Discuss the history of McCarthyism in Alaska and draw parallels with the current situation under President Trump.
Excellent column, Professor Haycox. Many Alaskans may be unaware we had our own direct brush with McCarthyism in 1950 when Andrew Schoeppel, a middling senator from Kansas of no distinction, accused Ernest Gruening and the Alaska statehood movement of Communist sympathies because they had once hired a lobbyist with ties to the Eastern Bloc. The baseless charge eventually ensnared Oscar Chapman, Interior secretary under President Truman, who Schoeppel accused of lying in his oath of office. Gruening and Chapman survived because they occupied positions of power, but, as Haycox notes, many others were not so lucky. Consider the reputations and lives that stand to be destroyed by Trump's self-pitying and imbecilic rantings.