Historian Nancy Baker Jones was a child when her father, who was serving in the U.S. Army in Europe, was called home in 1953 to testify at U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy’s hearings on an alleged communist spy ring at an army laboratory in Fort Monmouth, New Jersey.
During McCarthy’s four-year reactionary crusade to root out “card carrying Communists,” hundreds of government, Hollywood, and university employees were imprisoned, and thousands more lost their jobs and were blacklisted despite a lack of evidence they were subverting the government. After what came to be known as the Army-McCarthy hearings, the senator’s meteoric popularity just as quickly plummeted, and in December 1954 he was censured by the U.S. Senate for behavior that worked to “obstruct the constitutional processes of the Senate.”
Reading from an excerpt of her autobiography at the Alliance for Texas History’s first annual conference, which 400 people attended at Texas State University May 15-17, Jones recounted her lifelong career helping to build African-American and women’s history programs in Texas universities during the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s, and expanding the state’s historical encyclopedia, called the Handbook of Texas, to reflect diverse narratives starting in the 1980s. Jones warned the audience of a new McCarthyism arising and reminded them of the role historians can play to combat it.
