Getting away with it all

Stefan Stern wonders if we've lost the ability to feel shame

It was the summer of 1954. America was still troubled by the fear of the 'Red peril' – supposed communists at the heart of the establishment. Senator Joe McCarthy was leading a campaign this imaginary enemy. And McCarthyism, while not quite as powerful as it had been, was still a force to be reckoned with.

At a hearing over the alleged communist penetration of the US Army, McCarthy attacked a young lawyer, called Fred Fisher, for having held leftist sympathies while a student at Harvard. Fisher wasn’t actually present but the young lawyer’s boss, Joseph Welch, the army’s chief legal representative, had clearly had enough. He slapped down McCarthy and silenced the firebrand politician with a solemn (and now famous) condemnation: 'You’ve done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?'

The senator tried to make himself heard but the session ended with a spontaneous round of applause from those watching. Welch had given voice to a feeling that was widespread but until that point not powerfully expressed. McCarthy had finally been shamed, and McCarthyism as a movement never recovered. By the end of the year his Senator Joe’s career was effectively over. He died three years later, in 1957, aged just 48.