I did my senior history paper in high school on Senator Joseph McCarthy. I was looking for something of interest and it seemed to me at that age that the man's crusade to identify members of the Communist party serving in the US government was all the rage. I hadn't paid much attention to the man or his efforts but I had heard about the Army-McCarthy hearings. I didn't realize until writing this blog entry that the hearings took place in 1954. I was working on my paper in 1957 and McCarthy's reputation had seemed to me to be falling all that time. He died in May of that year.
I am not a very historically-minded person and might not have thought of the Senator, had I not read an op-ed piece from the New York Times that appeared in Google news a few days back. The piece was written by a UW prof of history and compared the tone of the current Wisconsin governor to the tone set by McCarthy. That professor is William Cronon. A headline today in the same Google source mentioned a request by the Wisconsin GOP, under Wisconsin open meeting and information law, for Cronon's university emails within a certain date and containing certain specified keywords which relate to the recent efforts by the governor to pass a law removing many of the collective bargaining rights of public employees. I read a post in another blog, maybe in Fortune magazine, that where a blogger had spent quite a lot of time reading news releases and statements concerning the GOP request and the professor's response. That reader found it all fascinating.
Since I write a blog myself, I was interested in following up, at least some. I found with some effort the professor's blog, "Scholar as Citizen" and his post regarding the governor's effort to pass a law and the GOP's request for the professor's emails. I was even more interested when I read his statement that he had only just begun his blog but that the issues that had recently arisen had resulted in a million visits to his blog in 24 hours! My blog here has existed for about 2 years and has had 4000 total visits, just for comparison. Much of the energy expended by the GOP seems to relate to Professor Cronon's statements about the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and its influence on legislation in each state of the Union.
