Counting My Blessings
I keep looking for another vintage Thanksgiving postcard, but most of them have creepy children wielding axes. Not my vision of Thanksgiving.
It is Thanksgiving here in the United States, and I have a LOT to be thankful for this year, including the fact that I am at home cooking Thanksgiving dinner.*
In a few minutes I will begin several hours of peeling, chopping, stirring, and roasting, with an occasional pause to put my feet up and count my blessings. Before I head downstairs to pull the turkey out of the refrigerator,** I want to take a moment to thank all of you who read History in the Margins, share my posts with your friends, send me e-mails, ask hard questions, point out mistakes, give me ideas for new posts, and cheer me on. Without you, I’d just be talking to myself.
*A week and a half ago, we were making contingency plans for who was going to cook the heritage turkey that was due to arrive a few days before the holiday in case I had to be elsewhere.
**Yes, it is thawed.
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Speaking of sending me ideas, I am currently issuing invitations to my annual Women’s History Month series of mini-interviews. I have some great people on board already, but I need more. If you “do” women’s history in any format, or know someone who does, or have an idea of someone you would love to see in the series, drop me a line. I’ve interviewed academics, biographers, podcasters, historical novelists, tour guides, and poets, but would be happy to talk to people who explore women’s history through music, puppet shows, graphic novels, the visual arts, interpretive dance….
In which I finally review Headstrong: 52 Women Who Changed Science—and the World
Journalist Rachel Swaby’s Headstrong: 52 Women Who Changed Science—and the World is the source of one of my favorite descriptions of the work I do as a writer of women’s history: “revealing a hidden history of the world.”
Swaby was inspired to write her collective biography of groundbreaking women scientists by an obituary which appeared in the New York Times in March, 2013. The obituary began by reporting that Yvonne Brill made a mean beef stroganoff, that she followed her husband from job to job, and took eight years off to raise three children. Only then did the Times mention the reason she had earned an obituary: she was a brilliant rocket scientist who won the National Medal of Technology and Innovation for her development of a propulsion system that keeps satellites in their orbits, a system which became the international standard. As someone who also makes a mean beef stroganoff, I can assure you that the two accomplishments are not equivalent.
The Times quickly amended its article to begin with the rocket science after a loud public outcry, but the original obituary led Swaby to consider the way women’s careers and accomplishments in science have been, and unhappily continue to be, underreported. The result is Headstrong, a collection of brief biographies of women who have made lasting contributions to science. At the time the book came out in 2015, I had only heard of a handful of the women whose stories she tells: Rachel Carson, Rosalind Franklin, Irène Joliot-Curie,* Sally Ride, and Ada Lovelace. In the intervening years a number of others that Swaby introduced me to have become well-known, at least in those circles interested in women’s history. Others I know only from the pages of Headstrong.
The book is structured as a series of essays, perfect for dipping into when you need a bit of women’s history to remind you that we were there. (Swaby suggests that you read one a week over the course of a year. I was not that disciplined.)
If you know a girl who is interested in STEM and would like to know where she fits in a world that is still heavily male, Headstrong would be a nice place to start the search for role models.
*Who I knew only because she was the daughter of Marie Curie and, like her mother, won a Nobel Prize for chemistry. Swaby chose not to include Marie Curie because she is the woman “we talk about when we talk about women in science.”
From the History in the Margins Archives: McCarthyism and the Red Scare, Part 2. Attacking “Communists”, and Anyone Else Who Got In His Way
If it seems to you that I've run a lot of posts from the archives lately, you would be right. At the moment, I am overwhelmed by life stuff and simply don't have the bandwidth to write new posts on a consistent basis. Instead of letting the blog go dark, when I don't have something new to say I will continue to share old posts that I feel you might enjoy or that seem relevant to the moment. Thanks for reading along. There will be new stories in the not too distant future. Honest.
Joseph Nye Welch, chief counsel for the US Army, being questioned by Joseph McCarthy
If you're coming in late to the party, you may want to read the previous post. Here's the short version: in 1948 Joseph McCarthy won a seat in the US Senate with a dirty campaign and began his senatorial career with a press conference calling for striking miners to be drafted, court-martialed, and then shot. Here's what happened next:
By 1950, McCarthy's Senate career was in trouble. The fact that he had lied about his war record during the election campaign had become public. Moreover, he was under investigation for tax offenses and for accepting bribes from Pepsi-Cola to vote in favor of removing wartime restrictions on sugar.
McCarthy directed public attention from his own problems by going on the attack. On February 9, 1950, while speaking to a group of Republican women in Wheeling, West Virginia, McCarthy announced that he had a list of 205 State Department employees who were "card-carrying" members of the American Communist Party,* some of whom were busy passing classified information to the Soviet Union.
When the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations asked McCarthy to testify, he was unable to provide the name of a single "card-carrying communist" in any government department. Undeterred by the absence of facts, McCarthy began an anti-communist campaign in the national media. His first step was claiming communist subversives had infiltrated President Truman's administration. When the Democrats accused McCarthy of using smear tactics, he claimed that their accusations were part of the communist conspiracy.
As a result of McCarthy's tactics, the Republicans swept the 1950 elections. Having watched him use scare tactics to discredit his opponents during the election, the remaining Democrats in Congress were reluctant to criticize him. McCarthy, whom the Washington press corps once voted "the worst US senator", was now one of the most powerful men in Congress.
After being re-elected in 1952, McCarthy became the chairman of the Senate's Committee on Government Operations, and more importantly of its permanent investigation subcommittee. In an ironic mirror image of Stalin's trials of alleged counter-revolutionaries,** McCarthy used his position to hold hearings against individuals whom he accused of being communists and government agencies that he claimed harbored them. He attacked journalists who criticized his hearings. He campaigned to have "anti-American" books removed from libraries. He accused newly elected Republican president Dwight Eisenhower of being soft on communism.
McCarthy ran into trouble in April, 1954, when he turned his attention to supposed communist infiltration of the United States Army. The army fought back by providing information to journalists known to oppose McCarthy, including evidence that McCarthy had tried to use his influence to get preferential treatment for his aides when they were drafted. The end came with the decision to broadcast the "Army-McCarthy" hearings on national television. For thirty-six days Americans watched from their living rooms as McCarthy bullied witnesses and offered evasive answers to questions. At one point, after McCarthy attacked a young Army lawyer, the Army's chief counsel, Joseph Nye Welch, demanded "Have you no sense of decency, sir?"
By the end of the hearings, McCarthy had lost most of his allies and the trust of the American people. Later that year, with a vote of sixty-seven to twenty-two,*** the Senate officially censured McCarthy for conduct "contrary to Senate traditions." He remained in office, but had no power beyond his senatorial vote. (Which is not nothing.) He died before the end of his second term, leaving as his legacy a cautionary political tale of popular fear, demagoguery, abuse of power, and the value of a democratic system of checks and balances.
*Personally, I doubt that the American Communist Party issued membership cards at the time. It was a disorganized group prone to fracturing along theological lines.
**Ironic from an historical perspective. It is unlikely that McCarthy intended the irony.
***Alaska and Hawaii were not yet states. But unless I'm doing the math wrong that still means some senators must have abstained or taken a convenient bathroom break.