McCarthyism and the End of Ideology

The 1950s was the highpoint for consensus theory, the end of ideology thesis, structural functionalism and modernization theory in the United States. Ellen Schrecker suggests that McCarthyism ‘perverted the scholarship of the 1950s’ (1986: 339). In the immediate post-McCarthy era many academics remained fearful of the perception of intellectuals that McCarthy supporters had propagated and maintained and chose to disengage from research that could be perceived as politically motivated. This approach was described by historian John Higham as ‘the cult of the American Consensus’ (1959) and by historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. as ‘the vital center’ (1949) in which academics settled for a conservative complacency and attempted to discredit research from a left- or right-wing perspective, branding it as dangerous, in an effort to provide legitimacy for the American political establishment. To what extent was this approach also true of Talcott Parsons and colleagues? The argument developed here is that Parsons was spurred on by the work of Gunnar and Alva Myrdal in the 1930s and 1940s and the civil rights movement in the 1950s to continue to argue in favour of the construction of a liberal modernity that stressed equality of opportunity. According to Charles Parsons (2004 ), although the Parsons family were proud of their New England heritage, Talcott’s father embraced the idea of the United States as a multi-ethnic nation and was hostile towards the 1924 immigration law; in addition the family were ‘thrust’ ‘into the melting pot’ with the marriage of Talcott’s older brother Edward Jr.’s daughter Joan to Kung-Chih Wang in 1947.