McCarthyism (1950-1954): Joseph McCarthy and the Red Scare

McCarthyism was the wave of anti-communist accusation and investigation that swept the United States in the early 1950s, led most prominently by Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin. Beginning with his claim in February 1950 that communists filled the State Department, McCarthy dominated headlines for four years until the televised Army-McCarthy hearings exposed his methods and the Senate condemned him in December 1954. The term “McCarthyism” has since become a byword for reckless charges of disloyalty.

Background: the Second Red Scare

Fear of communism had deep roots in the United States, going back to the first Red Scare after the Russian Revolution. After 1945 it revived as the Cold War began. Soviet control of Eastern Europe, the communist victory in China in 1949 and the Soviet atomic bomb test of August 1949 suggested that the United States was losing ground.

Spy cases sharpened these fears. In 1947 President Harry S. Truman set up a loyalty programme for federal employees with Executive Order 9835. The House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) investigated the film industry, leading to the jailing of the Hollywood Ten. Leaders of the Communist Party USA were prosecuted under the Smith Act in 1949. Above all, the Alger Hiss case ended with the conviction of a former State Department official for perjury in January 1950, and the physicist Klaus Fuchs confessed to passing atomic secrets to the Soviets.

The Wheeling speech

Joseph McCarthy was a little-known Republican senator first elected in 1946. On 9 February 1950 he addressed a Republican women’s club in Wheeling, West Virginia. According to newspaper reports, he waved a piece of paper and claimed to hold a list of 205 people in the State Department known to be members of the Communist Party. No recording exists, and McCarthy later gave different numbers, including 57 and 81.

The speech made him a national figure almost overnight. Reporters followed him as he repeated and changed his claims, and his willingness to name individuals on the Senate floor, where he was protected from libel suits, kept him on front pages across the country. A Senate subcommittee chaired by Millard Tydings examined his charges and in July 1950 called them “a fraud and a hoax”, but the outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950 and Chinese intervention later that year increased public anxiety and protected him from criticism. In March 1950 the cartoonist Herblock coined the word “McCarthyism” in a cartoon for The Washington Post.

On 1 June 1950 Senator Margaret Chase Smith of Maine, a Republican, delivered a “Declaration of Conscience” speech criticising the use of the Senate for character assassination, without naming McCarthy. Few colleagues joined her at the time.

The climate of fear

Anti-communism in these years went well beyond one senator. Congress passed the Internal Security Act of 1950, known as the McCarran Act, over Truman’s veto; it required communist organisations to register with the government. The Rosenbergs were convicted of conspiracy to commit espionage in 1951 and executed in June 1953.

Federal, state and local governments, universities, schools, trade unions and private employers all used loyalty oaths and investigations. In the entertainment industry, writers, actors and directors who refused to cooperate with HUAC, or who were named as former communists, were placed on unofficial blacklists and found it hard or impossible to work. Many people lost jobs because of past membership of left-wing groups, association with suspected communists, or refusal to answer questions.

Publications such as Red Channels, a 1950 pamphlet listing 151 people in radio and television with alleged communist links, helped spread the blacklist to broadcasting. Some of those affected worked under false names or moved abroad; others never resumed their careers. The playwright Arthur Miller, who was later convicted of contempt of Congress for refusing to name others (a conviction overturned on appeal), used the Salem witch trials as an allegory of the period in his 1953 play The Crucible.

The scare also targeted gay men and lesbians in government service, who were described as security risks. This campaign, now called the Lavender Scare, led to the dismissal of thousands of federal employees and was given formal backing by President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Executive Order 10450 in April 1953.

McCarthy at the height of his power

When Republicans won control of the Senate in the 1952 elections, McCarthy became chairman of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations in January 1953. With his chief counsel, Roy Cohn, he investigated the Voice of America radio service and the State Department’s overseas libraries, which removed books by authors deemed suspect. His aide G. David Schine travelled with Cohn on a widely mocked tour of these libraries in Europe.

McCarthy’s methods relied on publicity: sweeping accusations, guilt by association, and pressure on witnesses who invoked the Fifth Amendment. Many Republicans tolerated him because his attacks damaged the Democrats, and Eisenhower avoided confronting him in public.

McCarthy also attacked senior figures of the previous administration. In a long Senate speech in June 1951 he accused George C. Marshall, the wartime army chief of staff and former Secretary of State and Defense, of being part of a conspiracy that had helped communism advance. Such charges against a widely respected general showed how far he was prepared to go, and they alarmed many moderates, but at the time few politicians dared to challenge him openly.

The Army-McCarthy hearings and censure

In late 1953 McCarthy turned on the US Army, investigating alleged subversion at the Signal Corps laboratories at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey. The Army responded by accusing McCarthy and Cohn of seeking special treatment for Schine, who had been drafted. A Senate subcommittee held hearings on the dispute from April to June 1954, broadcast live on television by the ABC and DuMont networks.

Millions of Americans watched McCarthy interrupt, bully witnesses and raise points of order. On 9 March 1954 the broadcaster Edward R. Murrow had already devoted an episode of his programme See It Now to a critical portrait of the senator. The decisive moment came on 9 June 1954, when McCarthy attacked a young lawyer at the firm of the Army’s counsel, Joseph Welch. Welch replied: “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?” The audience applauded, and the exchange became one of the most famous in American television history.

Senator Ralph Flanders of Vermont then introduced a motion against McCarthy. After a special committee chaired by Arthur Watkins investigated, the Senate voted on 2 December 1954, by 67 votes to 22, to condemn McCarthy for conduct contrary to Senate traditions. He remained a senator but lost his power, and he died on 2 May 1957, aged 48.

The broader Red Scare faded more slowly. In a series of rulings in 1957, the Supreme Court under Chief Justice Earl Warren limited the use of the Smith Act and strengthened the rights of witnesses before congressional committees. The Hollywood blacklist began to break in 1960, when the screenwriter Dalton Trumbo was openly credited for the films Spartacus and Exodus.

Key people

• Joseph McCarthy (1908–1957), Republican senator from Wisconsin.
• Roy Cohn, McCarthy’s chief counsel, later a prominent New York lawyer.
• Margaret Chase Smith, senator from Maine and early Republican critic of McCarthy.
• Edward R. Murrow, CBS journalist whose 1954 broadcast challenged McCarthy.
• Joseph N. Welch, the Army’s chief counsel at the 1954 hearings.

By the numbers

Myths and facts

It is sometimes assumed that McCarthy ran HUAC or the Hollywood hearings. In fact HUAC was a House of Representatives committee, and its Hollywood investigations began in 1947, before McCarthy became prominent. McCarthy worked through Senate committees.

Another common view is that there was no Soviet espionage at all. Decrypted Soviet cables released in 1995, known as Venona, confirmed that Soviet intelligence had many sources in the United States in the 1930s and 1940s. Historians generally agree, however, that this network had largely been exposed before 1950 and that McCarthy’s own accusations rarely identified real spies.

Timeline

• 1947, March: Truman establishes the federal loyalty programme.
• 1950, 9 February: McCarthy’s Wheeling speech claims a list of communists in the State Department.
• 1950, 1 June: Margaret Chase Smith delivers her “Declaration of Conscience”.
• 1950, July: The Tydings subcommittee rejects McCarthy’s charges.
• 1950, September: The McCarran Internal Security Act passes over Truman’s veto.
• 1953, January: McCarthy becomes chairman of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations.
• 1954, 9 March: Murrow’s See It Now broadcast criticises McCarthy.
• 1954, 22 April: The televised Army-McCarthy hearings begin.
• 1954, 9 June: Joseph Welch rebukes McCarthy.
• 1954, 2 December: The Senate condemns McCarthy by 67 votes to 22.

Why it matters

McCarthyism showed how fear of an external enemy could erode civil liberties and ruin careers through accusation alone. Its excesses led to stronger protections in later court rulings and left the word “McCarthyism” as a lasting warning in American political language.