a picture of what American democracy should be. Is it okay for the KKK and the Democrats they support to go around to the homes of Republicans and beat them and whip them and try and kill them to keep them from acting as the representatives for their party.

 There’s this amazing moment when this man, a guy named Abraham Colby, who had been enslaved in Georgia and has been elected to the state legislature in that state, and he testified that in 1869, the KKK came to his house, and as he said, and I quote, “They broke my door open, took me out of bed, took me to the woods, and whipped me three hours or more and left me for dead. They said to me, ‘Do you think you will ever vote another damned radical ticket?’ I said, ‘If there was an election tomorrow, I would vote the radical ticket.’ They set in and whipped me a thousand licks more with sticks and straps that had buckles on the ends of them.”

 Then the question that came back to him is, “Who were the people who did this to you?” And he said, “Some are first-class men in our town. One is a lawyer, one a doctor, and some are farmers.” At the end of the day, the reason the KKK hearings were so important is that they opened a window for northerners who couldn’t really see what was going on in the south to what was going on down there, even though at the end of the day, both the Republicans and the Democrats issued separate reports.

 And those reports are really interesting for the present moment, I think, because the Republicans on the committee said, “We got ourselves a problem here, we don’t have a democratic system when in fact one party is trying to keep the other party away from the polls by killing them essentially, or by whipping them or by raping their daughters or doing all of the terrorist acts that the KKK is doing.” The Democrats on the other hand said, “No, you’re making this up. It’s not at all as bad as you think it is. In fact, the occasions that are being documented in this testimony are either made up… ” Because as they pointed out that anybody who was testifying and had to travel to testify in front of the committee was paid $2 a day.

 And that was true if you were African American or if you were a Euro American. If you were black or white, you got those $2 for the day for traveling and for lodging. But they said, “These are essentially paid witnesses, so they’re up stories to make money, sort of the precursors to today’s crisis actors.” But they also said, “Okay, even if we’re going to admit there’s a few things bad that happened, they were just bad actors. This is not a systemic problem.” Which again I think is an interesting moment for today when we talk about the commission to look at January 6, because you’re hearing a lot of that same language.

 But at the end of the day, what we’re looking at is, is it okay for one party to try and keep another party away from the polls? The Republicans said, “If you do this,” it said this to the Democrats, “If you do this, you’re going to end democracy. You’re going to end up with a one party state and that it’s going to suppress the rights of a number of your citizens.” The Democrats said, “No, no, no, no. That’s not at all what’s going on and that’s not at all what’s going to happen.” Then of course we get the solid south from the 1880s through to the 1960s. So, what the Republicans predict is exactly what happened.

 Joanne Freeman:

What’s interesting about that too, so you’ve just talked about the threat of one-party rule, you’ve also talked about that particular set of hearings as a kind of line drawing moment about what is or isn’t acceptable in democracy, regardless of the outcome. And of course, you could say both of those things about the Sumner hearings and the Sumner debate as well, right? In that case, it was the south trying to silence the north and really be the dominant force in politics and silence debate of slavery. Again, a commission that regardless of whether it did or didn’t act, and regardless of whether there’s agreement or disagreement, still a line drawing. What happened, at least for many of us, is not acceptable in a democracy.

 Heather Cox Richardson:

So we have the Sumner hearings taking a look at whether or not you can beat up a fellow member of Congress and shut them up, you’ve got the KKK hearings looking at whether or not it’s okay for one political party to silence another political party and create a one-party state. Then we pick the Army–McCarthy hearings because that’s a really interesting moment where Americans have to decide if it’s okay to control politics by lying. It comes down to the actions of the junior senator from Wisconsin, a guy named Joe McCarthy, who in 1950 made huge news when he said that he had a list of 205 communists who were working in the State Department.

 And this was really his way to get a leg up in his election because he wasn’t a very well-known Senator at the time. He becomes a man who leads the charge against what he says is communism in the American government and in things like Hollywood and across the country and really sparks this wave of anti-communism going across the country in the early 1950s. But the trick to McCarthy is he’s making it up. He’s acting by innuendo, he’s pulling people in front of the cameras, he’s accusing people.

 At the end of the day, he never produces any evidence, but he keeps the press always on the run by having one accusation after another, one headline and grabbing attack after another. He starts out in going after the State Department in the 1950s and he brings in more and more groups in America. But finally in 1953, he overreaches by going for the army, because an aide of his, a 25-year-old lawyer, aide of his named Roy Cohn, that’s going to be important in a minute, gets upset because a friend of his, G. David Schine, is drafted into the army as a private and he wants them to have a commission.

 So, in order to get shine a commission, McCarthy begins to accuse the army itself of harboring communists. Of course, Dwight Eisenhower’s the president and he is fond of the US army. So this is not something that’s going to endear him to the president, but also to members of the Republican Party, they’re both Republicans. So, in the spring of 1954, Congress begins to hold hearings to iron out whether or not the army has unfairly treated David Schine and harbors communists the way that McCarthy charges, or whether McCarthy and Cohn had been putting undue pressure on the army to go ahead and get Schine a better deal.

 These become known as the Army–McCarthy hearings. And they’re enormously important because what happens is people have been reading in the newspapers the headline grabbing accusations by McCarthy that there are communists who are perverting American society and the country is sliding into this totalitarian nightmare and that there’s this corruption throughout the government. And these headline accusations he would make would later be proven to be nothing, but nobody ever read the corrections on page four. So this was the moment where McCarthy is on television in front of the world acting as he does.

 Joanne Freeman:

That’s one of the interesting things about this, is that we’re suddenly we’re in a new moment, we’re in a more modern moment and a really interesting technological moment, which is that in this case, in addition to newspaper headlines, people can watch these hearings, they can watch what’s happening on TV. They can sit in their homes, in their living rooms, and watch what’s going on. In a sense, they can see firsthand McCarthy’s style of operating, which if it’s abrasive is being nice about it. One New York Times critic said, “One cannot remain indifferent to Joe McCarthy in one’s living room. He’s an abrasive man, he’s recklessly transparent.”

 Another said, “That because people could see how extreme and over the top he was, that seeing him on TV meant “coverage did him in”. People started to laugh at him, he became a joke and then a bore. He got tiresome. So what might’ve worked in headlines when people were at home watching it, so that ultimate tribunal, again, the public, the public could see it for themselves and draw their own conclusions.

 Heather Cox Richardson:

As many as 80 million people were watching at least some of these hearings and they heard the testimony where, for example, he would say, “I have here a photograph,” and then it would turn out that the photograph was doctored.

 Joanne Freeman:

But let me ask you, Heather, when he did that, how did people find out that it was doctored? He would hold it up and he would say, “I have here a photo.” Did they have to be reading the newspaper to find that out or how would have that actual knowledge of “fake news”-

 Heather Cox Richardson:

That it was fake?

 Joanne Freeman:

Yeah.

 Heather Cox Richardson

The opposing counsel, who is a Boston lawyer named Joseph Nye Welch, was very good about refuting that. He had a very good team and he would say, “I see that… ” And I’m obviously paraphrasing. “I see that you have produced this photograph, but here is the original photograph,” and it would be something very different. The point there was that he exposed McCarthy as a liar, as somebody who was simply being, as you say, a bore or trying to dominate a situation by lying. At the time, people were absolutely horrified because things that might have looked reasonable in the newspaper when you read it… And often, I find this when I read the news.

 I’ll read the account of something by one or another right-wing senators or congressmen, and I’ll think, “Well, that sounds really reasonable.” Then I’ll sit there and actually chase down the facts, and it’s like, “No, he made all that up.” It sounded reasonable because he made it up, and that’s exactly what McCarthy was doing. Then, very famously, all of this comes to a really important head on June 9th when McCarthy recognizing that he’s losing ground… He’s been making dirtier and dirtier accusations to try and be dominant even as he is losing ground as a person like that does, as a bully does, they get worse and worse the more they recognize that they’re losing ground.

 He goes after one of the young men who’s on Welch’s team. Welch knew that it was coming. In a sense, he set up McCarthy, and McCarthy goes after this young man. Welch says to him… You have to imagine this man sitting there with the microphone in front of him at this low table and soon he’s going to be putting his head in his hands, and he says, “Senator, may we not drop this?” Then he goes on to say, “We knew this. You’re just trying to hurt this man.” Then he goes on to say…

Joseph Nye Welch (archival):

Let us not assassinate this lad further, senator. You’ve done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?

 Heather Cox Richardson:

Have you left no sense of decency?

 Joanne Freeman:

By the end of that hearing, not that long after this exchange, the room where this was taking place burst into applause. So, even in that one room, the impact of this was really clear.

Heather Cox Richardson:

So the Senate goes on to condemn McCarthy. They have censure hearings for him, but they actually condemn him rather than censuring him. While some of his supporters tend to think of that as a victory, he was really done. People had turned against McCarthy, he died three years later from complications relating to alcoholism and he falls out of the picture. But in that moment, Americans decided that they did not think it was okay to get political advantage by lying. But what’s interesting about that minute… You know where I’m going with this.

 Joanne Freeman:

Yes.

 Heather Cox Richardson:

What’s interesting about that minute is of course Roy Cohn, that man that was the 25-year-old aide to Joe McCarthy, is the man that Donald Trump considered a mentor. So, while there was in fact a political revulsion at the way McCarthy behaved, it was a strand of political rhetoric that did in fact go into a certain wing of the Republican Party and has come to fruition in the present. So, that brings us up to the present, Joanne. I know you feel strongly that we need a commission despite the fact that they don’t always produce any immediate results. Why do you think we need one?

 Joanne Freeman:

Well, a bunch of reasons. One of them is along the lines of what we hinted at the beginning of our conversation today, and that is, there needs to be a public moment when just the fact that there is a commission meeting declares what happened was beyond the bounds, what happened was unacceptable, what happened was not normal. Having a commission states that pretty clearly.

No matter what happens in the commission, no matter what facts come out of it, having that moment where basically congresses says to the country in one way or another, “Something strange happened and we have to pause in our normal course of duty and investigate this because it’s not allowable, it’s not part of the democratic tradition of how our process should be operating, so let’s act.”

 On top of that, I also think that the idea of not allowing or voting against a commission to happen is a slap at the democratic process as well, because it’s saying that this obviously striking event doesn’t really deserve to be discussed before the public, which is another way of pushing the public out of the way at a moment when various aspects of the public are being pushed out of the way. So, you’re right, I do feel really strongly that we need it, even for many reasons, but for that reason particularly. What about you?

 Heather Cox Richardson:

Well, there are complaints that a commission, an independent bi-partisan commission, might not in fact get to the root of much, simply because if you look at, for example, the 9/11 Commission, the end results of that one on which the proposed January 6 independent bi-partisan commission was based, that those results were so watered down to make everybody happy that at the end of the day we really didn’t get a sense that there was anything other than a breakdown in communication.

 You think about what happened on 9/11 and think the conclusion was we needed to communicate better. It seems like it was something that perhaps might have had sharper teeth in it than that. So there’s concern that maybe that isn’t good enough.

 Joanne Freeman:

But let me ask you a question. So, if 9/11 had happened and there had been no hearing, no investigation, it just happened and then we’d moved along, what would that suggest?

 Heather Cox Richardson:

It would suggest that it was okay. Actually, what was interesting to me about that is that 9/11 is of course investigating something from outside without a suggestion that it’s necessarily something with our democracy, except perhaps in the fact that our different branches of the government didn’t communicate together as well as they ought to have done. But there is also the other way to look at it, that well, as a number of Republicans are saying, “We don’t really need a commission because we have a joint investigation going on right now between the Senate Homeland Security Committee and the Rules Committee.”

 But the problem with trusting individual Senate or House committees to investigate what happened on January 6 is that their purview is really small. They have something very specific to look at, in this case security. You could also think about Nancy Pelosi setting up a select committee, but in that case, of course, the Republicans are going to charge that it is terribly partisan. People have also talked about President Biden setting up an executive committee, but that wouldn’t have the subpoena power unless Congress gave it to him, which is highly unlikely that the Republicans could do that.

 So, one of the things that I think is really important about the idea of having a committee, a specific committee looking at the events of January 6 is that they can take this broad perspective. Is what happened on January 6th and leading up to it and perhaps coming out of it okay for a democracy? Is it okay for our elected officials to undermine the outcome of an election that has been inspected, challenged in court, certified, and counted? That is at the end of the day why this matters because it’s not over. We have never put a period at the end of this to say, “Yes, this is okay,” which I hope a commission wouldn’t do, but to say, “No, this is not the way a democracy happens.”

 Joanne Freeman:

I agree that there has to be a public moment of reckoning regardless of what happens in that moment. It can’t be part of some normal committee, like, “Oh, today in this committee we’ll debate this.” There has to be a kind of a line drawing in the sand moment, regardless of what lines do or don’t get drawn. There has to be a moment where things stop and some people point to what happened and say, “Weird, not normalized, not acceptable, anti-democratic.” Regardless of what happens with that commission, it’s important to have that moment.

 You could say the same thing about the Mueller investigation and the fact that some people walked away from that and said, “So, there was no collusion at all, right.” But there was a moment when we stopped and basically said, “Collusion is bad, collusion would be wrong.” And that matters. I feel the same way about this. I feel that there has to be a public reckoning moment, and just as you put it, Heather, as a way of putting at the end of the sentence and a way of pulling public attention to the fact that a line was crossed and it shouldn’t be crossed again.

 Heather Cox Richardson:

So, I’m going to give the last word here to one of our assistants, Sam Ozer-Staton, and who when we talked about this said, “I guess what you’re saying is it’s important to have a hearing, not because of who they are, but because of who we are.”