South Pasadena High School
A.P. English Language and Composition
Summer Assignments 2010
McCarthy Launches Anti-Communist Witch-Hunt
No Evidence Provided by U.S. Senator
John Kirshon
February 9, 2010
"We know of no Communist Party members and if we find any they will be summarily
dismissed," said a State Department officer. "We would be interested in seeing his list."
On this day in history, February 9:
"I have here in my hand a list of 205 names known to the secretary of state as being members of
the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping the policy of the State
Department." So said an obscure Wisconsin senator named Joseph McCarthy at a Lincoln Day
speech in Wheeling, West Virginia, to the Republican Women's Club in 1950.
McCarthy worked himself into a tirade as he considered those making U.S. foreign policy, "born
with silver spoons in their mouth" and endowed with the "finest homes, the finest college
education." No one angered him more than President Truman's Secretary of State Dean Acheson,
“this pompous diplomat in striped pants, with a phony British accent."
The conflict was not simply between the United States and the Soviet Union, or capitalism and
Communism, in his black-and-white worldview. It was nothing less than epic showdown
between God and evil. "Today, we are engaged in a final, all-out battle,” he declared, “between
communistic atheism and Christianity.”
McCarthy’s Charges Caused Furor
McCarthy’s charges were immediately denied by a State Department official, who said: "His
allegation that the secretary of state has a list of 205 Communist Party members who are working
and shaping policy in the State Department is entirely without foundation.”
McCarthy, who had been a tail-gunner in the Marines Corps during World War II, made followup speeches in Denver, Salt Lake City and Reno, claiming to have the names of 57, then 81, and
then 10 Communists. He also attacked as Communists the “whole group of twisted-thinking New
Dealers who have led America near to ruin at home and abroad.”
McCarthy’s charges caused a furor. In response, the Senate appointed a subcommittee to
investigate. McCarthy failed to name a single current State Department employee. The panel
issued a report that found no grounds for his accusations and concluded that he had perpetrated
“a fraud and a hoax.”
Anti-Communist Hysteria
McCarthy, who had won election to the Senate by smearing his opponent as a Communist
sympathizer, made his claims against a background of anti-Red hysteria. In 1948, the House Un-
American Activities Committee heard Whittaker Chambers, a former Communist spy, accuse
Alger Hiss, a former State Department official, of having given him secret, government papers.
McCarthy's speech also followed soon after the establishment of a Communist government in
China, as well as right before the outbreak in July 1950 of the Korean War, adding to American
fears about the global spread of Communism during the Cold War.
On March 30, 1951, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were found guilty of passing atomic secrets to
the Soviets. The two New Yorkers, both members of the Communist Party, insisted on their
innocence, but were executed in 1953.
“McCarthyism”
The term McCarthyism, coined in 1950 to refer to McCarthy's tactics, was soon applied to
similar anti-Communist crusades. “McCarthyism is Americanism with its sleeves rolled,"
McCarthy claimed in a 1952 speech.
His claims were never substantiated, but many people lost their jobs or reputations. And his
Communist witch-hunt won him popular support. At its height, 25 states passed laws outlawing
Communist organizations
McCarthy even accused the traditional Saturday Evening Post of spouting the Communist line.
Throughout the early 1950s, he continued to make exaggerated claims of infiltration of the
United States by what he and other conservatives called "the international Communist
conspiracy.”
"I say one Communist in a defense plant is one Communist too many," he scowled. "One
Communist on the faculty of one university is one Communist too many."
Army-McCarthy Hearings
In 1953, McCarthy became chairman of the Committee on Government Operations and the
subcommittee on investigations, and provoked President Eisenhower by accusing the
administration of sheltering Communists. Ike did not publicly rebuke McCarthy, but worked
behind the scenes to isolate him.
During the Army-McCarthy hearings aired on nationwide television between April and June
1954, McCarthy’s frequent interruptions of the proceedings and his calls of "point of order"
made him the object of ridicule and his approval ratings declined.
The hearings climaxed on June 9, when McCarthy attacked a young lawyer who worked for the
law firm of Joseph Welch, the Army’s chief counsel. McCarthy's name-calling and browbeating
tactics had come off as mean-spirited and crude. Welch’s reply to McCarthy echoed across TV
screens throughout the land.
"Until this moment, senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness …
You have done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense
of decency?"
Most Americans now saw the pugnacious McCarthy as a dangerous demagogue who was
paranoid and obsessed with Communism, and used the issue to his own advantage while
destroying the lives of innocent Americans, creating a political climate of suspicion and fear that
practically paralyzed the country.
Downfall of McCarthy
McCarthy never recovered. His tactics were negatively compared to those of the 1692 Salem
witch-hunt in Arthur Miller's allegorical play, The Crucible, on Broadway.
In August 1954, a Senate panel was formed to investigate, finally censuring him in a unanimous
report that labeled his behavior "inexcusable," "reprehensible," "vulgar and insulting." In
December, the full Senate, by a vote of 67-22, passed a resolution condemning him for abusing
his power as a senator.
The impact of McCarthy's anti-Communist witch-hunt was best assessed on the CBS television
program See It Now when Edward R. Murrow stated: "McCarthy's primary achievement has
been in confusing the public mind as between the internal and the external threats of
Communism.
“We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. We must remember always that accusation is not
proof and that conviction depends upon evidence and due process of law. We will not walk in
fear, one of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason, if we dig deep in our
history and our doctrine, and remember that we are not descended from fearful men.
"We proclaim ourselves, as indeed we are, the defenders of freedom, wherever it continues to
exist in the world, but we cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home.
“The actions of the junior senator from Wisconsin have caused alarm and dismay among our
allies abroad, and given considerable comfort to our enemies. And whose fault is that? Not really
his. He didn't create this situation of fear; he merely exploited it — and rather successfully."
SOURCES:
Reeves, Thomas C. The Life and Times of Joe McCarthy: A Biography. 1982.
Rovere, Richard. Senator Joe McCarthy. University of California Press. 1959.
Borrowed from suite101.com.