A term coined in 1950, McCarthyism described the escapades
of Republican Senator Joseph R. McCarthy of Wisconsin (1908–1957). It was
later applied to the broader excesses that characterized anti-Communism in
America during the Cold
War (1946–1991). McCarthy won notoriety by charging that federal
government employees, especially in the State Department, served the interests
of the Soviet Union. To critics McCarthyism suggested wild, often baseless and
shifting charges of Communist Party membership or sympathy for Communist
objectives or the USSR, made against one's political opponents. To McCarthy and
his admirers, it meant "Americanism with its sleeves rolled up." The
more negative connotation eventually prevailed, but only after McCarthy held the
spotlight and defined the nation's political debate for five years.
In his heyday, McCarthy's charges helped explain
to many Americans the adverse turn the Cold War took at mid-century and the
nation's seeming inability to enjoy the fruits of victory won in 1945. He picked
a ripe moment, February 1950, to claim he had a list of State Department
employees (the numbers fluctuated—at times 205, or 57, or 81) steering foreign
policy in a pro-Soviet direction. In 1949 Mao Zedong's Communist forces had won China's
civil war. The Soviets had developed an atom bomb, ending the U.S. nuclear
monopoly. In January 1950 former State Department official Alger Hiss was
convicted of perjury for denying involvement with the Soviet espionage
apparatus. These events jolted confidence in President Harry S. Truman's efforts
to "contain" Soviet expansionism and made his Democratic Party
vulnerable to charges of being "soft" on Communism. Many Republicans,
after seeing Democrats win the presidency five times in a row, eagerly embraced
a political issue that offered hope of victory at last. Thus, events and
partisanship bolstered McCarthy's ambitions and ushered in a half-decade of
shouted charges and countercharges of disloyalty and softness on communism.
Talent as well as timing served McCarthy. He played the media
skillfully, particularly the press, sometimes holding one press conference to
announce another (at which charges would be made), thus capturing headlines in
both morning and evening papers. He kept changing charges, numbers, targets,
making it hard for journalists—and
victims—to keep up. His agility and brazenness in political roughhousing
allowed him to keep ahead of his critics.
It should be noted, however, that a framework of laws, political
force fields, anti-Red rhetoric and theatrical anti-Communist methods predated
McCarthy's rise. He was first to discover
neither the presence nor political value of the Red Menace. From 1938 to 1942,
in the era of the Nazi-Soviet Pact and the onset of World War II, the federal
government's legislative and executive branches had set up programs to exclude
Communists (and fascists) from federal
jobs. The House of Representatives launched the Committee on
Un-American Activities in 1938. The 1940 Smith Act outlawed seeking or
advocating overthrow of government by force or violence. In 1942 a loyalty
program was instituted to weed Communists and other "subversives" out
of government
jobs. The Cold War heightened pressures to rein in Communist
influences. President Truman instituted a tougher loyalty program in 1947. In
1948 his Justice
Department prosecuted leaders of the Communist Party under the Smith
Act. Congress passed the Internal Security Act in 1950.
Although McCarthy's claims gave Republicans partisan leverage,
Democrats sensed—wrongly—that they could be easily exploded, and with them
the Communist issue. A Senate subcommittee probed McCarthy's meandering charges
in the spring of 1950. Its Democratic majority found them baseless (the
Republican members
labeled the inquiry incomplete). However, the onset of the Korean
War (1950–1953) and other jolts like the arrests of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg
on charges of nuclear spying for the Soviets kept McCarthy afloat. Indeed, Korea
weakened the Democrats and made his charges plausible. The public was clearly
worried about Communist influences, and because McCarthy, if nothing else, made
clear that he was too, they gave him the benefit of the doubt.
Publication in the 1990s of the fruits of Venona, the top-secret
project that decoded Soviet intelligence reports from the United States to
Moscow, suggested that the threat from hidden Communist agents was not just
speculative. But McCarthy had no access to such information (so tightly held
that not even Truman was told). He never found a real Communist on his own.
However, the initial promise of his efforts prompted some Republicans to
tolerate his antics on the chance that he might unearth another Hiss. He never
did. Then, when it appeared that his campaigning led to the 1950 reelection
defeats of several critics, his seeming political muscle discouraged his
colleagues from challenging him. He spent the next two years tormenting
Democratic leaders such as Truman, Secretary of State Dean Acheson, and
Secretary of Defense General George C. Marshall with various charges.
Decline of Mccarthyism
The 1952 election victory of General Dwight D. Eisenhower and the
Republicans brought a shift in McCarthy's status. Though senior colleagues
thought they had sidetracked him by making him chair of the minor Government
Operations Committee, he outwitted them. He used its Permanent Subcommittee on
Investigations to range far afield, probing charges of Communist activities in
numerous government agencies. He continued to monopolize headlines.
It seemed not to faze him that his own party now controlled the
government, and his continued blunder-buss charges began to weary
fellow-Republicans. When he accused the army of harboring Communists, blocking
his inquiries, and holding a young committee aide hostage by drafting him into military
service, these and the army's countercharges led to a set of
sensational hearings aired on television from April to June 1954. The
Army-McCarthy hearings were not conclusive, but the bullying impression McCarthy
made on viewers reduced his popularity.
That partial fall from grace and the apparent damage he was doing
to his own party gave fellow senators enough nerve to discipline him. Led by
Senator Ralph E. Flanders (Republican of Vermont), the Senate grudgingly came to
judgment, voting in December 1954 to condemn McCarthy—not for violating civil
liberties or defaming people, but for trampling the Senate's
gentlemanly customs and courtesies. He lost no formal power through this censure
resolution, but his power had always depended on appearances, and this slap on
the wrist was enough to deflate it. Colleagues and newsmen now avoided him.
Prone to abuse of alcohol, he suffered a physical decline linked to his
political fall and died on May 2, 1957.
All American leaders, including McCarthy's foes, stressed their
anti-Communism. But gradually after 1954, the Cold War atmosphere lightened. The
Supreme Court under Chief Justice Earl Warren began to curb the reach of
investigative bodies and the loyalty-security machinery. Hollywood blacklisting
(in which McCarthy took no part) and other repressive actions against Communists
or others on the Left took longer to recede. By the 1960s, when dissent bloomed
in every corner, efforts to inhibit it routinely were labeled McCarthyism. It
reveals McCarthy's Humpty-Dumpty-like fall that his name became a term of almost
universal vilification. And it was a measure of his political talents that his
name came to cover a broad set of political trends that he rode but did not
invent