The Proud Peasant
- Jon Nelson
- 4 hours ago
- 5 min read
SF has never been very forward-looking. It is likely the least innovative of literatures. It has certainly never been daring, though several of its practitioners wear the ‘I am Daring’ badge hypocritically. It is a field compounded largely of patsies who can be led by nose-rings anywhere at all. — "The Case of the Moss Eaten Magician"
Today, I want to jot down a few thoughts on one aspect of 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 try to have a measured view on the deeply flawed and often destructive McCarthy. After all, Soviet infiltration was a Cold War reality. He is not, in my eyes, the straightforward historical villain he is often taken to be in popular accounts. To put it mildly, not hating McCarthy is not a popular position.
So, where to start with McCarthy and Lafferty? There is a good online essay from the Jesuit magazine America by Larry Tye that I think gets it right. Tye argues that Senator Joe McCarthy’s Catholicism was central to his identity, but not in the deterministic way later popular accounts suggest. Yes, McCarthy was raised in a devout Irish Catholic farming family in Wisconsin, and then he was further shaped by his education at Marquette. Whatever its intellectual depth, McCarthy’s Catholicism was sincere, habitual, and deeply personal. McCarthy did not see his Catholicism as a matter of public display. It was part of a private discipline: regular Mass, confession, prayer, and support for Catholic causes all mattered to him, even as he didn’t want to let the institutional church define him completely.
Tye also 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 Irish Catholics, but Catholic opinion itself was divided, with important clergy and lay voices denouncing his methods. By the end, after the Army-McCarthy hearings and his Senate censure, both his public standing and Catholic support took a nosedive. One interesting detail is that one of the two Catholic senators who did not censure McCarthy was JFK, who was reluctant to alienate his base. 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.
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 he 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 type-man that I see," Pat O’Trassy was speaking with his hands as well as with his mouth as he tried to show the shape of the type-man, "will head an unorganized revolt. I even have a name for the phenomenon that he’ll head: ‘Remembrance of Proud Peasants.’ That’s sort of a title for something It keeps coming to me. I almost see the face of the man who will first typify it, Black Irish and Black German mixed, dark of brow and jowl, solid, honest, good. I’ll begin to see that face more clearly soon."
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:
"But this ‘Proud Peasant’ will be thwarted at every stretch and turn, Pat. He will be just about the biggest bust ever. He’ll be totally destroyed. And you yourself will be taught to loathe him. The peasant-as-hero will be ruined and shot down." "Why will he be ruined, Julius un-Caesar, you un-tactician of these battles?" "OH, I’m a superb tactician in these battles, Pat. But the members of the brotherhood have antennae that you don’t know about. They can give themselves warning of a threat even before it begins . . . They’ll not allow him to be seen undistorted. He’ll be smothered in slander and booing. He’ll be savaged to death. And his fellow Proud Peasants will be gulled into dishonoring him in death and after."
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 him for conduct unbecoming of a senator.
That will all happen in the novel's future. Back in Tulsa, Pat's wife Beatrice Belle possesses a ten-inch baked-clay statuette (from James Tyrone's archeological digs) that Julius says is the "Archetypal Proud Peasant." The connection is cemented:
In November of 1946, Beatrice Belle saw in the newspaper the picture of a youngish man who had won an election in a midnorthern state." That’s the man," BeeBee said. "He is the splitting image of his image on the buffet there."
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:
But the secondary effigy, ah, it was turning into a loathsome fellow. He was really having a foul job done in him. "Some people say that a person can see anything he wants to see in these little reacting-clay effigies," Pat O’Trassy grumbled. "But I’m seeing things in this one that I very much don’t want to see. Gah, it’s hard even to look at the loathsome thing!"
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:
But what was the man himself up to, the man that the effigies effigied? That was hard to say. The shrilling and booing and yelling and spitting against him did not really allow him to be seen or heard at all. Only distortions of him could come through. The "Loathsomizing Machines" were working on him. When last had there been such stark and violent slander and hatred!
The Proud Peasant died on May 2, 1957, pretty well hated by almost everyone. Never had the death of one honest man brought so much sheer delight to so grubby a commonalty. He was still a young man when he died. It was a Murder by Slander.
