McCarthyism

The term “McCarthyism” was first used in a cartoon by Herbert Bloom published on March 29, 1950, in the Washington Post. It initially referred to an extreme form of conservative anti-Communism, associated with Senator Joseph McCarthy, aimed at identifying and eliminating domestic Communist threats to the U.S. government. This anti-Communist agenda was often pursued at the expense of basic civil liberties such as freedom of association and the right to privacy. McCarthyism is also used to refer to a more general cultural and political milieu in which concerns about national security and the threat of Communism took precedence over the protection of civil liberties and personal privacy. Generally associated with the Red Scare of the 1940s and 1950s, the term is still sometimes used pejoratively by political dissenters who believe government policies are encroaching on the basic rights of citizens.
McCarthyism, narrowly defined, began in 1950 when Senator McCarthy gave a speech in Wheeling, West Virginia, proclaiming that he had a list of known Communist loyalists who worked in the State Department. As a broader cultural and political phenomenon, it can be traced back to the 1930s. During this period a fundamental shift occurred in which liberal anti-Communism was abandoned in favor of a conservative anti-Communist agenda. The initial response by the U.S. government to the growth of American Communism was to undermine the Communist Party by integrating several of its key issues into government policy. By increasing the federal government’s involvement in dealing with poverty, unemployment, and social inequality, liberal anti-Communists hoped to make Communism a less appealing alternative. However, by the late 1930s, conservative anti-Communists had gained significant influence in both the Democratic and Republican parties and introduced a number of strategies aimed at eliminating Communist threats through coercion rather than appeasement.
The formation of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in 1938 marked the arrival of conservative anti-Communism on the national political scene. HUAC played a central role in redefining domestic Communism from a matter of political opinion to one of national security, setting the stage for McCarthy’s rise to prominence. HUAC was the driving force behind the Alien and Registration Act of 1940, which criminalized the advocacy of revolutionary political ideologies and association with organizations that engaged in such advocacy. Furthermore, HUAC initiated a series of highly publicized hearings aimed at exposing the infiltration of Communists and Soviet sympathizers into American institutions and organizations, including the federal government and labor unions. In these hearings, HUAC members made sweeping, often unsubstantiated allegations. They offered a portrayal of American Communism that was severely distorted yet plausible enough to be persuasive. In this way, the HUAC hearings established a set of strategies that would be adopted by the Permanent Investigating Subcommittee of the Government Operations Committee chaired by McCarthy. But they also contributed to the dehumanization of Communists within American culture, portraying them as ideological outlaws that deserved to be punished.
The year 1950 marked the beginning of the McCarthy era proper. In the middle of that year, North Korean military forces invaded South Korea. Though the United States’ involvement in the conflict was defined as a police action, it became a constant reminder that the Cold War was not simply a clash of ideologies, but had tangible costs. On the domestic front, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were charged as Soviet spies for providing the Soviet Union with highly classified information on the development of atomic weaponry. Their arrests provided the ammunition conservative anti-Communists needed to legitimize their attack on domestic Communism. Congress was able to pass the Internal Security Act of 1950, which further restricted organizations and members of organizations deemed Communist. Also during this year, the newsletter Counterattack became the first publication listing entertainers believed to be Communist Party members or “fellow travelers”—a term used to refer to those with opinions and associations similar to those of Communists.
It was in the beginning of this year that McCarthy made the famous speech in which he proclaimed that he had a list of names of known Communists in the State Department, thus taking center stage in the anti-Communist movement. McCarthy quickly became the most sought-after political spokesperson for the Republican Party, receiving over 2000 invitations to speak at events leading up to the 1950 elections. He, along with many other Republicans, turned Communism into a major issue in the elections by labeling many Democratic candidates as soft on Communism. These charges were only moderately successful, as local issues tended to weigh more heavily on voters, and several Democratic candidates (such as Brion McMahon of Connecticut and Thomas Hennings of Missouri) won despite personal appearances for their opponents by McCarthy.
Charges of Communism by McCarthy and other extremists escalated during 1951 and 1952. Secretary of Defense George Marshall was accused of passively facilitating and even conspiring with Communists within the executive branch. Actor-director Charlie Chaplin was publicly accused of being Communist by Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) director J. Edgar Hoover and eventually had his visa revoked while he was out of the country on vacation. Extensive hearings by HUAC and the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee (SISS) continued to investigate Communist influence within government agencies and labor unions, and among high-profile celebrities and artists. During this time, HUAC alone spent 108 days in hearings encompassing 34 separate investigations. Yet the activities of these two committees would be overshadowed by McCarthy’s Government Operations Committee hearings, which began in 1953 and would last through the early part of 1954. Though limited to the investigation of government agencies and employees, McCarthy’s obstreperous personality and over-the-top tactics attracted a great deal of attention from the media, as did his sweeping claims of Communist infiltration.
The overarching purpose of these congressional hearings was twofold. Conservative anti-Communists used them to influence the broader social standards of political orthodoxy versus heresy in the United States. Yet they also were aimed at discrediting and marginalizing specific individuals. The hearings themselves could not convict suspect witnesses of any crimes and, in fact, had no practical legislative purpose. However, they were used to condemn individuals without adhering to the standards of due process. Hundreds of witnesses were fired by their employers and blacklisted in their industries. The hysteria spurred by the hearings also led to other forms of repression against perceived Communists and political dissidents. The most infamous was the Hollywood blacklist, which caused the expulsion of thousands of actors, directors, writers, and technical workers from their labor guilds and denied them employment in Hollywood movie productions.
The response to the anti-Communist extremists by presidents Truman and Eisenhower was inconsistent. Both presidents adopted a conservative anti-Communist agenda, though one more moderate than that pursued by McCarthy. Truman did cooperate with the Tydings Committee, which was set up to investigate McCarthy and the validity of his claims, and viewed the activities of some loyalty boards to be un-American; yet he also gave numerous speeches on the threat of domestic Communism. His administration continued to emphasize the arrests of Communists and pushed for the loyalty standard for the termination of employment to be changed from “reasonable grounds” to “reasonable doubt.” The latter resulted in the termination of 565 public employees who had previously been vindicated in hearings before the Loyalty Review Board (LRB).
During the beginning of Eisenhower’s term, the president continually appeased McCarthy. His administration launched investigations for the denaturalization of 10,000 citizens and for the deportation of 12,000 aliens. It also expanded the ability of the executive branch to dismiss federal employees on loyalty issues, resulting in 1500 more employees being terminated (90 percent without receiving any form of hearing). However, by mid-1953 the administration began publicly denouncing McCarthy and openly challenging his attempts to investigate the American clergy and the CIA. Truman and Eisenhower did eventually challenge McCarthy, but both played significant roles in increasing the hysteria associated with McCarthyism.
McCarthy remained a powerful political player for only a few more years. As 1953 wore on, his image worsened in the national media, particularly in television interviews. Media personalities such as newscaster Edward R. Murrow increasingly ran stories that were critical of McCarthy’s tactics, further damaging his public reputation. The climax of McCarthy’s self-destruction came during the televised McCarthy-Army hearings on June 24, 1954. As McCarthy made another of his crass accusations of Communist leanings, Senator Joseph Welch interjected, “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?” The Senate chamber erupted in applause, and its reverberations were felt by television viewers across the country. McCarthy lost much of the public support he had previously enjoyed, and the Senate voted to condemn him on December 2.
McCarthyism itself would continue on for another two years. However, it too was crippled in the aftermath of the McCarthy-Army hearings, as television was no longer permitted to air the congressional hearings that had fueled the anti-Communist hysteria among the general public. The McCarthy era is generally considered to have ended in 1956, when a series of Supreme Court cases (including Slochower v. Board, 351 U.S. 551 (1956) and Cole v. Young, 351 U.S. 536 (1956)) began to curb the repressive policies initiated under the guise of national security and to reinstate basic civil liberties.