Glen Taylor, Herman Welker and the Red Scare, 1944 to 1957

If the early chapters of this module were about Idahoans who organized, the Red Scare chapter is about Idahoans who accused. The Senate seats of Glen Taylor, Herman Welker, Henry Dworshak and Frank Church sit at the center of the story, and so does a question that recurs in every anti-communist period: how much of the accusation was about the targets' organizations, and how much was about their politics?

The core facts in this lesson come from two secondary accounts: "The McCarthy Era in Idaho," an article on Brewminate by historian Marc C. Johnson (adapted from a course he taught for the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute and posted October 7, 2016), and the Wikipedia article on Glen H. Taylor. Johnson is a former press secretary and chief of staff to Idaho Governor Cecil Andrus, a Democrat, and an author of Idaho political history; a reader should weigh his work knowing that. This update adds a 2020 talk by Johnson, the Idaho State Historical Society's senator biographies, the U.S. Senate's page on the censure, Taylor's own farewell and memoir (known through a review), and several contemporary and archival items. Where the accounts differ, the lesson reports the difference. The Congressional Record, the Idaho Statesman's 1950 and 1954 coverage and the memoir itself have still not been read.

Glen Taylor's path to the Senate

Glen H. Taylor served as a Democratic United States Senator from Idaho from January 3, 1945 to January 3, 1951. According to Wikipedia, he lost the 1938 House primary (finishing fourth) and the 1940 and 1942 Senate races to John Thomas before winning in 1944. In that year he defeated incumbent D. Worth Clark in the Democratic primary, by 216 votes according to the Brewminate account, and then beat Governor C. A. Bottolfsen in the general election, 51.1 percent to 48.9 percent.¹²

His earlier campaigns were already controversial. Wikipedia reports that his 1940 campaign was described as "semi-socialistic" and "communistic." It reports that party Democrats opposed to him (Wikipedia's word is "conservative") tried to expel him from the party in 1948 and failed.¹ Note the wording: these are descriptions of his campaigns by critics. They are not findings about his beliefs.

1948: the Wallace ticket and the Birmingham arrest

In 1948, Taylor broke with President Truman over a hard line toward the Soviet Union and slow progress on civil rights, according to the Brewminate account, and left the Democratic Party to run for vice president with Henry A. Wallace on the Progressive ticket. Wikipedia reports that the Wallace-Taylor ticket won no states and about 2.4 percent of the national popular vote, and that Taylor accepted the nomination knowing it would likely cost him his Senate seat. The Brewminate article says the ticket won fewer than 5,000 votes in Idaho, and that Taylor was attacked as a Communist dupe or fellow traveler partly because the Progressives did not repudiate support from socialists and Communists.²¹

On May 1, 1948, Taylor was arrested in Birmingham, Alabama, for entering a building through a doorway marked for African Americans. He was convicted of disorderly conduct. Idaho Governor C. A. Robins declined to extradite him to serve the sentence.¹² The sources disagree on details. Wikipedia describes a 180-day sentence of hard labor at a Southern Negro Youth Congress meeting and a lost appeal. In a 2020 talk, Johnson describes a fine and one night in jail and says the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the case in 1950. KTVB's anniversary article calls the event a Black youth rally and quotes Johnson.³ The Alabama appeal and the Supreme Court denial have not been pulled, so this lesson does not state the sentence as fact.

What the sources do and do not say about Taylor and Communism

The Wikipedia article, which is detailed, "does not document formal accusations of communist ties." It mentions only labels and criticism: his 1940 campaign was called "semi-socialistic" and "communistic." He criticized the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan. He was noted for being less critical of the Soviet Union than most colleagues. After 1948, Idaho voters viewed him as an "incorrigible leftist." From 1950 to 1952 he was president of Coryell Construction Company, and he resigned after being labeled a "security risk," which jeopardized a government contract.¹

The honest summary is therefore narrower than the 1950 headlines. The record supports that Taylor opposed the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan, that he accepted a place on a ticket that did not repudiate support from socialists and Communists, and that his opponents called him a Communist dupe. It does not, in the sources gathered here, show that Taylor belonged to the Communist Party, and the lesson does not say that he did.

Herman Welker and the claim of '87 communists'

Herman Welker, a Republican, defeated D. Worth Clark in the 1950 general election for the seat Taylor had held and served from 1951 to 1957. He sat on the Judiciary and Armed Services committees and on the Internal Security Subcommittee, and he was called "Little Joe from Idaho" and McCarthy's best friend in the Senate, according to the Brewminate account.²

In a July 4, 1950 speech, the same account reports, Welker claimed that there were "87 communists in Idaho," without explaining the figure.² A writer should treat that sentence the way the previous lesson taught. It is a documented statement by an official. It is not a documented count. It names no individuals, offers no source and cannot be checked against any membership record that the sources gathered here have turned up. In the previous lesson's terms, it is an allegation, and allegations are evidence of allegations.

McCarthy's own timeline

On February 9, 1950, Senator Joseph McCarthy gave his Wheeling, West Virginia, speech, in which, according to the Brewminate account, he claimed to hold a list of 205 names of Communists in the State Department; the account says he never produced such a list. About 18 days later Taylor denounced McCarthy on the Senate floor.² At a December 11, 1951 tribute dinner in Milwaukee, Welker praised McCarthy and warned of "subversives."²

The elections of 1950

The Idaho Statesman's coverage attacked Taylor relentlessly. Its political editor, John Corlett, later said it was the only time he set out to destroy a person and that person's philosophy.² In the Democratic primary, Taylor lost to Clark, whom he had beaten in 1944; Wikipedia says Taylor's Progressive run contributed to his defeat, and Clark lost the general election to Welker.¹ Henry Dworshak, the other Republican, defeated Democrat Claude Burtenshaw for the other seat; Burtenshaw had accused Dworshak of "playing the Kremlin's game" over his votes on the Marshall Plan and aid to Greece and Turkey.²

Notice the shape of the Burtenshaw charge. A Democrat tried to use the same weapon against a Republican, and it did not work. In the cases documented here, the accusation succeeded when it matched a candidate's record of breaking with his party's leadership and when a major newspaper pressed it.

1954: censure and the Taylor-Dworshak race

The televised Army-McCarthy hearings of 1954 exposed McCarthy's tactics to the public. A Senate committee led by Senator Watkins investigated him, and a censure motion followed. Welker said that if McCarthy was censured, he should be too. On December 2, 1954, the Senate voted 67 to 22 to censure McCarthy, and Welker and Dworshak were among the 22 opposed.² The Senate Historical Office confirms the date and the 67 to 22 tally and lists the Watkins committee members.⁴ The Congressional Record of December 2, 1954 prints the roll call: the 22 "nays" include both Dworshak and Welker. The adopted text, as the Record prints it, "condemned" McCarthy's conduct, and the presiding officer said the word "censure" did not appear in the body of the resolution, though it is the name the Senate Historical Office and most writers use. Johnson also says Dworshak served on the committee that investigated McCarthy; the Senate's member list for the Watkins committee does not include him, and this lesson does not repeat that statement.

That same year Taylor challenged Dworshak. Welker called Taylor "the Communist Party's most pathetic and willing dupes," and Vice President Richard Nixon, campaigning in Pocatello, called him "a dedicated left winger." Dworshak won by about 60,000 votes, and Wikipedia reports Taylor received 37.2 percent.²¹

1956: the end of the scare in Idaho

Welker won renomination in 1956 with only 42 percent of the vote (42.51 percent in Wikipedia's table) and four primary challengers. Frank Church, the Democratic nominee, defeated him in November by about 46,000 votes, even though Welker had called Church's supporters "radical pinks and punks." Welker also called the National Committee for an Effective Congress a conduit for Communist money and claimed Communists "wrote" the 1954 school desegregation ruling.² President Eisenhower sent Welker a "Dear Herman" letter endorsing him, and McCarthy blamed Eisenhower for Welker's defeat.²

Taylor lost the 1956 Democratic primary to Church by 170 votes according to Johnson; a Wikipedia table gives Church 27,942 and Taylor 27,742, a margin of 200. The difference is unresolved until the Idaho canvass is read. He alleged the "Clark Machine" stole it, but his door-to-door canvassing found no convincing evidence of irregularities, the Brewminate account says. He then ran a write-in campaign that drew more than 13,000 votes (5.1 percent, per Wikipedia), and the Brewminate account reports that Welker supporters financed it with $35,000 (single source: Johnson).²¹ McCarthy died in 1957 at age 48 (the Brewminate account says 49; his birth and death dates make it 48), and Welker, of a brain tumor, died about six months later in 1957.²

What the Idaho record shows about 'Communists'

• The Brewminate account does not describe any formal loyalty board or investigation in Idaho. The challenges it covers were campaign accusations, Senate floor charges and newspaper attacks.²
• Welker's '87 communists' figure is unexplained; the claim cannot be checked.
• Historian Adam Hochschild, quoted in the same article, argues that anticommunism has always been far louder and more potent than communism in the United States.² That is an argument. It is consistent with the numbers in lesson 4 and not proved by them.
• Communists never won significant political success nationally, and the 1948 Progressive ticket won 2.4 percent of the national vote.²

In their own words and in the record

This section sets out what each man said and wrote, what people who dealt with him said, and the stance of every source. Short quotations are attributed. Where a statement rests on one account it is labeled single-source.

Taylor: his own account, his defenders and his critics

Taylor's own account (first hand, sympathetic to the subject). Taylor published a memoir, The Way It Was With Me (Lyle Stuart, 1979). The memoir itself was not opened. A Kirkus review of October 1979 says he blames a machine-rigged 1956 primary and recounts his friendship with the columnist Drew Pearson.⁵ In his 1950 Senate farewell he said, as the Brooklyn Rail quotes him, "I did vote my convictions" (single-source).⁶ Johnson reports that Taylor early in 1950 called McCarthy a "demagogue" on the Senate floor, and the Brewminate account places his denunciation about 18 days after McCarthy's Wheeling speech; the Congressional Record date has not been checked.² Wikipedia also reports a 1946 speech to the National Lawyers Guild criticizing what Taylor called monopoly-driven foreign policy (single-source, secondary).

Defenders and sympathetic accounts. F. Ross Peterson's 1974 biography, Prophet Without Honor: Glen H. Taylor and the Fight for American Liberalism, is the standard book-length treatment and is sympathetic in its framing; it has a chapter on the Communist question that has not been read for this update. William C. Pratt's 1969 article, "Glen H. Taylor: Public Image and Reality" (Pacific Northwest Quarterly), is cited as a scholarly assessment, also unread. Robert Hamm's Brooklyn Rail profile "The Last Real Populist" (2010) is admiring and mostly anecdote. Johnson, in a 2020 talk, says Taylor was perhaps the most liberal person Idaho ever elected, and that Taylor backed a Columbia Valley Authority, opposed seating Senator Theodore Bilbo and challenged McCarthy early. Black-press coverage was warm: the Omaha Guide of May 22, 1948 presented his Birmingham stand as a challenge to discrimination and reported that he cancelled Oklahoma dates over segregation demands.⁷

Critics. The Idaho Statesman attacked him. Its political editor, John Corlett, told Johnson he had been told to "destroy Glen Taylor" and regretted it, a statement reported by Johnson in a talk and an essay and held here as single-source. In 1940 his campaign was labeled "semi-socialistic" and "communistic" and in 1948 Democrats opposed to him tried and failed to expel him from the party (Wikipedia). A 1948 Idaho State Archives scrapbook holds Statesman clippings about an effort to recall him (finding aid read; clippings not seen, and Idaho senators are not recallable under state law, so what the effort was is unclear). Attacks also came from another direction: Labor Action, the newspaper of an anti-Stalinist socialist group, called him a "Stalinoid liberal" on April 12, 1948, in a piece critical of his speeches on foreign policy.⁸ That label is the writer's opinion. It shows that the charge that Taylor served Moscow was not shared by every critic, and that some critics argued the opposite of the Idaho charge.

The 1956 primary, from both sides. Taylor said the "Clark Machine" stole it. Johnson reports that Taylor's door-to-door canvassing found no convincing evidence, that a Senate committee led by Albert Gore Sr. found no irregularities, that Church considered Taylor a sore loser, and that Taylor asked Church to take a lie-detector test.³ These are Johnson's statements. Taylor's side is the memoir, as the review describes it.

Welker: his own claims and statements

• The "87 communists" claim. Reported by Johnson from a July 4, 1950 speech: Welker said there were 87 Communists in Idaho and did not explain the figure. The speech text has not been found. It may have been a campaign speech and not a floor speech, so the Congressional Record may not contain it. It names no individuals.
• On Taylor. Welker called Taylor one of "the Communist Party's most pathetic and willing dupes" in 1954 (Brewminate).
• On McCarthy. At a Milwaukee tribute dinner on December 11, 1951 he praised McCarthy and warned of "subversives." In 1954 he said that if McCarthy were censured, he should be too (Brewminate). The sources call him McCarthy's closest friend in the Senate and "Little Joe from Idaho."
• On witnesses. A syndicated Washington column of about 1952 (newspaper and date not identified; Utah Digital Newspapers OCR) reports that Welker, a freshman senator, told a Georgetown television forum that congressional hearings should show a judicial demeanor and that witnesses should be compensated if their appearances were broadcast. The source is thin, but it shows Welker publicly urging witness protections while defending McCarthy.
• On the school desegregation ruling and the 1956 race. He called Church's supporters "radical pinks and punks," called the National Committee for an Effective Congress a conduit for Communist money, and claimed Communists "wrote" the 1954 desegregation ruling (Brewminate, single-source).
• His papers. The University of Idaho holds the Herman Welker Papers (MG 038, 1950 to 1956), with speeches from 1951 to 1953, correspondence and six scrapbooks including the 1950 campaign, and a separate voting-record compilation (MG 5176). A finding aid was read; the contents were not.⁹ Those are the place to look for his speeches in his own words.

The Lester Hunt episode (single-source)

This episode is an accusation and is reported here only as one. In 1954, according to the columnist Drew Pearson and a later book by Rodger McDaniel, Welker and Senator Styles Bridges pressed Wyoming Senator Lester Hunt to leave the Senate by threatening to publicize his son's arrest. Hunt died on June 19, 1954. Welker denied the accusation. The evidence found for this update is a 2024 WyoFile opinion column by Susan Stubson, which has no documents, and a Wyoming Public Media page about the Lester C. Hunt papers at the American Heritage Center that does not name Welker.¹⁰ McDaniel's book was not opened. The lesson draws no conclusion. A reader should treat the claim as unverified and attributed to its authors until documents are produced.

People and personalities

• Glen H. Taylor (1904 to 1984). A vaudeville and radio singer known as the "Singing Cowboy," who rode a horse toward Washington on one campaign, according to the profiles. He used a sound truck and a guitar, entered the Birmingham hall by the door marked for Black attendees, and after the Senate sold hairpieces under the name Taylor Toppers. The profiles describe him as a showman; the New York Times obituary phrase quoted by the Inlander is "flamboyant showman," and Hagadone calls him an eccentric populist. Sources disagree about how far he went in school, so this lesson does not say.¹¹
• Herman Welker (1906 to 1957). Born in Cambridge, Idaho on December 11, 1906; University of Idaho law graduate (1929); Washington County prosecutor; Republican senator 1951 to 1957; died October 30, 1957 of a brain tumor, per the Idaho State Historical Society and Wikipedia (which differ on his Idaho Senate dates).¹² The profiles call him a loyal McCarthy ally who also made the witness-rights remarks above.
• Eugene "Bull" Connor. Birmingham's police and public safety commissioner who arrested Taylor in 1948; his later role in 1963 is outside this lesson.
• John Corlett. The Statesman political editor who, in Johnson's account, said he set out to "destroy a person and that person's philosophy" and regretted it.
• Henry Wallace. The Progressive nominee in 1948, who, according to Johnson, refused to condemn Communist support. Taylor's defenders say the platform was peace and civil rights; his critics say the refusal made the ticket vulnerable. Both can be reported.
• Henry Dworshak, Claude Burtenshaw and Frank Church. Dworshak (editor of the Burley Bulletin before the Senate) defeated Burtenshaw, a Ricks College political science professor who accused him of "playing the Kremlin's game." Church, a Boise lawyer, beat Taylor in the 1956 primary and Welker in the general election; his campaign memo called McCarthy supporters "un-American political mobsters" (Johnson). Gerda Barnes, a former Taylor aide, became Church's chief of staff (Johnson).
• Drew Pearson and Lester Hunt. Pearson, the columnist, was Taylor's friend per the Kirkus review and the source of the Hunt accusation; see above.

No Idaho loyalty board, Idaho un-American activities committee or Idaho teacher or professor purge was found in these sources. Washington State had the Canwell committee in 1948. The absence of an Idaho equivalent in the sources is not proof that none existed.

The numbers and a timeline

Vote figures in the record, with their sources

Item	Figure	Source and status
1944 Democratic primary, Taylor over Clark	216 votes	Johnson (Brewminate and 2020 talk agree)
1944 general election, Taylor over Bottolfsen	51.1% to 48.9%	Wikipedia; canvass unchecked
1948 Wallace-Taylor ticket in Idaho	4,972 votes (2.31%)	Wikipedia table; its source is not stated
1948 Wallace-Taylor ticket nationally	About 2.4%	Wikipedia and Brewminate
1954 censure of McCarthy	67 to 22 on Dec 2, 1954	U.S. Senate Historical Office
1954 Dworshak over Taylor	About 60,000 votes; Taylor 37.2%	Johnson (margin); Wikipedia (share)
1956 Democratic primary, Church over Taylor	170 (Johnson) or 200 (27,942 to 27,742, Wikipedia)	Unresolved; Idaho canvass needed
1956 Republican primary, Welker	31,399 votes (42.51%)	Wikipedia table
1956 general election	Church 149,096; Welker 102,781; Taylor write-in 13,415	Wikipedia table; canvass unchecked
Welker claim, July 4, 1950	"87 communists in Idaho"	A claim; no names, no source, speech text not found

What the other side said

Welker and Dworshak were not inventing a threat out of nothing. Their position was that the Soviet Union was a real adversary during the Cold War, that the Marshall Plan and aid to Greece and Turkey were policy choices that could be opposed on those grounds, and that a candidate's refusal to repudiate Communist support was a legitimate issue. Taylor's side held that the Progressive ticket stood for peace and civil rights, and that the label "Communist dupe" was used to avoid debating that platform. The sources gathered here report both sets of statements. They do not settle which side was right about the policies, and a reporter does not need to settle that to report the record accurately.

Two balancing facts. First, Welker's side includes a public record of urging witness protections in hearings, and no source read for this update shows him presenting a list of names for Idaho. Second, Taylor's side includes a record of his own words on the Soviet Union that his critics quoted and that he did not hide: he opposed the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan in public. Neither fact decides the 1950 or 1954 campaigns, and neither proves that a charge of Communist membership was right or wrong. No source read here shows a government finding that Taylor was a party member, and an FBI file for him has not been located.

Source notes for reporters

• Pull the Congressional Record for Welker's July 4, 1950 speech. The December 2, 1954 roll call has been checked in the Record.
• Read the Idaho Statesman's 1950 coverage and Corlett's later comment in context.
• Check Taylor's memoir (The Way It Was With Me) for his account of the 1956 write-in financing.
• Pull the Alabama appeal and the 1950 Supreme Court denial before stating Taylor's Birmingham sentence.
• Resolve the discrepancy in how the sources describe Taylor's 1950 loss and the sequence of the Idaho Democratic primary, and the 170 versus 200 margin in 1956.

Learn more

• Idaho's Most Controversial Politician: Glen H. Taylor (Marc Johnson, 2020 talk): A transcript from the Idaho Humanities Council series; a historian's view with a stated point of view.
• Biographies of Idaho's United States Senators (Idaho State Historical Society): Official terms and dates for Taylor, Welker and Dworshak.
• The censure of Joseph McCarthy (U.S. Senate): The vote and the Watkins committee members.
• McCarthy executive-session transcripts (U.S. Senate): The Senate's own record of closed hearings; read the limitation note first.
• Glen H. Taylor: A starting biography with its footnotes.
• Idaho State Archives: Papers and newspapers from the 1950 and 1954 campaigns.

Notes

1. "Glen H. Taylor," Wikipedia, on his Senate career, the 1948 Progressive ticket, the Birmingham arrest, Coryell Construction and the 1950, 1954 and 1956 races. Read it online. ↩
2. Marc C. Johnson, "The McCarthy Era in Idaho," Brewminate (Oct. 7, 2016; adapted from an Osher Lifelong Learning Institute course). Read it online. A secondary essay by a historian who was press secretary and chief of staff to Democratic Governor Cecil Andrus; it has no footnotes, so verify vote counts and quotations against the Congressional Record and contemporary newspapers. ↩
3. Marc Johnson, "Idaho's Most Controversial Politician: Glen H. Taylor," Idaho Humanities Council Connected Conversation, July 14, 2020 (transcript, University of Idaho Library), and KTVB, "This day in history: Idaho's most controversial senator arrested for using Blacks-only entrance." Read the transcript. A spoken talk by a historian; claims not independently corroborated. ↩
4. U.S. Senate Historical Office, "Censure of Joseph McCarthy (1954)." Read it online. Primary government source for the date, the 67 to 22 vote and the Watkins committee members; the page does not list individual votes. The individual roll call is in the Congressional Record, Senate, December 2, 1954 (83rd Congress, vol. 100, part 12; Read it online), a primary record. ↩
5. Glen H. Taylor, The Way It Was With Me (Secaucus, N.J.: Lyle Stuart, 1979), as described in the Kirkus Reviews notice of Oct. 25, 1979. Read the review. First hand, sympathetic to the subject; the memoir was not opened and is not quoted. ↩
6. Robert Hamm, "The Last Real Populist," Brooklyn Rail, Nov. 2010. Read it online. Sympathetic profile; used for the farewell quotation and color only because it conflicts with other sources on details. ↩
7. "Senator Taylor Comes to Omaha," The Omaha Guide, May 22, 1948, p. 1. Read it online. A contemporary Black weekly, sympathetic to Taylor; public domain scan. Also F. Ross Peterson, Prophet Without Honor (University Press of Kentucky, 1974), and William C. Pratt, "Glen H. Taylor: Public Image and Reality," Pacific Northwest Quarterly (Jan. 1969), neither opened. ↩
8. Carlos Hudson (writing as Jack Ranger), "Taylor," Labor Action, Apr. 12, 1948. Read it online. Written by a critic from an anti-Stalinist socialist group; adverse to Taylor from a different direction than the Idaho attacks. Also Idaho State Archives, Evert L. "Shorty" Fuller scrapbook, MS 2/0818 (finding aid). ↩
9. University of Idaho Special Collections, Herman Welker Papers, MG 038 (1950 to 1956) and MG 5176. Read the finding aid. Finding aids only; contents unread. The 1952 witness-rights item is from an unidentified syndicated column in Utah Digital Newspapers (OCR page). ↩
10. Susan Stubson, "What Lester Hunt could teach us about our perilous political moment," WyoFile, Aug. 1, 2024 (opinion); Wyoming Public Media, "Blackmail in the Senate," Jan. 15, 2026; Rodger McDaniel, Dying for Joe McCarthy's Sins (2013), not opened. Read the column. Single-source and undocumented; Welker denied the accusation. ↩
11. Zach Hagadone, "A Fine Idaho 'Wackadoodle,'" Inlander. Read it online. Neutral profile quoting the New York Times obituary phrase. ↩
12. Idaho State Historical Society, Biographies of Idaho's United States Senators, Reference Series No. 17 (rev. 1993). Read it online. State agency publication; primary for terms and dates. "Herman Welker," Wikipedia, for the censure roll call and the Hunt episode (tertiary; used to find primaries). ↩