McCarthy and the Businessman

One day last summer a Wisconsin businessman, Charles R. Seaborne, faced up to a personal decision on an issue of politics and morals that has come to trouble millions of other Americans. It had to do with Senator McCarthy.

Mr. Seaborne is executive vice president of the Thilmany Pulp & Paper Co., situated near Appleton, Wisconsin, at a place called Kaukauna. Appleton (population 34,000) is Joe McCarthy’s home town. It is also the seat of Lawrence College, whose former head, Dr. Nathan Pusey, now president of Harvard, has lately been one of the Senator’s handiest whipping boys. During the 1952 campaign Pusey lent his name, along with many others, to a petition opposing McCarthy’s re-election. Last summer, on the announcement of Pusey’s call to Harvard, McCarthy cracked: “Harvard’s loss is Appleton’s gain.”

Until then Appleton had thought the world of McCarthy. So had Mr. Seaborne. He had helped to finance McCarthy’s 1952 campaign. But he also knew and respected Pusey, Appleton’s other Favorite Son. McCarthy’s sudden spiteful blow at Pusey shocked him, as it did many of his neighbors.

Last July 1, Seaborne (not a Harvard man, incidentally) telegraphed the Senator in Washington: RE YOUR RELEASE ON PUSEY. FEEL [IT] MOST UNINFORMED AND UNADVISED. SORRY THAT YOU ARE LETTING DOWN SO MANY OLD FRIENDS. HOPE YOU CAN EXPLAIN.

Next day Seaborne had his reply: AM CURIOUS TO KNOW WHAT OLD FRIENDS ARE BEING LET DOWN BY THE EXPOSURE OF BIGOTED INTOLERANT MUDSLINGING ENEMY OF MINE.

Seaborne’s company is one of the two largest employers of labor (1,350 on the payroll) in the Appleton area, and he himself is a highly respected and influential citizen. Now Seaborne says, “The feeling around here is that if McCarthy is that far off base about Pusey, who lived in his own home town, he must be very far off base on a lot of things.”

The stakes

Are Mr. Seaborne’s views on McCarthy typical of the views of the U.S. business community as a whole? The question has a good deal of importance for the future of McCarthy—and for the future of the businessman. Outside the South, at least, U.S. businessmen are popularly (and not inaccurately) associated with Republicanism—and McCarthy has made himself the second most conspicuous Republican in the land. The businessman’s repute, and his effectiveness, are heavily involved in the repute and effectiveness of a regime that calls itself a business Administration—and McCarthy is a standing challenge to that Administration on both counts. But if McCarthy matters to the businessman, the businessman matters no less to McCarthy.

Nobody really knows where Joseph Raymond McCarthy is going. He recently denied that he would challenge Eisenhower for the presidency in 1956. In private conversations he habitually disclaims all ambitions in that direction with the statement: “I’ve got two strikes against me already. I’m Catholic. And I’m controversial.” Such disclaimers are, of course, a politician’s stock in trade. They are hardly to be taken seriously in this instance. McCarthy’s temperament and behavior leave little doubt that he is prepared to go wherever his star takes him.

There is a theory—a plausible and fascinating theory—that McCarthy’s secret, long-range strategy is to split the Republican party, shattering and scattering the liberal leadership presently grouped around Dwight Eisenhower, and to reconstitute the party around the ultraconservative, ultra-nationalist elements that are today his main support.

McCarthy’s running attack on Dulles and Stassen, his fight with Robert Stevens (a businessman, by the way) over the Army’s alleged “coddling” of Communists, his studied, almost contemptuous shrugging off of the President’s leadership, his project to short-circuit the Administration’s foreign policy with a bill shutting off U.S. aid to allies that trade with the Communist bloc—these and kindred actions accord with, if they do not wholly validate, such a theory. But for McCarthy to get very far with his kind of “reform” of the Republican party, he would need, at least at the outset, the support of the business community, whatever diverse political combinations and permutations he might thereafter find it desirable to contrive.

Back in 1946 it was a consortium of Wisconsin businessmen, fed up with the suspected socialistic leanings of the late Robert M. La Follette Jr., who helped to finance and engineer McCarthy’s rise from a county judgeship to the U.S. Senate. An aura of big business, or at least Big Money, has enveloped the Senator ever since a shower of Texas and mid-western contributions, mostly from businessmen, provided him with a nationwide hookup for his controversial broadcast from Chicago just before the 1952 presidential elections. Money contributed by his well-heeled supporters also followed him unquestioningly in his intervention into other strategic senatorial contests, undoubtedly contributing to the defeat of William Benton, McCarthy’s archenemy in Connecticut, Scott Lucas in Illinois, and Millard Tydings in Maryland. Conspicuous in his panoply today are the super-millionaires of Texas oil, now for the first time flexing their muscles in national politics.

But of course the presence of some businessmen aboard or in the vicinity of the McCarthy bandwagon scarcely signifies an alliance, holy or otherwise, between him and U.S. businessmen as a whole.

The all-important shadings

One attempt at a broad survey of business opinion on McCarthy was a Gallup poll published in January. The poll found 49 per cent of business and professional men favorably disposed toward McCarthy, and 39 per cent unfavorable. But McCarthy’s “favorable” showing in the nation as a whole was 1 per cent higher—50 per cent. Furthermore, anti-McCarthy opinion ran higher among business and professional men than in any other segments of the population (white-collar workers, 37 per cent; farmers, 29 per cent; manual workers, 23 per cent). On the subject of McCarthy’s “methods,” more business and professional men—56 per cent—registered disapproval than did any other class.

As an index of what the business community thinks about McCarthy, however, these findings may be somewhat distorted by the lumping together of business and professional men; among the latter, constituting nearly half the Gallup sample, are two groups, clergymen and educators, who probably assay higher in anti-McCarthyism than any other elements in the country. Even more serious, the Gallup findings reveal no shadings of opinion—and this is a subject of all-important shadings.

A tireless cliché sooner or later breaks surface in most McCarthy conversations: “I don’t approve of all his methods, but I’m against Communism.” Anybody who has said that hasn’t said much. At the heart of the dilemma posed by McCarthy to his fellow Republicans is the question of whether his particular techniques are really the most effective way of dealing with subversion, and whether these techniques are beneficial or destructive to the Administration and the nation.

The difficulty is that (contrary to the Daily Worker, and to the Senator himself) McCarthy or McCarthyism is not a single issue. Yalta and Alger Hiss, subversion in government and education, the fiasco of U.S. policy in China, the anomaly of financing European allies that trade with the Soviet bloc—the misdeeds and mischances of American policy for the past twenty years are the well-worn touchstones with which McCarthy works his political magic. More than any other contemporary U.S. politician he has made himself the excavator of political corpses, the rattler of skeletons, the resurrector of the past. Inevitably a man who works with such varied materials means many different things to the company that is for him. It is obvious that they cannot all be for him for the same reasons; it is clear, too, that all who are for him are not altogether for him.

To find some of the crucial shadings, as they show up in business thinking about McCarthy, Fortune undertook a survey of 253 top executives in thirty cities, including the chief officers of the nation’s hundred biggest (by sales) industrial corporations. Before some of the individual opinions are reported, here are a few highlights:

• Fortune found some early McCarthy supporters beginning to turn against him, especially in the Southeast and California, even in Texas.
• Merging with the point above, there is evidence that some pro-McCarthy people are growing tired of the man—not turning away from or against him, but displaying unmistakable signs of boredom and impatience.
• While these first two findings may give cheer to anti-McCarthyites, it must also be said that Fortune found plenty of evidence of McCarthy’s strength. Among businessmen who support McCarthy, however, there are many gradations of enthusiasm, many examples of the many-sidedness of the Senator’s appeal. Among businessmen, in about the same proportion as among Americans at large, McCarthy appeals to the general abhorrence of spies, treason, and international Communism. He appeals to the remnants of isolationism. But with the businessman specifically, McCarthy appeals to a greater-than-average distaste for the New and Fair Deals.

Among businessmen who approve of McCarthy’s war on subversion there is a satisfaction, subconscious perhaps but very strong, over his incidental licks at all the longhairs, eggheads, professors, and bright young men of the 1930s and 1940s. Only one was named Alger Hiss. But the others, in NLRB, REA, TVA, etc., etc., were scarcely less dangerous—or so it seems to some businessmen. And many businessmen look to McCarthy to keep the albatross hung about the neck of the New and Fair Deals.

By the same token, one of the best illustrations of the limitations upon the Senator’s future is to ask a pro-McCarthy businessman how he would feel if Joe turned “liberal” on questions of domestic economic policy. Some astute political observers have said they could not get alarmed about McCarthy unless, along with his appeal to anti-Communism and nationalism, he also developed a broadly demagogic appeal on economic issues. What if McCarthy suddenly started talking up a more “liberal” revision of Taft-Hartley than the President has proposed? Vast public-works programs? Cheaper money? Pro-McCarthy businessmen said they would start unloading him fast.

Perhaps more eloquent of McCarthy’s strength than anything said by the pro-McCarthy businessmen was the high proportion of executives who either ducked the issue entirely or would not risk being quoted. Of the 253 executives surveyed by Fortune, only eighty-five were willing to speak for the record; many were willing to talk only on a not-for-attribution basis. Some declined to discuss McCarthy at all—a startling breach, at least at the topmost level, of the businessman’s tradition of plain speaking.

Those who decided to play doggo had their reasons—”too political,” “wouldn’t be good for business,” “too controversial,” “might hurt the company.” Says P. C. Spencer, president of Sinclair Oil, “Politics is something we steer clear of in this company.” And L. S. Wescoat, president of Pure Oil, reasons: “We’ve got Republican stockholders and Democratic stockholders—maybe some Socialist and even some Communist stockholders. It doesn’t behoove me to discuss politics.”

Though this attitude is understandable, especially on the part of executives whose corporations do business with the government, it is lamentable. In the hottest and most furious days of the New Deal, businessmen never shrank from registering their opinion of Franklin D. Roosevelt and his policies—and the spade calling was by no means confined to the Irénée du Ponts, Tom Girdlers, and Ernie Weirs. In the Fair Deal era, the fact that approximately half their customers and employees were Democratic did not deter businessmen from blistering attacks on Harry Truman. But the McCarthy nettle, practically all of the ranking corporation executives of Detroit, Pittsburgh, Wilmington, and New York were loath to grasp.

Still strong in Chicago

In the Midwest Senator McCarthy still exerts a powerful pull at the box office. Last December, at a luncheon given by the Executives’ Club of Chicago, whose membership includes the top strata of the local business community, he drew an audience of 2,500—60 per cent more than Attorney General Brownell on the occasion of his Harry Dexter White disclosure, 42 per cent more than General Van Fleet on his return from Korea, and 25 per cent more than Arthur Godfrey, who had the advantage of a “Ladies’ Day” audience. Even so, at the height of the standing ovation a small but resolute minority remained in their seats. And even the club president, John J. McDonough, who staged the affair, had his reservations.

McDonough is a vice president of the Harris Trust & Savings Bank. He describes himself as “an internationalist”—and therefore a fairly rare species in his native habitat. McDonough considers McCarthy’s criticism of Allen Dulles, director of the Central Intelligence Agency, “unwarranted,” his attacks on Dr. Pusey of Harvard “unreasoned—a grudge fight,” and McCarthy’s throwing his weight at the President an action “I can’t particularly admire.” But as regards the war on subversives McDonough finds himself “100 per cent with the Senator.”

In all, Fortune approached twenty-three of Chicago’s ranking businessmen, mostly board chairmen or presidents of big corporations. Twelve declined to be drawn into any kind of public declaration; two were willing to cast an anonymous ballot and nine to talk for the record. At the risk of some oversimplification, Fortune has set up four categories of business opinion on McCarthy: Yes, Yes-but, No-but, No. Here are some of the Chicago Yes’s:

John T. Beatty, president of United Specialties (automobile accessories), who out of curiosity attended several of McCarthy’s committee hearings: “I’m strongly for him—he’s touching on something that’s been dangerous to the country. If it hadn’t been for him …”

General Robert E. Wood, board chairman of Sears, Roebuck and one of McCarthy’s first important business supporters: “My opinion of him hasn’t changed one iota. McCarthy is doing a job that had to be done to get traitors and spies out of our government. You can’t be soft with these people. McCarthy went on although he knew he would be smeared, especially along our great eastern seaboard.”

President John McCaffrey of International Harvester: “I have no doubt at all that he may get into situations that are not soundly founded. On the other hand, somebody should be looking into all situations of this kind, which I think he’s doing. Over all, he’s done the country a great deal of good.”

Lieutenant General Charles Haffner, Jr., board chairman of R. R. Donnelley, the great printing house: “Initially I had an unfavorable opinion of McCarthy. After the Daily Worker and Mr. Lattimore coined the word McCarthyism I began to read everything the Senator has written, including his speeches and also much of the transcript of testimony before his committee. I have found nothing that seems to injure a single innocent individual. The deadly Communist infiltration still presents a grave threat to our free institutions.”

A Yes-but—President H. Earle Muzzy, Quaker Oats: “McCarthy’s alerted the country and smoked out quite a few Communists. Some of those Harvard people don’t show up very well. All the same, I’m not for everything he’s done. He’s kind of careless with the facts; his arithmetic doesn’t always add up; and he goes off the deep end every now and then. Even so, the net overall job is to the good.”

A No-but that verges on No—President Charles H. Percy, Bell & Howell (photographic equipment): “I have a general sense of unhappiness. McCarthy, as a Republican, now has a friendly Administration determined to root out Communists. Why must he fight the issue in the press? It is embarrassing the Administration and is a blow to our prestige abroad. As a businessman it does not seem logical to me for him to refuse to support the new management in Washington.”

A No—Laird Bell, prominent Chicago lawyer: “I’m against him. He’s clever, very dangerous, and unscrupulous.”

One Republican businessman of Chicago who has declared open war on McCarthy is John Nuveen, of John Nuveen & Co., a municipal-bond house. Nuveen was treasurer of the Citizens Committee for Eisenhower in Chicago. A onetime ECA plenipotentiary in Belgium and Greece, he frequently stumps the hinterland Rotaries and women’s clubs to defend U.S. involvement in world affairs and to twist the McCarthy tail.

Says Mr. Nuveen: “Senator McCarthy’s ‘Communists’ offer to most preoccupied businessmen a simple answer for our failures in the cold war; they also provide a scapegoat for our own sins of omission in politics and our deficient understanding of international affairs. Medicine man McCarthy seems to be doing a good job of frightening away the evil spirits—that is why most businessmen are for him. Someday, facing a more serious crisis, we may all see through the face paint and mumbo jumbo and realize that he neither understands the world forces that confound us nor does he have a constructive program to deal with them.”

Milwaukee: of two minds

To the extent that Milwaukee business support made possible McCarthy’s entrance into national politics, that support in the beginning was largely negative. In the 1946 Wisconsin primary Republican conservatives of the business community were mobilized not so much in his direct support as in knocking off Bob La Follette, the ex-Progressive incumbent.

If Milwaukee’s businessmen had no clear idea of what they were buying in McCarthy eight years ago, today they plainly are of two minds about him. Of the twenty-one ranking executives in that city and in Madison whose opinions Fortune sought, four were all for their junior Senator; two were dead set against him; seven would not cast a ballot; and the rest divided among the Yes-but and No-but categories. On one point they were, except for a lone dissent, agreed: McCarthy would be re-elected if he were to run again this year in the state.

McCarthy’s most aggressive businessman supporter is Tom Coleman, president of Madison-Kipp (oil systems, die castings). As chairman of the Wisconsin Republican organization in 1946, Coleman (who in 1952 was Taft’s convention floor manager) directed the strategy that made McCarthy a U.S. Senator. He has no fault to find with his protégé. “Joe has done a remarkably fine job—a much better job than the press has reported. It’s beyond me that the press doesn’t want the facts.”

Another Yes—the president of a manufacturing firm with 2,500 employees: “While I haven’t applauded his methods, the good far overshadows the bad. However, his not going along with the Administration troubles me. That could bring him down faster in my opinion than anything else.”

A Yes-but—Milton R. Polland, insurance executive and onetime Willkie campaigner: “As of now, I’m for him 75, maybe even 80, per cent. But it’s wrong for him to condemn liberals by calling them Communists. And although I am convinced that McCarthy is personally sincere, I believe he should divest himself of the bigots who have attached themselves to him—Gerald L. K. Smith, for instance, and those Texas oilmen and others who would destroy what we have.” Polland also believes that McCarthy’s challenges to the Administration have somewhat weakened, if not alienated, his business following.

A Yes-but—G. S. Crane, president of Cutler-Hammer (electrical control apparatus): “When McCarthy came into prominence in this state he didn’t have too good a reputation. I won’t say I like him more now, but I don’t dislike him quite so much. The good he does outweighs the bad. His forte is pulling out the misdeeds of past Administrations. I had hoped, when Eisenhower was elected, that McCarthy would calm down. Instead he continued on, and has not grown in my esteem.”

A No-but—J. Donald Zaiser, president of Ampco Metal, Inc. (castings): “I’m all for his ferreting out Communists, but I question whether he isn’t overly interested in headlines. His methods are certainly undignified and more impetuous than we would like to see in a Senator. Two years ago there definitely was some justification for his methods. But not now. Enough people have been alerted to the existence of Communists in the government so that McCarthy’s means are no longer necessary.”

A No—vice president of a manufacturing company: “There was a lack of leadership in the Republican party that made Joe McCarthy possible. If the party had really been on the job and started looking into Communism-in-government years ago, using proper methods, he wouldn’t have had a chance.”

More Middle Westerners

Outside Chicago and Wisconsin, virtually all of the twenty Midwest executives approached by Fortune concluded that discretion is the better part of corporate valor. There were a few forthright exceptions.

Charles R. Hook, of Armco Steel, Middletown, Ohio: “Senator McCarthy has performed a great public service, whether we agree or not with all that he has said or done, or the manner in which he has carried out his investigations. I, personally, believe that without his courage and persistence, particularly in the early days of his investigations, much of the subversive activity within the government would never have come to light.”

A flat Yes—President Charles M. White, Republic Steel, of Cleveland: “McCarthy is doing the kind of job which can only be done by a rough, hard-shelled man who can see nothing but his objective. For a man as smart as McCarthy to make as many bad friends in important places as he does indicates to me that he is simply doing a job for this country in his own way, regardless of consequences.”

A resounding No—Board Chairman Harry A. Bullis, General Mills of Minneapolis, a Republican: “The underlying significance of the damage done by McCarthy’s tactics, with little opposition, is: Shall a Senator be permitted to undermine the prestige of the United States, in ways the Communists could never do, by demoralizing and discrediting its foreign service and armed forces by unwarranted attacks upon the loyalty and efficiency of its members? I believe the executive branch should now boldly defend itself against McCarthy’s encroachments and his abuse of its members. I further believe the Senate should devise means of restraining this member who is abusing his responsibilities and opportunities.”

A No—President Donald Danforth, Ralston Purina, of St. Louis: “McCarthy’s inordinate desire for personal publicity has led to sensational tactics and a disregard for ethics. [The] constructive good accomplished has been outweighed by the harm he has done America in a period of world tensions.”

The import of the midwest survey is that most of the business community approves of McCarthy; but its approval is limited almost entirely to his campaign against the Communist subversion. None of the businessmen interviewed endorsed McCarthy as proper presidential material; in fact, the idea was generally brushed aside as preposterous. Finally, there is, even among those who support him, a growing doubt as to the effectiveness of his methods, compounded by dismay and irritation over his attacks on the Administration.

Henry Ford II plainly had the latter tactic in mind when, in recent praise of Dulles, he said: “It is unfortunate that our positive initiative is being hampered by powerful and grimly negative groups in American politics.” It is also the thing that excited Ernie Weir’s recent outburst: “If someone wanted to devise a deliberate policy that would torpedo the world prestige of the U.S. and completely destroy Western unity, I can think of no better one than the attempted use of economic coercion advocated by Senator McCarthy.”

The South isn’t sold

In the South, the survey took in some fifty businessmen, all of prominence in their communities. The South, despite the considerable shift to Eisenhower in 1952, remains innately Democratic; there also remains in the South some latent suspicion of Catholics in politics; hence it is to be expected that McCarthy would be something less than universally admired in that section. Yet, even discounting political and religious bias, the Senator has made spectacularly little headway among the profoundly conservative businessmen of the South. (The Southwest, or more precisely Texas, is another story, which will be told next month.)

Perhaps the most prominent southern businessman publicly to endorse McCarthy is Ceasar Cone, treasurer of Cone Mills Corp. of Greensboro, North Carolina. Even Cone has substantial reservations. He says:

“McCarthy’s the sort of guy who flushes a covey of quail and then, instead of drawing a bead on one bird and making sure he gets it, fires wildly into the covey. He makes a lot of noise and wastes ammunition, but it’s probably better to have somebody out there shooting than not to have anybody. At least he gets a bird now and then. What he does is not all good. It does harm—no doubt of that. Still, it does get out the dirty linen.”

Other Greensboro opinions: Howard Holderness, president of Jefferson Standard Life Insurance, who until a little while ago was convinced that McCarthy was on to “a good thing,” now says: “He ought to be toned down. There’s no need for all this sensationalism. The American people are too smart for him ever to be a menace.”

Spencer Love, board chairman of Burlington Mills: “He has run the danger all extremists do, of hurting the cause they espouse. His methods have not enhanced the idea of America we’d like to present to the outer world. I’d certainly not want him to represent my state. I believe in sending statesmen, not extremists, to the Senate.”

Joseph R. Morton, president of Morton-Withers Chemical Co. (manufacturing chemists), says: “This whole business of congressional investigations has gone too far. It’s got so that these Congressmen will investigate anything at the drop of a hat.”

John L. Latham Jr., cotton broker: “I think he’s shot his bolt. He’s shouted so much and produced so little that people are tired of listening to him.”

A banker, a lifetime Democrat who voted for Eisenhower, adds: “Seems to me the Administration’s got plenty to do just taking care of the present situation, and the trouble ahead, without digging up stuff that’s past and gone.”

Box score for Greensboro: Yes-but, one; No-but, two; No, five.

In Charlotte, another North Carolina industrial area, a dozen inquiries produced these results: five on the fence, declining to take a position; Yes-but, one; No-but, three; No, three.

C. W. Gilchrist, president of the Charlotte Chemical Laboratories and head of the Charlotte Chamber of Commerce, a No-but, says: “I don’t like him. I’m not even sure that he’s doing a good job of rooting out Communists, though I want to see them rooted out.”

E. S. Dillard, president of the Old Dominion Box Co.: “I don’t have a strong conviction about McCarthy, one way or the other. But when I see the wrong kind of people trying to knock him down, I tend to be for him.”

J. Spencer Bell, a corporation lawyer and former president of the North Carolina Bar Association, says: “He is an unprincipled scoundrel, devoid of moral character, personally and politically.”

The lone Yes-but, head of a small manufacturing company and a long-time local Republican wheel, says: “Possibly McCarthy’s made some errors in judgment, but the pursuit of his main idea has resulted in considerable good.”

“You don’t hear much”

In Atlanta some twenty businessmen were interviewed. Among them were branch-plant executives who said that controversial political positions were something for the home office. Some of these were asked: “What do you hear other business men saying about McCarthy?” Answer: “You don’t hear much.”

However, three prominent Atlanta businessmen stood up to be counted. Armand May, textile manufacturer and exporter, a man noted for his outspokenness: “Wherever there is a Communist menace it should be eradicated under the law. But to endorse this idea of branding free Americans without their day in court is un-American. Businessmen above all others should discourage any propaganda that creates fear among the public.”

Robert L. Foreman, insurance man and civic leader: “Patriotism is the last refuge of a McCarthy.”

Mills B. Lane Jr., president of the Citizens & Southern National Bank, the largest in the Southeast: “The world picture is most important now. McCarthy’s usefulness is about over.”

Store executive: “McCarthy is the most useless thing on the American political scene.”

Real-estate broker: “I’ve heard him make a speech and don’t know whether he’s a demagogue or not. I don’t think he’s sincere and therefore don’t take him seriously. My wife hates McCarthy.”

A bank chairman, one of the most influential bankers in the Southeast: “People here seem to have quit talking about McCarthy.”

A Kiwanis Club luncheon table of eight businessmen produced a judgment of unanimous disapproval.

In Birmingham, Alabama, eight businessmen were approached. Three refused to comment at all on the ground they were not sufficiently well informed. Of the two who were willing to speak off the record, one feels that McCarthy has done “some good”; the other says, “I admire the results but he uses damn poor judgment.”

Three spoke for the record. R. P. McDavid, electrical-appliance wholesaler: “He goes a little too far, but accomplishes some good.”

James A. Head, president of Birmingham’s largest office-supply company and a prominent civic leader: “A flag waver of that kind is always dangerous.”

L. M. Smith, president of Alabama Power Co.: “I wonder if it doesn’t take somebody with McCarthy’s push to get certain things done. But I don’t keep up enough to balance the good against the bad.”

Box score in Birmingham: Yes-but, two; No-but, two; No, one; No comment, three.

“Huey Long was smarter”

In New Orleans eleven businessmen were interviewed. Four declined to take any position. But the opinions of the rest, including four who for a variety of reasons preferred anonymity, were pungent—as one would expect in a community where the recollection of Huey Long lingers.

Only one businessman was unqualifiedly for McCarthy, Sumner V. Carson, an aluminum-products exporter: “He is one of the few voices the American people have had against Communism-in-government. I approve of his methods. No other way would have been effective.”

The other six lined up: Yes-but, one; No-but, one; No, four. The Yes-but:

Frank A. Godchaux, president of the Louisiana State Rice Milling Co. of Abbeville: “Sometimes I think he goes a little too far, but apparently it takes that to get the job done. We’re better off for what he’s done.”

The No-but position was taken by a senior official of a major oil company subsidiary, himself a Republican: “He is doing a very necessary job in a very objectionable and unnecessarily rough way for personal gain. Certainly Communists must be weeded out. But McCarthy’s way is beyond the pale.”

A No—E. H. Schill, of Schill-Wolfson, Inc., president of Home Builders Association of New Orleans: “Certainly I believe in stamping out Communism. But I’m not in favor of smearing ten persons to get one Communist.”

The No position was summed up by one of New Orleans’ wealthiest businessmen, who described himself as having occupied “a ringside seat” at Huey Long’s political battles: “McCarthy uses methods that are entirely at variance with American traditions. The man doesn’t begin to be as clever or as politically astute as Huey Long. He made one grave blunder that Long would not have made in a hundred years. That was when he allowed an assistant to charge that the Protestant clergy included many Communists. For anybody to make such a charge would have been bad enough, but for a Catholic to make it was a colossal blunder.”

The significant facts to emerge from the Deep South survey are that McCarthy is losing prestige even among the minority of businessmen who originally were for what he set out to do; and that even as a dwindling item of conversation he is now more cussed than discussed.

The East: mostly No-but

McCarthy’s outstanding champion among eastern businessmen is John Fox, the Boston financier whose properties include the Boston Post. Fox says: “McCarthy’s doing a good—a great—job. His business is dealing with rats, organized and articulate rats. A technique that might be suitable for a tea party would not work in this business. Joe is absolutely sound, basically right.”

A fellow Bostonian, Lindley Sutton, president of Lindley’s Inc. (paper-box distributor), holds much the same opinion. “I’m for him 100 per cent. Sure he’s taken liberties with the facts, but no more than other politicians do.”

These, however, were the only straight Yes’s uncovered by Fortune in a sounding of fifty leading businessmen in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia. To be sure, the great majority of these, especially the chief executives of national corporations having their headquarters in New York, elected to back off from the issue—for the reasons cited earlier. But the general political sophistication of eastern business and its traditional identification with the liberal wing of the G.O.P. are scarcely conducive to unalloyed admiration for a McCarthy. Sample opinions:

President William Balderston, Philco Corp.: “I believe that Senator McCarthy is a sincere, patriotic American. He had the courage to stand up almost alone in Washington during the Democratic Administration. He performed a real service. While I may not have all the facts, I seriously question some of his methods. I earnestly hope he will cooperate fully with the President in the handling of the Communists-in-government problem.”

President W. C. Stolk, American Can: “At the start I put him down as just another loudmouthed politician. Then I became his supporter after he got his teeth into this business of subversion in government, though I don’t agree entirely with his tactics—in fact, I know few who do. For that matter, I don’t agree with a lot of things McCarthy does. And I think the President is handling it very wisely.”

R. A. Weaver Jr., president of Bettinger Corp. (porcelain-enamel products) of Waltham: “McCarthy has served his purpose. It’s too bad he can’t seem to taper off.”

Board Chairman Roger W. Straus, American Smelting & Refining: “He’s hurting us abroad. I know our European friends exaggerate his importance and I’ve tried to tell them so. But they’ve seen right-wing demagogues come into power on their own continent and it’s hard to convince them the situation here is different. Equally important, McCarthy’s hurting the Administration. Brownell’s tough and intelligent—I’ve known him for years, and Dulles even longer. What I can’t understand is why McCarthy has to keep up his haranguing, instead of letting the new Administration clean house.”

McCarthy’s humiliation of Secretary Stevens, a New York businessman of high repute, has not gone down well with eastern businessmen. Says the president of a large manufacturing corporation: “When McCarthy starts doing that to one of us, it puts a whole new complexion on affairs.”

Los Angeles: cooling

The most influential businessman in southern California is Norman Chandler, who, in addition to his other substantial interests, owns the Los Angeles Times. The Times has occasionally defended McCarthy’s investigations without committing itself to his methods. Chandler, though still for McCarthy “in principle,” now finds his tactics “crude.” He has decided: “If McCarthy would approach his mission with more dignity the results would be still more effective and lasting and respect for him would be maintained. The fact is that McCarthy is losing public respect. His best work is over. The President would be wise to turn the job over to somebody else.”

It is, of course, no surprise to find among McCarthy’s West Coast champions W. C. (“Bill”) Mullendore, president of Southern California Edison, who for years has seen the nation careening toward socialist ruin. But even Mullendore refuses to take the Wisconsin Senator seriously as a national political leader. To him McCarthyism is a passing and by no means entirely beneficial phenomenon brought on by the excesses of the left. The important fact about West Coast business opinion is that there are multiplying signs that it shares Norman Chandler’s view that McCarthy is overstaying his usefulness.

McCarthy’s most powerful opponent in that region is probably Paul G. Hoffman, Studebaker’s board chairman, of Pasadena and South Bend. “I am in opposition,” Hoffman says, “to those who create disunity and discord by their tactics.” Among the influential Los Angeles businessmen, all Republicans, who question McCarthy’s continued usefulness are Harry J. Volk, vice president in charge of Prudential Insurance’ western operations; Leonard Firestone, who heads up the rubber company’s West Coast operations; Edward Carter, Harvard-educated head of Broadway Stores Inc., large department-store chain on the West Coast.

What underlies the congealing doubts of Los Angeles businessmen who only a year ago were unqualifiedly for McCarthy is a belief that he is a bungler who may, unless curbed, split the Republican party.

Willard Keith, president of Cosgrove & Co. (insurance), treasurer of the Republican State Central Committee, a Taft supporter in 1952: “No doubt there’s a better way, a quieter way, of doing this particular job. He says things that make me cringe. The explanation, I suppose, is that McCarthy’s a Marine, a roughneck; and he’s going about it in a Marine’s way. But, as between Ike and McCarthy, if the choice ever arose, I’m for the President.”

San Francisco, perhaps because it is more cosmopolitan, was never so strongly pro-McCarthy as Los Angeles once was. To be sure, McCarthy has not lacked powerful champions in San Francisco, and does not now.

San Francisco’s doubts

A Yes—Charles R. Blyth, president of Blyth & Co., broker; a conservative Republican who in recent years turned into an anti-Warren Republican: “McCarthy was needed, and he’s done far more good than harm. He recognized the problem, and knew that rough tactics were called for.”

President Lingan Warren of Safeway Stores, Oakland: “The job needs doing. I can’t for the life of me understand why the President didn’t grab this popular issue away from McCarthy and make it his own. Naturally I’m for preserving civil rights and I certainly don’t believe in smearing people. McCarthy has been too careless in these areas for my taste. But I don’t mind his throwing brickbats at the State Department—it asked for them. And having myself taken my full share of blows from Leon Henderson, the NLRB crowd, and the other longhairs of the New Deal, I’m not much impressed by their cries of outrage now.”

A Yes-but—the chief executive of a large utility company: “Actually, I don’t think there is such a thing as McCarthyism—only rough politics. I observe that the people who are screaming today are the same ones who were just as ruthless, just as rough, just as careless with the truth, when they were riding high in the Thirties.” Although this man is for McCarthy, he confesses to a serious misgiving: the fear that through blunder or vanity McCarthy may upset the Republican applecart. “Ike’s doing fine,” he adds. “I’d hate to see McCarthy embarrass him.”

Another Yes-but—President Robert Watt Miller, Pacific Lighting Corp., a trustee of Cal Tech: “I deplore McCarthy’s methods. That business, for example, of investigating Harvard and other universities was futile. McCarthy is intensely partisan and genuinely shocked by what he has found—and perhaps he sees the political advantages in it, too. But I can’t help thinking that if the previous Administration had not created the conditions, McCarthy would not exist. He will fade when the conditions that produced him are changed, but not before.”

A Yes-but—a banker who is prominent in Republican politics: “Would I support him for any other position in government? No, sir. I’d be afraid of him. No telling where he’s going.”

A Yes-but—president of a large industrial organization: “McCarthy seems to be driving the snakes out of the bushes, and I’m glad somebody’s doing it, although I’d prefer a quieter, more rational way. But I’m not drawn to people who raise hell for the sake of raising hell. And I certainly can find no useful purpose in the ruckus McCarthy is raising around the President. For me the most important question about the man is: ‘Does he really know where he’s going?'”

A No-but—Ralph Gwin Follis, board chairman of Standard Oil of California, a much-traveled executive: “McCarthy is perhaps doing a job that has to be done, but his way of handling it has been unfortunate. I won’t say that the faults of method offset the job entirely; nevertheless, they are unfortunate. They cause the outside world to misinterpret the patterns of our system. My opinion is that our enemies abroad have capitalized on the way McCarthy has handled these investigations.”

A No—president of an insurance company: “My conclusion is that at home he is doing more harm than good, and only harm abroad. His methods are false to our traditions, and I hold that means must always be compatible with the ends. It disturbs me to hear businessmen support McCarthy. For them to do so, in light of his behavior and his mentality, seems to me to show a lamentable lack of maturity. It shows a failure to appreciate their social and political responsibility.”