The Proud Peasant

I want to think a little about Lafferty's support for Joseph McCarthy and his refusal ever to believe that McCarthy had been wrong about communism. I should say at the outset that I take a measured view on the deeply flawed and often destructive McCarthy, but I am sympathetic to Laffery's view of anti-communism. After all, Soviet infiltration was a Cold War reality. McCarthy is not, in my eyes, the straightforward historical villain he is often portrayed as in popular accounts. The whole thing is just sad to me, on all sides. To put it mildly, being remotely measured about McCarthy is not popular.

So, where to start with Senator McCarthy and Lafferty? Perhaps we begin with the fact that they were both proud Irish Catholics. There is a good online essay from the Jesuit magazine America by Larry Tye that gets McCarthy and Catholicism right. Tye is a McCarthy expert who argues that McCarthy’s Catholicism was central to his identity, but not in the deterministic way later popular accounts suggest. The cartoon McCarthy is a Catholic ideologue. Yes, McCarthy was raised in a devout Irish Catholic farming family in Wisconsin. He was further shaped by his Catholic education at Marquette. It is a weird coincidence, if it is one, that, within Green Tree, the Green Tree community converges at an Irish burial in Ireland, in the county from which the McCarthys had immigrated to the U.S. At that point in the novel, America has become in many ways politically intolerable within the novel's imaginary of Flatland.

McCarthy himself was not intellectual, but even his knowledgeable detractors seem to agree that his Catholicism was sincere, habitual, and deeply, if naively, personal. McCarthy did not use Catholicism for public display. He did not want to be thought of as a Catholic ideologue. His Catholicism was old-fashioned: regular Mass, confession, prayer, and support for Catholic causes all mattered to him.

Tye takes aim at one of the big McCarthy myths, the claim that Catholic leaders effectively launched McCarthy’s anti-Communist crusade.. Catholic anti-Communism and Catholic voters certainly helped promote his rise, and he was often a hero of Catholics, but Catholic opinion itself was hotly divided on McCarthy, with important clergy and lay voices denouncing him from the beginning. By the end, after the Army-McCarthy hearings and his Senate censure, both his public standing and Catholic support took a nosedive. There are few political implosions in American public life quite like it. One interesting detail is that of one of the two Catholic senators who did not censure McCarthy was JFK, who was reluctant to alienate his base. In Green Tree, Kennedy is the Cardboard Man, the cardboard Catholic. McCarthy was a man whose faith was real, yet whose demagoguery overshadowed it, and who will probably always be a villain in the popular imagination. Again, he isn't getting a measured treatment anytime soon. The last serious academic attempt at partial rehabilitation was in the year 2000.

Now, a complicating factor in all this is the way Lafferty’s view of communism intersects with questions of American Jewish identity, since one part of the McCarthy story involves the different responses Senator McCarthy drew from Catholics and Jews. As Tye writes, “The truth is that at his peak, McCarthy had the support of an impressive 49 percent of Protestants, which was just one point below his national rating. Jewish Americans were the one religious group who consistently and overwhelmingly rejected him, with 15 percent viewing him favorably and 71 percent unfavorably.” It is therefore not surprising that McCarthy becomes a figure in In a Green Tree about whom Julius Brass has something to say.

McCarthy’s identity in the book is called the "Proud Peasant." He is first introduced by Pat O'Trassy, who foresees a "type-man" who will lead an unorganized revolt to reverse the world's surrender to evil and slavery.

This is where Julius Brass comes in. Because the "brotherhood" of his enemies has antennae that warn them of threats early, Julius predicts that the Proud Peasant will be thwarted:

This is Lafferty’s allegorical take on what happened in 1954 following the televised Army-McCarthy hearings. What Americans learned led to the U.S. Senate’s 67-22 vote to censure McCarthy for conduct unbecoming of a senator.

That will all happen in the novel's future. Back in Tulsa, Pat's wife Beatrice Belle has a ten-inch baked-clay statuette (from James Tyrone's archeological digs) that Julius says is the "Archetypal Proud Peasant." The connection gets cemented:

Over time, Pat O'Trassy observes that he has two effigies connected to this man, and they begin to reflect a disturbing, explosive ambivalence. The primary statuette remains true to the man's original appearance: a clear, crisp, good-looking, and honest man, clouded only slightly by concern and frustration. The secondary effigy, though, morphs:

As Julius predicts, the real-life Proud Peasant is targeted by what the novel calls "Loathsomizing Machines." The media and his enemies subject him to an onslaught of character assassination until his true self can no longer be seen or heard; only distortions reach the American public:

Ultimately, the Proud Peasant dies. It is the day that Senator Joseph McCarthy died: