Politics & Power Quote by J. William Fulbright

Fulbright doesn’t bother to name Joseph McCarthy; “the junior senator from Wisconsin” is a courtroom-style demotion, a way of shrinking a man who’d made himself huge through headlines and intimidation. The insult is strategic: it frames McCarthy as an upstart abusing office rather than a tribune “speaking hard truths.” That matters in the early 1950s, when anti-communist panic had become both a genuine national anxiety and a convenient political weapon, and when even mild dissent could be cast as disloyalty.

The line works because it diagnoses McCarthyism as less an ideology than an ecology of emotions. “Fears and hatreds and prejudices” is a stacked triad that widens the charge beyond anti-communism into something older and uglier in American life: the willingness to let suspicion substitute for evidence. Fulbright’s verb choice, “preyed,” makes McCarthy a predator, not a patriot; the public becomes the hunted, manipulated into volunteering their own worst impulses.

The “prairie fire” metaphor is doing heavy lifting. It evokes the American interior, fast-moving danger, and a landscape that looks stable right up until it ignites. Crucially, it also shifts blame from one demagogue to the system that feeds him: once mass panic becomes entertainment, policy, and career ladder, it outgrows its author. Fulbright’s warning isn’t just moral; it’s institutional. When accusations become a governing method, the eventual target is the legitimacy of government itself, and no one gets to be the firefighter in charge.