What was McCarthyism?

Where the word comes from

A cartoonist named it. On March 29, 1950, seven weeks after the speech that made Joseph McCarthy famous, Herblock (Herbert Block) put the word “McCarthyism” into a cartoon in the Washington Post. It stuck because it described a way of working, not just a man: a charge made in public, repeated in the headlines, and left for the accused to disprove. Dictionaries still define it roughly that way, and the word now stands for the whole Red Scare of the late 1940s and the 1950s.

The man behind it was born on a Wisconsin farm in 1908. He became a judge, served as a Marine in World War II and won a Senate seat in 1946. His supporters saw a senator fighting a real threat. His critics counted the careers wrecked by charges he never proved. He died in 1957, at forty-eight.

Wheeling and the number that kept changing

On February 9, 1950, McCarthy spoke at a Lincoln Day dinner of the Ohio County Women’s Republican Club in Wheeling, West Virginia. He waved a sheet of paper that, he said, listed Communists employed at the State Department. It was never passed around. The local paper reported 205 names. Two days later, in a letter, McCarthy said 57. On February 20 he took 81 cases to the Senate floor. A radio recording of the speech was erased, so his exact words are lost.

Did he really have a list? Whatever was on that paper, his cases were drawn from State Department files several years old. Within weeks, all the same, the whole country knew his name.

The real shocks behind the fear

The fear had causes. In the six months before Wheeling, the Soviet Union tested its first atomic bomb, years ahead of American estimates. China became Communist. Alger Hiss, who had served in the State Department, was convicted of lying under oath about passing secrets to Moscow. And the physicist Klaus Fuchs confessed to giving bomb secrets to the Soviets. In June 1950 war broke out in Korea. Soviet espionage was real, as the Venona cables later proved. McCarthy’s list was something else.

It started before McCarthy

The Red Scare did not begin in Wheeling. In March 1947, President Truman’s Executive Order 9835 set up loyalty reviews of federal employees, a program that screened millions of government workers. That October a House committee went looking for Communists in Hollywood. In 1949 eleven leaders of the American Communist Party were convicted under the Smith Act of conspiring to advocate the violent overthrow of the government, and in September 1950 Congress passed the Internal Security Act over Truman’s veto. McCarthy gave his name to a hunt already under way.

The Tydings report, and the fall

A Senate subcommittee led by Millard Tydings, a Maryland Democrat, examined McCarthy’s charges and reported in July 1950 that they were “a fraud and a hoax.” It changed little. That November Tydings lost his seat after an election campaign in which McCarthy’s staff helped circulate a doctored photograph of him beside the Communist leader Earl Browder. Margaret Chase Smith had already answered McCarthy on June 1, 1950, with her Declaration of Conscience, but for four years few senators joined her.

The end came on live television. After the Army-McCarthy hearings of 1954 and Joseph Welch’s question, the Senate condemned his conduct, 67 to 22, on December 2, 1954. Both halves of the era’s record stand side by side: there were Soviet spies, and there were people whose lives were ruined by accusations no one ever proved.