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7.1.05

Books at the Barricade

In March 1954, Gerald Chittenden, owner of the Borrowdale Bookshop in Edgartown, went to war against Senator Joseph McCarthy, using a table of books as his only bulwark and weapon. Chittenden, a longtime Edgartown summer resident, had retired to the Island after thirty-eight years as a master at St. Paul’s School in Concord, New Hampshire. He was in his fifth year as president of what is now the Martha’s Vineyard Historical Society. He was a recognized Island personage and seventy-two years old when he drew a literary bead on the senator.

McCarthy, a Republican from Wisconsin, first elected in 1946, took advantage of the developing cold war to stage reckless and belligerent investigations of purported communists in academia, show business, the government, the military. The presumption of innocence, and the right to face one’s accuser, went out the window. The accused, as well as witnesses both for and against, lost jobs and could not find new ones. Polls in 1954 showed that half the country backed McCarthy. People in every station of public and private life were afraid to speak out.

But not Gerald Chittenden, the bookseller of Edgartown. Chittenden’s Anti-McCarthy Table displayed fiction and nonfiction on the theme of American freedom, from Revolutionary times to the mid-1950s. The books included the works of Tom Paine, Elmer Davis’s But We Were Born Free, Edward W. Barrett’s Truth Is Our Weapon, Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here, and George Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm. Chittenden told a Vineyard Gazette reporter that he wanted “to do all that a man living on an Island can do to fight the currently alarming trend toward nationwide suspicion.”

Henry Beetle Hough and Elizabeth Bowie Hough, editors and publishers of the Gazette, felt the weekly paper could not remain silent on the McCarthy issue, but the policy of the paper was to limit its coverage to Island matters. Yet McCarthyism affected Vineyarders as much as mainlanders. As Hough wrote in his 1975 memoir Mostly on Martha’s Vineyard: A Personal Record, “We could feel the McCarthy intolerance on the Vineyard, a division among us.”

Chittenden’s table brought the issue home. In cold and sharp detail, an editorial by Hough – “Also a Local Issue” – analyzed McCarthy’s sense of patriotism, his lies, and misdeeds. Half a century later, one paragraph is a useful reminder of a bad time: “The matter is not one of partisanship but of civil right, democratic processes, honesty and the tradition by which the United States has become great. It is one of individual liberty against the totalitarian mob. Men of good will of all parties stand together. McCarthy is on the other side.”

Responses ranged from anger to an offer to stand with the editor and take some of the bricks thrown at him. In a personal letter, Hough later wrote, “Well, we were damned a lot by the spoken word and some by words which we printed. But we were glad to have broken through that horrible stillness.

“This was our first experience of the working out of a totalitarian regime. . . .

It’s all over now. Matters have progressed, and anybody who likes can throw a brick at McCarthy. The one we threw didn’t cause anybody any pain, but we are glad to have thrown it when the fashion was against us – in proof that there is still political freedom even though it may not be exercised.”

Hough wrote this letter during the televised Army-McCarthy hearings, days before the moment when attorney Joseph Welch delivered his famous reprimand: “Have you no sense of decency, at long last? Have you left no sense of honor?” and McCarthy, baffled by applause from the audience, asked his aide, Roy Cohn, what had happened.

In December 1954, the US Senate censured McCarthy for conduct unbecoming a senator. That must have gratified both Chittenden and Hough. Chittenden completed eight years as president of the historical society in November 1957. That same year McCarthy died of cirrhosis of the liver.

In his memoir, Hough wrote: “So we rode the storm out, more at length supporting us than denouncing us, and it all came right in the end. Why, then, did it seem such a near thing? Perhaps because it really was a near thing, for us and for the country, and I wonder about another time and, in different forms, of course, another McCarthy.”