Ralph Flanders: The Vermont Machinist Who Moved to Censure Joe McCarthy

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Ralph Flanders was born in 1880 and grew up on subsistence farms in Vermont and Rhode Island. With college out of reach, he finished high school in 1896 and entered a two year apprenticeship at the Brown & Sharpe Manufacturing Company, then taught himself Greek, German, French and Latin. After five years editing the trade magazine Machinery in New York and a nervous breakdown in 1909, he moved to Springfield, Vermont, joined James Hartness at Jones & Lamson, married Hartness's daughter Helen in 1911, and became company president in 1933. He and his brother Ernest won the Franklin Institute medal in 1942 for an automatic screw thread grinding machine tied to jet engine production.

The Great Depression pulled him into public policy: he led the New England Council, served as president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston from 1944 to 1946, and helped found American Research and Development, widely considered the first venture capital firm. After losing the 1940 Senate primary to George Aiken, he was appointed to the Senate in 1946. A staunch anti communist, he spoke against Senator Joseph McCarthy in March 1954, and on June 11, 1954 introduced the resolution that led to McCarthy's censure by a vote of 65 to 22 that December. He did not seek reelection and died in 1970.

• He held side conversations in Latin with Senator John Sparkman during committee meetings so the press could not follow them.
• His 1940 campaign brochure showed him in a three piece suit holding a muddy piglet, and he lost the primary by a wide margin.
• He welcomed the United Electrical Workers into Jones & Lamson, making it the first unionized company in Springfield.
• In a June 1954 speech he compared McCarthy's conduct to the comic strip character Dennis the Menace.
• Telegrams to his office praised his stand against McCarthy by a ratio of six to one, while the Eisenhower administration urged him to drop it.