Ralph E. Flanders was born in Barnet, Vermont, September 28, 1880. He graduated from the Central Falls, Rhode Island high school and took courses from the International Correspondence Schools. At the age of fifty-two he was awarded an M.A. from Dartmouth, and later received honorary doctorates from several institutions, including Northwestern University and Harvard.
Starting as a machine apprentice and draftsman in Rhode Island, Flanders soon became a designer and mechanical engineer. In 1912 he was made a director and manager of Jones and Lamson Machine Company, and served as president of that firm from 1933 to 1946. From 1934 to 1946 he was also president of Bryant Chucking Grinder Company, from 1944 to 1946 was president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, and in 1946 was president of the American Research and Development Corporation.
Throughout the 1930's and the early 1940's, while serving as a director or officer for several New England machine companies, Flanders was a member of United States governmental committees and boards dealing with economic development and production. A Republican, in 1946 he was elected to the United States Senate from Vermont, and remained in office two terms.
Senator Flanders was the author of numerous technical papers as well as the following books: Gear Cutting Machinery, 1900; Taming Our Machines, 1931; Platform for America, 1936; The American Century, [1937?] and co-author of Toward Full Employment, 1938.
With the exception of a few clippings, all of the Flanders papers are composed of correspondence and virtually all of the correspondence deals with one topic--Senator Joseph R. McCarthy. There are only nineteen letters preceding 1954, and about one hundred in 1955 and 1956. The years 1954 and 1957 contain the bulk of the collection. The correspondence is arranged by months.
Letters of 1954: On March 9, 1954, Flanders first denounced McCarthy and his methods on the floor of the Senate, charging him with “trying to shatter the party whose label he wears.” Again in June he twice attacked McCarthy, saying, on June 11, that if Senator McCarthy were i“n the pay of the Communists, he could not have done a better job for them.” Senator Flanders urged the Senate to strip McCarthy of committee chairmanships if McCarthy did not purge himself of what Flanders called “contempt” of the Senate. The contempt charge was based on McCarthy's refusal to appear before the Senate rules sub-committee investigating his finances.
On July 30, 1954, Senator Flanders delivered a speech in the Senate calling for censure of Senator McCarthy for conduct that “tends to bring the Senate into disrepute.” Following this a Committee on Censure was appointed, of which Senator Arthur V. Watkins of Utah was chairman. This committee's report recommended censure of McCarthy, and after debating the issue in November 1954, the Senate supported the committee's recommendation on December 2.
From March until December Senator Flanders received thousands of communications both supporting his view and castigating him for criticising Senator McCarthy. By far the greatest volume of mail is dated June and July, 1954, before the Committee on Censure was actually appointed.
Letters of 1957: Somewhat less than one tenth of this collection is composed of mail Senator Flanders received at the time of Senator McCarthy's death in May 1957. These are almost entirely composed of adverse criticism of Senator Flanders for the part he had played in McCarthy's censure of 1954. Some of the letters are abusive, most are critical, and many urge Senator Flanders to try to expunge the censure from the Senate record.
Although Senator Flanders often stated, in his replies to letters, that he received as many as 20,000 letters, telegrams, and postcards concerning the McCarthy affair, there are probably not more than 10,000 in this collection. Whether the other half of the correspondence disappeared, or whether the total number was over-estimated is not known; however, it is believed that the mail for July 28 to August 2, 1954, and for 1957, is complete.
