Joseph McCarthy

Categories: US History | Members Of Congress | News

  • Republican U.S. Senator Joseph R. McCarthy represented Wisconsin from 1947-1957. He became an iconic figure of the Cold War through a series of gestures against and investigations into Communists and domestic subversives now typically regarded as excessive and politically self-serving.

  • Rise to notoriety

    In February, 1950, McCarthy gave a speech in Wheeling, West Virginia in which he displayed a piece of paper which he claimed held the names of 205 current employees of the State Department who were known by the Secretary of State to be members of the Communist Party. The number was later disputed, and when McCarthy cited the paper again he gave it as 57, and later as 81. It is generally agreed that McCarthy had no such list.

  • Backstory

    The speech came at a historic moment in which accusations of disloyalty and subversion were heavily in the news, following the January, 1950 perjury conviction of accused Soviet spy Alger Hiss, who had formerly held a high-placed job in the State Department. America was undergoing a shift from wartime sentiments, in which the Soviet Union was an ally against the Axis powers, into those of the Cold War, in which the Soviets were positioned, to an extent consciously, as a new unifying enemy of the U.S. The Communist Party was, at the time, a small but far from imaginary force in American politics and letters, wielding influence through the remnants of a socialist tradition that had peaked in the 1930s.

  • Rise and fall

    McCarthy's accusations continued, and led to special hearings by a subcommittee of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. The subcommittee's final report denied McCarthy's charges, but a partisan gantlet was taken up, and for a time, Republicans championed McCarthy in further accusations of treason, especially against Democrats and the Democratic Party, but also in an investigation of the U.S. Army. By 1954, McCarthy had largely worn out his political capital, and was the subject of a scathing March 9 CBS News report by Edward R. Murrow. On June 9, his Waterloo came during the Army hearings, when the Army's chief representative, Joseph Nye Welch, uttered the famous denunciation, "Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last, have you left no sense of decency?" On December 2, the Senate censured McCarthy.

  • Later life

    McCarthy served the remaining 2 1/2 years of his Senate term, and died on May 2, 1957, of acute alcoholism.

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